Your Winter Training Doesn’t Have to Be Slow

By Ric Stern

Last week I mentioned that the off-season is dead and that you should continue training over winter if you wish to improve year after year, or maintain your fitness in the unlikely event you’ve reached your physiological limit.

However, many people feel that lots of long steady miles is the way forward over the winter. You may have heard the expression: “Winter miles equals summer smiles.”

I’ll start off by saying that yes, given a choice between time off and riding steady, riding steady is the winner. But if the choice expands beyond those two options, then you should be looking at more training than just steady miles.

Traditionally, those pros who did train over the winter would tend to log large amounts of steady volume. This filtered down to the rest of us. Additionally, somewhere along the line (and I genuinely have no idea who came up with this incorrect concept), some coaches felt that intense training in the winter would result in capillaries being burst, ultimately leading to a reduction in your VO2max (which would result in you losing fitness). When I started professional coaching in the late 1990s this was something I had to frequently explain was untrue.

Much research has been conducted over the last 50 years looking at the effects of various training on physiological responses, and the simple fact is that hard aerobic training increases VO2max and can increase skeletal-muscle capillarization. In other words, doing hard efforts doesn’t damage your capillaries, quite the opposite.

So why did steady winter miles work so well for professional cyclists? Because when you do a very large volume such as 25 to 30 hours per week, the training stimulus is enormous. That’s completely different from doing, say, six hours a week at the same relative intensity.

There’s another difference which is often overlooked: absolute power.

A professional rider may be producing substantially more power than an amateur while both are riding at the same relative intensity. That changes what happens when the terrain starts rolling.

For example, on a flat endurance ride I might sit around 170 to 180 watts. When I reach one of the short, steep climbs near home, I may need 250 watts or more simply to maintain momentum, and sometimes I’ll briefly go above 300 watts. My supposedly steady endurance ride therefore contains repeated excursions well above my normal endurance power.

A much stronger rider traveling considerably faster may be able to negotiate the same terrain with a much smaller change in relative effort.

So even when two riders describe their session as “steady,” what actually happens physiologically can be rather different.

So, if this doesn’t work (well) for riders who have limited time to train, what should they do? In part this will depend on a variety of factors — the time you have available to train, your age, health, your goals, and your personal strengths and weaknesses. However, for the most part, for most riders, but not all, some intensity year round is a really good training concept. Does that mean you need to be battering yourself into the ground three times a week with some seriously hard intervals? No, it doesn’t. It could be doing some maintenance MIET for a couple of months, or adding in some threshold or VO2max work every week or two — it’ll really depend on you and your goals.

One of the riders I work with is a young masters rider (early 40s) who races, and he’ll continue his regular summer-type schedule of weekly intervals through the winter. This is because his volume drops a fraction as he has to ride indoors all winter (he’s in northern Europe) and long endurance rides are too boring for him, plus he’s only been riding a few years and hasn’t hit his peak yet.

On the other hand, if I look at myself, where I’m also limited by lousy winter weather (constant rain, or if it’s not raining — then low sun with the worry I’ll be run over because a driver hasn’t seen me in the glare), I’ll switch to a more MIET-heavy program to maintain my durability and endurance so that I can hit racing at close to 100% in April.

How much is enough? Research going back decades suggests that you can reduce training volume substantially — in some studies by as much as two-thirds — and maintain much of your aerobic fitness for a period, provided you retain the intensity. What doesn’t work nearly as well is keeping the volume and removing the intensity altogether.

An important aspect to consider is how much pressure should you place yourself under in the winter period? For this you can definitely drop the “stress” of whether you’ve completed your intervals or hit the targets for your sessions. Look, even in the summer season — you shouldn’t be stressing this way — some sessions you won’t be able to generate target power, the body doesn’t work like that. But in winter, while for example I may have one interval session per week, if stuff crops up and I have to skip it this week (either due to time constraints or feeling like a “bag of spanners” (wrenches in the USA)), I’m just not going to worry about it. Obviously, if you go a whole month without doing the efforts then it may well be time to think about your plan or your health because something then is clearly going awry.

If you want to make next season better than this one, MAP: The Build gives you a coach-built training program, updated every four weeks, for £25 (about $34) per block.

Find out more about MAP: The Build here.

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Coach Ric Stern is the founder of CycleCoach. He holds a first-class degree in Sport Science, has published peer-reviewed research in exercise physiology, and has coached riders from track sprint through to ultra-endurance and the Tour de France.

At 57, he’s still racing himself and is fitter now than he was in his 20s.