This is one of the first questions a new athlete asks, and one that every athlete who wants to improve asks sooner or later. How much should I train for my event? How many kilometres should I ride, run or swim? How many hours should I train? That last question is the right way to think about your training.
Everyone is looking for a silver bullet, but it doesn't exist. There is no single answer, and it almost always comes down to "it depends". Over my career, I have coached athletes to race wins on 100–200 training hours a year. Other athletes train up to 800 hours a year and still don't win races. Many factors shape your performance: genetics, existing skills, your ability to train, your racing level and the difficulty of the event.
“Everyone is looking for a silver bullet, but it doesn't exist.”
— Head Coach Jānis Mūsiņš
First, the terminology. When we talk about training hours, we mean all your active, training-related hours, and this is where TrainingPeaks comes in handy. We track weekly and yearly hours, so we always know how many hours a year you are doing. That includes gym, core work, stretching, yoga, running, swimming, skills sessions and so on.
We ask every new and existing athlete the same question: how many hours are you willing to train per week, and per year? Traditionally, the average comes to about 300 hours a year. From there, the coach plans around the time you have. Keep in mind that more training hours bring more of everything around training: washing kit, bike maintenance, eating and, most important, recovery. If you add another training day, you also need more time for all of these. A lot depends on your willingness and motivation.
You can double your training, but you will have to change your daily habits drastically. To be more realistic, our coaches look for about 5–20 hours of training per week, which gives 250–1,000 hours a year. If an athlete can train 250 hours now but did around 500–600 hours two or three years ago, the coach can safely increase the yearly amount. If you have never done much more than 250 hours, the coach will increase your annual training by only about 10%. There are many moving parts, of course, but that is the ballpark. Once we add hours, we evaluate your performance and how you adapt over the year.
Besides the amount of training, we look at how many months of the year you actually train. Quite a lot of athletes train 250–300 hours a year but then take two or three months of complete rest and a sedentary lifestyle. If you think you need that much rest after a season of about 250 hours, you are probably wrong. You should keep training during those months instead of doing nothing. To put it simply: you are not pushing your body so far that you need two or three months of doing nothing to recover.
The idea of a long off-season break comes from the pro peloton, where riders post on social media that they are taking time off. True, they are not riding their bikes. But they are most likely still going on long hikes, running, going to the gym and doing yoga. They are still training, just in a different way. People tend to forget that.
“You are not pushing your body so far that you need two or three months of doing nothing to recover.”
— Head Coach Jānis Mūsiņš
It is a different story if you do 250 hours spread over more than nine months. Then we have more options to build your training capacity over a longer period, and in that case we could stretch your annual hours up to 350.
Don't forget the recovery we talked about earlier. As a coach, I will always choose consistency over the total amount of training. A crash course of training is almost always a bad idea, and keeping your consistency high will do you far more good.
Our best athletes are the ones with a lot of "green" in their TrainingPeaks. It is hard to find a missed workout in their calendars, and if you don't miss workouts, you will keep getting better. Train regularly and consistently. That's it.
That doesn't mean you should follow the plan blindly when you are not feeling well. Talk to your coach weekly, or even daily, and adjust the plan as you go. That way of planning and training gives the best results in the end.
Want a plan built around the hours you actually have? Book a free intro call with the coach you choose.
