You are training too hard

Training
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tl;dr: You are training too hard.

Do you know how I know that? Because despite knowing this and writing this post to tell you this, I am also still training too hard.. Maybe putting this down in writing will help me stop training too hard. Maybe it will help you too.

Who the hell am I telling you this? I’m a 50 year old competitive US masters racer, who got back into training and racing about 3 years ago after being a, well, less competitive Cat 2 for about 10 years around the turn of the century (doesn’t that just sound quaint?). I’m self coached, because I like to learn about training and think I know what I’m doing (you can form your own opinion on that!)

And what have I been doing? Training too hard. All of it, all the time. Back in my “prime,” I could grind out some seriously hard workouts, multiple times a week, and I’d get pretty damn fit. I was at least in the mix in local and some regional 1/2 races. And then my results would start going the wrong way, and I’d throw more hard work in. And then my performance would completely collapse, I’d get blown out the back of all my races, I’d throw in the towel for a few months, and eventually get back on the bike, to start back at the bottom. And repeat.

Now I’m back. I have a power meter. I have the internet. I have forums like this. I’ve listened to over 1000 hours of training podcasts while I ride. I’d like to think I have more discipline and maturity. And do you know what all of this is telling me? That I’ve been training too hard.

I’ve almost learned. I think I’ve got the zone 2 thing down. No more riding near VT1. Or even sort of near VT1. I’m riding at 50-55% of my FTP, basically right down at the bottom of zone 2. Hell, I’m doing a few hours a week in zone 1. I listen to how I feel, tune in first to RPE, fine tune based on power and HR. Which usually means I go even slower. Although sometimes it feels all too easy and the HR is lower than expected and the power is higher, and I’ll still tell myself to dial it down just a little.

My one or two hard workouts a week? Probably still doing them too hard! Oh, I have an interval workout today? I’m doing them right at the top of the zone! Maybe slightly over! Too hard! I’m doing the group ride? I’m taking pulls and also at the front for every sprint! Too hard!

Two hard workouts a week? That might also be too hard! You’re 50 you dingus!

The best part? I’m fairly certain I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been. I have amazing durability in races and have way more matches than I thought I would. Being fit enough that racing is “fun”. To getting into the lead group of an open USAC 100K gravel race where I’m at least 13 years older than the next oldest racer, and have a son nearly the same age as the eventual winner.

Because my training is consistent, my volume is high, and my motivation is there, 12 months a year. Because I’m not training too hard.

I know - this is a feast of insipid training bromides. You’ve heard it all before. Of course you know what you’re doing.

But you know that you think a little harder is better. I do. I still do! I’m going to get on my bike tomorrow and do some intervals and have to work hard to not be right on that top edge of the zone, because harder will make me faster, right?

I hope you made it here, to the end. I hope I’ve made you think about your training for a moment. Maybe you aren’t actually training too hard, and this was just what you needed to hear! Maybe you’ll try dialing back your Zone 2 ride by just 10Watts and see what happens? Maybe you won’t jump on the wheel of that person who just passed you. Maybe you’ll cut out that 3rd interval workout for the week and just “go for a ride” and not be worried that you’re going to lose fitness, because you won’t. You’ll just be faster.

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@fabric5000 super appreciate this post.

You say you’re high volume.

I’ve heard many times that bulk Z2 is specifically for HV riders, and if you’re strictly LV, you should be doing more intensity work. [ A couple very knowledgeable coaches & riders told me it should all be VO2; nothing else. ]

What advice do you have for riders who are stuck at max 2 - 5 hrs / wk on the bike, possibly total [ with the necessary associated wgt training sessions ], but also possibly plus swim & run training, for triathlon ?

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I’m training 10-14 hours a week. Definitely on the higher side. If you can ride a lot, you can ride easy.

