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WINTER CYCLING TRAINING: DOSE, FREQUENCY & DURATION | ROADMAN CYCLING

33:06·30 January 2026

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Winter training doesn't fail because cyclists do too little. It fails because they stack unstructured endurance work that drifts into moderate intensity, carry that fatigue into spring, and wonder why they can't sharpen up. This solo episode of the Roadman Cycling podcast breaks down the three variables that actually control whether your winter builds something or quietly eats itself.

Key Takeaways

The thing I keep seeing is riders treating easy rides like they're free. They're not. A three-hour endurance ride can be a bigger dose than a 90-minute threshold session depending on your sleep, your fueling, and what life is throwing at you that week. Seiler's work keeps pointing to the same thing: aerobic development comes from repeated manageable stimulus, not occasional big hits. Six-hour-a-week riders are better off with four or five shorter sessions than three long ones. Lower dose per session, more frequent aerobic signaling, and if you miss one ride you haven't lost a third of your week.

The framework I use for 8-10 hour riders is two easy endurance rides, one structured tempo or sweet spot session (something like 2x20 at 88-91% of threshold), one higher intensity session with full recovery between efforts, and an optional easy spin if the legs are there. That's it. The drift into medium hard happens when the long ride becomes a group ride with people slightly too strong, the tempo session becomes all-out, and suddenly every day has a bit of bite. When life stress spikes, the rule is reduce dose before you reduce frequency. A planned 90-minute endurance ride after a brutal day at work becomes 45 minutes easy. Same habit, lower cost. Anyone can survive a hard week. The point is doing it 16 times in a row and actually being fitter.

In this solo episode of the Roadman Cycling podcast, Anthony Walsh outlines a winter training framework built around three interdependent variables: dose (total stress per session), frequency (stress exposures per week), and duration (how many weeks the load is sustained). Walsh recommends a minimum 16-week base phase. For riders training 6 hours per week, the framework targets 4-5 rides including two easy endurance sessions of 60-75 minutes, one quality session of 60-75 minutes, and one long ride of 2-2.5 hours kept steady and fueled at 80-120 grams of carbohydrate per hour. For riders training 8-10 hours per week, the framework targets 5-6 rides including structured tempo or sweet spot work such as 2x20 minutes at 88-91% of threshold power. Walsh references Stephen Seiler's endurance training research as supporting evidence that aerobic adaptation favours repeated low-intensity stimulus over high-volume spikes. The episode also references training philosophy from Olaf Bu (Uno-X), Dan Lurang (Bora Hansgrohe), and Christian Prudhomme as consistent with the five-pillar coaching model Walsh applies in his Not Done Yet coaching community.

The 5 fixable mistakes episode covers the self-coached errors that compound through winter if you're building your own plan. And if you want the science behind why easy really needs to stay easy, the Bora endurance episode with the team's coaching staff goes deep on that.

KEY QUOTES

“When you copy pro riders volume without proriter recovery, you're not doing base. You're doing chronic fatigue management.”
Anthony Walsh — Roadman Cycling podcast host

“A three-hour endurance ride, it can be a bigger dose than a 1 hour, one and a half hour really difficult threshold session depending on a few things like your fitness, your fueling, and your recovery status.”
Anthony Walsh — Roadman Cycling podcast host

“Could I repeat the week that I'm doing right now with minor progression and overload for the next six weeks without needing this mammoth rescue recovery week? And if the answer is no, the week is not a good winter week.”
Anthony Walsh — Roadman Cycling podcast host

