Days Off

fauxpas

Should riders have a day out of the saddle every week?

Are days off good? Or if fit, should you ride every day?

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Pendejo

Funny you should ask this now, Faux, as I've recently started experimenting with a new schedule. In the past, I've trained primarily according to hard and easy on alternate days (of course, weather, scheduling, etc. interrupts the pattern occasionally). But I started asking myself if the easy days were really doing anything worthwhile in improving my time trial ability (the only kind of races I do). I believe not, and am now taking every other day off, and going hard when I'm out on the bike. I'm betting that this will allow me to go harder on ride days, and that the frequent rest days will make it less likely that I'll break down in some way. We'll see how it all works out when race season starts again in the fall.

ed073

Depends.....what's your current training load?

If you do an hour a day, there's no reason why you can't ride ad infinitum.....but if you're doing 6 hour hit-outs, it's a different story.

fauxpas

I'm only doing 10-20k per day (work and back). Mon-Fri.

On the weekend, I wanted to keep up the 50k ride on a Sat, then have Sun off.

I do medium weight, medium rep workouts nightly and want to do this Mon-Sat to coincide with days I'm on the bike and still have Sun as a nothing day.\

I'm 40 next month and don't know if taking a day off a week is a good thing or not.

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ed073

if you're not worried about racing....Sunday off is fine.

keydates

Taking a day off every once in awhile is always a good idea, although as another poster suggested it depends on the training load. Harder workouts require a higher frequency of rest days (probably no often than once a week though). Also, taking a couple days off every once in awhile can make getting back on more enjoyable.

when eddy ruled

my coach and i changed my program a few months ago from hard day/easy day/hard day etc to hard/hard/easy. hard being hill work and resistance, easy being flat kms or rollers. ive found if i have a day off the bike, the next day the legs take longer to get going. the pros go riding on the tour rest days, ok we're not pro's but the ideas are the same. in my experience after a hard day when the legs are tired, 45 min on the rollers or easy kms on the road are the best thing to aid recovery. i also get 2x 2 week breaks a year, no bike at all. you miss it for the first week but then you get use to the sleeps ins (but not the hairy legs!!)

if you race/ride organized rides, the worst thing you can do is not ride the day before or the day after. i remember the first time i did round the bay (200km) i didnt ride the day after and the next day on the bike was horrendous. made sure the next year i went out on the bike for a couple of hours, just rolling along.

ed073

Journalist: "How do you recover after a race as brutal as Paris-Roubaix?"

Eddy Merckx: "150km on smooth roads."