It’s been two decades since I last trained under a coach, and in that time, exercise science has moved on dramatically. Sweetspot training, now a staple of many riders’ plans, was barely talked about back then. But it’s not just training methods that have evolved – the science around how we measure training load, tailor our nutrition, and optimise recovery has exploded, offering riders more tools and data than ever before.
Over the years, I’ve experimented with plenty of approaches, but I keep coming back to what works best for me – and, as it turns out, it’s not far off the routine my coach gave me two decades ago.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as the saying goes – and just as many ways to build fitness on the bike. Ask any group of cyclists and you’ll find no two training routines are exactly alike. Even Adam and Simon Yates, identical twins competing at the very top level of the sport, don’t follow the same programme-not least because they ride for different teams with different approaches. This uniqueness is interesting but also perplexing: are we each doing our best guesswork?
“Ride your bike, ride your bike, ride your bike,” was Fausto Coppi’s simple advice (in fact, the motto has been attributed to any number of riders). And while that seems like something of a broad brush approach, you can’t really fault the logic. At the other end of the spectrum, online training platforms prescribe training programmes that dictate everything from power to heart rate to cadence, pretty much down to every minute of every week.
Unnecessarily prescriptive? Maybe, although if your computer simply told you to ‘saddle up, ride hard’ it might leave you wondering what you were paying the subscription for.
(Image credit: Future)
So what has changed?
It might seem almost sacrilegious in today’s era of sports science to suggest that training hasn’t fundamentally changed-but set that aside for a moment and consider the facts. Cyclists have been tapping into every intensity level since the dawn of the sport. Victorian-era penny farthing riders were likely pushing VO2max up their local climbs; Tour de France breakaway specialists have long churned along at what we’d now call sweetspot or threshold; and for generations, Zone 2 and tempo have been the bread and butter of those simply out ‘getting the miles in’. The labels may be modern, but the efforts are timeless.
What we have today that riders of the past didn’t is a clearer language for training and the tools to measure it.
“To say training hasn’t changed is a bit like saying bicycles haven’t changed – they still have two wheels, a saddle and a pair of handlebars,” says Michael Hutchinson, known to CW readers as Dr Hutch. “But I think you’re half right,” he adds. “In the end, there are only so many physical interventions you can make.”
I press him for a fuller explanation. “Well, there’s only so much that can be changed: ride long or short, hard or not hard – that’s all there is.”
“Structured interval sessions are now very easy and rewarding to do on the turbo trainer,”
Dr Hutch
Hutchinson argues that training has evolved, with changes often pioneered by professionals trickling down, slowly, to amateurs and club cyclists. One key change he identifies has been the advent of structured interval training on turbo trainers, which didn’t really exist in the amateur realm until the late-Eighties.
Now, with online riding platforms, riding indoors can be – dare we say it? – satisfying fun. “Structured interval sessions are now very easy and rewarding to do on the turbo trainer,” says Hutchinson. “In the 1970s, most people were only riding on the road.” On the other hand, a 1970s ride that included a set of sprints to lampposts or village signs was effecting much the same physiological stimulus as a sprint session on Zwift does now.
I pick up this thread with TrainSharp coach Jon Sharples. “Back in the day, only a few people rode indoors because most just didn’t believe in it. The attitude was, you know, ‘we’re not made of sugar, so who cares about the elements?”‘ What those riders were missing, thinks Sharples, is the precision available indoors.
“The turbo is really beneficial now. People can train for the demands of the race. With the amount of attacking that goes on, everyone knows about their 30-second efforts, their one-minute efforts, their four-minute efforts, and they can all now see where their weakness is, and track the changes, which spurs them on.”
As well as the structured indoor riding, another change, at least at the elite level, is volume. “Monday, I took a day off,” says Hutchinson, revisiting a typical training week from 25 years ago. “Tuesday, I did 120 miles. Wednesday, I did 105 miles. Thursday, I took a day off. Friday, I spent an hour doing hill reps. And then the weekend I did a 50-mile time trial on Saturday, and a 120km road race on Sunday.” That works out to around 400 miles (643km) for the week – far more than most of today’s elites are doing.
(Image credit: Future)
Volume is even more paired back at amateur level – with work and family commitments to factor in, club riders chase hard after high bang-for-buck sessions. “It’s become more structured and more interval-based whereas 25 years ago many of my rivals’ training consisted of riding hard-ish for however long they had available.”
One approach to training that has attracted its own label – and a huge number of adherents – in recent years is sweetspot training. Defined as 84-92% of FTP, sweetspot purports to offer maximum bang for buck, especially for those with limited time available. But is it really new?
