Original episode & show notes | Raw transcript
This document provides a detailed breakdown of the principles for managing fitness and fatigue during a competitive cycling season, as discussed by the coaches on the Empirical Cycling Podcast. The central challenge addressed is the inherent conflict between the need to train and race hard to maintain fitness, and the equally critical need for rest and recovery to achieve peak performance in key events. The podcast advocates for a proactive, intelligent, and flexible approach, moving beyond simple metrics to a more holistic understanding of an athlete’s state.
Before implementing specific strategies, it is crucial to establish a framework for the season. This involves understanding the demands of your schedule and prioritizing your goals.
The hosts differentiate between two extremes to illustrate that a one-size-fits-all approach is ineffective:
Light Schedule: An athlete who targets one to three major events per year. This schedule allows for distinct, long-term training blocks focused on progressive overload, followed by a taper and peak for the A-race.
Dense Schedule: An athlete who competes frequently, accumulating 30 to 50 race days in a season. For this athlete, the season itself becomes a major source of training stress, and the primary focus must shift from building fitness to maintaining it while aggressively managing fatigue.
A common mistake athletes make is imbuing too many events with high importance, leading to a constant state of being “almost-peaked” but never truly fresh. The A-B-C framework is essential for managing physical and mental energy.
A-Events: The primary goals of the season. An athlete should have a maximum of two or three. All training, rest, and strategic decisions are oriented around being at absolute peak form for these events.
B-Events: Races where a good performance is desired, but they are not the central focus. The danger, as highlighted in the podcast, is having an excessive number of B-events. This leads to a flat-lined season where the athlete is constantly trying to be “on” without sufficient recovery, ultimately compromising their A-race performance.
C-Events: These should make up the bulk of a busy schedule. They are best viewed as training sessions. The outcome is irrelevant; the goal is to gain specific experience (e.g., practicing pack positioning, testing nutrition) or to use the race as a high-intensity workout without the pressure to perform. The hosts argue that many athletes would benefit from downgrading their B-events to C-events.
The podcast outlines several key proactive strategies. These are actions and mindsets to adopt throughout the racing season.
For athletes with a dense schedule, it’s impossible to follow a traditional training plan. In this context, races themselves must be used for training. This means:
Accepting Sub-Optimal Performance: You cannot be at your best for every event. Go into C-races with residual fatigue, understanding that the goal is the training stimulus, not the result.
Targeted Race Goals: Use a C-race to work on a specific weakness. For example, a rider might decide, “Today, my goal is to try and get into the second breakaway,” and once that goal is met, they can sit up and conserve energy.
A mid-season break is non-negotiable, especially for athletes with long or dense seasons (e.g., road racers who also compete in cyclocross).
Plan in Advance: Identify a week in your calendar with no events and lock it in as a rest week. The podcast emphasizes, “don’t fuck with your rest week.”
Purpose: The break serves to shed deep-seated fatigue, prevent physical and mental burnout, and allow the body to supercompensate from previous training blocks. While a small amount of fitness may be lost, it is rapidly regained, and the athlete returns far fresher and more motivated.
Easy endurance riding is a cornerstone of in-season fitness maintenance.
Benefits: It helps maintain aerobic fitness (VO2 max), aids in recovery by promoting blood flow, and does not add significant stress.
Fatigue Indicator: A long, easy ride is an excellent diagnostic tool. As one host notes, if you feel terrible after the first hour and don’t start to feel better, it’s a clear sign you are overly fatigued and should go home.
Objective and subjective feelings about power numbers can provide early warnings of accumulating fatigue.
FTP (Functional Threshold Power): During a warmup, a few minutes at FTP should feel “like FTP.” If it feels excessively difficult, this is a major red flag.
TTE (Time to Exhaustion): A noticeable decrease in your ability to complete your standard threshold intervals (e.g., struggling to do 3x10 minutes when you can normally do 3x20) is a sign of fatigue, not a need for more training.
Sprint Power: Neuromuscular power is highly sensitive to fatigue. A significant, unexpected drop in your peak sprint wattage is one of the clearest indicators that you need rest.
Equally important are the common mistakes that athletes make, often with the best intentions.
This is identified as the single most common and destructive mistake. When performance declines mid-season, an athlete’s instinct is often to “double down” on training. The podcast is unequivocal: reduced performance mid-season is almost always a symptom of fatigue. The correct response is more rest, not more intensity.
A race has a “blast radius” of fatigue. The days immediately following a race should be for recovery, and the days leading into the next one should be for freshening up. Squeezing in hard, progressive interval sessions between race weekends is a recipe for burnout.
“Openers” are short, high-intensity efforts performed 1-2 days before a race to “open up the legs.” The hosts make a critical point: “Openers are a privilege for the well-rested.” If you feel you need openers before every race just to feel functional, it is a sign that you are chronically fatigued and your body is resisting high-intensity effort.
Unless you have a very light race schedule, the goal of in-season training is maintenance, not progression. Racing provides a powerful but “unfocused” training stimulus. Trying to force FTP or TTE progression on top of a demanding race schedule will lead to backsliding due to excessive fatigue.
An athlete’s needs can change dramatically from year to year, or even week to week.
Listen to Your Body: What worked last year might not work this year if you are more fit and require more recovery. Life stress, travel, and sleep all impact your ability to recover.
Be Flexible: On a given day, if a planned hard effort feels terrible, the correct decision is to stop and recover. The hosts’ rule of thumb is: “Don’t ever pedal harder than feels good.”
A true performance peak is a transient state that can only be held for approximately 2-4 weeks. It is physically impossible to maintain a peak for an entire season for two reasons:
High Fatigue Generation: When you are at your absolute fittest, you can push yourself harder and dig a deeper hole of fatigue than at any other time.
Decay of Training Volume: Maintaining a peak requires a reduction in training volume to stay fresh. Over time, this lack of volume will lead to a gradual decay of the underlying aerobic base.
“Race legs” are defined as the ability to handle repeated high-intensity surges comfortably. The reason for not having them depends on the time of year:
Early Season: It is likely due to a lack of racing. The body needs 4-6 races to adapt to the specific, chaotic demands of competition that are difficult to replicate in training.
Late Season: It is likely due to accumulated fatigue. You have the experience, but your body is too tired to express it.
The overarching philosophy of the podcast is that rest is not a passive state of de-training, but an active and essential component of a successful competitive season. Athletes must shift their mindset from fearing rest to embracing it as the mechanism that allows training adaptations to be realized. By carefully prioritizing events, using races as a targeted training tool, monitoring for signs of fatigue, and being flexible in their approach, athletes can better navigate the demands of the season and arrive at their A-events truly ready to perform.