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Les Woodland's book Cycling's 50 Craziest Stories is available as an audiobook here. For the print or Kindle eBook versions, just click on the Amazon link on the right.

Hunter Allen writes:

Traditionally the beginning of October is the start of the off-season for many athletes, and this is a key period of time for these cyclists. This means time for relaxing, catching up with chores around the house, making deposits into the ‘emotional bank account’ with your spouse, doing some things that you hadn’t had time for earlier in the year and a more casual time for riding. These are all good things. I highly recommend to almost all of my athletes that they have some downtime in October or November in order to recharge their battery.  

It’s not just a time to recharge the physical battery, but it’s a time also to recharge the mental/emotional battery.  “Emotion creates motion”, as my good friend Tom Coleman at https://www.3dwearable.org/ says, and he’s right. Emotion is key to motivating yourself for peak performances throughout the year and just like your muscles, tendons and ligaments, your head needs a break too. One of the keys to a successful off-season is a proper amount of rest in order to re-charge that ‘battery’, and then just the right amount of training in order to improve your key limiter all the while making sure that your battery does not de-charge too much.

Think about it from this perspective: Each of us has a ‘battery’ (is a battery according to THE MATRIX movie), and that battery is at 100% full charge when you are rested and completely recovered from any training. This usually happens around the first of the year for most people as they have had reduced training volume since October and then a couple of weeks with hit-and-miss training from the holidays. Recharging your battery to 100% in the off-season allows you to train hard and ‘de-charge’ your battery, but only to 97%, and not the usual 87% that you ‘run’ your battery down to in the season.

You see, in the season you run your battery down to 87% or so, and just like a rechargeable battery that you use in your cell phone, it eventually re-charges back to 93%. It never gets fully re-charged ‘in-season’ since as soon as you get to 93% you go racing again. However, one of the secrets to a successful season is not just getting your battery re-charged, but it’s getting it charged, then training hard during the winter, never going below 97% charge, and then always re-charging to 100% each week. If you look at your off-season training from this perspective, then you find that. Indeed, you can train quite hard in the off-season, keep a fresh mental outlook, and at the same time not become a ‘January Star.’

So, what does this all mean for your off-season training and training with a power meter? It means a couple of things, it means that you can use your power meter to train very specifically this winter and in just the right amount to turn one of your weaknesses into a strength, improve your fitness a notch, and/or completely take your fitness to the next level. I believe that in every cyclist’s ‘career,’ so to speak, there is that ‘one’ off-season in which they really gave it their best, and that off-season is what catapulted them from one category to the next category and even beyond in the season after.  

I remember one winter I trained harder and smarter than ever. I got up early, lifted weights, ran up the local mountain every couple of days, rode on the Mt. Bike every day, and really pushed it. I would always do my training in blocks and train hard for 3-4 days, then take a break and let that battery re-charge to 100% again and this turns out to be a highly effective way for you to manage your off-season as you can keep your Chronic Training Load (CTL) slowly building throughout the winter, without a large negative impact on your Training Stress Balance (TSB).  (Reminder: CTL is the cumulative Training Stress over a longer period of time, say for 42 days, and TSB helps us to know how fatigued you are or you aren’t.)

Now, the next thing that this secret of success tells us about the off-season is that by laying down a good winter training plan, you can have a more consistent and successful season. It’s the athletes who train smart and hard in the winter that have a more complete season for the entire season. When I see an athlete that has loads of “ups and downs” throughout the season, it usually means that they didn’t put in the proper off-season training necessary to carry them throughout the full season. I am not talking about loads of long base miles, as personally, I think that’s great for pros but somewhat unrealistic for most of us trying to balance work, family, cycling, etc.

