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OVERCOMING EXTRAORDINARY
TIMES BY STICKING TO THE BASICS The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a new challenge to both professional and recreational cyclists alike. Countries introduced restrictions on outdoor activities, and many have only recently removed or adjusted these policies to allow us to spend time outdoors. The restrictions highlighted a very important aspect of training; sticking to the basics of exercise prescription. There is nothing wrong with a little bit of creativity, but when it comes to improving your performance on the bike, if you haven’t taken care of the basics, then progression is unlikely to occur. In this article we will cover the basics of training load and how you can apply these to your own training to improve your performance. TRAINING LOAD Training load can be considered the “dose” of exercise that you are applying to your body. We can consider training load for any given time period; daily, weekly or monthly, and many of the training platforms and analysis software, such as Training Peaks, Strava and Golden Cheetah, allow us to quantify our training load using exponentially weighted moving averages (e.g. ATL and CTL) which provide us with an easy to digest number to track our training loads. Periodization is the organisation of training load into periods of progressive overload, which essentially means that we increase our training loads as we progress through our training programme or block.