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT7 SECTIONS

Why Winter Training Fails Cyclists

The secret to winter training, it's dose, frequency, and duration. It's not motivation because trust me, motivation will fade. And it's certainly not an AI plan or a training app that just delivers some new version of cookie cutter. Just please don't do that stuff. It's not even a winter of riding around in zone 2 all winter. Here's what actually trips most cyclists up. Because winter doesn't fail because people do too little. It fails because they stack too much unstructured work that feels easy, but it's never truly easy. They add errors when they can. They let endurance drift into moderate intensity, and they remove recovery weeks because nothing feels particularly hard. Fatigue slowly and quietly accumulates in the background. So, when the season actually arrives, the aerobic fitness looks fine, but the system is already carrying too much load. The scaffolding isn't really built. The body can ride, but it can't absorb the training that actually moves performance forward to the next level. So, if you give me like 10, 15 minutes, I'm going to give you an operating system for winter training that explains exactly how to apply the right stress often enough for long enough without breaking the system. You'll leave with knowing how to set your week up, how to adjust it when life hits as it invariably does, and why consistency beats those hero volume weeks every single time. I'm going to break this into a couple of acts. And the first act is why winter training fails most cyclists. Let me start with a rider you probably recognize because you might be him or I might have been him in the past. He's disciplined. He trains year round. I'm not talking about a beginner here. He knows what zone two is. He knows the physiological adaptations in each zone. He knows what polarized means. He even maybe has listened to some of my podcasts with Steven Siler. He watches Dylan Johnson or GCN videos. Maybe even has Trainer Road or some sort of training plan. And every winter he decides he's going to build this massive base. This is going to be the year. It's a big big winter where it's one. Those sort of phrases. And November looks great for him. If you click into his Straa, November's flawless. December, it it's actually probably looks even better because he's stacked an alesta 500 in there. He stacks long rides on the weekend. He adds an extra spin midweek because it feels easy. And he tells himself, "It's only endurance riding. It's only endurance. I'm building a base." He thinks he's being sensible. Then January arrives. Sleep starts to fracture a little bit. He's not shattered, but he never really feels fresh anymore. Heart rate is a little higher on easy days. Heart rate variability is just dropping a little bit on the trends. Legs feel heavier on the climbs than they should. Then the first cracks appear. He skips a session, then another. Now he catches a cold. Or he keeps training through the fatigue and the cold because he's too scared to lose that fitness. And by February, he's fit still, but he's flat. He can ride, but he can't sharpen the knife anymore. And now we're getting into the part of the season where you need to sharpen the knife. Intensity feels like a threat that could bring this whole house of cards rattling down. This is what winter failure looks like. It's not dramatic. It's a slow leak for motivated riders. And the first reason it happens is that smart cyclists, well, they often do something that isn't very smart. They copy what they think works without seeing the full system behind it. They see pros that are riding big errors so they ride more. They see influencers in Instagram doing long steady rides in Jirona. So they go and do the same. They hear just build your aerobic base and they interpret that to add more hours wherever you can. But winter is not where you win by doing the most hours. This isn't a Straa contest. This is why they've they've gified the wrong things in Straa. Winter is where you win by staying absorbable. And I love that word. That's what word I first heard when I signed for a French team. Observable. Because the purpose of winter training, it's not to create your peak. The purpose of the winter is to build a platform, a scaffolding, a framework that lets you tolerate high quality work later in the summer. Because if you're a busy athlete like me, riding longer happens more in the warmer months. You're meeting the friends for those harder group rides. You're doing like the roadman group. We do a Thursday chop. The races are in the summer months. It's where all the fun is. And if you load winter wrong, you raise fitness a little, but you lower that resilience an awful lot. And resilience is what decides your season. And by resilience, I mean your base, which allows you to absorb the training, your body, which remains injuryfree, resistant to sickness, resistant to just those naggling nicks and knocks that you get when you're the opposite of it, when you're a brittle type rider.

