I have just spent an hour on Dr. Google’s web site studying topics related to recovery after hard events. For context I raced a 64 mile/100K winter gravel event, two hours of accumulated time at threshold and above. I took first in my age group but at some cost to my body. Currently I have had two nights of poor but improving sleep. Beyond, rest, hydration, massage, and good nutrition how and when do you get back to training or training hard? Dr Google suggest it is highly variable among athletes as to when you are recovered. Numbers that I saw were 1-2 weeks but that article was talking about the youngsters in the 50y/o category. @Gerhard has mentioned using his cycling efficiency numbers to help determine recovery. My cycling efficiency numbers are a little harder to use as I’m predominately a mountain biker with the typical slower cadence (I’m working on developing a faster cadence now).
I think for now, after having one complete day off the bike I will do an hour long Z1 pace today. I will not do any intensity until I’m sleeping well. Do any of our members have any suggestions as to how long to rest, and what training if any should be done as part of that rest?
I have over reached in the past and in general I’m terrible at figuring out how to rest properly.
First well done on your race result.
If it were me and only speaking from personal experience I would say it depends.
I don’t know how accustomed to riding at or above threshold you were or just how smashed you are. Two hours is quite a long time to be above 100% so I can understand you are feeling it.
It also depends on whether you had peaked for this event and need to transition before going back to a build phase for another peak, however I will assume not for now.
Not sleeping well has been quite normal for me after hard events and this can last a day or sometimes 3 or 4, usually it’s the aching legs that are causing it.
Personally I think 2 weeks rest is far too long, why not put a planned 2 week of rides into the activities on the calendar and see how much your CTL (Fitness) drops and adjust it until the form line goes into the fresh (blue) area? Also if you monitor your resting heart rate, see how quickly this goes back to normal.
If it were me I would have the next week as a recovery week, so Monday and Tuesday off,
Wednesday I would do a mid length lower zone 2 ride, so maybe 2 hours at 65%
Thursday, 1 hour max recovery ride, real easy maybe 40% FTP or less.
Friday I would do some higher intensity work, depending on what you were doing before the event but less duration, so maybe over-unders or threshold with bursts or something, or maybe do a few all out sprints. Saturday 1-2 hours zone 2, sunday 3 hours zone 2.
I think with recovery weeks you should not drop the intensity too much, just the volume so go for 60% of your usual TSS
Then I would get back into training on the next week.
Of course only you know how you feel and how you recover but I would do the above and see if your CTL (fitness) has dropped and your form gone into the blue (Fresh). If you have 2 weeks off you may find you need to go back to doing some base again and then starting the build phase all over.
Hey Steve, I did not taper for the race except I took two days off before the race. I am shooting to get some fitness gains for endurance events that are yet months away. I had not looked at resting HR until just now and it is perhaps a little low. I’m with you on 2 weeks of rest. I like your idea of adding some workouts to the calendar and adjust workouts based on Fatigue and Form. Thanks for your input.
Hey guys I’m new here, Hello. I read this about how to tell if one is recovered and thought I’d share my thoughts. As a 65 yr. old who still races MTN bikes and gravel bikes, I’ve picked up a few things that work for me, they might work for ya’ll. Resting Heart rate taken 1st thing in the morning, if mine is higher or lower then 5 beats from normal that’s a sign that I might not be ready but will still try planned workout. But the real indicator for me is there is small hill, bump in the road actually, that I ride during my warm up and I’ll notice while riding up that hill how my legs feel compared to normal (do they feel heavy/tired of fresh), how my heart rate responds, (does it jump up to zone 3 as usual or stay low) and finally my RPE while climbing that hill (does it feel harder then usual, for the effort). If legs feel fresh, heart rate responds, and RPE feels normal, I’ll proceed as planned, If Heart rate is sluggish, legs feel heavy/tired and RPE feels like I’m climbing a mountain, I’ll either just spin or turn around and go home taking day off (depending on how bad I feel)… anyway this seems to work for me, better than HRV, or subjective recovery test. Also I take 2 days every week (7days) as I’ve learned I have to at my age!!
Hi Jeff
It looks like you have a good system, I do check resting HR myself but definitely not regular enough just on occasion as a guide to recovery or to check in general my current RHR when I know I am fully recovered. I must admit I wasn’t aware of lower than normal meaning you may not be recovered, I thought the lowest you could get it was your resting HR?
On outdoor rides when I set off there is a climb in most directions and it’s true that sometimes my legs feel very heavy but I’m not sure if I would ever use that as a reason to turn around and go home, I do find that it can take me 30 mins to warm up properly and sometimes the legs just seem to bed in as it were. Also it can be good to train with fatigue in the legs sometimes.
