Do you think your best cycling days are behind you? Well, think again. I'm about to show you why turning 40 might actually be your secret weapon on the bike.
New science is flipping what you thought about aging upside down. We'll uncover the training tweak that could make your 50-year-old self faster than your 30-year-old self and the mistakes that might be aging you faster than your birthday. When I hit my 40s, I started hearing the old tropes, you know, you're not 25 anymore.
Better back off, old man. pure recovery felt slower and V2 max numbers definitely aren't hitting personal bests anymore. But here's the truth.
Now that I'm a M's rider, I discovered you can still get faster. You just have to train a little bit differently. In today's episode, I'm going to look into some hard science to bust some myths that age is a one-way ticket to slowing down.
And by the end, I want to give you a road map so you can build your own weekly training plan backed by some of the best coaches and the biggest names in the sport science and coaching game like Joe Freel, Dr. Steven Syler and Vasilus Anastopoulos. Let's start with the facts.
Yes, aging is real. There's no escaping that. V2 max, your body's engine capacity, it does decline starting in your late30s.
On average, a sedary person loses about 10% of V2 max per decade after the age of 30. And by age 50, the news gets worse. Muscle mass drops, especially fast twitch muscle fibers.
Body fat creeps up. Interestingly, even when the weight on your scale doesn't. This all sounds pretty grim, right?
But here's what most people get wrong. They assume that these declines are inevitable no matter what. The myth is aging equals automatically slowing down.
But the reality, a huge part of the slowdown is under your control. In fact, long-term studies on mast's athletes show V2 max declines ranging from as little as 5% to as much as 46% per decade. That's huge variance, and it largely depends on changes in your training volume.
In other words, use it or lose it. If you maintain solid training, your fitness can hold remarkably well. If you slack off, your aerobic capacity nose dives.
Genetics no doubt play a role, sure, but training is often the deciding factor in how much performance you really lose. Okay, check this graph. Each dot is an older athlete followed over years.
Notice how those who significantly cut back on their training, that's on the right side of the graph, experienced far greater V2 max losses. In fact, keeping up regular training explained over half of the variation in fitness decline. A striking confirmation that how you train can slow down or speed up your aging.
The takeaway from this is your floor, meaning what you do on a week-to-eek basis really matters and it actually matters much more than your ceiling. Your ceiling being those once off amazing weeks you have on that annual training trip with friends. Elite Masters endurance athletes.
Think of the 55year-old lifelong cyclist still crushing it on your club spin. These guys are models of optimum healthy aging. They maintain high cardio fitness into their 60s,7s and beyond.
How? Well, it's not magic and it's not illegal performance-enhancing supplements. It's smart training.
Legendary coach Joe Freel, author of Faster After 50, great book worth checking out. He says outright, "You can slow down the decline, even reverse it temporarily with the right approach." And he notes, "Many of us gravitate towards logging just miles as we age.
Long slow endurance rides all the time because they feel safer than hammering intervals." But if you've only been riding slow and steady, Joe Freel has a stark wakeup call for you to boost your V2 max and performance, intensity is your friend. Yep, you got to go hard.
Intelligently hard, but hard to hang on to that youthful power. Now, on the flip side, Professor Steven Siler, one of the world's top exercise physiologists, emphasizes something seemingly the opposite, the importance of easy volume. Confused?
Don't be. These two ideas actually fit together and we're going to stitch them into a new master plan. I'm going to break this down into three parts.
Here's the first part, the first training secret I want to talk about in this kind of agedefying cyclist system we're trying to building and it's polarized training. Dr. Siler's research shows that doing about 80% of your sessions at low intensity and 20% at high intensity is a winning formula.
This isn't just for pro athletes. It's not just a thing for them. It works for masters athletes with jobs, families, the works.
The key is polarization. On easy days, ride easy. Like zone one, coffee spin, easy, zone 2, easy.
If you want to get technical on it, it's anything below LT1, your first inflection point on the lactate curve, and go hard on the other days. You're hitting those with intent. Why?
Well, it's all about balancing stress and recovery. By keeping easy rides truly easy, you avoid overstressing your body so you can nail those one to two key highintensity sessions each week. And those intense days give your body the signal to adapt and get stronger.
Most amateur riders do the opposite. They go moderately hard all the time, living in the dreaded gray zone. That just leads to burnout and plateau.
