I am new and signed up just over a month to after having rode unstructured for three months on Zwift. My goals are maybe someday to do a XC MTB Race but mostly to join my local road and MTB group rides and to fit to ride/ski/hike with family and friends. I signed up for the XC Mid Volume Marathon Plan with no event focus and have been seeing huge benefits. However, I also ski once or twice a week and am hoping to keep doing some yoga to keep my flexibility and maybe even do gym workout to keep some strength up. But with a busy job and a two year old I am finding the five workouts a week to be challenging. Most weeks I end up shuffling them around and collapsing the rest days sometimes just to get five rides in. I am pretty tired and quite sore and having a hard time recovering. I am seriously considering dropping to the low volume plan but am hesitant because I have been getting so much benefit from the current plan and don’t want to ruin this progress. Plus I am still hitting all the workout targets. Interested in hearing about what happened to folks who might have dropped from mid to low volume and what kind of drop off they have seen.
Drop to LV, customise the durations and add Z2 stuff if you have time or ride outdoors in their place. Since I dropped to LV, touchwood I’ve been getting pbs on my timetrials. Some of that will be improved positioning etc but a large part of it will be building more recovery into my schedule.
Drop to the LV plan. When time allows (either after scheduled workout, or on open days), add extra time at a lower intensity.
I do this much of the year, as it allows me to mix in running and group rides without totally messing up the plan. I usually only go to MV when I’m hyper-focused on an ‘A’ event.
It’s hard to make changes to something that’s proven to be so effective for you in the past, but life changes and our training often needs to change alongside it for the best results.
If you’re struggling to recover from what you’re currently doing, that’s the biggest sign that you need to dial things down a little bit. The alternative is that you’ll crash and burn and ultimately need to take a bunch of time completely off of the bike to recover.
The goal here is continuous, sustainable stimulus. Finding a way to get your workouts in when you can and then making them count is key. Our Low-Volume plans keep the intensity of the Mid-Volume plans with the goal of keeping your fitness up with less volume. It sounds like this is sort of what you’re already working towards and could be a great place to start.
As @HLaB mentions, you can also customize your workout duration caps for each day of the week to ensure that you’re going to have an approachable plan on hand, and if three hard workouts each week still feels like too much, you could switch over to a masters plan as well. This caps the hard workouts to two each week. This could be a great option as well and was designed with people in your situation in mind!
Make sure to keep in mind that you’ll probably get better gains by reducing your volume when you need to instead of trying to push through and fatiguing your body too much for its own good. More isn’t always better, and you’ll have the best results long term when you feel healthy at the end of each week and you still look forward to most of your workouts.
