Supercompensation: the golden rule of cycling training
Many cyclists train as hard as they can, while resting too little, or ignoring the warning signs that an injury is imminent. One of the most important concepts to understand in planning training is Supercompensation and to build in proper recovery time. We have written at length elsewhere on how to structure a cycling specific training programme, universal advice on how to improve, as well as the wider benefits of cycling (with lessons from psychology, neurology and sociology). In this post we focus on the mechanics of cycling training from first principles to help you better understand where you are at with your training. It could be that you are not training enough, or that you are not resting enough.
It seems a fairly common and natural human failing to think that because exercise is critical to improved cycling fitness it’s the only thing that matters. Rest and recovery are all too often viewed as a necessary evil, or sign of weakness. Even when the importance of rest is understood intellectually, it can be hard to internalise this idea. When thinking about how to achieve Supercompensation, two principles are worth considering:
-
Hard/easy days. Training too hard on easy days is probably the biggest mistake recreational athletes can make. Often even if they understand conceptually that the easy day should be easy, they miscalculate their easy, for example by benchmarking against desired rather than actual fitness. This additional exercise reduces the body’s ability to Supercompensation and in turn makes intensity on the hard days more difficult to maintain. A good training programme will have hard training sessions that damage the body just enough to promote Supercompensation, and rest days that provide the opportunity to recover.
-
Training Monotony. This metric is not about boredom, but a way of measuring how similar each day's training stress is. Training should, if calibrated correctly, test you in different ways and gradually at higher intensity over time.
The goldilocks zone (adequate training)
In the ideal situation you will be optimising training and recovery to maximum benefit. This will mean training at the right intensity and resting adequately so you start the next training session near peak Supercompensation.
Stagnation from insufficient rest
Without sufficient rest, you may start your next training while you are still recovering. This can mean you have not benefited from the training, just barely recovered from it. This can carry on indefinitely, with no improvement in fitness.
Overtraining
Without sufficient rest, fitness starts to decline with each successive exercise worsening fitness further. Unfortunately, we see too often with cyclists responding to lack of progress in this way by increasing training stress, further perpetuating a decline in fitness.
While all models are wrong, some might be useful. And we think understanding these different ‘phases’ described above can help cyclists orientate where they might be with their training. Of course it gets more complex. With different systems (e.g. muscles, cardiovascular, tendons, bones, hormones) likely requiring different rest for given stress. This means optimum rest for Supercompensation is likely to vary significantly. But it is, rightly, well understood that intensity requires more than 24 hours rest and therefore in structuring a cycling training programme, cyclists should alternate between hard and easy days. It is also understood that there is no upside from cycling easy days too hard, and therefore cyclists should err on the cautious side.
