Including Rest in your Bicycle Training Schedule

Rest will help your overall fitness. You need to schedule rest in your training routine.

Be sure you rest

If you cycle two times per day every day for a short amount of time you may see benefits. This type of training will not be of an advantage for long periods. This type of training is not advantageous for long periods because your body needs time to rest, recover and build strength and endurance.

Schedule rest

Make sure that you schedule rest in your training schedule so that your body has time to recover from the periods of training. The rest time also allows your body to make adaptations for the long term based on how long your rest periods are scheduled.

Rest will help your body adapt

After you have taken your body through a competition phase in your season you may decide to schedule a six to eight week rest period in your routine. You may then decide to place regular scheduled short rest periods on your season schedule. These rest periods may be anywhere from one to three days long. The regular scheduled rest within your season schedule will help you to adapt your body to your cycling routine.

It will take a long time to reach your potential so do not expect to reach your potential in a few weeks or even the first season of training and competition. The only way to reach your potential, become a better cyclist and make the needed adaptations is to practice persistently the systematic principles of training from season to season.

Enjoyment is as important as fitness

Performance and fitness are not the only goals you should have for your training. You will also want to strive to reach a level of enjoyment and satisfaction. If you focus too much on a distance goal or an average speed you are risking the advancement of your overall fitness. If you try to cycle too far, too fast or too soon you may be submitting your body to too much stress. It may be more important to take a day of rest than to push yourself to continue when you begin to feel fatigued.

You will gain more improvement from a time of rest than you will gain from pushing your body through a period of fatigue. Although we will discuss the benefits of over training in other articles, the prevention of over training is also very important. If you over train incorrectly you can place a tremendous amount of undue stress on your body. You must always keep cycling as an enjoyable activity. If it becomes more work than enjoyment you will not reach your highest potential and you may no longer desire to cycle.

Written by alastair · Filed Under Training