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Resting Your Way To Fitness
The important part of your training is not just the training

  Written by Adam Hodges Myerson
  Cycle-Smart President
  June 22, 2005

When developing riders want to improve, naturally the thing they focus on is their training. Usually they take the "more is better" approach, piling on more hours, miles, and intensity. To a point, those are the basic ingredients for getting stronger; you train hard, you get better. While it may be somewhat true, it's only half the story.

The important part of your training is not just the training, but more importantly, the resting. In previous articles I've written about the cyclical nature of training and the process of stressing a system, letting it heal and adapt to the stress, and then stressing it again at a higher level. The hard training you do is the stress you place on your body. The improvement, however, doesn't come in the training; it comes in the adaptation to the training. The adaptation doesn't happen without rest. Rest is where the actual growth and increase in your fitness takes place.

What does it mean to rest, then, and what is the difference between rest and recovery? Many times you'll see a rider with that far away look in their eyes--they're struggling to finish races they should be winning, they can't sleep at night, maybe they've even got a cold sore. The usual response when a rider has a poor performance, of course, to go home and do more training. Sometimes someone will at least have enough sense to say, "hey, man, you need a rest week." What, however, does a rest week or even just a rest day entail?

Cycle-Smart Training Articles A Case For Base    by Adam Hodges Myerson    February 2, 2007 Power, Stability, and Confidence    by Adam Hodges Myerson    September 20, 2006 Training While You Work    by Adam Hodges Myerson    April 25, 2006 Surviving The Trainer    by Adam Hodges Myerson    March 2, 2006 You Gotta Have A Plan    by Adam Hodges Myerson    January 8, 2006 Peaking For Cyclo-Cross Nationals    by Adam Hodges Myerson    November 29, 2005 How To Improve Your Starts For Cyclo-cross    by Adam Hodges Myerson    October 18, 2005 Interval Training for Cyclo-Cross    by Adam Hodges Myerson    September 9, 2005 Hang On To That Form!    by Adam Hodges Myerson    August 9, 2005 Resting Your Way To Fitness    by Adam Hodges Myerson    June 22, 2005 How Long, How Hard, and How Often?    by Adam Hodges Myerson    May 25, 2005 Warming Up    by Adam Hodges Myerson    April 11, 2005 "Training" in Training Races    by Adam Hodges Myerson    March 13, 2005 Preparing for a Cyclo-Cross Race    by Johs Huseby    November 16, 2004 Choosing Between a Club or a Team    by Kirk Albers    October 6, 2004 Running for Cyclo-Cross    by Adam Hodges Myerson    September 22, 2004 My Aching Back (and legs, shoulders, hips, feet, neck)    by Christine White    August 4, 2004 Key Workouts for Early Season Mountain Bike Racers    by Kurt Perham    July 14, 2004 The Philly File    by Adam Hodges Myerson    June 12, 2003 Training Weaknesses, Racing Strengths    by Adam Hodges Myerson    May 15, 2003 The Lanterne Rouge - The fine art of driving the bus in a stage race    by Adam Hodges Myerson    April 18, 2003 Choosing a Coach    by Adam Hodges Myerson    March 13, 2003

When we talked about training in cycles before, we talked about a 3-on, 1-off structure, both in terms of days and weeks. Three days in a row of training, followed by a day of rest, or three weeks in a row of training, followed by a week of rest. In previous articles I detailed the training part; here I'll detail the recovery.

Single days of rest can take on two different forms: rest or recovery. After a week of hard training and a weekend of racing, Monday is an easy day for most people. I like to describe this day as a recovery day, rather than a rest day. Recovery implies you're trying to heal from what you've just done, rather than thinking ahead and resting to be fresh for what's coming up. It's a matter of semantics, but I feel it helps clients understand what their goals for the day really are. The best way to recover and repair damage from a hard weekend is ideally to ride, but life can often get in the way of your perfect training plans. Monday's recovery day can be a day completely off the bike for both mental and physical healing. If you've got limited training time, it might be the day you get caught up on sleep, school, work, or skip your ride in lieu of a weekly massage.

If you can ride, 30-90 minutes very easy, in a light gear, and at a high cadence will help you promote blood flow to damaged muscles and recover more quickly. In some cases, you might find that you need two or more days to recover, and won't be ready to train until Wednesday or later. For many of my clients who have stressful full-time jobs, and especially for my mountain bike racers, this is often the case.

The second easy day of the week is more of a rest day than a recovery day, and should come two days before an important event on the weekend, working backwards. If you have races on both Saturday and Sunday, you may want to sacrifice a day of training during the week by taking your rest day on Thursday, and then doing some light training on Friday to open up for the race. If the race on Saturday isn't a priority, then you might choose to train through Thursday, rest on Friday, and then race both days. If the race is only on Sunday, you might again train normally during the week, rest on Friday, and then simply open up on Saturday with a light workout.

On a larger scale, entire weeks of recovery serve the same purposes. After 3-5 weeks of progressive training, your body will reach a point where it has to have some extended time to heal. If you don't give your body that time, it will force you to take it by getting you sick, or at the very least letting some staleness creep into your form. This is where most riders make the mistake of going back and training more, which of course only digs their whole deeper.

After 2-3 weeks of training, your body will begin to adapt to the stresses you place on it with training. Sometimes you can push that adaptation with a 4th or 5th week of training, but you often run the risk of overtraining in that case, and so should always proceed with caution. As a general guide, an easy week of training should consist of 25-50% of the volume of duration and intensity of the heavy training week that proceeded it. If you got in 14 hours as your longest week, 6-7 hours will be sufficient as a rest week. If you got in 30 hours, then 10-15 may be more appropriate. If you did an hour at threshold on your interval day, 15 minutes on your rest week is more than enough.

If a client finishes their last week of training with very good form and feeling strong, then I'll typically allow them to have Monday as a recovery day, and then proceed with a normally structured training week but with greatly reduced intensity and volume. This works as more of a taper than a complete recovery week, and will leave them open and still riding well in the races that weekend without any interruption in their good form. Often this is the best way to lead into a season peak.

If, however, they finish somewhat overdone I'll have them take a day off, and then ride 30-60 minutes easy each day until the first day they can ride without soreness or pain and have regained enough mental freshness to handle structured training again. That may happen as soon as Wednesday, as late as Friday, or perhaps after a full week to ten days. With deep recovery periods like this one, the body goes into full healing mode, and the first week of training that follows is often a painful one as you force the body open again. Typically, though, by the end of the first or second week back, you'll feel on top of things and should be racing well. You'll be surprised at how little fitness you've lost, and how much being fresh makes up for it.

It can be difficult to rest properly--much more difficult than training. Paradoxically, training hard is just about the easiest thing a rider can do. Anyone can go out and bang their heads against a wall to get better, and riders often let their egos get the best of them by thinking "more means more." Resting takes discipline, patience, and intelligence; because it's actually more difficult to do than training hard, it naturally will yield the biggest results.

There are many effective adages out there that will help you remember how important it is to rest. "Train harder and rest easier." "Put the same emphasis on resting as you do on training." "Be as intense about resting as you are about training." I feel as if I've said those words in every possible form to make the point. While they might be clichés, they get repeated often for a reason. Take the advice to heart--rest with same discipline, dedication and self-control you put into your training, and you'll see the effects for yourself.

To learn more about Adam, or for more articles by Cycle-Smart coaches, visit www.cycle-smart.com.

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