Quite often I have set off with intervals on the programme and thought I was never going to mage them, but once I get into the intervals it’s a different matter.
Sometimes I will get half way through the first interval and think there is no way I am going to manage another one never mind complete the set, but I may as well start the second and see how I go, and then I finish that one and try another and before you know it you are on the last interval.
I think there is some value in considering a two week on one week recovery schedule at our age if doing high intensity work.
Hey Steve, resting Hr has a baseline, although as you get fitter it should slowly decline. Your are right about taking a while (forever for me!) to get warmed up (the hill is near the end of my warm up) and maybe I should have said it’s a combo of several metrics that clue’s me in, tired legs, sluggish heart rate high RPE, probably a combo of 2 out of 3?? And I also agree about sometimes training w/ tired legs, to the extent of maybe a long endurance ride and if I was a road racer I could see value in doing sprint work at the end of a ride, to simulate the final sprint! For the last several yrs., while doing intervals to train a specific system ( threshold, Vo2max, …) I’ll usually quit if 2 of the 3 don’t line up: 1) heart rate does not respond as it should, 2) can’t hit my power goal or 3) RPE feels harder then it should. I don’t believe you can train a specific system if you can’t reach that system! Not saying that what’s anyone else should do, just what I do. And I have also gone to the 2 wks on, 1wk recovery, but only during Build phase, while in Base I’m still 3 and 1… Sometimes I do think about trying what Joe Friel calls “recovery on demand” where you don’t really have designated recovery wks built into your plan, you play it by feel and take recovery whenever it’s needed, even if in the middle of a training wk. Just my thoughts and trying to explain myself better, as sometimes it hard to put into words why we do what we do!!
I will say this, when I hit somewhere around 55 yrs. old, I became obsessed with trying to monitor my recovery as I keep reading older athletes can’t do this or that, or they will overtrain, injure themselves, blah blah blah. I found a product called Restwise which is based off resting Hr and some questions that you answer each morning such as sleep quality and hrs. sleep , soreness, urine color and others. It gives your a recovery score for that day, which helped me decide if I needed rest or if I could train harder. It really helped me develop, lets call it “my fatigue awareness”. I still use that product, but now I use it to look for trends, if I have several days of scores getting lower, I’ll pay more attention to “my fatigue awareness”, If I have several days of the score staying the same, I might train more or harder, and it helps me reaffirm what my body is saying. If I have one day of a low score, I will STILL train as planned if “my fatigue awareness_ hill test” is good. Several yrs later, thinking new technology might be better then Restwise (to me, it’s not), I bought a 24/7 activity tracker to monitor my “off the bike” fatigue and I tried using HRV, took it every morning for over 2 yrs., honestly, most of the time, it just didn’t correlate w/ the way I felt. As someone said before, HRV has no way of knowing how your legs feel, and I found out my my 24/7 activity tracker doesn’t really help, as far as recovery, it’s interesting as far as steps taken but I’m not going to stop walking just because I hit XXX number of steps that day (lol). So to sum it up, I pay the most attention to how my body feels (and I use that hill to help decide that) more then anything else… FYI: I am not sponsored by Restwise in anyway and not trying to sound like a advertisement for that product, just telling about my journey trying to learn how to judge my recovery. WOW this turned out to be much more than then I meant and probably more than most others care about.
Jeff, totally with you on 3/1 for base and 2/1 for build. I also think you have hit the nail on the head with regards doing intervals and if you can’t hit your targets then might as well ride home.
'Recovery on Demand - I have considered this but I suppose getting out of the 7 day week habit is not easy and most software doesn’t cater for it.
Not heard of Restwise but I’ll check it out online.
Regards
Steve
Hey guys, Sorry to have been off the grid here for the last few days, work and a busy schedule has prevented me from chiming in. Their have been a lot of great suggestions here. My path after my 100K race ended up being two days of rest, two days of hour long Z2, day of rest, another day of Z2. So six days of going easy and just monitoring how my legs feel and hoping to flush them out. Along with this, monitoring rest. My cortisol levels go through the roof after stressing my body this hard, resulting in poor sleep quality. Good rest, good legs means it’s time to get back on it. This time it took 6 days. Other parts of recovery, are all the normal things, hot tub, massage (thereagun), foam rolling, good nutrition, and as much hydration as I can (2+ liters/day). I especially like the suggestion of warming up and trying a hill. This time of year in Colorado, I have to use the trainer.
With regards to recovery, I read recently that an immediate recovery fuel helps prevent post ride Cortisol spikes.
For all of us in this group recovery is a challenge and how we manage it is very interesting.