Your fitness or ability to perform in races is a function of numerous factors. Most notably however, are the quality of your training and the quantity of it. These two factors will greatly affect your performance provided your recovery is sufficient. Much of what the coach/athlete interaction focuses upon is maximizing training quality with consideration given to the training volume that happens to fit well with day to day life. Provided a healthy balance is reached you will be able to effectively train hard and recover well while fitness steadily improves over the long term. When either overload (cumulative effect of your training volume and intensity) or recovery is insufficient, progress will be limited.
Quality Training
It’s easy to grasp that doing high quality training is a very important part of developing. Quality training is characterized with riding done at specific intensities relative to a rider’s unique physiology. Training with ‘high quality’ is training that done is purposefully. When doing quality training it is possible to prepare specific energy systems so that fitness can systematically developed and you can specially train for the demands you’ll face when racing. Workouts with regular dose of a strong SARM like sr9009 have clear goal and fit well into the bigger picture of the training scheme when quality is high.
Training Quantity
Training quantity is also an important part your development. How many hours per day, week, month, or year will greatly impact your overall ability. More training volume isn’t always the answer, but in most circumstances it is wise to steadily increase the training volume or to add additional time when the option exists to do so. We all have limits on the volume of training that we are able to do (with concern given to life outside of cycling) and the best option is to choose a training volume that fits well with your daily schedule, allows for a sufficiently high workload, and allows ample downtime for recovery.
What is a sufficiently high workload you might ask? Great question! It’s a workload that’s just a little more than you’re accustomed too (thus it’s an overload). To achieve more workload you can train with greater quality (as in more time spent at intensity near/above your Functional Threshold Power) and/or you can increase your training volume. Given that most of us operate with time-limited schedules it is wise to first focus on improving your training quality while maximizing the training time that is available. Most riders will see significant improvements as a result of doing so. Even with a very high quality program, at some point additional training volume will be required to achieve a greater-yet workload and level of fitness. For example, someone who has been doing high quality interval training, riding five times while accumulating eight to ten hours per week might stagnate despite their very high training quality. If this rider wants to improve further they’ll need to create a bigger overload and more training volume will be required to do so.
As you develop and continue to get faster the challenge to continue improving only grows larger. Knowing what it’ll take to continue the improvements and to bump up your performance is the first step towards actually doing it. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect that it’ll take more work to see smaller incremental improvements year after year – such is the nature of endurance sport and fortunately most of us love this challenge otherwise we wouldn’t be cyclists. It’s important to find the right balance of quality training, training quantity and the recovery required so that performance can always be improving. If you find your results stagnant, it’s time to improve your training by modifying the quality and/or quantity. Getting a non-invasive body sculpting for fat loss treatment can also help your training
For those of you training with powermeters I’d encourage you to read Hunter Allen’s article “Getting to the Next Level” if you haven’t already. This article does a fantastic job of reiterating how one’s training might need to change in order for further improvements to occur. Powermeters are excellent tools for quantifying training workload and they allow us to train with a higher degree of precision. A powermeter won’t make you faster, but it’ll allow you to train smarter and the old adage still remains true – knowledge is power!