5 Training Blocks To Race Season with VELONEWS PODCAST

Velo News Podcast - Training Tips with Dr. San Millan

I was getting some questions on my original Five Blocks To Racing Series, which is a compass to help get you pointed in the right direction as you prepare for your race season and give guidelines for cycling training blocks.

I was listening to a Fast Talk Podcast on velo news and some of the topics that Dr. San Millan brought up really highlight some information that we need to consider. This post will sum up a lot of great points that he made throughout the show, and look at how we can relate these ideas to your season planning.

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Race Season: What Do We Need To Succeed on A Cellular Level

Bioenergetics: is the part of biochemistry dealing with energy flow through living systems. Life is dependent on energy transformation reactions. The ability to harness energy from a variety of metabolic pathways is a property of all living organisms.

A very good lactate clearance capacity: we create lactate all of the time, but what we hear athletes call FTP is the balancing point of creating too much lactate (when we go over FTP) and clearing lactate (usually most efficiently at 80-90% FTP)

Very good fat burning or fat oxidation capacity: this is achieved from endurance rides. Your aerobic efficiency improves on these rides.

Very good glycolytic capacity, which I also call the turbo: this is your VLaMax. Low is not bad, and high is not good.

Very good high intensity, so anaerobic sprinting capacity. 

So, those are the main energy systems that are going to make an athlete successful according to Dr. San Millan on the velo news podcast.

Training Blocks to Prepare for Racing

You really need to have a very good base, and that comes at the cellular level from a very solid mitochondrial function.

When you travel through a race at high intensity the fast muscle fibers, produce a lot of lactate, and it’s not lactate itself, because lactate is a great fuel for the body, but as the hydrogen ions associated with lactate, they’re going to decrease the pH of the muscle and interfere with what’s called the muscle microenvironment.

You want to have a high lactate clearance ability so that you are very efficient. Whenever lactate is created, your body can quickly clear it, and use it for energy. This occurs in the mitochondria in slow-twitch muscle fibers, which highlights the need for training with lactate clearance intervals and endurance riding.

The goal of this efficiency talked about above is so that you find yourself at the end of the race fresher than the other riders. It isn’t who has the biggest watts per kg at hour 1. It is who can push the biggest watts at the end of the race, or what the deciding moves truly throw down!

How To Get This Focus In Your Race Season Preparation

Utilize Block 1 and 2 to reap the rewards of long endurance rides and lactate clearance work.

If you’re unsure what the exact workouts would be for the blocks, see this post.

Block 3 will also aid in this progression as you start to rev the VO2Max system with over unders and stair step type workouts. Classic style VO2max intervals or tabata intervals do not need to be performed yet.

Aerobic Fitness

We spoke about this before in other podcasts, where if you have the most amazing sprint, but don’t work on endurance rides in order to get you to the end of the race, where you are fresh enough to unleash that sprint, you will never win. Even a great sprinter needs fresh legs to utilize that big power.

The better the mitochondrial function, the better the fat burning, and the more glycogen you preserve for the second part of the race. So, those are the key elements that intuitively, people tend to forget when they put together a training plan for an athlete because we all want to go faster, and we all know that this is where the races are decided in that high state. So intuitively, we do high intensity, but if you don’t have the basics for fat burning, and for lactate capacity, it’s very difficult to be successful.

If you don’t create a solid base of aerobic fitness, you are seriously limiting your performance ceiling for the upcoming season.

How To Get This Focus In Your Race Season Preparation

Utilize Block 1 and 2 to reap the rewards of long endurance rides on the weekend, and some midweek endurance and tempo sessions. 

The small number of burst workouts early on will keep your VO2Max primed and rolling, without adding too much overall stress to the body during this training period.

Important note: aerobic endurance work continues all year long, but we are simply highlighting its focus during this early season period when race efforts are not necessary.
See Also: What is polarized cardio


Lactate Metabolism

Let’s simplify this concept: our anaerobic fibers pump out lactate, but can’t use it for fuel.

It goes through our body and aerobic fibers use it, but hydrogen ions get into our bloodstream which creates the burn.

Getting the lactate out of your anaerobic (fast twitch) fibers is something that happens very quickly, but the development of clearing the lactate in the oxidative fibers (slow twitch) can take months to develop. This is why you really want to work on this for a solid amount of time.

