Strategic Training: Building a 6-hour-week High-Performance Program for Busy Individuals

The vast majority of time spent coaching involves optimizing athletes' programs to fit in with a busy lifestyle that needs to take care of family, work, and social obligations. Without a definitive program or at the very least having a coach on your side, how do you build a program that even the most busy individual can achieve, thrive, and perform on?
Prioritize the long ride (and your weekend training)
The biggest mistake I often see regarding performance gains is that a longer aerobic session is missing from a program.
Longer rides run glycogen levels lower in both the fast twitch and slow twitch fibers and one of the potential mechanisms of improved performance is that signaling for additional aerobic adaptation is created. There is only so much intensity that can fit into a program before fatigue, injury, sickness, and over-training begin. Creating aerobic signals via duration is important for a time-crunched athlete
Actionable steps: Start at 1 hour and tick off each subsequent hour each week until you find you hit the time constraints wall or conditioning limitations. For example, if you find you struggle going from 2 to 3 hours, there is potentially a physiological/metabolic limitation that needs work and/or nutrition limitation. Sort those out and you unlock new performance levels
Frequency of Rides
Here's where it gets sticky. Too much time between sessions and you tend to lose fitness than gain and too much frequency can be challenging if you are on a limited time budget. So what to focus on? Depends on your goal event. Let's use a few examples to give some perspective-
On shorter events (under 2 hours):
The above week has two rest days which gives us three days of training and then two days on the weekend with additional training stimulus from a longer ride.
On longer events (2 to 4 hours):
The above example of a four-day training week tends to work well for those who struggle to find time to train during the week. There is ample recovery between sessions so you chase after the intensity and the most important aspect especially if your event is longer than 2 hours, which means the weekend ride can be much longer. Progression of that longer ride can be up to 6 hours if needs be. Remember, you can only get stronger from what you can recover from. So while there isn't a hard and fast rule on limits to the long ride, at some point, it does get either too short, too long, too hard, or too easy. A good coach can guide you on this principle if you are not sure. The longer the event, the longer your long ride needs to be, especially beyond 3-hour events.
Horses for Courses
So far we have the importance of the long ride mapped out, we have our training frequency mapped out and now we need to figure out what those sessions look like.
Remember that cycling is an AEROBIC sport. Many coaches live in a world of more intensity is more and more is more. Unfortunately, that is not the case. In very specific cases, athletes need an assessment to see what is it that need to work on. While banging out your local World Champs street race every week seems productive at first, inevitably you find that you either stagnate or go backward. Programs and coaches who are all about being popularity contest winners often burn athletes out within 3 months on the more intensity is more better attitude. Watch out those 40/20s every week gonna get ‘cha! When in doubt build VO2 max!
Here is a progression you can follow for one of your key sessions every week (try to take every 4th week super easy instead of a workout):
VO2 Progression | ||||
Workout | Number of Reps | Number of Sets | Recovery |