Maintain Your Fitness During the Winter Months

Probably one of the hardest things to communicate to my athletes is how to stay fit during the off-season winter months. Living up here in New England, the cyclocross season is near wrapping up by mid-December, and the real racing doesn’t start again until mid- to late March of next year.

So, what to do in the meantime? I usually suggest a full week off from training to help recovery and heal up the body and mind.  Then, it is time to start to think about next year. You should think about your schedule and goal races and plan your training to eventually build up to those goals.

However, in order to be ready for that intense part of your training, you need to be fit and most importantly, fresh. The constant training that you endured all race season was a tremendous stress on your muscles and your emotions. The focus and sacrifice needed to succeed can be brutal on you, not to mention your family, loved ones and even your career.

As an athlete with goals, you just can’t quit everything and expect to be ready to perform come springtime, so we have to maintain our fitness while at the same time keeping our health and sanity by taking a definitive "break" from the normal training routine.  But how do you make sure you're exercising enough to maintain the level of fitness you need? 

One great way is to use the Performance Management Chart (PMC) on Training Peaks and/or WKO+, as shown below:

Those familiar with the PMC will remember that the blue line on the PMC is your fitness as quantified by your Chronic Training Load (CTL), the magenta line is your fatigue as quantified by your Acute Training Load (ACL), and the yellow is your Training Stress Balance which quantifies your "form". We are going to temporarily ignore form for now and think mostly about the other two.

For the off-season, I suggest a reduction in your Chronic Training Load (the blue line) of at least a full third from your load during your peak events of the racing season. Then, try to match that level with your Acute Training Load (the magenta line). Since the load is measured by the Training Stress Score (TSS), the easiest way to do that is by decreasing the duration and/or intensity of your workouts.

So, the first thing is to cut down your workout schedule to four or five days per week, max. When you're on the bike, keep your workouts down to about an hour with little intensity. During this time of year, there's no need to burn yourself up in the pool, and forget about those track workouts for a few months. I suggest perhaps a half an hour one day a week in the pool, with any intervals or efforts in your high-endurance or low-tempo zones. Then, your indoor bike workouts can be just an hour, again with any efforts in the low-tempo zones there as well, to avoid utter boredom. Run workouts can be simple jogs around the park. When the weekend comes, enjoy your group workouts but avoid the local "weekly world championships" where the intensity can be too high due to others not being on your off-season training plan.

If you're lucky enough to live in an area of the country where you can go hiking, hit a group fitness class, cross-country ski, or snowshoe during the off-season, then use the “Zones” tab on your TrainingPeaks user account settings to set the intensity zones for any of these cross-training sports. When you upload the workouts either by feel or with your heart rate monitor, those workouts can be translated into a TSS and your magenta line maintained. Pretty cool, actually.

Monitor how you're doing by paying attention to that magenta line on your PMC. If the weekend was super hard and there is a spike on the chart, then ease back on the number of days during the following week to keep the line level.

I like to think of the off-season as a few months of squeezing the water out of a sponge, and then the using that dry sponge in the early spring to soak up the intense workouts that are needed to make sure you're sharp on race day. I've also found that easing off during the winter, mixing in other sports, and maintaining a stress-free endurance base makes me excited to get out and hit myself in the face with a brick all spring and summer. Good stuff all around.

Want to know more about the metrics that Kyle is referring to in this article?  Find out more about the PMC, TSS, CTL, and other metrics you can track with our software for athletes.

Kyle Wolfe has spent the last 26 years of his life dedicated to the sport of cycling.  Kyle is the multisport coach of Finish Fast Cycling, a USA Cycling licensed Level 2D Coach, a Level B USAC official, and is Power Based Training Certified by USAC.  Kyle is one of only a few in the Northeast with such certification and one of only about three dozen nationwide. As a former elite racer, he has competed and scored all across this country and in Europe while learning about the sport and competition.  His lifelong exposure to competitive sports and coaching has taught him how to work with athletes and help them reach their highest levels possible!

Comments

[jaffa]

Great.