Cycling Recovery Week

What does a recovery week look like for cycling? How often should you take a recovery week in cycling? Should you take a rest week from cycling?

These are all good questions, and we’ll look at each one in more detail below.

Most cyclists hate recovery weeks. Not only do we have to ride less on a rest week, but the immediate feelings afterwards can make us feel sluggish.

That said, cycling recovery rest weeks are 100% necessary, as they make us stronger cyclists. When we rest, we recover from the training, and come back stronger. If you do not rest, you will never hit your peak performance capabilities. This article details how to do a recovery week for cycling.

Rest is also crucial when you start to feel sickness lurking. Take a day or two completely off, and get back to 100% health. See the video below, where I immediately nipped sickness in the bud before Tour of Southland. Sticking to the original planned schedule and just trying to “tough it out” could have derailed me for a week!

Remember to always listen to your body; all of the algorithms and cycling computer programs do not know everything else that we have going on in our lives (sleep, stress, work, family, etc).

If you’re looking for all of the products that I use during a cycling recovery week, check out this post.

Why You Need Cycling Rest Weeks

“Do I need to take a recovery week for cycling?” If you’re human, the answer is yes!

If you’re going to take a rest week, you certainly need to know why you’re doing them in the first place. The best cycling training program is the one that you understand and believe in. So why exactly do you need to take a full week of rest?

If you’re training really hard and doing big blocks of training, you cause damage to your body and build up lots of fatigue. After a hard three-week training block, you’ve overloaded your body and it needs time to repair itself to come back stronger. This is called supercompensation.

When your body becomes overloaded with something it hasn’t seen before, as a survival mechanism, it wants to repair and become better at that activity. When you are training hard on the bike, your body thinks it is running from a hungry pack of lions. It then thinks “Oh boy, that was really hard! If I don’t get better at this, I might not survive my next encounter with the lions…” Thus, your body repairs that damage to make you stronger so you can show the lions who’s boss.

Additionally, when you’re training the whole year, you must take rest weeks to mitigate fatigue. If you continue to train without rest, your body won’t be able to handle it sooner or later. Either your progress will stagnate or worse, you end up overtrained. Many riders have overtrained for years and are stuck in a perpetual cycle of stagnant training because of insufficient cycling recovery days.

However, these adaptations take time. After a full three weeks of training, it will take a few days for your body to fully repair. You can’t hurry it up, just be patient and let you body do its thing.

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What To Do During A Recovery Week

What should a recovery week look like in cycling? There are many different ways to approach cycling rest weeks, but here’s a very basic idea. There’s a more advanced cycling rest week routine down below.

You want to recover, and get rest, but keep a small amount of sharpness in the legs. Don’t take the whole week off! You want to keep the legs turning over to keep the “feel” in the legs and maintain some level of base fitness. Here are some examples of recovery week cycling workouts.

Monday: Active Recovery Ride, 50% FTP or less, NO SURGES, 60 minutes

Tuesday: Completely OFF

Wednesday: Openers: 5 x 30s at 105-120% FTP, recover 2 minutes between, ~60-90 minutes

Thursday: Completely OFF

Friday: Openers: 5 x 30s at 105-120% FTP, recover 2 minutes between, ~60-90 minutes

Is cycling good for recovery days? Well, that depends! If you have ample time in your day to go out for a short and easy cruise, go for it. However, if it’s going to add “one more thing” on your to do list, I would skip it, and take the day off. Cycling on recovery days is good to get the blood flowing and keep the body in motion, but if you’re training a lot, there is something awesome about not having to kit up and get on the bike. Every athlete is different and has a personal preference, so try both, and stick to what works best for you.

How Often Should You Take A Recovery Week For Cycling

The very generic guideline that you will hear is 3 weeks of training, and then 1 week off for recovery.

While this is generic, I have found that it works quite well for most cyclists, no matter how much they are training. Beginner cyclists will be training less hours during the 3 training weeks, but still need time to recover because their body cannot handle as much training stress.

This format also allows you to get in about 6-8 medium to hard sessions, and then have ample time to recover from them. Said differently, recovering is where you body soaks up that stimulus that you just put it through, and then your body rests, and compensates from the stress. You then return slightly stronger and ready to train more.

Sometimes athletes feel a bit dull during the third week of training. I see this happen if they’ve trained too hard for a block or two before (maybe adding in more group rides than needed, or just smashing super hard on the weekends each day), or if we are just getting into the summer months and the accumulation of training has left enough residual fatigue that it is hampering the hard sessions.

If you see this dullness setting in, don’t be afraid to take a rest week early! If Tuesday’s workout in the 3rd week is a dumpster fire, start recovering, or just shift the rest of that block into endurance riding.

We have to be realistic that sometimes we plan lots of off-the-bike “life” activities during rest weeks, so if you already have a rest week planned for next week, but you’re feeling a bit exhausted, take a day off and ride endurance until you get to the rest week.

At the end of the day, it would be ideal to be fluid with the recovery time and take it when needed, but that doesn’t always fit perfectly with the rest of our life’s schedule. When in doubt, a little less is better than doing a little too much; the extra training stress can add up over time and make us not feel so great on the bike!

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Advanced Cycling Rest Week

Depending on your riding level, you may be able to ride more or less during your cycling recovery week plan. If you normally train 10 hours per week, then you might need to reduce your rest week to 6-7 hours per week. However, if you’re routinely busting out 20-hour weeks, then shutting it down and only riding seven hours is probably a bit excessive. You can definitely ride more and still recover. A seven-hour week might cause too large of a drop in your training load and take a while to come back from.