“Twenty years ago, people who had 45 minutes available for training would have just gone and ridden fairly hard for 45 minutes – probably not very different from sweetspot intensity,” says Sharples. “For an everyday rider, you can keep it really basic, and sometimes basic is better. Fundamentally, fitness comes from consistency, and that means doing something every day, keeping going. That is it.”
(Image credit: Future)
One way of pondering the differences between modern and old-time training is the good old hypothetical comparison across the decades. “People often ask me, how good would Beryl Burton have been had she had modern training? Or, how good would Alf Engers have been with modern training?” says Michael Hutchinson. “My answer is that those riders were presumably getting it right intuitively. What was it that the likes of Beryl Burton should or could have been doing that she wasn’t doing?”
Listening to the body is something that cropped up in all the interviews for this feature. Though hard to define exactly what it means, it’s clearly important and largely comes down to intuition. “There were points in her career where Burton was quite badly overtrained, so she could have done with modern recovery – that might be a better way to put it,” adds Hutchinson. “But the people who were good in the past were, I think it’s fair to presume, generally getting it right.”
This consistency idea is backed by exercise physiology Professor Jamie Pringle, who points to the ‘hierarchy of training needs’ pyramid designed by renowned sports scientist Stephen Seiler. “He’s almost a philosopher more than a scientist,” Pringle says of Seiler, “because his real area of interest is, how do the very fittest people train? What do they do? How do they structure their training?”
No structure, no problem
(Image credit: Future)
I’ve witnessed first-hand an example of an unstructured programme that has worked very effectively. My brother and colleague Steve Shrubsall raised his FTP by more than 50 watts in three months simply by doing plentiful indoor sessions whenever he felt like it. Suffice to say, much of it was very hard riding – but he was able to adapt and make gains, rather than just get more and more tired. This isn’t a story of zero to hero; we all know that an untrained person can make huge gains quickly. Steve, who is 47, was already in decent shape when his stint of intense training began.
“I didn’t ride outdoors for months,” he remembers, “but once I started training, it was relentless, and most of it came by way of doing a lot of races on Zwift. And that is the best way to get absolutely everything out of yourself.” Racing around three times a week for between 40 minutes and an hour, as well as doing VO2max and sweetspot interval sessions, he pushed himself hard practically every other day. No doubt this would backfire for some riders, but the point is, there was no planning involved: “It was a case of asking myself, how are my legs today?” he says. And he ended up with an FTP of more than 400 watts.
Seiler’s hierarchy of needs, explains Pringle, is a pyramid with “the fundamentals at the bottom, and the ‘nice to haves’ at the top. It’s always consistency at the bottom, on which everything else is built. In other words, it doesn’t so much matter what you do, or how you do it, as long as you keep doing it.”
As we move up the pyramid, we find high-intensity training next – with Seiler using various study protocols to demonstrate its effectiveness over mere low-intensity training. Next is intensity distribution – essentially, how athletes spread the load between easy and hard sessions. Seiler, it turns out, is a big proponent of polarised training. In fact, in a study on cyclists he demonstrated the superior effectiveness of polarised training over a threshold-based programme.
The three components of the pyramid-consistency, intensity, distribution – all interact with each other, the smaller details towards the top of the pyramid are harder to pin down. Periodisation models, heat and altitude training are listed as having unclear, modest or individual effects, while race-pace training and, finally, right at the top, a taper, are finishing touches built on everything else.
Is there any way to pick the most effective sessions? “I always steer away from trying to identify the outcomes of a session,” says Pringle. “It’s an almost impossible task, because we know that each individual will get different adaptations from different types of training. He demonstrates this by referring to a 2008 study by Kirsten Burgomaster that saw riders who completed sprint intervals three times a week produce similar aerobic muscle responses to riders who did an hour at Zone 2 five days a week. “What matters most is not the session itself,” Pringle says. “It’s understanding how to put together a series of sessions day after day, week after week, while allowing your body to adapt.”
(Image credit: Future)
Putting your body in a position to adapt – creating enough physiological headroom, as Pringle puts it – is still the cornerstone of effective training. Modern sports science still can’t tell us exactly what to do, day by day, but where it excels is in helping us quantify training stress and fine-tune how we recover and adapt.
The best power meters and platforms calculate training stress scores or identify fitness trends give greater insight into your performance profile: where you’re strong, where you’re weak, and how close you’re pushing to your limits. (Just don’t place too much trust in Al and algorithms, which can produce misleading advice.) The core principles remain unchanged: train consistently, apply enough intensity to trigger adaptation, but avoid overreaching. What has changed is the confidence with which we can now walk that fine line.
Add to that modern fuelling strategies – including multi-source carbs and gut training to enable a higher level of carbohydrate utilisation – and it’s clear that some scientific advancements are helping us train smarter. But in the end, success still hinges on the same simple truths: show up, push yourself just enough, and don’t let the data get in the way of the work.