The Hidden Cost of Endurance Rides

The second reason that winter fails is that endurance rides are treated like they're free. There's no cost. There's no consequences. They absolutely are not. Endurance training. Yes, it's lower intensity, but it is still a stress. It's a mechanical stress. It's a metabolic stress. It's an autonomic atomic stress. It's a hormonal stress. It carries a cost that shows up when you stack it in with life. And that's the invisible part that most people miss. When you stack it in with life, you need to start looking at your total stress capacity. That's the ability to train and handle life stress cumulatively. Most amateur cyclists, they're not limited by how hard they can train, they're limited by how well they can recover. Pros don't just have more time to train, they have more capacity to recover because it is their job. You know, I can't remember who on the podcast was telling me a story about their wife came home and was giving them some stick for sitting down playing Xbox. She's like, "What are you doing?" And his response was, "I'm working." And it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but that's what they have. They have that bandwidth to be able to recover. Their life is set up to absorb that training. They structure their day to absorb that training. They fewer competing stressors than me or you do. Many of them are in warm climates. They're climates. They're not commuting in the dark. They're not juggling meetings and trying to be a decent partner or parent on four to six hours per night of sleep. So when you copy pro riders volume without proriter recovery, you're not doing base. You're doing chronic fatigue management. The third reason winter fails is mis applied progression. Cyclists often progress winter by adding just duration. Longer rides, more hours, more days. That can work, but only if dose and frequency are controlled. If you simply add duration on top of week, that's already full. Well, you create a training low that feels fine for two weeks and then it totally collapses in the third and fourth week. This is the classic winter pattern that I see. You get these few hero weeks. Think that fest of 500 again, followed by a recovery week that turns into two recovery weeks if we're honest at the start of January. followed by a restart, maybe a change of coach, and it just never gets that momentum going again. So the question is not how do I train harder this winter. The question is how do I apply stress in a way that I can repeat week after week, month after month without losing the ability to respond to training. And this is where dose, frequency, and duration come into play. Let's call this part act two, the real variables that matter. Because most conversations about winter training, they get stuck in intensity distribution. Should you go polarized? Should you go with some sweet spot work? How much strength and conditioning should you do? Should you do tempo in your base period? The problem is these debates that you see online raging all the time. They often ignore the bigger lever. And the bigger lever is not what you can do. It's how much, how often, and for how long you apply that stress. So, let me define these three variables for a second. Dose is the size of the stress you apply in a given session or a given day. Think of this as the punch. Frequency is how often you apply meaningful stress across the week. Think of this as how many punches I'm actually throwing. Now, duration is how long you can hold a given level of training stress across weeks and months before you change the load. Think of this as how long you can keep punching before you pause, shift, or reset. Winter success is getting those three things right for your life, your physiology, and your goals. Dose is not just intensity. Dose is total stress. And this is the part that a lot of amateurs miss because a three-hour endurance ride, it can be a bigger dose than a 1 hour, one and a half hour really difficult threshold session depending on a few things like your fitness, your fueling, and your recovery status. This is where cyclists misinterpret winter and they equate easy with low dose. But easy intensity, it doesn't automatically mean low dose. A low inensity ride can still be a high dose. If it's long, if you're underfueled or if it includes a lot of surges like your weekend group ride or even, you know what, if it's in the cold, riding in the cold takes way more out of me during the winter. If you're sleepd deprived as well, or if you're just mentally fried from work. So, dose is very context specific. A two-hour endurance ride might be perfect on a Saturday when you've slept well and life is chill and calm. You just finished your cold plunge and your meditation the night before.