If you're 45, juggling work, family, and training, you can't afford junk miles that tire you out. Do less but better. In practice, this might look like three or four low heart rate rides a week, but when it's interval day, you're hitting it.
You're doing say five by three minute V2 max intervals at 90 5% effort. Two days a week of that is plenty for a master's athlete. In fact, seller warns that more than two highintensity training days a week can actually backfire for older athletes.
Increasing sickness, injury, and even heart rate arrhythmia risk. So, we cap intensity at two days. Quality over quantity is what you need to be thinking about with lots of gentle riding in between.
Now, about those easy rides, are they really worth doing? Are they doing anything? It feels like we're just going out the door and going for a walk on our bike, twiddling our legs.
What's the point in all this? Well, I had a chance to chat with Vasilus Anastopoulos. He's the head of performance at Aana and he coached Mark Cavendish when he took the tour to France record last season.
Zone one training is actually a cornerstone of building endurance, Vasilus told me. And that pros and masters athletes alike spending long hours of low intensity is non-negotiable for improving fatigue, resistance, and aerobic base. Think 5 to 6 hour steady rides at a conversational pace.
It sounds almost too easy, but this is where the magic happens. The goal is to push your first lactate threshold, LT1, higher and closer towards your second threshold. Meaning over time, you can ride harder before you start accumulating fatigue.
Essentially, you become an endurance monster, able to cruise at speeds that used to feel hard while barely breaking sweat and nose breathing. Physiologically, these long zone one rides, they boost your mitochondria and capillary density. They also train your body to better burn fat, preserving precious glycogen levels for when you need it later in an event or a riot.
And here's the kicker for older folks. They're gentle on your joints and your nervous system. You finish, yes, a little bit tired, but not destroyed.
You're not falling in the door and showering with your clothes on. Yes, I've been there crying with my clothes on in the shower. And that means you can get up and you can do it all again tomorrow.
This repeatability, it's gold for masters athletes. Facilus basically told me that endurance has no shortcut. You must put in that low inensity volume to see the big gains later.
For amateurs, this is a gamecher. Stop viewing easy rides as junk miles. They are foundation miles.
So, secret two, schedule long, slow rides every week or whenever fits your life and guard it. Protect it viciously. Protect it because it's building your aerobic fortress brick by brick.
All right, we've covered cardio, but what about the muscles pushing those pedals? By around age 50, if you're not strength training, you're losing muscle. It's called sarcopenia, and it shrinks your power reservoir.
Joe Fel points out that the loss of muscle contributes to V2 max decline. Less muscle means less oxygen uptake. The fix is to get stronger.
Fel insists his athletes have at least two strength training sessions per week, all year round. And this isn't just to make you look good. It directly translates into cycling performance.
A recent study found that master cyclists who added weight training saw a whopping 17.8% improvement in cycling efficiency, whereas younger riders saw only 5.9% gains.
Let that sink in. Older athletes benefit more from strength training work because they have more to gain. Strength is often their limiting factor, not cardio.
By doing heavy squats, leg presses, deadlifts, etc., you're not just fighting age related muscle loss, you're actually boosting your endurance performance. Have you tried to watch pro bike racing this season?
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com/roadman. And I've dropped the link and the code in the show notes down below. Strength training bolsters bone density, helps prevent injuries also.
And this is important because an injured rider can't train. That sounds obvious, but if you can't train, that undermines your consistency, and consistency is your secret weapon. So, don't skip the gym.
Twice a week, 30 to 45 minutes is enough. Think compound lifts and some upper body work, too, because we need overall stability. And if weights aren't your thing, Freel suggests alternative muscle stressors like big gear hill reps on the bike.
you know those old school strengthies where you're going dropping right down the block 53 11 12 in a slight incline and you're grinding it out but one way or another you need to challenge those muscles. Now I know all of this talk of intervals long rides and lifting weights it sounds like a lot for a busy athlete and you might be thinking how on earth do I recover from all that? I'm age 55.
Well the answer is recovery now needs to become part of your training plan especially for mast's athletes. Fel jokes that when you're 20, you could smash hard workouts on back-to-back days, but not so in your 50s. Older athletes need more rest.
That's not a weakness. It's just biology. Professor Steven Siler emphasized to me that rest days are your most powerful reset tool.
A day off will do a lot more for you than another recovery ride where you still pushing some watts. This was a big shift for me because I used to ride easy on Mondays on a recovery ride where I might go out 120 watts and just ride to the calf. No more.