You said triathlon, I’m going to throw my hands up and admit ignorance here, and just plow ahead with cycling-specific, and my thoughts on how I’d do it if that was my time limit. And recommend that you give up triathlon, sounds like you’d have 10 hours to ride your bike then! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

2-5 hours is starting to get to the point where you are right - 2 hours at zone 2 isn’t going to do anything. If all you have is 2 hours, smash it. But let’s look at it this way - the rest of your workouts are taking “easy” to the extreme - nothing easier than staying on the couch!

5 hours is an interesting number. 1 hour 5 days a week? 5 hours 1 day a week? Somewhere in the middle? They’ll probably all get you fairly close to the same thing. What are you training for? If you are racing crits, the lack of a long ride becomes less important, and you need to focus really on LT and above - I wouldn’t do any tempo (I don’t really do any tempo! I’m excellent at it, but I hate it!) . Is your goal to just do the weekend group ride? Well, that ride is your long ride and probably your hardest ride. Should you then ride hard more when you’re not doing that ride? Maybe. 2 really hard 2.5 hour rides a week and then you are just recovering the rest of the time?

And the coaches who are telling you “make every workout a VO2 max workout?” Yeah, get back to me after doing 5x3 every day for 5 days. Sounds like a way to hate your life really quick.

Here’s something for another post maybe I’ll write - you’ll need to experiment. Any training is going to work, but what is going to work for you. Not the best. What will you stick to? If all you have is 1 hour a day 5 days a week, what are you likely to do? If you have flexibility, will you do 3 hours on Saturday and then 1 hour 2 other days? Can you do 30 minutes a day and then a 3 hour ride? The 5 hours you’ll do 12 months a year is better than the 5 hours you’ll do for 3 months and then pack it in or just ride without a real purpose. Gotta find your why!

I’d figure that out first. Once you have some days and durations, you can work from there. If you have 3 hours on a weekend, that’s best being a long Z2 ride. Maybe with some cadence work, but not much. That’s actually going to be a “hard” ride for you, in terms of recovery, even if it’s “easy.” You can probably do interval work on two 1 hour days then. But I don’t think you need to over do it. I’d start with something like a 3x3 VO2 one day and maybe 2x10 or 3x8 LT the other one. I’m sure people will say “do more” but this is exactly my point. Even at 5 hours a week, don’t over do it. You don’t have the volume, so every ride is sort of hard, in a way.

If you are riding 1 hour every day, you might still want to do three 1 hour Zone 2 rides, and maybe just throw some 10 second sprints through out them with the same two interval rides?

The interesting thing is, say you do any of these for 6 months, and then suddenly you get 5 more hours. What should you do? Probably just keep doing what you’re doing and add more zone 2, and just a bit more to those hard workouts.

Ultimately, you’re going to need to try these different things. Give it 2-3 months, and see how you feel. I’d pay less attention to your ATL/CTL and see how much you want to ride. With only 2-5 hours, I’d start on the high side of effort, and back off if you start to not look forward to doing a hard ride. Rather than start easy and ramp it up.

These are the things the various coaches I listen to say. 6 hours seems to be the point where they seem to agree you should start being careful about training too hard too much. Under that, you can get away with a lot.

yeah yeah, I just told everybody they are riding too hard, and now I"m telling you to go get it. :slight_smile:

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Because triathlon was specifically mentioned: I would add, if you train three sports, and have time for each 5 hours a week, then you should definitely not train harder. So don’t ride hard for 5 hours, because it’s only 5 hours, then another 5 hours of HIT runs, etc.
Instead, maybe two sessions a week hard (no matter what sport), the remaining sessions should be easy.

That’s how I handle it: max. 2 hard sessions per week (usually rather 1), the rest easy sessions. So if I have 6 hours, that would be 2 hours hard (session time, not TiZ), 4 hours easy. If I have 15 hours, then it would be 2 hours hard, and 13 hours easy.

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My sport is cross-country skiing. Over the past 12 months, I’ve averaged 7 hours of training per week, with 75% in Zone 1-2, 10% in Zone 3, and 15% in Zones 4-5.