Dose and Frequency Explained

But that exact same ride on a Wednesday evening after a stressful day in work and battling rush hour traffic. That dose can tip you into a hole. Think of this as a practical example. Imagine you're training eight hours a week. I think that's a duration that a lot of us watching can kind of manage. If you do four sessions each, each session is roughly two hours on average. That's a high dose per session. It can work, but it requires strong recovery and careful execution. If you do six sessions, the average dose drops much more manageable, much more repeatable, less likely to require an optimized recovery setup. Well, winter training for most non pro cyclists is often about making dose small enough that you can recover quickly while still being meaningful enough to drive adaptations. Now, there's some trade-offs to this because higher dose sessions can be efficient. They can create a big stimulus. They can build durability, drive fatigue, but they come with a longer recovery tail. If you cannot pay that recovery cost, and that's looking at your lifestyle, the dose just becomes a debt. Lower dose sessions are easier to absorb. They allow you to train more often, but if they're too small, they don't create that progression. They don't drive that adaptation. So, the art here is choosing a dose you can repeat. And that brings us into frequency. Frequency is the most underrated lever in my view in winter training because frequency is what builds consistency. And consistency is what builds aerobic development. Sailors work in a broader endurance literature. It keeps pointing back to the same idea. The aerobic system responds to repeated manageable stimulus over time, not occasional big hits followed by long recovery periods. Cyclists misinterpret frequency in two ways. First, they think more days always means better. It just doesn't. If the extra days reduce quality, reduce sleep, or increase stress, that can totally backfire. The second problem I see with this is a lot of riders think that frequency is about just riding days. But frequency is really about stress exposure. You can have frequency without overload if every day becomes medium hard. And that's the winter trap, that medium hard, the moderately hard sessions. And I I see this time and time again over the winter where you never go deep enough, but you also never recover. The type of sessions that would fall into this kind of bucket for me is tempo rides, group rides that are just a little bit too hard or with stronger riders where you have a lot of surges, just stuff that's slightly too hard, endurance sessions where it's always pushing you into that fat max. You end up stacking that medium stress every day. No single session kills you, but the week in totality when you zoom out is what kills you. Think about this hypothetical rider. He's training six hours a week, but he often does best with four to five rides. Why? Well, because you cram six hours into three rides. The dose is high. The recovery cost that we talked about is high. You might miss one ride and lose onethird of your entire week. 33% of your week disappears if you miss one ride with this setup. And you often end up riding too hard, especially if you've missed a session because you feel a pressure to make every single ride count. But if you spread the week across four or five rides, now each session dose drops, you can keep intensity controlled. You can recover between the sessions. You can keep momentum. Higher frequency, it it has so many benefits. I'm a huge fan of it because we get more swings at bat. We're out the door more, which means we're honing our skills better. We're just we're building that consistency. James Clear talks about this. Vote for the type of person you want to become. And that's what happens when you get out the door more, when you put your kid on more, when you press start on your bike computer more, you build that consistency. You vote for the type of person you are. But there's amazing aerobic signaling benefits as well. But higher frequency, it does increase logistical stress. I had a US tier one operator on the podcast and he talked to me about admin and I've become a huge fan of this idea of admin because there is a toll to having to get out the door more and the toll is real and you don't hear people talking about it. It's a toll in terms of the extra laundry you have to do, the extra time you have to spend because it takes time to get into your kit and out of your kit. You're going to end up training in the dark, in the cold, maybe you have indoor training fatigue. It increases the cost of being a cyclist. So the best frequency, it's not just a maximum frequency. It's the frequency that your life can support without adding more stress than training removes.

