Rebuilding Peak Fitness After Time Off or Injury

Many cyclists experience periods where they have a long break from training due to some sort of life circumstance—work commitments, family responsibilities, etc.—or they are making a comeback from an injury. I’m writing this article in May 2024 as I’m nearing recovery from a debilitating back injury that has had me sidelined for the entire spring race campaign, which has been quite depressing.

Hopefully, this article can help you move forward quickly through your own recovery process of rebuilding peak fitness if you find yourself in this situation.

I’ve really been forced to lean into patience which is not my strong suit!

So, if you’re impatient to regain your former level of performance (this is screaming at me right now!!), let’s talk about how we break through these obstacles that we face and reignite our cycling development!

Silence The Doubting Voices

First, silence the doubting voice that questions your ability to improve. In the early stages of revamping your training approach or rehabilitating from injury, excessive negativity about how terrible you are riding can undermine motivation and belief in your progress. Nip this in the bud and don’t overly focus on the micro—the results from all the early workouts might not be pretty.

You know the watts are going to be trash in comparison to numbers you are used to hitting, so don’t be mad at yourself when they are!! Have realistic expectations of what you can do with the fitness that you currently have, no matter how minimal it may be.

Some of my own doubting voices when rebuilding from injury included the following:

I suck.

I’ll never get back to where I was.

Why are these intervals so hard?

Am I doing the right workouts?

When will this end?

It was absurd that I thought that after 3 weeks of training that I’d be hitting numbers that I usually hit after 2-3 months of base training + a build phase + early season races.

Suspend disbelief temporarily and allow the training to take root and develop. Just go do the work, even if the numbers suck. Ignore them – you know you aren’t about to set a PR!

Don’t Look At Where You’ve Been

In this case, looking backwards only messes with your mind! Don’t look and compare yourself to previous levels of fitness. This can be extremely discouraging and hard to palate!

I’m speaking from recent experience: I was blowing up on VO2Max intervals because I was riding them as if I was at normal fitness levels—no wonder I was exploding 2.5 minutes into a 5-minute interval. The real kick in the pants was that since I went WAY too hard, I was barely able to put out any watts on a 3rd interval, let alone a 5th.

I was sabotaging my return to fitness by going way too hard and not training properly.

Set realistic targets and go out there and get some wins. Aiming too high might sound ambitious, but in endurance sports, it can be extremely deleterious to your progress.

Quick Thoughts on Metrics - Acute Training Load (ATL)

Ignore most of the cycling training metrics!!

Your heart rate will be screaming high and your watts will be crying low. Being hyper-focused on this will not be constructive.

When you are coming back, your new numbers will pale in comparison to normal ones, and it can get depressing. Feel free to focus more on RPE and utilize heart rate, even though it is high.

I really like to lean into RPE for this. What does a 3H endurance ride normally feel like? Go ride that way.

Looking at things like Chronic Training Load (CTL) and your fitness can be sad, but at the same time, it can also be misleading. Here’s how:

What if you are 90 CTL for 4 weeks or so after some solid training, and this is where you are maintaining fitness for a while. You then go to 60 CTL as training derails, and eventually, you then back go 90…

When you first return to 90, it’s not the same 90 in terms of race readiness or performance as the 90 that you had been maintaining when you were there for 6-8 weeks. The stacked blocks of training that kept you at 90 are gold; that consistency of proper training is what makes us fast, so just because your fitness score is now equal to what it was before, you still need to stack some more blocks of training behind that to feel the same and hit the same numbers!

Personal Example: I ride and train a ton, so when I’m around 150 CTL, I feel great. Now, when things fell to 125, most people would be ecstatic with that…and so I thought, “damn, I’m still at 125, I’ll still be riding well!!” Ha, far from the truth.

I didn’t want to look at the whole picture which includes the missing link in my opinion: Acute Training Loads!

Or really, seeing the FULL PICTURE as an easy to digest image, the Performance Manager Chart.

Take a look at March, between the red arrows.

It’s obvious then! The purple line, ATL, is nowhere near normal levels, for an ENTIRE MONTH.

Take into account all the metrics, CTL and ATL, but also how long of a gap away from training that is.

I need to take into account how little work I’ve been doing! No lactate clearance or VO2Max training when I just return to training (more on that below), so I can’t expect big numbers right away! Even though that is obvious, it can be hard to palate when we are the athletes having that struggle!

When I do get back to hard workouts, even if I have realistic numbers in place, I need to remember that failure is okay. These workouts will get you to where you want to go, but it might take a few months!!

When my numbers are down 15%, I need to know that hitting the crap numbers as best I can will get me back to my best numbers.

These sessions are all stepping stones to where I want to go. Just wade through the waters as you’re building back and give it your all!!

Initial Training Sessions - Base Miles

Building back to just normal fitness in March, when you’re usually building into race form, will feel different. It won’t feel good, especially as your friends are ripping and you’re feeling like you’re SO FAR BEHIND, but take a second and rethink your normal race calendar. You might not be race-ready for the races you usually love to podium…so look for other opportunities this season!

When you’re coming back, base miles will be your friend. Just as you would build a strong base coming INTO the year, you now need to build a strong base coming into the summer (this is your new beginning of the year!)

This doesn’t mean you have to ride ONLY base miles (endurance), but it should be the focus.

First Two Weeks

In the first two weeks, throw in some tempo blocks or easy over-under workouts.

Get through the first 3 weeks of training with small wins.

You might be trying to race back into VO2Max training and going full bore but shelve that for the immediate comeback. Doing too much intensity to “catch up” will leave you with lots of mediocre rides over the next 2-3 months, just beating yourself into the ground.

