For many cyclists, winter is the least wonderful time of the year to ride. A mixture of sick kids, holiday commitments, and fewer daylight hours often conspire to ruin the best-laid training plans.
In 15 years of working with cyclists, I’ve observed one primary difference between people who make progress during the winter and those who end up falling off the bandwagon: that primary difference is mindset.
All or Nothing
Cyclists who adopt an all-or-nothing mindset set themselves up for failure when weather, life, or health challenges inevitably get in the way of training.
All-or-nothing cyclists mistakenly view the contents of a workout as the most critical component of their training. They hold the view that if the contents of a workout can’t be executed as planned, the workout has no value and might as well be skipped.
This mindset leads to predictable results: missed rides, blank weeks, and spotty months of training.
The Scaled Approach
The antidote to “all-or-nothing” thinking is a “scaled” approach.
The “scaled approach” prioritizes the habit of training over the programming details of any one workout. Said another way, training habits are more valuable than training details.
The scaled approach to training assumes that workout instructions are written for “best-case” training conditions. If training conditions are less than ideal, the workout target is scaled to preserve the habit of training.
Let’s walk through a cycling and strength training workout to see precisely how you might scale a workout to meet the shifting demands of your schedule.
Follow along with the graphic below, as Jason scales his ride targets from right to left as his training availability changes.
Jason Scales a 4 Hour Ride
Jason starts his Monday by looking over his training schedule for the week. He’s especially excited about his 4-hour ride scheduled for Saturday, but by Wednesday, his ride window has already shrunk to 3 hours.
Using the scaled approach, he reduces his target to a more reasonable 3 hours, throwing in a handful of sprints to increase the intensity. Unfortunately, his modified plan only lasts a day and by Thursday, he’s looking at only 2 hours to ride.
Jason takes it in stride and shifts to a Zone 3-focused ride to round out his available 2 hours. No sooner has he modified his ride plans for Saturday than he notices some awful weather rolling in for the weekend. Jason hates riding in the rain so instead opts for a workout on the trainer.
Jason isn’t a big fan of the trainer but knows if he restricts his trainer rides to one hour, he can manage. He opts for a basic threshold workout targeting 1 hour of ride time.
It’s Saturday afternoon and Jason’s window to ride is rapidly shrinking. He’s at an inflection point; he can bail on ride plans for the day, or opt for a focused 15-minute trainer ride with three 30s efforts in Zone 6.
In previous years, Jason would have bailed on his ride after the initial disruption to his plans, but this time around he’s focused on strengthening the habit of riding, not the completion of a perfect workout. He takes the day in stride and crushes a high-quality 15 minutes on the bike.
Our graphic begins with the target or “best case” training scenario on the far right, then moves left while scaling each workout according to the available training time.
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Jenn Scales a Strength Workout
Jenn is committed to adding strength training to her cycling this year. So far she has enjoyed making steady progress under the bar, but recently, she’s fallen into the trap of bailing on her workout if she feels time pressure from other obligations during the week.
To combat this “all-or-nothing” approach to strength training, Jenn adopts a scaled approach to each strength workout. While her goal remains the completion of each workout as prescribed, she’s improved her ability to scale the workout depending on her training availability.
With less time to train, her first move is to drop one set on her squats, and two on her bench press. This adjustment helps shorten the workout’s overall time, allowing her to still complete focused strength work in the exercises most applicable to cycling (the squat and deadlift).
If she’s especially crunched for time, she’ll ditch the bench press, hold onto a single set in the squat, and deadlift while bumping the intensity just a touch to RPE 8.
This scaled approach to strength workouts has allowed her to nail six weeks of uninterrupted strength training, even during a highly variable work period.
The scaled approach to strength training begins with the target workout on the far right, then scales to available training time moving left, dropping sets, and reps as needed.
The takeaway of using a scaled approach in your training is to not fall victim to seeing each prescribed workout as an all-or-nothing proposition on your calendar. The sooner you become more flexible in modifying a workout scheduled on a challenging day, the more likely you’ll remain consistent through challenging times of training, emerging on the other end of adversity as a fitter, stronger, and happier cyclist.