RECOVERY

A recovery ride is not training. It is movement: gentle blood flow, a bit of mobility, a habit kept alive, and a way to spin the stiffness out of your legs. There is no fitness to be gained in 30 minutes at 45% of FTP, and that is the point — you get the movement without adding fatigue.

• Keeps you loose between hard sessions without adding load.
• Maintains routine and mental engagement without touching your ability to hit tomorrow's intervals.
• Gives the clearest possible feedback on how tired you are — easy power feeling desperate is a real signal.

Indoors is arguably the ideal place for a recovery ride, precisely because there are no hills, no traffic lights and nobody to race. Set a wattage cap and refuse to exceed it.

How often

Most riders do well with a lighter week every third or fourth week — so three weeks building, one week easier. Older riders, riders juggling heavy work and family load, and anyone new to structured training often do better with two weeks on, one week easier.

What to cut

• Cut volume by roughly 30-50%.
• Keep a little intensity: one short session with a few brief efforts stops you feeling flat.
• Delete the long ride, or halve it.
• Delete all sweet spot and threshold blocks. That is where the accumulated fatigue lives.
• Do not cut everything to zero — full rest for seven days tends to leave you feeling worse, not sharper.

What a good recovery week looks like

• You cannot hit your usual interval power despite feeling motivated.
• Heart rate is suppressed at your normal hard efforts, or elevated at rest.
• Sleep is broken, or you wake up unrefreshed several days running.
• Legs feel heavy on the warm-up of every ride, not just the hard ones.
• Motivation has quietly vanished and rides feel like an obligation.
• You are getting every cold going round.

One bad session is noise. Three in a row is a message. Taking four easy days early costs you almost nothing; ignoring it for a month costs you a block.

• Sleep is the single largest lever, and no supplement comes close to an extra hour.
• Eat enough, especially carbohydrate around training. Under-fuelling is the most common cause of endless fatigue in amateur riders.
• Protein across the day supports repair — roughly 1.6g per kg of body weight is a sensible target for a training cyclist.
• Walk. Gentle non-cycling movement on rest days helps more than lying still.
• Massage, foam rolling and compression feel good and may help you feel readier. Treat them as comfort, not as training.
• Alcohol and late nights reliably wreck the adaptation you just paid for.