I’m time-crunched, how much training is enough when I’m fitting it around work and family?
Coaching amateur athletes as well as pros, it’s a question I hear often. Hobby riders see their friends and riding buddies racking up more hours than they have available, and end up asking: just how much should I be riding to get fitter?
Andy is a sports and exercise scientist. He is a cycling coach at ATP Performance, and also works as a wind tunnel operator and performance consultant at the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub. Andy spent three years riding for a UCI cycling team, and will be answering reader questions monthly in our ‘Ask a Cycling Coach’ series. Got a question? Pop it in the comments for Andy to review.
Getting fitter is about generating stress and resting appropriately.
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Stress comes through increasing volume or intensity; it can be tracked through measures such as Training Stress Score (TSS), which uses data from each ride to determine how much load the session has put on the body. If you use Strava, you’ll see this represented as ‘Relative Effort’. As we build up the stress, we provide the training stimulus for our bodies to become fitter.
However, without adequate rest, our body does not enter a state in which it starts to adapt to the training stress and generate improvements in fitness over time. Balance is essential; without it, we leave ourselves open to issues such as dysfunctional overreaching and overtraining syndrome, the latter of which can take months to recover from.
Amateur athletes also need to consider the sum of all stresses. Higher training load adds to stress, as does looking after a young child, having a stressful job, suffering from poor sleep, or inadequate fueling for sessions and recovery.
When speaking with riders I coach, the first thing I ask them when we start working together is how much time they realistically have to dedicate to training, while leaving enough time for work, family, life, and rest. It’s vital we correctly gauge the sum of all stresses and availability to both train and rest, for the work put in to be effective.
This then leads us on to the next component of training, which is the intensity distribution. You may have heard of polarized training and the 80/20 concept. This relates to the theory that 80% of time should be spent training at low intensities, and 20% at higher intensities. Professionals – who have more time to train – might work with a ratio closer to 90/10, fluctuating depending on the time of the season and goals. For those with less time, however, it can be better to spend more time at higher intensities, as you can generate a greater training stress across a shorter amount of time.
Real life examples
Andy took a look at the training volume carried out by some of his coached athletes, the volume and intensity split looks very different…
ATHLETE 1 – UCI Continental rider
- Hours trained: 18-24
- Sessions completed: 10 (x6 bike, x2 S&C, x2 heat session)
- Intensity split: 81/19 in favour of below Lactate Threshold 1/lower intensity
ATHLETE 2 – Medical shift worker, expecting a baby
- Hours trained: 6-8
- Sessions completed: 6 (x5 bike x1 S&C)
- Intensity split: 66/34 in favour of below Lactate Threshold 1/lower intensity
A good rule of thumb that I apply with my coached riders is to do between two to three sessions that include higher-intensity efforts (above 8/10 on the RPE scale or 80% of threshold) a week, making sure that none of them fall on consecutive days. For the rest of the time, it is ideal to include longer-duration endurance rides. By this, I mean sessions that are around 6 or 7/10 in effort, or 60-70% of threshold power, and ideally at least 2 hours long.
The duration of those longer rides is important as it’s at this point that muscle glycogen stores become depleted and we generate more of our fat-burning capacity, even with consumption of appropriate carbohydrates during the session. This in turn helps drive certain aerobic fitness elements which help us produce more power over longer durations of time or find longer rides easier.
Mix up the intensity with at least one longer ride a week
(Image credit: Andy Jones)
In terms of the number of hours you should be aiming to target, this unfortunately depends on your specific circumstances. Plus, the more experienced you are or the more you train, the greater the training stress is required to see greater training gains.
If you can manage two to three 45-60 minute intense sessions a week, that is a good starting point. If you add to that, recovery rides or endurance rides are optimal, with the latter being at least two hours. If you have the choice between two 90min endurance rides at the weekend, and one three hour session, opt for the three hour session to generate the most aerobic training gains. But if 90 minutes is your maximum, it is better than nothing.
Ultimately, the optimum volume for you is individual, and quality beats quantity; three to seven hours of structured training will see you make greater gains than seven to ten hours of random efforts. Just remember, you do need rest; your work, family life, sleep and nutrition all play a role in your ability to recover.
