Hello everyone,
I was after some tips after a change in cycling training time availability. I previously had time for 14 to 15 hours weekly, now I can only squeeze in 12h, which doesn’t seem a big difference, but it means my progress always sits in the grey or fresh zone on the progress chart. I complete 2 target sessions a week, usually vo2 and the rest is endurance Z2. My fitness is around 100. If I take 5 days recovery, by the 3rd week of hard training I’m only just reaching a time where my fatigue is greater than my fitness.
Has anyone any tips on continued progression and improvement despite having to slightly reduce available training time?
If your upper weekly time-limit decreased, then you need to drop the lower end of the weekly load too. At 12 hours you can peak at about 660-720 load. That means everything else scales down and you start at about 400 load.
Your two hard sessions can still progress in a similar way as the 14 hour weeks, while your endurance rides fill the balance of the time. Most times, someone dropping duration doesn’t want to lose enough fitness (CTL) to enable them to build up to the upper limit.
Here’s a graphical representation of how the load compares between 12 hours and 14 hours as the peak. You can see the progression is the same relative to the start and end of the plan.
The two graphs are a 3+1 vs 2+1 ratio of work+rest
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Thanks for the reply, really appreciate it, but I’m not entirely sure what you mean 
Always in the grey zone is an indication that you find yourself at a plateau, meaning you no longer have time to progressively add more time/load. To ensure you have progression, your start point (01 on the x-axis) needs to be about 7 hours and you add more time each week, recover, progress more up to 12 hours.
Just because you have 12 hours available, doesn’t mean you have to do that duration every week.
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I know for myself if I have a rest day I seem to go in the grey/fresh and it’s then hard to get out of it again! I’ve been there with 14+ hours a week, how I do not know
I will bump this discussion because I think I’m having the same “problem” thus the same doubts.
Let’s say I have 12h available for 3 weeks straight when I’m starting a plan, is it actually better to do 8h, 9h, 12h in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively, instead of doing 12h on all three while increasing the intensity of the efforts over the weeks?
Depends on you training history and how big a jump it is from what your normal training load/ hours are compared to the 12h you suggest doing…
If you already did say 10hr, then jumping to 12h straight for 3 weeks should be no problems (depending on how you fill these additional hours; more rides, longer rides, more intensity)
If you only did say 6hrs, then jumping straight to 12hrs for more than one week (even one week may be too much) would be too big a leap perhaps and you would be better ramping up time over the 3 weeks.
Ultimately, more hours and volume is going to be better…until its not - classic coach resonse…it depends 
You mention “starting a plan”. What are you planning? And how long does the plan last for?
Block periodisation can be used, as it loads all the intensity into the first week and uses low intensity for the next two weeks to compensate for the large overload created in the first week.