As a result, I’ve built solid endurance at LT1 level (good power/speed with low lactate), but I’m clearly lacking at intensities near LT2—specifically, what you might call durability—and in finish-line sprints. After this past season, I’ve concluded that I haven’t done enough controlled high-intensity work.

Or am I wrong? (Oh, and I’m also 50… so there’s that. :wink:)

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@fabric5000 thank you for the input, I really appreciate it.

I typically ride Mon Wed Fri, 45 - 90 mins, and swim Tue & Thu, 60 - 90 mins. [ I don’t currently run; injury; in physio. ]

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Would you share what your zone 3 and zone 4-5 workouts are? That seems like an excellent mix, but maybe you want to try some different zone 4-5 workouts?

My guess is that cross-country is not quite as up and down power-wise as a bicycle race, but more so than running? More like a hilly TT but where you might have specific points in the race where extra speed to drop somebody at the top of a hill or that sprint in the end you mention?

When it comes to sprints, that’s a specific thing to work on. My initial thought is to just work in some sort of sprint workout into the zone 1-2 workouts, and not change anything else?

The other idea I think is worth exploring is getting 2 different sorts of workouts into one of your hard days. Polarized is really about workouts, not specifically time in zone, and Seiler himself has said 80/20 would mean 8 days easy, 2 days hard. To give you more recovery time. So why not do a little more on the same day?

My thinking here is, do the more important work first, when you are fresh, give yourself some z1 in between, and then something less important or that you want to work on when you are fatigued. I’ve been doing something like a VO2 or LT workout, and then combine some 30s or 10s really hard efforts later in the day. That might be a strategy you could employ here, it wouldn’t add a lot of time, just throw some short high intensity stuff after an existing workout.

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Don’t be afraid to do something different! This recent study is basically saying it barely matters what you do, as long as you do something.

Jem Arnold has been making the rounds talking about this and I’ve listened to Michael Rosenblat as well. I think cycling is a bit of an outlier due to the different disciplines (I race mostly crits, and while VO2 Max numbers are important, TT performance doesn’t necessarily translate to crit success), but again the differences are small here.

I also like leveraging morning HRV to help me listen to my body. I really believe success here is about learning to tie what your body is telling you to what your metrics are telling you. I had been using Xert for awhile, and what I came to realize is that it was way overestimating my FTP. So I was - wait for it! - training too hard!

A great coach is going to help you figure this stuff out. But training is really an experiment with an N of 1 - you!

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My typical workout is on the threshold of LT2: 2x5х3.30/1.30@z4
Closer to the start of the season, I did these (intensity sessions) about once every 5-7 days, depending on how I felt. Of course, in skiing, it’s tricky to control and precisely dose intensity due to terrain variations and the lack of exact power measurements.

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2x5х3.30/1.30@z4

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On the flip side, when I’ve trained in the 6 hour/week range, I got faster and more durability by training hard most of the time (2 a days: ~20 minutes morning, short or long afternoon). That was at 55 and almost a decade ago in the 2nd year of training.

Years later almost achieved the same by hiring a coach at 7-8 hours/week and doing more endurance although those were around 70% and 2 hours and 270W ftp = not easy.

Most of my local cycling friends that get really fast increase the volume above 12 hours/week and do a lot of 50% rides. And twice a week fast drop rides that end up looking like ~60 minutes at FTP.

One guy has something like a 380W ftp and spends a lot of time (18-20 hours/week) noodling on Strava at 100-120W and then hits it hard on group rides for at least 40 minutes at threshold.

After I deal with a nagging injury, I’m going to try lower volume 6-8 hours/week noodling outside at 50% most of the time and then once or twice a week progressively work on 30-90 minutes at upper tempo to threshold.

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You hear this from a lot or pros. When it’s easy, it’s easy. When it’s hard, it’s hard. Unless Inigo San Milan is your coach, sound like he has them riding closer to VT1 - hence Pogi riding at 250-300W, which is still in Z2. Jack Haig was talking about riding with Pavel Sivakov, and said he didn’t like riding with him because Jack’s easy rides were like 140W, and Sivakov’s where like 250-280W.