You're either riding or you're recovering. Ditch those recovery rides. Also, let's talk about sleep.
The ultimate performance and hack. Most masters athletes are busy people and we steal hours from sleep to fit everything in. It's really not a good idea.
During deep sleep, your body releases growth hormone. It repairs muscles and it consolidates gains from your workouts. My old French DS used to say allows them to be absorbed.
Joe Freel stresses aiming for seven to eight hours of quality sleep a night. That might mean skipping your late night Netflix binge, but I promise you it's worth it. When I spoke to legendary triathlon coach Olaf Buu, he told me often his athletes will forgo their evening massage just to get to bed early.
One more pro tip. Consider shifting from the traditional 7-day training week to a 10day cycle if recovery is tight. Sailor notes that you don't have to cram hard workouts into the Monday to Sunday traditional calendar.
Instead, we can zoom out and use a 10day micro cycle. And this could allow say two quality interval days and your long rides with plenty of time to rest in between spread over a week and a half. And this flexibility can keep you progressing without burnout.
So, what does an optimum week look like for a 40, 50, or 60-year-old cyclists? Well, here's a quick snapshot incorporating everything that we've discussed. We need two highintensity interval sessions.
These are your hard efforts. These are really the key, if you want to call them, breakthrough sessions for the week. I'm talking sprints, V2 max, or threshold sessions.
Now, you need two to three low inensity endurance rides. They're long zone one, zone 2 rides. These are anything from 2 hours to 7 hours.
They're your aerobic base builders. We need two strength workouts. 30 minutes in the gym or at home, weights and bands, doing legs and cores is perfect.
Recovery and rest. At least one full rest day or two per week. And prioritize sleep nightly.
Nutrition and protein. We didn't dive deep at all into this, but it is worth noting briefly. As you age, a high quality diet matters more.
Emphasizing protein intake. Masters athletes benefit from a bit more protein to aid muscle repair and recovery, but also don't neglect carbs around those hard sessions. For a deep dive into nutrition and a look under the hood at what world tour athletes are doing around nutrition, you should go back and check out my conversation with World Tour nutritionist David Dunn.
I'll link that up in the description below. So, if we look at the totality of this this structured approach, it maintains consistency without monotony. You're hitting the high notes and giving yourself plenty of rest to absorb it.
It's a smarter plan, not necessarily a harder plan. Here's the bottom line. Age is just a number.
It's your training that defines your trajectory. At 45 or 55, you can be outperforming your younger self if you train with intent and intelligence. The big takeaway from this video is mix intensity to keep your edge, volume to build your base, strength work to shore up your body, and recovery to allow those gains to flourish.
Don't let anyone tell you you're too old to improve because the science says otherwise. Hey everybody, let's take a quick break to talk about the bike I'll be riding this season, Reap. I've been lucky enough to ride all the top brands in the world over the past few years, but these Reap bikes, they're not the same.
And I'll tell you why. Reap is the first company I've seen that isn't chasing sales targets and the mass market. They're chasing something very rare, perfection.
Every bike they make, it's crafted in the UK factory. And it's not about slapping a made in Britain label on a bike from a Chinese factory. It's about control.
From the first sketch to the final build, they're hands-on, ensuring that every detail is dialed in. That's very rare in an outsourced world of mass production. What sets them apart is innovation.
While others pump out the same old designs, reaps pushing boundaries. They're not following trends. They're setting trends.
Think precision and performance like an F1 car for the road. Absolutely no compromises. And it shows and you can feel it when you ride the bikes.
These bikes are built for riders who demand the best. Whether they're chasing podiums or just want a machine that feels like an extension of your body, a piece of art. It's not hype, it's substance.
Ride a reap for yourself. And you're riding something crafted with intent. So, if you're serious about cycling, check them out.
It's reapbikes.com. I absolutely love my one and I couldn't recommend it highly enough.
Back to the show now. I want to hear from you in the comments down below. If you're a M's athlete striving for a new personal best this season, what challenges are you facing?
If you found this video useful, please take a second to hit the like button and share it with your riding buddies in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, wherever. Subscribe to the channel for more deep dive sciencebacked cycling content. And we've got an upcoming video where I'll build weekby- week training plan for masters riders, taking all these principles a step further.
Until next time, folks, remember it's never too late to get faster. I'll see you in the next one.