I don’t know about you, but if I take more that three days off from riding I really notice my fitness drops away. Not totally. I don’t suddenly turn into a bloated couch potato who can’t manage to get out of the armchair without gasping for breath. But after about three days I lose the fine-tuning—that top level of physical fitness that allows me to cruise along comfortably (even in the face of a headwind!)
For want of a better term, let’s call it peak fitness
. My idea is a bit shaky, and it’s probably not the way you see it, but basically I’m talking about the ability to go hurtling along while feeling like I’m just coasting. Cadence seems to come along a bit more often, and a bit more easily too. OK, peak
fitness probably isn’t the right word, but you get the idea: it’s the conditioning you get to keep when you exercise regularly.
So, one or two days out of the saddle is fine. In fact, in most weeks I don’t mind staying off the bike over the weekend (not that I have choice in the matter…) and it makes no real difference on Monday. Now that I come to think of it, I often feel stronger on Mondays after a no-ride weekend.
Three days off is a bit chancy. I think I lose a bit of that peak fitness, but it’s not too bad. But any more than three days and I tend to pay for my laziness.
And so it was last week, where for a number of almost acceptable reasons I didn’t ride to work once (for shame!) If the truth be told, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ride last Friday out of simple fear that after being off the bike for six days it would hurt too much to get back on.
Which is, of course, claptrap.
I was back on the bike this week and I’m happy to report that nothing dire happened. Sure I had to take it a bit easy on the first day back—and it helped that it was a clear, still morning—but it didn’t kill me. In fact, it didn’t even hurt. I was a bit slower, and I worked a bit harder than usual but that’s only to be expected.
And now I’m back to normal. I guess that’s the flip-side of slipping off your peak: as long as you don’t let your underlying level of fitness fall away entirely, it’s pretty easy to get back to the top again.
Now, I wonder if there’s any connection between not riding and a lower propensity to blog? Ah, inertia is a funny thing, isn’t it?
Wow, that’s a great way of phrasing it. I’ve often experienced the “peak fitness” phenomenon and oftentimes find it quite disheartening, especially with my typical rugby-season peaks and end-of-summer low.
Yep, I’ve noticed something similar myself — although for me it comes from three consecutive days of “only” riding to and from work. I actually think there might be some finer aspects of pedalling technique that are lost as much as physical conditioning. Something similar happens in the closing stages of a long ride (i.e. a 200km ride), pedalling technique is the first thing to fall away when tiredness sets in.
Yeah Chris, I’d forgotten that. Well, I kind of hinted at it. Some Mondays are good but after a long weekend ride they aren’t always so good.
But then again sometimes it’s fine.
In general I prefer to keep riding than to have a weekday lay-day, but I can see how having no time to recover could wear you down.
As for technique, I think I’d have to acquire that first before I could lose it!
If I can hazard a guess, Al, I reckon like most footballers the gap between seasons is plenty of time for you to not just slip down from the peak but also to lose some of your underlying fitness.
It must be a constant struggle for people who play seasonal sports. I know the AFL teams make a big deal of getting their players to maintain pre-season form, but even then they only really get match fit when the season starts.
Back when I played rugby more seriously (i.e. not pints the day before a match!) we were given summer work-out programmes - that was the time we were supposed to work on base strength and build up more muscle. It’s hard to do that during the season.
At the end of the day there’s only one way to train for a match, and that’s playing a match :)
Yeah, we often hear of AFL players bulking-up over summer. Undoubtedly that’s not something players (elite or amateur) could do during the playing season. That longer-term work during the off-season is a different kind of fitness, isn’t it? But if done well, it’s the kind of thing that helps players stay on peak (and maybe avoid injury too) at the pointy end.
However, there is no season for me—every day is a good day to commute by bike (although some days are gooderer than others). So it’s pretty much the same workload every day, month, year. When there’s no off-season, what am I to do to build more strength and speed without losing that all important peak that makes it easy to cruise?