Duration and the Base Myth

So just use that kind of framework to think about it. Now duration is the third lever and this is the variable that almost nobody plans properly. Most cyclists change their winter training based on emotion. They feel good, they add some extra volume. They feel tired, they start to panic that the wheels are coming off. they feel bored, maybe they switch plans or switch to a new coach. Winter training needs longer time horizons. You need to zoom out. This general's tent approach where we need to zoom above it. Every rider chases that feeling. The one where the bike just disappears. Where the pedals turn easy and the road hums beneath you. And for a few fleeting seconds, everything just clicks. No effort, no noise, just flow. That moment isn't luck, it's engineering. The coin that only comes from obsession. For over 20 years, Parley has refined the art of carbon. Every layer placed by hand. Every angle tuned by feel and data until response, balance, and speed exist in perfect harmony. You don't notice a parley because it's flashy. You notice it because it feels right. Because every input, every climb, every corner happens exactly how you imagined it would. Customer production, every frame goes through the same uncompromising process. traceable, tested, and finished by people who still believe craftsmanship matters. Parley doesn't chase trends. They chase that moment every rider lives for when the bike and the body move as one. Parley cycles engineered for that feeling that keeps us coming back. Your aerobic adaptations, they don't care about your mood this week. It happens over longer time frames. They care about what you repeat for 12 weeks, 16 weeks. Duration is also where bass gets misunderstood totally. Base is not the phase where nothing changes. Bass is a phase where you build capacity in a controlled way. You keep the stress within a range you can absorb. You stay in that range stable enough long enough for adaptation to accumulate. Longer duration gives you these compounding benefits. You get better at the work. You accumulate time at the right zone at the right intensity. You build that durability. But longer duration also increases the risk of monotony, of underreovery, of stagnation if you don't adjust the dose and recovery along the way. In winter, most riders benefit from longer duration with small intelligent changes rather than consistent reinvention. I'm calling this part act three. And this is how these variables interact. And this it's really interesting. But before I jump into act three, I just want to talk about something that we've been quietly building in the background for the road man cycling community. I got frustrated about 12 months ago because when I was chatting with world tour coaches, what I seen was world tour coaches were coaching their riders according to a framework. They built five steps, five pillars of performance. And they didn't look at any of these as negotiable. It's was training, strength and conditioning, nutrition, proper recovery protocols, and having a community or tribe. Now, that was built inside every coach, every conversation I had. If you go back on the podcast, that's a reoccurring theme. It's a golden thread that runs through whether you're talking with Olaf Bu from Uno X, Dan Lurang from Bora Hansro, or Christian Shroud from Jake Olua. I got this golden thread team running through them all. But I got increasingly frustrated when I see an amateur riders and they just didn't have this. They had maybe one or two of these pillars. So I didn't want to build this. But I also want to serve the community. So in the last 12 months, I've been quietly building this in the background. A system that includes coaching, strength and conditioning, recovery protocols, worldclass nutrition, and community. And it's finally here. We opened it up a few days ago and it's actually almost sold out. We've had an application process, but this is kind of my call to you if you want to skip the application process. If you're ready to get going, it's not a free community. It's $395 per month to jump into this. But if you are ready to skip the application process, if you pop me an email on Anthony Nyromancycling.com, you're going to skip the queue and I can get you started in there today. We're going to cap it out once the community hits 100 people. So, I think there's about 20 25 slots left. Let me get back to the video because here's the most important point in this entire video. Dose, frequency, and duration. These aren't separate knobs. They are linked. And if you increase dose, you usually need to decrease frequency or shorten duration. If you increase frequency, you usually need to decrease dose or increase recovery. If you extend the duration, you must make sure dose and frequency are sustainable. And this is where winter training becomes simple in a really good way. You stop asking what's the perfect workout?

