Anyone do no days off? (Zone 2 or higher every day, at least 1 hour)
watched this video of someone that is super fit and took a little bit of time off for travel…then logged his return. he basically took no days off for 10 weeks.
got me wondering what happens if you take no days off? say most of your rides are endurance / tempo with 1 hard day a week?
let’s assume someone who has been training regularly and built up to a decent level of fitness
let’s also assume just general training…no need to taper for an event or test or anything like that.
(and let’s assume no injury / illness / terrible night of sleep, etc).
i’ve ridden 9 days in a row and 16 of the last 17…took the one day because my knees were achy. overall I don’t feel fatigue or the need for a day off. I’ve been riding all Zone 2/3. just wondering if I’ll see signs of fatigue build-up? or will I just explode and be in trouble? or am I gonna be just fine plugging away every day?
I recently found my old training logs from college. Looking back I took about 2-3 days off over a 5 month season. We did have one day a week that was an easy shake out. No such thing as “recovery weeks” back then. Training included lots of intensity and mileage (80-100 mpw), averaging 10-12 workouts a week. After the season it was 1-3 weeks off completely and then the process began again. Not saying that was optimal… there are a lot of comments of feeling tired.
But we ran fast. I guess the question is… could we have been faster or is that what it takes to be your best? (There’s definitely a few things I would change… mostly we would follow up a killer interval session with a double the next day. Would have been better off sleeping in and not feeling guilty about it).
Also note… I am a couple decades removed from that training and have no desire or ability to train like that now. Training as a working adult with a family is a lot different than when you are single in your 20’s.
Furthermore, that guy has years of training at a high level, where 25 hour weeks weren’t out of the ordinary, and aside from some coaching, has the privilege of not having a “real job”… So to do a 10 week boot camp to regain some lost fitness is manageable. For most of us, no, we’re better off with days off. No different principal at work here when compared to rest/recovery weeks. Training every day, regardless of the zone, is probably not sustainable, efficient, or beneficial to performance gains.
I’m not saying you are wrong but I just would like to raise the question.
I feel like I’ve been told this so often that I believed it to be true so I would always plan a rest day…then I’d be sitting around thinking, “I really don’t need this”.
I took the one day that I felt I needed then back at it.
I feel like I’m in a groove and don’t really feel like I need one (just by my feel…not by my deep dive into science or anything like that).
Is your fitness improving? Or are you just stagnant? If you are improving, then this approach is working for you at them moment- let us know how it goes after 8 / 10 / 12 months.
Rarely take day off. Most of my days are 30 minutes Z1/2 and then 2 days per week I go long/hard. As long as you distribute your weekly training stress well, I do not know of a physiologic reason why a day off would be necessary.
I’ve been training everyday for the last month. Used to take a complete day off per week but I’ve replaced it with 30-60min super easy instead. I just can’t get the hours in otherwise. No problem recovering. I could prob get away w 1hr at 50-60% ftp to recover but I go even easier
@broshaughnessy I understand this. But your example is far from what the original post was, which describes the Youtuber’s 15-25 hour weeks, with TSS upwards of 900 per week. Five days a week of 30 minute Z1/Z2 rides with two “hard” days ins’t exactly pushing the envelope, and surely is doable for most, but again, is it of any benefit over two full rest days, probably not in my opinion.
@KWcycling That’s fine, but I’d ask what’s the point of that hour then? I doubt you’ll find any evidence that an extra hour of <50% ftp offers you any benefit. If you’re just looking to hit a fluffed up hour number, it might be worth being honest with yourself about the metrics you’re using.
I guess thats in line with my point of my first post… Sure, you could ride everyday, but at some point you’re making a compromise of intensity for time. If you feel like you don’t need/want a day off pretty regularly, I’d try upping the intensity of the days you do go hard. Not that you need to head into a rest day destroyed, but you might be “wasting” an opportunity for improvement, with less time on the bike. This is all to say, if you just enjoy riding your bike, and want to make time for that everyday, thats fine too, but don’t kid yourself that its the best way to improve fitness or performance.
One of my cycling friends has been riding every day for the past 5 or 6 years, I’m not even sure how long is his streak anymore. His Strava profile is public so easy to check it out:
The thing is, I used to be able to keep up with him, but the guy just turned into an absolute machine. It’s not like he just noodles along on some days, he’s doing like 45000 km/1400 hours a year on top of a normal 9-5 office job.
I consider him to be a freak of nature to be honest, his training volume and frequency just flies in the face of the conventional wisdom and I’m just genuinely puzzled every time we ride together. We’ll go on a 300+km ride and he’ll be as strong at the end of it as in the beginning.
So my conclusion is, some people don’t seem to need days off, although an n=1 example is obviously just an outlier.
Need? -only when your legs (or knee) start to fall off.
Ideally making you as fast as you can be? -probably not.
If you are mostly riding about an hour and only doing one hard day per week then you probably aren’t getting much if any progressive overload. The training is a bit monotone.
If you took one day off and then did two hard days per week, you’ll probably get faster with more stimulus. If you took two days off per week but then did a couple 3+ hour rides during your 5 days of training, you would probably be faster.
The six days per week of low intensity is a lot of fitness maintenance but not progressing fitness to new levels.
But I get it. I like to ride almost every day. My ‘day off’ today was 35 minutes of easy pedaling and some upper body weights because I did 48 minutes of ftp intervals the day before and need some recovery.
Thing is for me even a non training day = about 30,000 steps. This is the nature of my work and I’ve done it for 30 years. Weekends are always active too because its fun.
So I guess I’d agree with the statement that day offs aren’t essential.