So, when you have a good lactate clearance capacity, you kill two birds with one stone. First, you don’t accumulate lactate, unless the microenvironment is lower, and therefore the muscle contraction is going to be better. Second, you use it as fuel, and you spare other fuel.

Lastly, if you have high lactate levels, you will inhibit fat burning, which can create havoc for you at the end of your event!

Dr. San Millan recommends riding a lot of zone 2 during the offseason to work on clearing lactate and burning fat. 

When the race season approaches, you need that high intensity from racing and some training sessions (when racing is happening often), and then it’s a lot of recovery. 

You still want to address these endurance and lactate clearance rides though as well so that your efficiencies don’t wear off before the end of the season. It’s a fine balance!

See Also: Complete Indoor Cycling Training Plan



How To Get This Focus In Your Race Season Preparation

Blocks 2 and 3 will focus on your lactate clearance capabilities. A side note that is not included in the infographic: Lactate clearance work can also be a great Thursday, medium intensity workout for athletes at all levels.

I even like putting a shorter Lactate Clearance workout in on the Tuesday of a taper week for some athletes. It keeps the body stimulated in multiple zones, without adding too much fatigue.

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When To Incorporate Intervals During Training Season

All season, but aerobic intervals that do not bring along a lot of fatigue are the focus during off season cycling training. Block 3-5 will start to initiate some more race preparation, but if you feel like you are training too hard or putting too much effort in early on, dial things back a bit. 

Less is more when we look at how long a season can be. That being said (!), if your biggest race of the year is in March or April, you will be training harder, and at higher intensities, than your friends when it is January and February.

Race season: use the races as training sessions, and ensure that you can absorb the training (avoid nonfunctional overreaching). 

Work on your weak points. If you can crush 5m efforts, do you need to address 10 minute power? 

What are the demands of the most important races?

Improvement comes a little bit year over year. Ideally, you have to improve in everything, you need to keep improving every year, and keep stimulating those, those metabolic pathways and the bioenergetics, and regardless of the age, this is what we do, you know, we see that so far in this last three years I’ve been with Tadej, every year, he keeps improving a little bit, a little bit, and hopefully, he keeps going like that as well.

How do you get to a competition pace? Race! If you don’t have races, high-intensity intervals, about 2-3 per week, will help. Follow the blocks to the racing template to address how hard you should be going, and how often.

You really want to monitor your training here; racing is a huge stimulus. Don’t go so hard after it!

San Millan claims that 60 to 80% of cyclists get overtrained during the season. While it’s not an overtraining syndrome, it is training too hard.


How To Get This Focus In Your Race Season Preparation

Focus your planning on how hard you need to go, and how often, based on the template. 

Drawing out your calendar will be extremely helpful in this process.



The Amateur Racer’s Preparation

Many cyclists will only race 5 to 15 events all season, a far cry from 80.

If you aren’t racing a bunch in order to have some race fitness for when your big event comes along, what should you do?

Tip from Dr. San Millan: You still want two to three months of base preparation! This includes a ton of aerobic work.

Neal Henderson, the head coach at Wahoo Fitness, commented that when race season comes around, you pull back the volume a bit, and start to focus on more race specific, higher intensity work.

Ask yourself: what are the demands of the race ahead in 2-4 months?

Neal makes a fantastic point here that I think is often overlooked. A lot of what we do in training is to elicit physiological changes, but sometimes you want to go out and rip some hard intervals just so you have that confidence!

While this isn’t something you always want to be doing (don’t always be checking in on that 3 minute or 20 minute power, as that is a session that takes away from something that could improve that power!), a litmus test here and there, especially as you get closer to the event, is a great idea.

Here’s what Neal had to say on the velonews podcast:

Being able to do some sort of simulation of those kind of efforts to get the confidence, and to also get that kind of reacquaintance with those sensations that you get when you’re digging deep into that anaerobic capacity, so doing short, high-intensity efforts with limited recovery is really beneficial there, as well as in some cases like start simulation. So, if you have a mountain bike event that, you know, they always start very hard, and then you settle into some level, and then, you know, depending on the course, it’s going to vary a little bit, but being comfortable with the level of discomfort that’s associated with racing and performing well is something that you have to build into your training just enough so that you have the confidence and capacity.

