Home › Guides › Sessions and training
Three sessions a week suits most people with jobs: one hard, one sustained, one easy. Two maintains fitness and builds it slowly. Four or five works if the extra sessions are genuinely easy. What matters far more than the number is doing it every week rather than in bursts.
One harder, one easier. Maintains fitness well and builds it slowly. Perfectly respectable, and far better than a heroic week followed by three blank ones.
Enough stimulus to make real progress, enough recovery to absorb it, and few enough sessions to fit round a job.
Keep the hard work at two sessions and make the extra ones easy. The mistake here is adding intensity rather than volume: five moderately hard sessions a week is a reliable route to being permanently tired and no fitter.
Three sessions a week for twelve weeks is thirty-six sessions. Six sessions a week for three weeks followed by burning out is eighteen, and you finish tired rather than fit.
Fitness is built by repeated, absorbed stimulus over months. The plan you can sustain in February, when it is dark and you are fed up, is worth far more than the plan that looks impressive in October.
Set the number of sessions at a level you are confident you can hit on a bad week, not a good one. If that is two, make it two.
Signs you are doing too much: resting heart rate noticeably up for several days, sleep going backwards, dreading sessions you used to look forward to, power dropping at the same perceived effort, getting ill repeatedly, or persistent irritability. If several of those turn up at once, take several easy days. It will cost you nothing and may save your winter.
If you can ride outdoors at all, a sensible British winter pattern is to do the structured work indoors, where it is efficient and safe, and keep one longer outdoor ride at the weekend when conditions allow.
That keeps your handling sharp, keeps you sane, and means the turbo stays a tool rather than a sentence. See is indoor cycling as good as outdoor.
If you are training for a specific event, a coach will build something better than any general guidance, including this page.
Not inherently, if most of it is easy and you take rest when you need it. But most people doing it end up riding everything moderately hard, which is a problem.
Yes, particularly if one is hard. Maintaining takes considerably less than building.
A lighter week every three or four weeks is usually better than a complete week off, though a full week off occasionally does no harm at all.
That is the problem we are actually trying to solve. Turbo Trainer Games turns your watts into the controls of a browser game — your power flies the aircraft, climbs the mountain, pulls the sledge. Nothing to install, and it works with a smart trainer you already own.
It is in closed testing at the moment, so there is nothing to play yet. But you can put your name down.
Ask for early access