Here's a question I'd love you to ask about every ride in your training log: how much fitness did I get for that hour?
Not how hard it felt. Not how many kilojoules it burned, or how empty you were when you got home. How much fitness, per hour, once you've paid for the recovery.
If you ride 20 hours a week, you can carry a few rides that don't do much. Most of the riders I talk to have six, maybe eight, maybe ten. At those numbers every hour is carrying weight, and a session that returns very little isn't neutral. It's taking the place of one that would have done more.
I made a whole episode ranking seven of the most popular sessions from worst to best on exactly this test. This article is the tool behind it — how to score the sessions in your own week, and what to change when one of your favourites comes up short.
The four questions that decide a session's score
Every session in your week can be judged on four things. None of them needs a lab.
1. Does it have a clear job? An easy endurance ride, a sustained sub-threshold block and a set of VO2 max intervals are each training something different. If you can't say in one sentence what a session is for, you can't say whether it worked, and you can't tell whether something else would do the job better.
2. Who controls the dose? When you decide the intensity and duration, the session can be measured, repeated and progressed. When someone else decides — the strongest rider in the bunch, the traffic, the race to the café — you find out afterwards what you did. Sometimes it's brilliant. Often it isn't.
3. What does it cost? Fatigue is a price, and you pay it in the quality of whatever comes next. A Tuesday ride that leaves you flat for Thursday's key session has to be scored across the week, not on its own.
4. Can you repeat it? Fitness comes from doing the right thing again and again, slightly better each time. A session you can only survive once a month isn't building much, however heroic it felt.
Score each ride against those four and a pattern appears very quickly.
Seven common sessions, run through the test
I'm not going to give you a league table here — for that, listen to the episode. What's more useful is seeing how each session behaves against the four questions, because that tells you how to fix it.
The Saturday group ride
The social value is real. Riding in a group builds skills, confidence and the kind of racing sense you can't get on a trainer, and for a lot of us it's the reason we ride at all. I'd never tell you to give it up.
But as a training session it struggles on question two. The group decides the intensity. You ride too hard on the flat, too easy sitting in, then empty yourself for the town sign. The result is a ride that's hard to measure, hard to repeat and unpredictable to recover from. We've talked on the podcast about how half-wheeling and a missing ride leader make this worse.
The fix: decide before you leave what the ride is for. Either it's your endurance ride and you sit in and stay out of the attacks, or it's your hard day and you pick one or two efforts and commit to them. What it can't be is both.
The fasted ride
Riding on an empty stomach raises the amount of fat you burn during that ride. That part is true. It also limits the power you can produce, and for many riders it leads to a big appetite later that more than cancels it out. We've gone through the evidence in the fasted riding myth.
Against the four questions, the problem is the cost-to-return ratio. Any intensity done fasted is a lower-quality version of that session, and on six hours a week you don't have spare quality to give away.
The fix: if you like an early fasted spin, keep it short and easy. Fuel every session that has any intensity in it.
The "medium" solo ride
This is the ride most people do without thinking about it. Out the door, ride at a pace that feels like training, come home tired. Not easy enough to be cheap, not hard enough to push anything specific.
It fails question one. Its job is vague, so its return is vague, and the fatigue it creates is real. The same hour, split into a properly easy ride or a structured session, nearly always does more.
The fix: give the ride a job before you clip in. Easy means easy. Hard means a specific format.
The easy endurance ride (Zone 2)
Properly easy riding scores well on cost and repeatability: you can do a lot of it and still turn up fresh for the hard work. Stephen Seiler's research on elite endurance athletes describes most of their training time sitting at low intensity, and that's part of how they absorb so much.
The catch for time-crunched riders is total stimulus. Pros can live on easy riding because there's so much of it. On six hours a week, an easy-only diet may not give your body enough reason to change. I made that argument in why your Zone 2 training isn't working: the zone is relative, but the cost is absolute.
The fix: keep easy rides properly easy, and make sure your week also contains something that asks more of you.
Sweet spot and sustained sub-threshold work
Sustained efforts just below threshold score well on questions one, two and four for most amateurs. The job is clear — raise the power you can hold for long efforts — the dose is yours to set, and it fits a lunch break or an evening on the trainer. Our sweet spot guide covers how to set it up and progress it.
The risk is question three. Stack too much of it and you're doing moderately hard riding every day, which is where a lot of stalled amateurs end up.
The fix: treat it as a quality session, fuel it, and count it in the week's hard days rather than sprinkling it everywhere.
VO2 max intervals
Short, very hard efforts that push the top end of your aerobic range. They score well on clear purpose and control, and they give a lot back per minute. The research on formats is more nuanced than the internet suggests: one small ten-week trial of trained cyclists found 30/15 short intervals beat effort-matched longer intervals, while a 2025 crossover found the difference depended on how the intensity was controlled. Pick a format you can do well and repeat — our VO2 max guide has several.
Their weakness is cost. Done too often, or on tired legs, they drag the rest of the week down.
The fix: one well-executed VO2 session is worth more than two half-executed ones. Put it where you're freshest.
The long weekend ride
Two to four hours of mostly steady riding. It scores well on job — endurance, durability, fuelling practice for the events most of us actually ride — and on repeatability if it's kept mostly easy. For a lot of sportive and fondo riders, it's the session most specific to the goal.
It drops on question three when it turns into a four-hour race, and on question two when it's done in a group that won't let you ride your own pace.
The fix: ride it with a plan for the effort and the fuelling. Dan Lorang's advice to time-crunched riders, which we covered in how to get faster on 6 hours a week, is not to treat limited time as a reason to skip the long ride.
Scoring your own week
Here's the exercise. Take your last seven days. For every ride, write three lines:
What was it for? Who decided how hard it was? How did I feel the next day?
Where the first answer is blank, that ride needs a job. Where the second answer is "the group" or "I just rode," that ride needs a structure. Where the third answer keeps coming back as "wrecked," look at what that ride is costing the session that follows it.
Then look at the week as a whole. Is there at least one session that clearly asks more of you than the rest? Is there at least one that's easy enough to be cheap? Is there anything you'd struggle to explain to a coach? That's where the free fitness is hiding.
Most riders don't need more hours. They need the hours they already have to be doing a clearer job.
What to leave alone
Two cautions. Don't take a ranking — mine or anyone's — as permission to strip the joy out of your riding. If the Saturday bunch is what gets you out of bed in February, it's earning its place, just not in the training column. And don't change everything at once. Pick the one session with the worst score, fix that, and give it four to six weeks before you judge it.
If you want to talk through your own week, or you're stuck on which session to change first, the free Roadman community on Skool is full of riders working on exactly this: https://www.skool.com/roadmancycling