What I am talking about is more intense rides on the trainer or out on the road, which are focused, strong, and relatively short. You don’t have to do three-hour rides in the freezing cold to make this your best-ever season, but a focused hour to hour-and-a-half session on the trainer with plenty of intervals is all you need. If you do this every day, you will be a ‘January Star’ for certain. Still, if you sprinkle in these hard workouts with some other workouts that just emphasize more muscular work, then you’ll be able to maintain and improve your functional threshold power (FTP) and also keep that battery charged. I have below a sample week of workouts based on an FTP of 250 watts that might help you to understand better what I mean. (Note: WU=warm-up, MS=Main Set, CD=cool-down)

Monday: 1.25 hours- Fast pedaling drills
WU:15 minutes warm-up
5 minutes fast with Cadence in 90-95 range, then do (10) 1 minute on, 1minute off High pedaling cadence efforts.
Cadence over 105 for ON, 85 for off. Don’t worry about HR’s, just Cadence.
Then 5 minutes easy, and then do (2) 5 minute efforts trying to get watts to 255 and hold there.
Keep cadence at 100rpm. Don’t worry about speed.
This is about improving your cadence at LT, not about going the fastest... Build it up, so you don’t blow. Rest for 3 minutes between each.
Finish with 6 more one minute on and off cadence drills- 105 and 85.  
CD: Cool-down for 15minutes

Tuesday: EASY Trainer spin -- one hour...
Small ring with CADENCE in the 100+ range for the first 30 minutes.
Then in the 2nd 30minutes, use the same gear, but more of a normal cadence and every 2 minutes PUNCH it for 8 seconds and go to to two gears harder.
Fast Cadence and make those legs feel a short burn and then recover.....
This shouldn’t really give you High Heart Rates or watts, but will be overall tough on the legs.

Wednesday: One legged pedaling efforts.
WU: 20 minutes warm-up,
MS: 5 minutes with FAST pedaling – Cadence over 105!!! SPIN those legs. Then 3 minutes easy, then, do (10) 1-legged pedaling efforts. ONE minute each leg. FOCUS on smoothing out the stroke. NO dead spots, cadence is LOWER… 53:17, 16,15 for these.. SO, 10x on each leg…
CD: Ride for at least 15 minutes spinning 90-100rpm after that to cool down. O.k., the legs should feel balanced now!

Thursday: Threshold work.
WU: 15 minutes warm-up
MS: then do 2 x 20 watts and just hammer these.
I want to see what you can do for 20 minutes...
Try for the highest wattage you can do for 20 minutes….
REST for 10 minutes between each.
Then do 14 efforts for 1 minute to cadence of 120, in the small ring.
Easy for 1 minutes between each.
Finish with 2x 5 minutes with watts at 250-265.
REST for 5 minutes between each.
CD: Cool-down 15 minutes

Friday: Sub-threshold and a pyramid-1.5hours
Working on your Sub Threshold and also your power at the shorter time periods.
WU: Make it a nice 15 minute warm-up,
MS: Then 2x 20 minutes at SUB-LT, so around watts of 230-240.
Rest for 10 minutes between.
Then do a pyramid:
1 minute super hard - watts 290
then rest for 2 minutes.
then do 2 minutes a touch easier - 280watts
then rest for 2 minutes.
then little more easy, but still hard as you can for 3 minutes - 275 watts?
then 2 minute rest.
then do 4 minutes at 250 watts.... Make this a strong one!
then 2 minutes easy
3 minutes - 260 watts,
2 minutes rest
2 min 245 watts!
2 minutes rest
1 minutes WAY HARD, 390 watts+

This is a sample week from one of my online winter training plans that I built for anyone to use over the winter, and they contain the same workouts that I give to my personal athletes as well. It’s interesting the athletes that have a coach but then call up at the beginning of the off-season to put their coaching ‘on hold’ for the off-season. They just don’t get it. The off-season is where you ‘do your homework’, make gains in your FTP, lose that stubborn extra 5lbs. and work on the ‘holes’ in your power profile so that the season to come is even more consistent and successful.  

Planning for success does not just happen; you have to make a plan, write down your goals, and then take action to make those goals a reality. Nothing new and mind-blowing there, but when you put this set of rules in context with your off-season, it hopefully will make you re-think your off-season and resolve to make it your best ever.

Hunter Allen is a USA Cycling Level 1 coach and former Professional Cyclist. He is the co-author of “Training and Racing with a Power Meter, co-founder of TrainingPeaks Software, and the CEO and Founder of the Peaks Coaching Group. He has coached over 1000 athletes ranging from professionals to fitness enthusiasts and has helped many athletes achieve dreams and goals that they didn’t think were possible.  He specializes in coaching cyclists with wattage meters and is on the forefront coaching with cycling’s newest tool.  

He has online training programs available at www.ShopPeaks.com and you can contact Hunter directly www.PeaksCoachingGroup.com

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