Rest, the flip side of the training coin

Aaah, time for a rest week. Enjoy the easier rides while you can. Does resting mean not riding at all? Definitely not. It means reducing your time and intensity so that the body can recover from the work you have been doing. Rest is the flip side of the training coin. Without letting your body rest you will not improve.

Resting is the time in which we allow our body to recover from the strain we have been putting on it. Training is about creating micro stresses in the body. Letting these heal by resting is what allows you to get better.

We all would like our training to be linear. A steady build would be so much easier, but a linear progression isn’t possible. Fatigue, injury, mental burnout and loss of motivation will put a wrench into any sort of plan for a linear progression.

Your body needing rest to adapt creates a wave pattern in your training. You spend a few weeks building the wave - building the workload through a combination of time and intensity - and then letting the wave ebb in a rest week, allowing for the adaptations to occur. This pattern plays itself out both in the shorter time span of several training blocks, and across the season as a whole.

Taking a rest can be frustrating. But take it when you can and let your body heal. To manage your frustration think of where rest comes in on the scale of consistency and repeatability in your training. Rest is the flip side to the solid training you have been doing and will allow you to experience the gains you are hoping for.