The cycling training plan most masters riders are following was not written for them. It was written for a 28-year-old, then scaled down — fewer hours, easier intervals, an extra rest day taped on the end. That is not a masters plan. It is a generic plan with the volume turned down.
A genuine masters plan is built around a different physiology. Recovery windows are longer. Strength training is a load, not a lifestyle add-on. Intensity distribution matters more, not less. And the rider who organises their week around what their body can absorb at 47 — rather than what it could absorb at 27 — improves for years where peers stagnate.
This is the structure used by riders working with Roadman coaching and the masters athletes inside the Not Done Yet community. It is not a magic week. It is a defensible weekly architecture that respects the science Joe Friel, Stephen Seiler and Dan Lorang have spent decades putting in front of people. Use it as a template, then adjust to your event, your week, and your data.
The weekly architecture
The non-negotiables of a masters plan are three: two hard sessions, recovery space, and strength work. Everything else is decoration.
The default weekly skeleton looks like this:
| Day | Session | Why | |---|---|---| | Monday | Recovery ride or full rest | Cleans up Sunday's load | | Tuesday | Hard session 1 — VO2 or threshold | Body is rested, intensity available | | Wednesday | Endurance + strength session 1 | Build aerobic base, protect muscle | | Thursday | Easy ride or rest | Two-day buffer before Saturday | | Friday | Endurance + strength session 2 | Aerobic load, second strength dose | | Saturday | Hard session 2 — long endurance with intensity | The signature ride of the week | | Sunday | Long endurance, conversational pace | True zone 2, no grey-zone drift |
Total volume sits between 8 and 12 hours. The intensity ratio sits at roughly 80 per cent below the first lactate threshold and 20 per cent at high intensity, exactly as Prof. Stephen Seiler's polarised training research describes. The two strength sessions are placed on aerobic days, not hard ride days. The hardest two rides of the week are 72 hours apart.
This is not the only way to structure the week, but every variation respects the same constraints. If your week makes Sunday a hard ride, Tuesday becomes the long endurance day. If you only have time for nine hours total, you cut volume from the easy days, not the hard ones. If you cannot lift twice, you lift once and accept slower gains. The non-negotiables stay non-negotiable.
Why two hard sessions, not three
The single most common error in self-coached masters training is the third hard session. It looks fine on paper. It feels productive. It quietly destroys the plan over six to eight weeks.
Recovery from genuinely hard intensity takes 48-72 hours after 40. That is not a soft suggestion. It is what the VO2max recovery research and the masters endurance literature consistently show. A third hard session inside 96 hours stacks load on a body that has not finished adapting to the previous one. Over a month, you are training in a slow-cooking deficit. Your power numbers stop responding. Your sleep gets worse. Your motivation drops. Then you book a coach and tell them your "FTP is plateaued."
The fix is straightforward and emotionally difficult: cut the third hard session and accept that the easy days have to be genuinely easy. Dan Lorang's athletes — including riders who have won Tours and World Championships — go slowly on slow days. The internal pressure to validate the easy day with a hard finish is amateur. The professionals do not feel it because their job is to do the next hard session well, not the current easy one.
If you are training for a specific event and need a third intensity day, the structure becomes block-and-recover: two weeks at three hard sessions a week, followed by a full recovery week of zone 2 only. This is a tool, not a default.
Volume targets and the role of zone 2
Most amateur cyclists ride 50 per cent too hard when they think they are riding easy. Anthony has been saying this on the podcast for years and the data backs it. The grey zone — too hard to be aerobic, too easy to be productive — is where most weekly hours go for self-coached masters riders.
A productive zone 2 session for a masters rider looks dull on a head unit. Heart rate sits comfortably below 75 per cent of max, perceived effort is between three and four out of ten, you can hold a full sentence without effort. Power is whatever it is at that effort — not a target you chase.
The HR zones tool and FTP zones tool calibrate these from your own numbers. Calibrating the upper edge of zone 2 properly is more important than the precise floor. Drift up by 10 watts and you are no longer training the system you intended. The mitochondrial density and fat oxidation adaptations that make zone 2 valuable do not happen in zone 3.
Long endurance rides — the Saturday ride in the table above, often three to five hours — can include short higher-intensity blocks (10 minutes at sweet spot, three or four climbs as tempo) without losing their identity as endurance work. The Sunday ride should not. Sunday is the cleanest, most aerobic ride of the week, and the one most likely to be ruined by group dynamics. The fix is solo, not social.
Strength as a load, not an extra
The hardest part of writing a masters plan honestly is admitting the gym is not optional after 40. Sarcopenia — age-related muscle loss — runs at roughly 3-8 per cent per decade from the 30s, accelerating later. The riders who keep hitting personal bests at 50 are the ones lifting heavy. The ones who don't, fade.
Two sessions a week through base and build phases. One to two through competition. Compound lifts loaded heavily — squat, deadlift, split squat, hip hinge variations. Six to eight reps in the working sets, two to four sets per movement, real load. Bodyweight circuits and bands are not strength training in the sense your physiology cares about. They are conditioning. Conditioning is not what the muscle fibre needs to keep responding to bike work after 45.