But it’s a bit of a chicken and egg here. Are these guys fast because of their training, or their genetics? I saw a video about David Millar getting back into training. He had been complete off the bike for years, spent 3 months training, and was TT’ing at 375Watts.

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Interesting. Let me stress - you gotta find what works for you. So take this as simply friendly feedback (which I feel like you already are - I just want to be sure).

Most prescriptions I see for LT have longer ons and shorter offs. 6-20m with 25% recovery. I’ve seen some folks recommend even shorter recovery, less recommend longer. And with fewer total intervals. I personally like around 8 minutes with 2 minutes recovery, 4-6. Your interval timing fits a bit more closely to traditional VO2 intervals.

But if it’s all about time in zone, does it really matter? Is there really a different effect physiologically, in terms of the interval length? Some coaches seem to really like much longer LT intervals. Blech. :slight_smile:

Another thing to consider is that you are going off of heart rate time in zone (is a cross country power device somehow in the works somewhere? Doesn’t look like Stryd can be leveraged for it). How are you feeling at the end of your 3.5 minutes? Might you be going too hard? That you are getting some HR into the VO2 Max zone could indicate that you are actually going beyond LT? Your consistency on these intervals makes me think not, but something to consider. You might be actually doing something closer to a hard start VO2 max effort, and then partway through the interval you’re actually bringing the intensity down closer to zone 3, but based on HR it all looks to be in the right zone? Again, I’m completely speculating here, you can maybe check this via the time chart of HR, how quickly are you getting it up to the top of the Z4 range. If you are breathing super hard during these intervals, that could also be an indication that maybe you are going too hard for the intended LT type effort.

It’s really nice having power to compare with HR, and I’ve definitely done intervals where the power at the end is nowhere near what I intended, because I went too hard, but the HR all looks reasonable.

Again - I’m not saying this is what is happening! Hopefully these 2 different thoughts I have will help you dig into them and maybe you have some fine tuning you could do.

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Feedback is a gift.
I’ve been doing skiing for 5 years, and during the first 3–4 seasons, my progress was very rapid. Before I started skiing, I was a runner — my marathon PB is 3:30, and my VO2 max is currently 53.

I’ve been training with lactate monitoring for about 1.5 years now — almost every session. Plus, about every 2–3 months, I do a ramp test — one on a treadmill and one on skis.

Before I had a lactate meter, I used to do LT2 workouts using a 6/2x8–12 protocol. And I remember those sessions felt extremely hard. My first lactate measurements showed that I was going way above LT2 in terms of lactate levels (>6–7 mmol). I also remember that during those seasons, I got injured and sick more often. Overall, when I got the device, I realized just how excessively hard I had been training.

I truly believe in training easier. When I started monitoring lactate, things got easier, and at the same time, I saw progress at the LT1 level — my speed increased at the same heart rate, and lactate levels dropped at that intensity. However, I spent a long time training mainly in zones 1 and 2. I didn’t focus on LT2-type workouts. In retrospect, I feel I lacked sufficient training at the anaerobic threshold. And I didn’t do sprint intervals at all.

If you look at the screenshot, I measured lactate at the end of the last interval in each block. After the first block, it was 3.1; after the second, 3.7, while my LT2 lactate level at the time was around 3.8. At that moment, in these workouts, I realized I was training approximately at LT2 intensity but not going significantly over it.

Maybe you’re right — I need to increase interval duration and reduce recovery time. But if you look at the total time spent in zone 4 (LT2) based on heart rate, I still got about 35 minutes of work in that zone, which in my opinion is comparable to a 4x8/2 workout. Yes, I need to think and search for the individual key to unlock this.

P.S.
In skiing, there’s no power meter. My Garmin HRM Pro Plus strap shows power data for skiing too, but it’s calculated and not very accurate. It’s heavily influenced by wind, terrain, and ski glide. Still, I look at this data once I’ve gathered enough to spot trends. But in a specific workout, I mostly rely on RPE and heart rate readings.