Consistency Beats Hero Weeks

What's the perfect session? Maybe the most common DM I get. You stop asking that question and you start asking what's the combination of stress that I can repeat for the next 16 weeks. And let me make a con. Let me make this really concrete for you because if you love long weekend rides, that's fine. But the weekend ride is a big dose. The recovery tail is long. So you can't also stack high frequency, medium hard sessions midweek and expect to stay fresh all winter. If your time crunched and you can only ride four days, your frequency is lower. That means that means that each session has to carry more of your weekly load. Dose goes up. That increases the recovery cost. So you must control intensity and protect recovery or you'll drift into this medium hard trap that's just so common. This is also why more is not always the way and that sometimes less can actually be the move because winter it's not just about what you can survive, what you can tolerate for the winter. It's about what you can absorb. And it's back to that word again, absorb. Because a winter with slightly less training stress consistently applied often produces a much better spring than a winter with really impressive weeks that look great on Strava, but you can't sustain. Consistency beats these hero weeks every time because adaptation isn't linear. Fitness gains come from repeated exposures, not these isolated achievements. And if you want a simple test, ask yourself this. Could I repeat the week that I'm doing right now with minor progression and overload for the next six weeks without needing this mammoth rescue recovery week? And if the answer is no, the week is not a good winter week. It's this sort of ego-built week built for Straa comparisons. Now, let's take a second to talk about how to actually build this winter training framework. Act four, we're calling this. And this is like the practical part of it because I'm going to give you two frameworks based on weekly hours that I think are quite common. We'll say a six-hour framework and then an 8 to 10 hour framework. And these aren't rigid plans. And this, you know, this is not going to plan out your whole winter for you, but it's just it's a fun way to illustrate what we're talking about. These are maybe think of them like templates that you can adjust using those three variables if you go back and watch this video and examine those closely again. And when I mention intensities like the real focus is I will mention intensities but the real focus here is on controlling stress. So let's talk about that sixhour per week. The biggest mistake I see at six per week is this idea of making every ride count. Because when you try to make every ride count, you make every ride too hard. At 6 hours, you win by protecting low intensity work, keeping doses manageable, and sprinkling in just enough intensity to keep the system awake. Frequency, I would honestly target four to five rides per week. Why? Because it lowers the dose per session and it improves consistency. So, a sample week might look like two endurance rides. That's 60 to 75 minutes. Truly easy endurance rides. Nothing above zone 2. Don't let them drift into tempo. These are aerobic maintenance and they're going to support recovery as well. One quality session, 60 to 75 minutes, where you touch something above endurance. And this could be short threshold intervals, control sweet spot, or even V2 micro bursts depending on your history. In early winter, it's often better to keep this controlled, not maximum efforts. One longer endurance ride, two to two and a half hours plus. Needs to be steady. It needs to be fueled. It needs to be managing that intensity. And that optional fifth ride of 45 to 60 minutes really easy where you're recovery ride. Maybe you're focusing on skills depending on fatigue. [clears throat] The long ride is your big dose. You got to make that clean. You're not going out on a group ride for this. You also got to fuel this properly. You got to keep it steady. At six hours, you cannot build huge durability. I'm going to be totally honest with you. You're not going to build huge durability through the duration of these rides. So, you're going to have to try and build durability through frequency and consistency. The old magic of compounding. You're training the habit and that aerobic signaling, not chasing those one-off rides because you don't have time for them. And in terms of progression, I would progress this by adding small amounts of time to the long ride every two or three weeks or by adding a little work to the quality session, not by turning easy rides into tempo rides. And if you're watching this and you're over the age of 40 years, you probably do need to tweak this.