Second Training Block

In the second block, focus on 1 hard workout a week at first with realistic numbers. If you normally hit 400W on 5m VO2Max intervals, maybe 350w is more realistic. Or even 330! Who knows…but be patient.

When you become deeply entrenched in a particular goal for an interval you normally hit, and you keep missing it, your mindset can become inflexible. Clinging to your “usual numbers” is limiting your potential to get back there.

Third Training Block

I’d really wait until the Third Block to really start tackling 2x a week of intensity. You want to be winning at these workouts and building confidence, and not failing all the time. This was a mistake that I feel I made in my recovery—trying to have normal April numbers when there was a lot of building back that needed to take place.

Use the longest timeline to give yourself some space and grace if things don’t go as quickly as planned. I was hoping for a 2 month recovery and it looks like in reality it will be 4. Hoping it’s 4!! (Update, more like 5-6 months until this is 100% gone, although I’ve been fortunate to return to racing with some pain….lots of pain in crits though still)

Perfect Workouts

Let go of the pressure for perfection. An unbending quest for the ideal can hinder meaningful progress by instilling a fear of failure or reluctance to dig deep even when you’re way off of “digging deep numbers”. Seeing a thread here? Detach from the numbers!!

A month ago my 480W was 420W…it was sad. Depressing almost. I had to embrace this setback and injury as a learning opportunity—not really in terms of watts, but taking a step back from how intertwined cycling is in my daily life. The normal wins that would boost me up weren’t really there. Sure, I was feeling like I was having “recovery” type wins, by getting workouts done, but I wasn’t hitting Lifetime PR’s or ANYTHING near that. However, I can say without a doubt that I’m a better husband and friend from this process, possibly from having a clearer viewpoint of all the OTHER awesome things in life aside from cycling. Hmmm, maybe this point is only beneficial for the obsessed cyclist like myself, lol, but I’m leaving it in here! Maybe this is a whole other blog/podcast though.

When a workout doesn't go as planned or your recovery hits a snag, reflect on the insights gained and how they could ultimately bring you closer to achieving your cycling goals.

You will be back. As my athlete Cam just said after some illness, “I’m a phoenix rising from the ashes!”

Find The Positives

I know, this sounds like cliché nonsense and Kumbaya, but it can be really helpful—find some positives in this whole process!

Instead of focusing on the fact that I trained so hard through the winter and was coming out full steam, I was trying to manage this injury instead of fully resolving it.

It was only when it flared up so much that I couldn’t walk for a day (just after EVOQ Camp), that I went to a Physical Therapist and started the proper treatment. (Long story and maybe I’ll cover this in another post, but I thought I was on the road to recovery with an acupuncturist protocol, but there were many components missing, which I only realized after trying to race at the Swamp Classic and was writhing in pain. Back to the drawing board!)

So what is the positive? When looking back I’ve realized that this glute deficiency that is intertwined with stressing the heck out of my Quadratus Lumborum (QL), I’ve allowed myself to become extremely weak with all lateral movements. This weakness was hidden enough for years climbing outside of Nashville and Blowing Rock, but would flare up in Florida or Memphis.

I’d have these random rides where my hips and back would be extremely sore after random rides, and finally in 2024 it was on nearly every ride. BUT now I’m putting this to bed and it has helped me reaffirm how much I love cycling, how much I LOVE training, and how much I miss RACING!!

I’ve definitely had some FOMO, but finding the positive of my own personal fitness has helped me fall back in love with this sport as I continue to inch closer and closer to 100%.

How Long Does It Take To Regain Fitness After Injury

Like most things in endurance sports, it depends. How long will it take to regain fitness? There are a number of things we have to consider:|

How long was your break from training?
What were you able to do while you were away from training? Were you still active, or completely laid up in bed?
How much fitness did you have before the injury?

There are a lot of variables that go into this equation, but the biggest thing to remember when you are regaining fitness is that it’s not instant, but if you chip away, you might surprise yourself and find some form earlier than expected.

Without being too optimistic though, race readiness might take a little bit more time, and some races! The first few might not feel great, and your performance might struggle, but those will be building blocks towards your next event.

Let’s talk a bit more about race readiness, which is definitely different than just regaining fitness. Fitness comes first, then the ability to crush a race.

Be Patient With Race Readiness

Once we start to see some progress in workouts, it’s easy to fool ourselves that we are ready to go CRUSH a race. I do think that it’s fine to GO RACE, but go in with the expectation of having fun by being back at the race scene, seeing all your race friends, gaining fitness from the session, but have no stress on yourself to have a great performance.

Racing is a different beast than a really hard workout—we all know that. But when we started our comeback from poor fitness, it’s easy to think our newfound fitness after 2-3 months of training might have us Race Ready and truly ready to crush it! The reality is, we just might need a bit more time to get the speed back in our legs, be able to handle the volume of hard efforts that we encounter in a race, as well as the fatigue resistance to have the watts at the end of the race.

If you go to a race and it doesn’t go well in terms of placing, don’t even think twice about it! Take the fitness gains and head back to your dojo to train. Keep going back, and eventually everything will click and come together!

Conclusion

No doubt about it, time off the bike that is unplanned or returning from injury is a rough road to traverse, but the right mindset can make it not only palatable, but a unique growth experience!

We might miss some races and feel like everyone else is passing us by, but look inwards at all of the amazing things going on around you—add more perspective to your training and racing—and you’ll most likely come back an even stronger athlete, both physically, and most definitely mentally.

Trudge the road —it will be challenging!—to your next big event, and go crush it!

Rebuilding Peak Fitness After Time Off or Injury