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.