How To Get This Focus In Your Race Season Preparation

When you’re coming out of base and a build, I’ve always recommended a few, but not a ton, of VO2Max work so that you’re IN the race, and not instantly jettisoned off the back. 

Dr. San Millan highlights this point, that it’s important to stimulate the glycolytic pathways so that you can go and actually race.

Look at Blocks 4 and 5 to get a better understanding of when you should start throttling down on some high intensity work.


Adding in the Cycling Group Ride

You know I had to bring up the group ride ;-)

Colby Pearce threw in some terms that really stood out to me.

The positive of the group ride is that you will probably push a little more, and dig deeper, when “racing’ with your peers. You should have no fear of blowing up in a group ride, and TRULY push your limits. I mean, who cares if you blow up and get dropped? Now is the time to figure this out.

The downside of the group ride is that you have no control of when or how long the efforts are.

If you don’t have a bunch of races to attend before your big race, the group ride can wake up your “racer instincts”.

Do you follow that move, or let it go? It’s a yes or no question.

When do you bridge?

How is the group feeling?

So these rides do have a place once in a while, but doing them too much definitely hampers an athlete’s progress.

How To Get This Focus In Your Race Season Preparation

Block 5! You’ve seen it by now. Ooooh baby, we’re close to racing!



Cycling Overtraining, or Training Too Hard

An overtrained athlete is much different than one that has overtraining syndrome; the latter being a much, much worse condition.

The overtrained athlete more often just trains too hard.

A lot of what I initially do with athletes is strip down their calendar of hard rides that aren’t adding anything to their overall performance.

You don’t have to listen to me on this; here is what Dr. San Millan said:

Many times, this is very, very, very typical in these athletes, they show up to races, and they’ve been doing a lot of high-intensity training combined also with high volume days, and they show up in the peak of the season, and they’re not doing well, and they blow up, and they think oh man, I need competition pace. I cannot produce more watts, my FTP, for example, was 350, and now it is 300. I have lost 50 watts, I think that I need to do higher intensity because it’s the summer, right? 

It’s very important, and why we do more analysis, you see that this athlete is completely overtrained, and has deteriorated significantly. There's a study published recently showing that non-supervised, high intensity leading to overtraining damages mitochondrial function, for example. So, it’s not just at the muscle level that you cause muscle damage, but also mitochondrial function and structural changes, and low-grade inflammation, hormonal changes, and this is what leads a lot of people to overtraining, it’s very, very typical in these athletes.

Cycling Race Training Blocks

Dr. San Millan was asked what he would do if he had two months before a big race. 

Essentially, that is two training blocks: 3 weeks on, 1 week rest, 3 week on, 1 week taper to race. We won’t get into what “ON” means right here, but check out the 5 Blocks to Racing in a minute.

His recommendation is 2-3 high intensity workouts per week that are tailored around the race demands.

How To Get This Focus In Your Race Season Preparation

This would really be blocks 6-12! With racing calendars varying amongst the type of events, the frequency of events, and the importance of events, it would be impossible to tailor something that is right for you.

This is exactly why templates during race season are a bad idea. Instead, learn a bit more on how you can create a race calendar and the training that goes alongside it. 

Also, use the Free Power File Analysis to understand what you’re good at, what you’re bad at, and how to use where you have been to point the ship so that you crush your goals!



Training Hard and then Maintaining Race Form

One thing that I’ve received a lot of questions on is how to manage the early season intensity in the spring, the training and racing around a Peak event, and also how to make it through the entire season feeling good and wanting to race.

The podcast talks about this for about 8 minutes starting around 48:30.

Once you're coming out of base and build periods, you can get the super high end power with just a few sprint workouts or super hard interval sessions.

You don’t even need to do these sessions if you have some early spring races that you can attend.

The key point is realizing that “race form” does not take a lot of intensity to hit. The true focus of a successful cyclist is laying down that huge aerobic mass of training; that will make you the fastest version of yourself.

If you’re only training for one event, things are super complicated, because you need to stimulate all those high intensities on your own; going super deep in a 3-4 hour training ride burns way more mental matches than going full blast in a bike race.

If you can hit a solid block of races in the spring, and then recover, this is a phenomenal way to roll into the summer portion of races. With all these spring races though, you need to make sure you don’t overdo the hard training days, or you will get to June and have some serious malaise.