This advanced cycling rest week incorporates more riding to mitigate staleness.

Monday: Active Recovery Ride, 50% FTP or less, NO SURGES, 60 minutes

Tuesday: 50-60% FTP if you're FEELING GOOD. Do not leave low Zone 2!, ~2 hours
Stretch and foam roll after.

Wednesday: Openers: 5 x 30s @ 106-121%, recover 5m between. Ride zone 2 the remainder of the time. ~ 2-3 hours

Thursday: Ride this one by Feel. You probably feel recovered, but give the body ONE more day to really soak up all of the hard work you've done. ~ 60 minutes at 50% of FTP.

Friday: Power Dip Test, see below.

How To Know When You Are Recovered From Training

A big question a lot of athletes have is “How do I know when I’m fully recovered?” We don’t have any empirical studies to determine this, and everyone recovers differently, so you must use your best judgment based on how you feel. Here is a “Rest Week Checklist” to make sure you’re fully rested.

You Feel Recovered — Kind of obvious, right? Your legs should have little or no soreness and you should be bursting with energy
Your TSB should be at least above 0 within the Performance Management Chart. As a general rule, 0-15 TSB is a good range to be in.
You cycling recovery week TSS should be between 50-70% of a normal training week.
You’re motivated to CRUSH. Recovery weeks are not just about physical rest, but also mental. You want to make sure you feel rejuvenated and you’re ready to smash the next block of training. This is also a good sign that you are physically recovered and ready to take on more strain.

What Cycling Workout To Do After A Rest Week

It’s Saturday morning, and you’ve just come off a solid recovery week, with lots of easy riding, rest, and a few hard efforts or performance tests. You’re feeling fresh and ready to get back to work. However, because of all the rest during the week, you may not be at your best on longer, aerobically-intensive efforts. So, what do you do?

Test short efforts or jump into a fast group ride! Or, if this sounds a bit aggressive and you need another day to get rolling, go for a long endurance ride!

If you are riding alone and use WKO Cycling Software, use the tab that shows you Normalized Residuals and test the short and medium duration.

Also, look at your Power Duration Profile and see where you have low dips in power compared to other areas of your curve. I call this the Power Dip Test; test one of those low lying areas to see if it’s a weakness, or just something that hasn’t been tested in a while.

While you’ll hear us discuss the pro’s and con’s of group rides, after a solid rest week, this is the time to jump into one. Those town line sprints and surges up the short climbs are exactly what will kick start your cycling engine again.

You’re not going to be crushing long aerobic efforts, like short or long Threshold efforts , so I would avoid doing an FTP test during a recovery week. Focus on the shorter stuff: short VO2Max Intervals and anything anaerobic. If you aren’t sure what these mean, message us today and we will explain that to you.

The mental side of cycling is very important, so don’t set yourself up for a let-down by trying to go solo or shred an all day break. You’re likely to perform at your best on the anaerobic efforts, and have really great watts, although your legs will burn like hell because you are so fresh.

Compete for all of the town line sprints and take hard pulls reeling the break back, but avoid the breakaway. If you’re riding alone, hit some sprints, a couple 1-2 minute efforts, and solid endurance riding (65-75% FTP) for the remainder. Then, get ready to crush those longer intervals on Tuesday night!

I Feel Like Crap After A Cycling Recovery Week

Don’t be discouraged if you’re not at your best at the end of a cycling recovery week. Stay focused on the overall game plan, and your legs will be back in a couple of days.

Many people avoid rest weeks in cycling because they fear that their fitness goes down a ton, and this lethargic feeling in their legs. Sadly, we need to rest. This lethargic feeling will pass and your legs will come back, stronger than before.

Don’t forget that you need cycling recovery weeks and rest in order to become stronger. The rides put stress on your body, and the rest is what makes you come back stronger than before.

You Need Rest If You Feel Sick

Sometimes you get sick, especially when hitting massive training loads before a big event.

If you feel yourself getting sick, STOP RIDING!! Rest is needed.

You need to get back to 100% as soon as possible. When you train, you break your body down, so if you're almost sick, riding (aka breaking yourself down) can really make you sick.

Take a quick break and get some extra sleep. Missing the one workout and getting back to 100% is better than riding at then finding yourself at 70-80%.

Difference Between Rest Week and Taper Week

This is an older video, so I apologize on the poor quality!

There is a difference between a cycling training recovery week and a cycling taper week before a big race or event. The taper week will also differ if you’re getting ready for a road race, gran fondo, criterium, or time trial!

Related Post: When to Taper in a Cycling Race

Rest Week Before Big Race

When you have a rest week before the last block before a big race, you want that first week back to have your largest number of hours and the most intensity. The reason for this is because as you get closer to the race, you are first reducing the number of training hours, and then secondly reducing the amount of intensity in your training schedule.

You still want some hard, sharp, race specific efforts a couple of weeks before the race, but your goal is to shed all of the fatigue that you’ve accumulated up to that point.

You want to find the perfect balance between freshness and fitness; this is something to figure out well before your first big race.

So front load the hours and intensity in week one, reduce the hours in week two, then reduce the amount of intensity in week 3, and taper into the race with just some efforts during race week to keep the legs sharp.

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Cycling Recovery Week - When To Rest & What To Do