3 days off

bigbadwoulfe

Hi everyone. I've been for training for the last 4 months or so for my first ever MTB race. I have gained decent power since then. I give credit to this forum for that. For the last three days, I had been very busy and was not able to ride my bike at all. Too much time consumed by business, job, and new baby. Prior to this, I was doing my regular routine of SST and FTP. Now my question is, did I loose fitness over the 3 days that I was off the bike?

Addtional info.
Sunday was a two hour SST ride at 85%
Monday was a scheduled off day
Tuesday I was feeling ok and was raring to go but got dissapointed because I had to attend to something urgent, so ride got cancelled
Wednesday I was ok to go but found out I cant because of work.
Tomorrow (Its still wednesday here) I will be riding (I hope) and I wonder if I can crank it up to my usual power level or I have to do SST work just to re introduce some fitness that I may have lost during the last 3 days.

Thanks for the replies everyone.
(Sorry for the english, its not my native language)

grahamspringett

Relax. You will lose absolutely no fitness at all in 3 days. None. There may even be some improvement as your body recovers to a stronger point. Just carry on, you're fine. Honestly.

I've just had 10 days off after a virus and last night I did an hour sweet spot on the turbo and felt fine.

daveryanwyoming

+1 on Graham's reply.

Remember, the adaptations that training brings are slow. Increased heart stroke volume, increased red blood cell count, increased mitochondrial densities in the working muscles, increased capillarly bed densities around those muscles. Those sort of changes don't happen in just a couple of days. You can't cram for fitness, it takes steady and long term efforts to bring about these positive changes.

The flip side of the coin is that they don't evaporate over night either. Take away the excess training stress and your body will begin to detrain but it takes a while. Yeah, unfortunately we seem to detrain faster than we train but still it takes time.

But you may very well feel sluggish after a few days of total rest. That's pretty normal and why I never race after a complete rest day. I don't really understand all the physiology, but folks tend to need an openers ride to loosen the muscles back up and get them ready for hard efforts after complete rest days. So your first ride or two may feel off but don't let that worry you. As grahamspringett said, 3 days is really just a good rest after a long block of steady training. Once you've loosened up you should feel better than ever and quite possibly put out some personal best efforts.

Good luck,
-Dave

Ade Merckx

Yeah I gotta agree with the sluggish but somehow fresh feeling. As an oldie but hopefully goodie I a little bit of threshold pressure (~20mins) the day before a race is a must

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