Six and Ten Hour Frameworks

Especially if you have a stressful job or poor sleep, the winter move, the winter move for mast's riders is often reduction. It's often subtraction and not addition. You want to try and create space to increase recovery a little bit to maintain that frequency. And that might mean two truly easy endurance rides. One moderate quality session and one long ride. That's not as long as you wish it was. Mast's riders, they often don't lose by doing less. They lose by doing way too much and they just don't get to the start line fresh enough. Let me jump in and look at that second framework, that 8 to 10 hours a week. And this is the sweet spot for many of the serious amateurs watching. enough volume to build real aerobic capacity, not so much that you're living like a professional athlete. I would target for frequency, five to six rides per week. Now, you can spread stress across the week. Dose per session can be moderate. So, you can include two quality touch points per week if you recover well. So, a sample week might be two endurance rides of 60 to 90 minutes, easy and controlled, one tempo or sweet spot session, but structured, not an allout freefor-all. Something like two by 20 minutes at a control temp or a low sweet spot like 88 to 91% of threshold depending on your phase and your goals and then one higher intensity session, but not a death march. Early winter might be like short V2 work or some high cadence aerobic work or even some hill sprints with full recovery. The goal is that neuromuscular and aerobic stimulation, not to dig a huge hole. The endurance ride with this sort of time availability, you can stretch it a little bit longer. It can go to three, four hours, but again, focusing on the same things, fueled and steady. You can add in an optional sixth recovery ride if you have time for it. But dose control is where you need to be thinking is what you need to be thinking about here. And this is where many riders drift into medium hard because they feel capable. The long ride becomes that group ride with the group that's just a bit too strong for you. The tempo ride becomes a threshold session. The endurance ride becomes a fat max session. Suddenly every day has a little bit of bite in it. You must protect the easy days. If your easy days are not easy. You have no space for the quality hard rides and you have no space for adaptation. At 8 to 10 hours a week, you can build real fitness. You can build real durability. But durability comes from repeated work, not those occasional massive weeks that we talked about. A consistent threehour ride every weekend for 10 weeks beats doing 5hour rides for a couple of weeks followed by a couple of weeks off. How would I progress this? I'd progress it the same similar to the last way. I'd progress this gradually by increasing the long ride or slightly increasing the total weekly endurance time while keeping the same number of quality sessions or progress by improving execution. And that just means better fueling, better pacing, better recovery, better admin around the offike stuff rather than adding just load. And I I keep hammering home this point about the off the bike stuff because life stress really matters. Winter is where life stress is most underestimated in my opinion and life stress is the part of the equation that if you take nothing else from this video take this that training stress is not separate from life stress they add up if work is intense sleep is poor if your nervous system is already loaded the same training dose becomes very costly so your winter operating system it needs a decision rule and here's one simple rule I would I would that you should try and incorporate into your winter. When life stress rises and be honest with this, reduce dose first, not frequency. Keep the habit, keep moving, but make the session shorter and easier. A practical example of this is you plan the 90-minute endurance ride, which you had a brutal day, boss is shouting at you, you slept badly. Do 45 minutes easy instead. Same frequency, lower dose, lower cost. Or maybe you've planned the structured tempo workout, but your rest and heart rate is up and your heart rate variability has dropped. You just feel flat. Well, just turn it into an endurance ride. Keep the duration if it's not too costly or shorten it. Save the quality for when you can actually absorb the quality. This isn't like you being weak or wussing out of this. This is experience. Winter training isn't a test of toughness, of manlyhood. It's a test of judgment. Like, why does any of this matter that I'm talking about today? because we care. We want to get return on our training investment.

Spring Form Is Built in Winter

There's a huge opportunity cost to us riding the bike to leaving family and loved ones and missing promotions in work or deadlines. So, let's make the most out of our training. Like winter training, it sets your ceiling for the year. It doesn't set your base. That's why it's kind of a counterintuitive term. If winter training is mismanaged, you're still going to get fit, but you'll not have that scaffolding to push your ceiling into the spring. You'll always be protecting yourself from collapse. But if winter training is managed properly, you can arrive into the spring hungry. Your body's going to be responsive. You can handle blocks of intensity. You can stack quality. You can actually build form because you're already not carrying this hidden fatigue. This is why spring success is often locked in by January. Not because January has these magic workouts. Trust me, it doesn't. But because January is where the cost of your winter decisions start to show up. And if you're feeling that cost right now, it's not too late to do a U-turn out of this. If you overdosed in November and December, January does tend to expose it. If you get dose, frequency, and duration right, January feels stable. Definitely not effortless, just stable. And stability is what lets you build. So, what's the secret to winter training, I hear you ask? Well, it's not the perfect zone 2 ride. It's not copying the pro plan. It's not trusting our AI overlords. It's understanding that training stress and life stress must be dosed, repeated, and sustained intelligently. Choose a dose you can recover from quickly. Choose a frequency your life can support. Choose a duration long enough for adaptations to compound with recovery built in before the system breaks down. If you do that, winter stops being a grind. It becomes an investment that pays you back all season long. Since getting back into training, the biggest thing that's hit me isn't fitness, it's fueling. I used to finish rides totally wrecked. I'd come through the door, collapse on the couch, scroll through Instagram, and call it recovery. But now that I'm actually fueling properly, and that's anywhere from 80 to 120 grams of carbs an hour, depending on the session, it's a completely different story. I'm coming home from training feeling fresh, and my power data throughout the ride supports this. I can actually function when I get off the bike. It's honestly blown me away how big a difference that proper fueling makes. When I started fueling right, I realized just how good I could actually feel on the bike. a daily staple in my training now. It's for endurance because I know exactly what I'm putting into my body. Every product is designed for performance. It's tested in real racing and it's used by the very best from Olympians to tour to France riders. It's the same science just without the luxury brand markup. Seriously, jump over to their site and check out the prices. You'll be absolutely blown away. It's real fuel, unbeatable price, great taste, no gut issues. Like, that's a winning combo for me. For endurance, built on science, proven in sweat. Check them out at forurance.com and start fueling smarter. I'm going to put the link in the description down below. Here's the thought I want you to take into your next ride. When you're deciding whether to add more, do not ask, can I do this today? Can I actually get through this session? ask, "Can I still do this six weeks from now and be better because of it?" And that question is the difference between winter training that looks impressive and winter training that actually makes you fast come the spring. If you enjoyed this video and you got a lot of value for it, please do me a quick favor and press that subscribe button and the bell notification because we have some massive interviews coming up in the next couple of months, including an exclusive with Chris Fri, which you're going to love. and let me know in the comments what you're struggling with around your training. And if you are, as I said, really struggling with it and you want to put those five pillars together, put me an email on anonyromancycling.com and you can skip the queue to join our not done yet community. That's for people who are, like the title sounds, not done yet, and you're ready to write that next chapter in your cycling story. Thanks for watching.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why is my cycling not improving after a winter of base training?+

