As bike riders, many of us feel most at home when breathing hard on an upward slope with beautiful vistas all around, so it’s sometimes difficult to process the idea that fitness is accrued through rest. That’s right – sitting on the sofa reading this article on your phone or your laptop could well be gaining you more fitness than heading out for yet another ride.
But how many rest days should we be taking, assuming fitness gains are what we’re after – and what should they look like?
Why rest anyway?
If training is the process of breaking your body down, rest is the process of rebuilding it, enabling you over time to become a stronger and more accomplished bike rider.
However, the new, stronger you can only emerge with sufficient rest and recovery, as your body repairs fatigued muscles and replenishes the glycogen stores that will enable you to ride hard again another day.
Matt Bottrill is a former National 25-mile champion, and these days he runs a successful racing team and is the owner of Matt Bottrill Performance Coaching. He tells Cycling Weekly: “Your body can only absorb so much load.”
How often should we rest?
For most riders, especially at this time of year, when training involves more of a slow build towards the summer months, Bottrill recommends two days off the bike each week.
“If we’re looking at the winter phase a couple of rest days would be sufficient for most people,” he says, but adds that racers might be OK to do more: “If you’re more geared towards performance, you might just want to go for one day.”
There are no hard and fast rules around how many days off you should take, he points out, as individual needs vary so much.
“That’s when coaching, or understanding how your own body works, kicks in. Because how one athlete adapts to training is so different to the next,” he says. The key thing is being able to recover sufficiently to be able to make your ‘quality’ days count – those when you are performing intervals or riding hills, for example.
Even if you feel like you could ride every day, the smart advice is not to, says Bottrill.
“It’s not worth it,” he cautions. “What happens is the quality of those sessions, it just starts to dwindle. For the…