I know I know, recovery is an essential part of training in order for our muscles to repair but I’m not talking about consecutive moderate to hard days all the time but simply replacing rest days with 30 minutes of easy spinning of the legs with something like Taku.
I’m on a streak of 25 days and yesterday I had a 180 minute average power PB so for me, I feel like full rest days are not needed. I’ve been riding 5 years and work in an office.
I’m currently on the medium volume plan and replacing all rest days with Taku.
Interested to hear others experiences with relaxing rest with active recovery. For me, at my age (43) and a office based job I find it keeps my fluid and gives me a mental boost too.
I heard a really interesting podcast from Science of Ultra (an ultrarunning podcast) - Episode 114: Are Rest Days Needed?
You can check out the episode but the big takeaway I got from it is, as always, it depends. That being said, assuming you’re doing 1-1.5 hours of working out per day you’re still getting 22.5 to 23 hours of recovery time. That’s damn near a whole day. It needs to fit into your lifestyle and not cause overtraining or burn out but you can definitely ride your bike every single day. Whether it’s a good idea for you personally may remain to be seen
There’s not nearly enough information, and the impact is far too individual specific for there to be any general statements made about this.
Rest days being replaced with 30min of spinning still likely qualifies as recovery. And regarding 23hrs of recovery between workouts, this takes nothing into account with respect to intensity of the work done in the preceding workout, or to be done in the subsequent workout.
Example: I can ride around in z2 every day for 90min and not need recovery. But I can’t do Spanish Needle back to back to back without digging myself in a very deep hole.
It makes a good point, why do you need so much more when, if you rest at work, you keep on resting.
Well I guess is focuses on the sleep aspect. During sleep you really get some kind of boost, physically and mentally. I do feel that rest days are needed but an easy spin is really beneficial too. I guess, saddle sores or related fatigue injuries may need total time off the bike. Aside from that - spinning and being “clever” about the zone you are in when training is probably more important.
It isn’t the physical so much ……I have today off and it was nice to get home from work and chill out, have a coffee…not have to worry about getting the bibs out and the trainer ready…I have V02 tomorrow , super threshold Thursday and O/U Saturday…I just like the mental break - and my legs feel fresher with a day off. That said when I am in base one of my 2 rest days is a gym session and I will do 40 press-ups and some side planks in a few minutes to mitigate my lack of gym time now I am in SPB!
I’ve often wondered about whether I need as many rest days as the all plans indicate. I’m 64 & retired and do very little high intensity , maybe 1 hard ride a week if that. I do 15-20 hrs a week mostly Endurance and Tempo. The most stress I have in my life (thankfully) is deciding whether to fall asleep watching Amazon or Netflix. Most of the the plans I think are designed for people with job and children etc, and thus having a degree of stress in their lives. That stress plus the training stress therefore requires frequent rest days presumably. In answer to the original question - 9 although I’m currently on 8 and not anticipating having a day off until Saturday. My normal weekly TSS is between 500 & 700.
I’ve put in about 14 days straigh last year a few times.
I’ve always felt blown out by doing that. But not because of the physical effort, I did had at least 2 recovery rides in there.
I think mentally I was just blasted. I didn’t have any real ‘relax’ time. I don’t think anything that I gained in the fitness department made up for the mental fatigue that I added onto myself.
I totally support that you might want to try and get to a month or whatever just to say you did it. But I don’t see any good reason to ride every day. Unless you’re a pro or you’re living with your family, I just don’t see why you would want to ride every day (with a few minor exceptions).
People who commute to work by bike and train at the same time basically do it all year round. Obviously they don’t hammer it to work but like yourself do an easy ride there and back. Used to do it myself for a while… got tired of the rain though
It’s definitely not to just be able to ‘tick off’ a ‘hey look what I did’. I am merely interested in being mindful of how I feel and taking it day by day and then all of sudden I found myself in this situation.
I would emphasise that I sit at a desk for a day job and get plenty of sleep so a ‘rest day’ is being totally inactive.
I got involved in a challenge to ride an hour every day in October. I ended up extending the streak out to 109 days. I started out pretty conservative with the TSS to stick with the challenge but got progressively more daring with high TSS work outs. Felt pretty good for the first 60. The last 30 it started to become unproductive as it was necessary to limit higher intensity work.
I’ll probably do it again next fall during base season.
Taking a look at last year seems my longest streak was 59 days without a day off. 12th June to - 9th August. Totally unintentional, Mostly due to commuting 30 mins each way during the week.
During that time I was on top form racing most weeks and no burn out.
However once or twice each week it would just be those 2x30 mins commutes, and i’d be doing under 50% FTP for those commutes.
As you I also do a desk job, and my commute is less stressfull than someone working construction. Probebly even less than someone like a teacher on their feet all day.
