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Keep
the Fitness You've
Earned
By Chris Carmichael
One of the biggest crimes in human
performance is the willful loss of the
fitness gains made during the course of
the season; and it’s about time you
stopped the cycle.
Fall should not mean the demise of your
hard-earned fitness. There is no need to
gain 20 pounds between mid-September and
November 1, nor is there any good reason
why you have to go from the front of the
group ride to struggling at the back for
the winter. While you shouldn’t try
to maintain your peak race fitness
throughout the year, staying in good
physical shape year-round is part of
leading a balanced, active lifestyle.
In order to make appreciable
improvements in your aerobic conditioning
and sustainable power from year to year,
it is essential to retain at least 75% of
your peak summer fitness through the fall
and winter. When athletes go into
hibernation and allow their aerobic
engines to lay dormant for too long, it
can take two to three months of training
to regain lost fitness. It simply
doesn’t make sense to expend three
months of energy just to get back to where
you’ve already been.
Fortunately, your summer fitness is
easier to keep than it was to gain in the
first place. If you cut your training
volume by about 25%, and eliminate most of
the structured interval sessions,
you’ll notice your top-end speed and
ability to handle repeated accelerations
diminish. Let them go. Your goal is to
reduce your overall training load
(recuperate from the season) while still
retaining the majority of your aerobic
conditioning (prepare for next year). Your
top-end performance will come back more
quickly next spring if you don’t have
to spend months rebuilding the aerobic
engine necessary to support it.
Fall
Training
You’re not well suited to being a
couch potato anyway, so the end of the
summer cycling season should just be an
opportunity to use some of the other
sporting equipment in your garage. The
exact mode of exercise you choose
doesn’t really matter, as long as it
addresses your needs as an endurance
athlete. The best activities for cyclists
are weight bearing and require nearly
continuous movement, including running,
cross-country skiing, snowshoeing,
cyclocross, racquet sports, basketball,
hiking, and soccer.
While cyclists have highly-developed
aerobic systems, we run the risk of being
very one-dimensional athletes.
Weight-bearing exercise is beneficial for
the integrity of bones and connective
tissues, and since you are almost
certainly less efficient as a runner than
you are as a cyclist, you can apply a lot
of stress to your aerobic system in less
time than you normally spend on your bike.
Honing your cycling technique has made you
very economical on your bike, but that
economy of motion disappears when you
enter a different sport.
Strength
Training
Any discussion of fall and winter
training inevitably gets around to the
question of strength training. While
resistance training, particularly in the
form of lifting weights, can improve
cycling performance, your decision to
renew your gym membership should depend on
the time your have available.
As an endurance athlete trying to
balance family and work commitments with
your pursuit of performance goals, time is
a precious commodity. You have to evaluate
the potential benefit of strength gained
through resistance training against the
time it will take away from your aerobic
training. For a Category 3 or
Master’s cyclist currently devoting
less than 10 total hours a week to
cycling, resistance training may not be
the best use of your time this fall and
winter.
A typical resistance training program
requires at least three hours a week, and
when that comes out of your 10 available
hours, you’re diluting the
effectiveness of your aerobic training.
I’d rather see athletes with limited
training time spend more of that time on
the bike, and the rest participating in
activities that enhance core strength,
balance, and overall flexibility. Cycling
and your choice of yoga and/or Pilates can
be a very effective combination for making
aerobic and strength gains in the fall and
winter.
Weight
Management
If you’re like most cyclists,
you’re at your leanest somewhere
between June and August, and you’re
heaviest somewhere between December and
February. It’s normal and healthy to
gain a little weight after the summer
cycling season; staying at peak
competition weight can be stressful on
your body and mind. However, gaining
“a little weight” doesn’t
mean packing on 20-plus pounds for
insulation against the cold.
Your nutrition program needs to change
as your training load decreases from the
height of your competitive season. Many
athletes reduce the volume and intensity
of their training, but continue to eat as
if they were still in the height of the
racing season. This leads to a serious
discrepancy between energy intake and
expenditure, and the pounds accumulate
quickly.
Properly fueling your fall training
simply requires a few minor adjustments to
your nutrition program. By applying the
concept of periodization to your nutrition
program, the same way you do to your
training, you can ensure that your
nutrition program supplies the
carbohydrate, protein, and fat necessary
to support your activity level throughout
the year.
At the height of your season, during
the Specialization Period, you might be
consuming 3.5-4.0 grams of carbohydrate
per pound of bodyweight per day (g/lb/d),
and 0.8-0.9 g/lb/d of protein. During the
fall, these numbers need to come down to
reflect the reduction in your training
load. I recommend a target of 2.0-2.5
g/lb/d of carbohydrate and 0.6-0.7 g/lb/d
of protein during this period of the year.
For a 165-lb cyclist, this could mean a
reduction from about 620 daily grams of
carbohydrate to about 370. That’s
about 1000 calories worth of carbohydrate
energy alone, but it leaves enough to
support your exercise goals during the
fall while eliminating the excess that
leads to significant weight gain.
Fall
and Winter
Handled correctly, the fall and winter
can be the most productive, diverse, and
enjoyable portions of your training year.
You have worked hard to achieve specific
performance and body weight goals this
season, and the actions you take over the
next eight to twelve weeks will determine
how much of that work you’re going to
have to redo next spring. This is the year
to change the normal cycle of gaining
weight and losing fitness; keep what
you’ve worked for already and set
your sights on ambitious new goals for
next season.
Chris Carmichael is Lance
Armstrong’s coach and author of
“Chris Carmichael’s Food For
Fitness: Eat Right to Train
Right.”
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