The most common reason is that unstructured endurance rides drift into moderate intensity, accumulating fatigue without producing clean aerobic adaptation. By spring, the body is too fatigued to absorb harder efforts, so fitness appears to have stalled despite a high volume of winter work.

How many hours should a amateur cyclist train in winter?+

Amateur cyclists are limited by recovery capacity, not training capacity, so the correct volume is whatever can be consistently absorbed week after week. Copying professional training hours without professional recovery infrastructure produces chronic fatigue rather than a genuine aerobic base.

How often should cyclists train in winter to build aerobic base?+

Frequency matters more than any single long ride. Three to five consistent, well-recovered sessions per week will build a stronger aerobic base than irregular high-volume weeks followed by forced rest, because adaptation requires repeated stimulus without accumulated fatigue disrupting absorption.

What is the difference between aerobic base building and junk miles in cycling?+

Aerobic base rides are performed at a genuinely low intensity where the body can recover fully between sessions and adapt progressively. Junk miles occur when rides drift into a moderate grey zone that is too hard to allow proper recovery and too easy to produce meaningful high-end adaptation, quietly eroding the quality of the entire training programme.

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READ THE GUIDE

The written companion to this episode.

Winter Cycling Training: The Right Dose, Frequency, and Duration

Winter training isn't about surviving until spring. It's the period where the biggest fitness gains happen — if you get the dose right.

Cycling Base Training: How to Build an Aerobic Engine That Lasts

The aerobic base is the foundation of everything. Without it, your intervals are built on sand. How to build it properly.

Cycling Periodisation: How to Structure Your Training Year

Training without periodisation is just exercising. You might get fitter, but you'll plateau, burn out, or peak at the wrong time. Here's how…

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Key Takeaways

KEY QUOTES

“When you copy pro riders volume without proriter recovery, you're not doing base. You're doing chronic fatigue management.”
Anthony Walsh — Roadman Cycling podcast host

“A three-hour endurance ride, it can be a bigger dose than a 1 hour, one and a half hour really difficult threshold session depending on a few things like your fitness, your fueling, and your recovery status.”
Anthony Walsh — Roadman Cycling podcast host

“Could I repeat the week that I'm doing right now with minor progression and overload for the next six weeks without needing this mammoth rescue recovery week? And if the answer is no, the week is not a good winter week.”
Anthony Walsh — Roadman Cycling podcast host

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why is my cycling not improving after a winter of base training?+

How many hours should a amateur cyclist train in winter?+

How often should cyclists train in winter to build aerobic base?+

What is the difference between aerobic base building and junk miles in cycling?+

WINTER CYCLING TRAINING: DOSE, FREQUENCY & DURATION | ROADMAN CYCLING

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WANT THIS APPLIED TO YOUR TRAINING?