Strength sessions go on aerobic ride days, not hard ride days. The order on the day matters: lift after the ride, not before. If the gym is in the morning and the ride is the afternoon, swap the structure for the day or accept a softer ride. The strength training research for masters cyclists has a longer breakdown.
Roadman's strength plan for cyclists is built for exactly this — heavy enough to matter, structured around a normal training week, with two and three-session-per-week variants. At $65 it is the lowest-friction way to add strength without redesigning your life around the gym.
Recovery weeks and the 2:1 cycle
The build-to-recovery ratio is where masters plans diverge most from younger ones. The classical 3:1 ratio — three weeks of progressive load, one week of recovery — works for athletes whose hormonal recovery is intact. For most riders over 40, that ratio quietly breaks down across a season.
A 2:1 cycle is more honest. Two weeks of progressive load, one week of recovery, repeat. The recovery week is not a rest week. It cuts intensity volume by half, drops total hours by about 30 per cent, keeps strength work in but reduces loads. The point is to clear the residual fatigue that compounds across loading weeks, not to detrain.
Markers that say it is time for a recovery week regardless of the calendar: HRV trending below your individual baseline for five to seven days, resting heart rate up four or more beats from normal, perceived effort climbing on familiar sessions, sleep quality dropping. The masters recovery score tool does the maths if you log the inputs daily.
Two recovery weeks back-to-back is sometimes appropriate after a high-stress block, a hot weather camp, or a race. Pretending you have recovered when the data says you have not is the most expensive habit in self-coached masters cycling.
Periodisation across the year
Annual periodisation for a masters rider with a target event in summer follows a predictable shape:
- October to December — base 1: 80 per cent zone 2, two strength sessions per week, one threshold maintenance day. Eight to ten hours.
- January to February — base 2: Add one VO2max session per week, retain the threshold day, hold strength at two sessions. Nine to eleven hours.
- March to April — build: Two hard sessions per week with race-specific intensity, drop strength to one session per week, raise volume to peak. Ten to twelve hours.
- May — taper and prep: Reduce volume by 20-30 per cent, retain intensity, sharpen race-specific work.
- June to August — race season: Maintain intensity, lower volume, race regularly. Strength stays at one session per week.
- September — transition: Unstructured riding, commute volume, light gym, mental reset.
The dates shift by event. The shape does not. A masters rider building for an Etape in July or a Wicklow 200 in May follows the same arc, the same ratios, the same recovery cycle. The structuring a cycling training plan guide has more detail on the build-and-peak mechanics.
For an event-specific plan — a 12 or 16-week build for a sportive — start from the training plans hub. Each plan is already calibrated for masters intensity distribution and recovery windows.
Where this plan goes wrong
Three failure modes account for most of the masters plans that break down inside a season.
The first is volume creep. The plan starts at 10 hours, drifts to 12, then 14, because each additional hour feels productive in the moment. By month three the rider is overtrained and cannot tell, because the plan changed gradually enough that no single week looked excessive. Fix: log weekly hours, defend the planned number, treat creep as a red flag.
The second is intensity creep on easy days. Sunday's three-hour ride starts at zone 2, drifts into zone 3 because the legs feel good, finishes at sweet spot because someone else turned up. Repeated weekly, this hollows out the entire polarised structure. Fix: solo on Sunday, calibrate the upper edge of zone 2 with the HR zones tool, and accept that the easy ride is supposed to feel underwhelming.
The third is dropping strength when life gets busy. Strength is the first thing most riders skip when work or family load increases. It is also the load with the largest cost when it disappears, because the adaptations decay faster than the bike adaptations. Fix: protect one strength session minimum per week even in the worst weeks. One is not as good as two, but it is not the same as zero.
The version of you that is not done yet
A plan that works at 45 is not the plan that worked at 25, scaled down. It is a different shape, with different ratios, written for a body that responds differently. The riders who get this right are not the most talented or the most disciplined. They are the ones whose plan matches their physiology.
That is what the Roadman coaching programme is built to do — personalised 1:1 work across training, strength, nutrition and recovery, with masters-specific structure as the default rather than an afterthought. The plan above is the framework. Coaching is the version that adjusts to your week, your event, your data.
If you would rather start with a structured event plan, the training plans hub is the entry point. Pick the event. Use the plan. Adjust the framework when life intervenes. Keep the non-negotiables non-negotiable. That is how you keep getting faster after 40.
The full picture is in the masters cycling training report 2026; the strength side is in strength training for cyclists over 50 and the new study on heavy strength training after 40; and the VO2 max workouts for cyclists over 40 post covers the high-end stimulus.
Got a specific question — your own week, your recovery, your event? Ask Roadman for an answer drawn from the actual conversations with Stephen Seiler, Joe Friel, and the rest of the masters experts on the podcast. And the application is the start of the conversation if you want the plan run on a 1:1 basis around you.