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Bravo on a 3:30 Marathon, that is super impressive!

I’ve thought about doing the lactate testing, and your details are making me consider it more. I was listening to a Jack Burke podcast, he’s been talking about the Tymewear breath measuring device, and is saying you can leverage that to get to the same answer as the lactate measurement, but a lot easier:

I haven’t looked into it that deeply, but it makes sense. Now that they have a strap, and not a vest, I’m thinking about it. Still pre-order.

But it sounds like you have the intensity very much dialed in! In terms of interval duration and such, I’m right with you with time in zone being the most important metric. Another thought on the structure is to look at your events and see what the important sections of the race are, and then tailor your intervals and power to that. I don’t know what that looks like in XC, but for cycling, if you know you have a critical 5 or 7 minute climb, working the intensity you’ll need to perform well there is definitely a strategy.

This is again working the margins and fine tuning things. But our ultimate goal here is race-day performance, so getting alignment there is another way to think of workout structure.

For me, I’m doing a lot of V02 Max and a lot of really short, really hard stuff, because that’s what a crit is going to need. Right now I’m focusing on the latter with lots of recovery, but as I get closer to target races, I’ll focus on repeatability, so on/off work with very short recovery.

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I’m always fascinated by new tech and innovations – like Core (though I don’t use heat training) or, even more intriguing, Moxy. But I’m highly skeptical about dosing intensity based on ventilation metrics. Brands like Garmin and Polar have oceans of HRV data yet remain cautious about using it for threshold detection. Still, there’s clearly something to this approach, and I’ll be watching closely.

That said, lactate testing remains the gold standard. I’ve probably burned through 300+ test strips in my training. It takes skill to administer the test and—critically—interpret the results, but the payoff for load monitoring is real. Right now, I know I can metabolically sustain Zone 2 HR, but it’s far from easy and feels radically different when fitness levels change. For example:

Earlier: 7:15/km pace at 135 bpm (lactate ~2 mmol)
Now: 5:30/km pace at 154 bpm (same ~2 mmol)
The effort perception? Dramatically harder.

You’re absolutely right that threshold development must align with sport-specific demands. One key takeaway from this season: I need dedicated hill work. That’s a whole separate training domain.

But circling back to polarized training – ultimately, everything hinges on recovery speed, which is dictated by lifestyle and (undeniability) age. When we cite 80/20 studies, we’re extrapolating from athletes under 30 with optimized lifestyles. For those of us juggling jobs, families, and stress, the real challenge is maximizing productive training while sustaining recovery. That’s my Everest

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hi, what is HV and LV?
i am trying to figure out if maybe that is what I am missing in my personal situation. would you please tell me more or what to look for?

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hi, would you be able to address me to more knowldge about recovery speed? Im 27 but at a certain point in my life covid and lockdown I felt my metabolism changed a lot. I feel I need so much more time now to recover from efforts. I wonder if there is anything I could do about it

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I also had the best progress doing HV (10+ hours) with lots of slow rides (50-55% FTP).

However, it‘s boring: I live in a hilly area and riding this easy means I can‘t go around too much. After some time I have seen all of the flatter paths and I also don‘t get as far. I lost motivation somewhen.

I desperetaly need these slow rides back though. :slight_smile:

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If I understood your question correctly…
Any infection, especially COVID, dramatically damages our cells and mitochondria. Recovery requires both time and blood biochemistry monitoring.

From a metabolic recovery standpoint: My lactate clearance rate is 0.5 mmol/min.

  • Example: A 4-minute LT2 interval ending at 4 mmol lactate
  • Requires 4 minutes to return to LT1 levels (~2 mmol).

Thus, for lactate utilization training, I use 4x4min intervals with equal recovery.

Optimal recovery intensity:

  • Pace: Easy (RPE 3-4)
  • Best metric: Your subjective RPE – it’s the ultimate indicator.
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