8-Week Advanced Programme

Plans developed by Prof. Ross Tucker and Richard Woolrich, official coaches of the Cape Town Cycle Tour.

Is this programme appropriate for me?

This is the advanced programme, which is aimed at a relatively high level cyclist.  You need to be capable of riding for three hours, and have five days of training available per week, peaking at a total time volume of just over 10 hours in a week. In fact, that time commitment is probably the main criteria, because we are going to build your cycling fitness and performance through a series of easy rides, strength training sessions, interval sessions and a weekend long ride, all of which build in volume and intensity over time.

That’s a substantial commitment, and if it feels a stretch, then the intermediate programme may be more appropriate for you, since you will be able aspire to improve, but with more realistic time demands given your schedule. 

It’s important to appreciate that the speed of the ride is not as crucial as the time spent training. We prescribe training sessions by time, and the intensity is based on either your heart rate or your rating of perceived exertion. So whether you ride at an average of 25 km/h or 32km/h is not as vital as getting the relative intensity right for you. Think of this as the programme for those with performance aspirations, regardless of your current performance level. 

So, if you have designs on improving your riding, have the time and energy to commit to some solid training weeks, this programme is for you!

How to use this programme

This training programme is built around four key pillars:

1. Monday is a rest day. It may sound strange to put this top of the list, but rest is as important as training. We load up the volume and intensity, and then allow rest for the body to adapt
2. A mid-week interval session on the bike. This is a session aimed at improving your leg strength, building your aerobic capacity and raising your performance ceiling. Over the eight weeks, this session will evolve, starting out as a leg strength session where you’ll ride in a heavy gear, with a low cadence, and then later in the programme, it shifts to higher intensity (zone 4 and 5, see below) sessions to develop your top end cycling ability
3. A weekly long ride, which we schedule for Sundays, but which you can shift to a Saturday if necessary
4. Two strength sessions a week, most weeks (with a couple of exceptions), aimed at developing core and lower back strength to unlock even more of your cycling potential. One of these strength sessions is done as a second daily session, while the other is a standalone session.

What to do when your schedule interrupts your training

First, the programme is prescriptive in the sense that we advise you to do certain sessions on certain days. However, we appreciate that life doesn’t always comply with our sporting goals, and so work and other factors may pop up and prevent you from doing the rides we suggest on the days we suggest.  When that happens, don’t panic, you can make small adjustments and do the rides on other days, but within reason.

What we really need you to avoid is overtraining. That happens if you load too much training on your body too soon, and so the golden rule, if you’re going to make changes to the programme because of your schedule, is try to avoid doing three rides in a row.  You’ll see that we currently have you doing a Saturday ride, a long ride on Sunday, and then Monday is a rest day.  We do this to allow you to recover from the weekend on Mondays, and the Friday before the weekend is also intended as a training day, but without leg and cardiovascular load.

So, if you make changes, just be careful that you don’t move rides around to suddenly do three, or even four rides in a row. If you have no choice, then make sure that you drop the intensity so that those rides are really, really easy. You’ll see that most of your riding is done in Zone 2 and Zone 3 – if you find yourself riding consecutive days, drop to Zone 1 for some, and stay out of Zone 3 as much as possible!

Cycling Indoor vs On The Road

Another practical issue that may come up in the next eight weeks is that you may find time or opportunity to jump on the indoor trainer, either your own bike at home, or a gym, and you may find that this is more convenient than getting out on the road. There’s no problem with that – in fact, those midweek sessions are easier to control and ‘perfect’ on the indoor than when outdoors.  This is particularly true for your midweek intervals sessions, where you’ll see that we often prescribe an interval session at low cadences to help develop leg strength. That’s a session that can be tricky on the road, because uphills and downills and traffic and traffic lights play havoc with your ability to control the ride. So if you have access to the indoor option, it might really pay to use it for those sessions.

For the weekends, it is best to get out onto the road, and gain the experience you’ll need for race day, but keep those indoor rides in mind as you work through the programme.

How hard should I ride?

When we prescribe your cycling sessions, we advise you on the ideal intensity. Intensity basically means “how hard must I go?”.  Here, it’s really important to get the balance right – too hard, and you’ll cause overtraining, fatigue and a lot of frustration.  Too easy, and you won’t get the necessary stimulus to make you fitter.

Our advice is that you judge intensity based on your subjective perception of effort, using a scale that runs from 1 to 10, where 1 is very very easy effort, and 10 is maximum effort.

You can also use heart rate to judge your ride intensity, though this requires some equipment, but if you have this, great. And finally, there is a very handy practical test called the “Talk test”, that you can use to gauge how hard you are riding compared to how hard we suggest you ride.

Here is a handy table that summarises the intensities, which we have banded into five zones. In the actual programme, we recommend a training zone, and you can use this table to choose a method of “pinning” the training zone down for your ride:

Recovery weeks

You’ll also notice in your programme that we advise that week 4 should be a recovery week. This is really important, though it may feel unnecessary at the time. The idea is that you gain fitness, strength and performance not directly from training, but from the recovery after training. So the programme is structured in such a way as to build the load, volume and intensity over the course of three weeks, and then give you a week where the volume and intensity come back down, just to allow that adaptation to occur.  Then from week 5 we build again, and then allow week 8 to be taper week ahead of the race.

For instance, you’ll see how your long rides on Sundays increase from 3 hours in Week 1, to 3h30 in Week 2, to 3h00 over hilly terrain with more Zone 4 riding in Week 3. That’s the build. Then comes a drop down to 2h30 on a flat course in Week 4.  This is linked to similar reductions in the interval session on Thursdays, and shorter rides throughout the week. We know that when your fitness is emerging and you’re riding well, you’ll be tempted to push hard all the time, but we hope that you’ll reign it in during these recovery weeks, trust the process, and take it easy, because it will allow you to launch again the week after and take advantage of the consistency of training!

The Strength Training Component

You’ll see that there are four potential strength sessions prescribed over the eight weeks. We often neglect this part of our training as cyclists, but it’s crucial for both injury prevention and performance that you dedicate some time each week to doing these. They’ll help you develop the core and leg strength that create stability, which in turn allows you to leverage leg strength into power. The specific session that you need to do is indicated (from 1 to 4), and you can follow the videos that are prescribed to ensure that you nail the technique and get the most from the session.

On Tuesdays, you’ll see that we prescribe a double session day. There is a ride and a strength session. Ideally, you’d do the strength session in the morning and the ride in the afternoon, because the strength session ‘switches on’ or primes your neuromuscular system which translates well into a subsequent ride. However, our lives often dictate that we can only ride in the mornings, and squeeze the slightly shorter, more convenient strength session in later in the day.  So if that happens, don’t sweat it, but if it is possible to do the strength session as the first session in the morning, and the intervals later in the day, that would be great.

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Prof Ross Tucker is one of the world’s top sport scientists and an avid cyclist while Richard Woolrich is a personal trainer and cycling coach who specialises in strength and conditioning

Follow Ross: @scienceofsport (Twitter) RossTucker10 (Instagram)
Follow Richard: @rwoolrich (Instagram)