Still new to cycling… was excited and pushing hard. So much so that I became over trained. I was following all my HR and HRV data on several apps. I truly thought I was doing well. I have taken a good chunk of time off ~4 weeks and have been dabbling in a few little workouts to see how I feel (Lazy Mountain, Dans, etc) and am reluctant to go full swing. What techniques/signs do you look for to know you’re full recovered and ready to rock and roll?
How new is “new to cycling?”
What training plan were you following when you became overtrained?
How long have you been training?
What was your HR and HRV taking you?
Often times for me, when I’ve had an extended amount of time off, coming back to training can feel brutal which, I suppose, could be mistaken for fatigue…
I think it’d be tough to become overtrained if you haven’t been training long and are following a low or medium volume plan.
I suffered from fatigue when I first started out. SSB LV, 1 and 2, with a rapidly rising FTP and a physically demanding job meant that I tipped over the edge quickly. 20 years out of the saddle was ‘new’ for me.
Don’t sweat it. Give yourself some time to recover and listen to your body. You’ll know if you are adapting to the workload, or not.
In my case, I backed off for awhile before coming back for more. Now I’m doing the mid volume plans and my body is keeping up so far.
Stay safe.
“new to cycling” is cycling for less than a year. I was following the sweet spot, then moved on to sustained build. To be fair, I was also doing a decent amount of strength training. I come from a olympic building and running background. I’ve done the marathon and “big gains” thing for well over a decade. When I found TR, I started adding it in to my routine as “just cardio” while still doing the heavy lifts. In order to do both, I would often do two a day workouts. So, overall volume for some days would be 1-1.5 hours of cycling in the morning combined with heavy, heavy strength work for another 1-1.5 (and I don’t dally in the gym… I’m the guy with angry face the whole time). In the evenings, I would do Yin Yoga and worked real hard at keeping myself from strain injuries. At moderately clean (not perfect I’ll admit) and would get between 7.5-8 hours of sleep a day.
Resting HR would be at its lowest at 46 and when I hit a resting of 56, I’d back off a little. HRV I was using hrv4training and at no point did it ever say: “back off” unless of course I drank a little bit of alcohol (which then also through off the resting hr).
To my core I can truly say that I underestimated how much cycling can tax the body. But when I kept researching over training symptoms, I found things like poor performance, etc. However, all my numbers (ftp and lifts) were going up. However, I learned for me, my first sign of over training is insomnia. Which when I first started to experience it, I thought I was just getting bad sleep… so I started taking Melatonin at night to assist in sleeping.
Which is another good point. Clearly some people respond to being ‘overtrained’ differently than others. I never knew what my tell-tale was. Now I do.
Cycling - more than ‘just cardio’ when following TR
Lifting and cycling - need to not tackle the world
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Do you remember about how long you took off? I’m kinda curious.
Yep. I didn’t ride the bike for over a month.
Admittedly, I had a busted shoulder after crashing badly in my first mtb race. That made it easier to take the hint and back off for a bit on the bike.
If I’d been able to blow off work I’d say a few weeks would’ve done the trick. That’s my gut feel at least.
Your training load makes it sound like your poor old legs don’t get much recovery time.