To be honest, I currently try to ignore the development of fitness (I’m talking about the chart). The ambition to develop my fitness curve in the winter compared to the summer drove me into overtraining last year - it was simply not possible to achieve anything close to a similar development without constantly driving myself completely empty on my trainer.
In the current phase, I’m concentrating much more on the quality of the training, which is not comparable to the rides with friends in the summer.
My goal is currently:
- to do targeted polarised training according to the 80/20 method to improve my anaerobic abilities (please read this article: Polarised training suggestions)
- to train in a very structured way, which I don’t do so well in the summer with lots of pleasure rides.
Reflect on yourself please, do you do short hard HIT sessions with friends in the summer - I don’t think so. I feel the same way. Fitness development (I’m talking about the chart again) takes place in a completely different place in the summer, more in the endurance area. Of course, the ability to climb and sprint also improves, but the long rides alone result in a completely different image of load compared to winter training, which would not be possible over the same duration as in summer.
The result is that you have the feeling of stagnating or even losing fitness in winter. Therefore, I compare the summer development to the winter development with the CIL metric, which is also much flatter in the summer because only the IF is taken into account. If we now look at the winter, we see that the winter is not so bad. The IF in winter is sometimes just as high for hard units as in summer for long units.
I would like to give another example: A few days ago I rode a familiar loop outside again. About 70 km and two short hills with 750 metres of altitude each that I know very well and where I also know my performance and subjective feeling well.
On the ride I had to fight hard but not harder than in summer and it was freezing cold. It was unusual to ride a “real” mountain after a few weeks of pure indoor training. I thought: What a mess, my good form from the summer when I flew up is gone. But when I got home, I saw that I had achieved a new best time on both climbs.
This showed me again that the development of the fitness chart doesn’t really map to actual fitness. I think you have to move away from comparing summer and winter fitness development. It probably works better to look at training periods and their development separately.