Build aerobic fitness, add on some early season race fitness, back it down a bit while still stimulating those pathways, and prepare for your target events.





Tips For During Race Season, Dr. San Millan

These tips are fantastic, and easy basics that I think we can all forget!

  1. Don’t overtrain

  2. Focus on nutrition; do not diet during race season, and consume carbohydrates

  3. Don’t get frustrated if things aren’t going well

I think that if you’re confident in what you’ve done, you have to stick to a program, and give yourself some time to achieve your goals, and if that’s not the case, then instead of just, you know, going crazy at things and try to do more intensity.

Stick to a plan, and if things happen well, you know, you should be successful. And again, if you fail, okay, it’s good. I mean, it’s not ideal, but it’s good, because that’s a wake-up call that okay, you know, I will not do this again, and if you fail, okay, it’s part of the process, and it is necessary many times

  1. Be conservative. It’s normal for athletes to get nervous about their training 1-2 weeks before a big event. This is when they start adding intensity, thinking it will help them improve a bit more!


Here’s what Dr. San Millan warns you about: many times people think, oh, if I could do an extra two, three days, so hard days of hard training before this race, oh, man, like, well, when you have worked for so many weeks, right? Two or three days go nowhere, right? In simulating energy systems, those two-three days might really start putting you in a hole, in an overtraining situation, and jeopardize your results. So, always be conservative, always.






Things To Avoid in Race Season

Well, I want to highlight two things that I disagree with, simply because they are a bit too much of a blanket statement.

  1. Avoid high torque work.

  2. Avoid gym work.

Chris Case brings up that low cadence, or high torque cycling intervals, might be something that you want to set aside during race season. Trevor mentions that this is something you “Don’t want to do right before a race.”

The timing is crucial here! Chris mentions this as “all of the race season”, but Trevor mentions this “right before a race”, and the two are not one in the same.

High Torque work is definitely advantageous for the right athlete during race season. The lower cadence will result in a greater torque; therefore a greater force will be applied on the pedals and consequently an increased recruitment of fast-twitch fibers. In other words: instead of increasing the intensity to threshold or above, we use an intensity below the threshold, but we increase the torque to get the same recruitment of fast-twitch fibers as we would get at the higher intensity. Since the intensity is now below the threshold, this will allow the athlete to spend more training time in the zone.

I've also noticed that high torque can give me that feeling of an extra gear when I’m riding around 98-105% FTP.

So, while these sessions are fatiguing and you don’t want to do them immediately before a race, they definitely fit in a race season’s cycling training program.

Regarding gym work for cyclists, Trevor and San Millan are fans of strength, core and stability work, with Trevor mentioning that he is a fan of it all year round. 

Dr. San Millan brings up the fact that lifting does create a lot of muscle damage, and I’d add that lifting is a whole other sport in itself. Strength training can give you that extra bit of strength and a lift in performance, but you don’t want to do it so much that it takes away from your cycling interval training, and definitely not from your race performance!

Strength training will be received very differently from athlete to athlete, so monitor how you feel with lifting and some basic intervals as you go through your base period. Maybe you can get away with getting to the gym 1x a week during race season, maybe you can’t! Time is another constraint that must be considered!







Conclusion

Hopefully you’ve been able to take the information provided from the Five Blocks To Racing and match it up with some of the gems that Trevor, Chris and Dr. San Millan were talking about.

The more and more I heard that podcast, the more it reminded me that training does not need to be overly complex.

There continues to be a high importance placed on aerobic fitness, which will put you in the right place come race day to use the fitness that you gain from your high intensity sessions.

There is a time and place for all training. At the end of the day, from both ends of the spectrum, utilize the aerobic sessions all year long and build your depth of fitness by improving your mitochondrial function, fat oxidation, and lactate clearance capacity. 

Add in the high intensity, or get this from racing, to fine tune that glycolytic capacity.

Keep those pathways stimulated when the big events arrive, but make sure you are fresh enough for your finest performance.

Lastly, have fun!!! It’s just cycling, and you should enjoy the journey year after year. They all stack up on each other, so remember: it’s a marathon. If you stay consistent, year over year, you will be shocked at how much you improve.

Thanks for reading! 

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Interval Training / Season PlanningBrendan HouslerComment