Here's the question I want you to ask about every session in your week: how much fitness did I get for the hour I spent?
Not how hard it felt. Not how many kilojoules it burned, or how many kudos it got. How much fitness, per hour invested, once you've paid for the recovery.
If you ride 20 hours a week, you can afford a few rides that don't do much. If you ride six, you can't. Every hour is carrying weight. So in this episode I take seven of the most popular sessions in amateur cycling — the group ride, sweet spot, VO2 max intervals, fasted riding, Zone 2 and a couple of others you'll recognise from your own training log — and rank them from worst to best on that one test. Some of the rankings are going to annoy people. That's fine. I'd rather annoy you than watch you spend another winter doing sessions that don't pay you back.
The test, and why it's harder than it sounds
Fitness per hour sounds simple. It isn't, because there are three things hiding inside it.
First, what the session actually builds. An easy endurance ride, a block of sweet spot and a set of VO2 max intervals are each training something different. If you can't say what a session is for, you can't say whether it worked.
Second, what it costs. A session that leaves you flat for two days has a price, and you pay it in the quality of everything that comes after. A hard ride on Tuesday that ruins Thursday's intervals has to be judged across the whole week, not in isolation.
Third, whether you control the dose. This is the one most people miss. A session where you decide the intensity is a session you can measure, repeat and progress. A session where someone else decides — the strongest rider in the group, the traffic lights, the race to the café — is a lottery. Sometimes you win.
Where popular sessions come up short
I'm not going to give the order away here — the reasoning is the valuable part, and it's in the episode. But run the test yourself and a pattern shows up quickly.
The sessions most likely to come up short are the ones people do for reasons other than fitness. The social pull of the Saturday bunch. The habit of a ride that's always been in the diary. The promise that riding on an empty stomach will melt the weight off. Those reasons aren't worthless. Community is half of why most of us ride, and I'd never tell you to give up your club run. But social value and training value are two different columns, and the mistake is putting them in the same one.
Fasted riding is a good example of the problem. Ride without fuel and you'll burn more fat during that ride, and you'll also produce less power. If the session was meant to have any intensity in it, you've just done a worse version of it. We've covered the detail in the fasted riding myth and on the fact vs fiction episode, and the short version for a rider on low hours is that most of those hours should be fuelled.
What makes a session score well
The sessions that score well are the ones with a clear purpose and a controlled dose. When you know what you're training and you decide how hard, three good things happen: you can measure it, you can repeat it, and you can progress it. That's what turns individual sessions into a training block.
This is where the WorldTour coaching I've been lucky enough to hear on the podcast lines up with the research. Stephen Seiler's work on intensity distribution shows elite endurance athletes spend most of their time easy and a smaller share very hard — and the easy riding is only cheap because it's properly easy. In one small trial, Bent Rønnestad's group found short 30/15 intervals produced bigger gains than effort-matched longer intervals in trained cyclists — though a newer crossover suggests the gap depends on how the intensity is controlled. Neither finding tells you that one session is magic. Both tell you that the details of how you do a session decide what you get back from it.
Zone 2, sweet spot and VO2 max get a proper hearing in the episode, and I'll say now: they're not rivals. Each one earns a place for a different reason. Where they land depends on the rider — which is exactly why I argued in why your Zone 2 training isn't working that the zone is relative but the cost is absolute.
What to do with the ranking
Don't read it as a list of sessions to ban. Read it as a list of questions to ask about your own week.
Take your last seven days. For each ride, write down what it was for, how hard it was and who decided that, and how you felt the day after. If you can't answer the first question, that ride is a candidate to change. If the answer to the second is "the group," that ride is a candidate to restructure. If the third answer keeps coming back as "wrecked," look at what that ride is costing the session that follows it.
Most riders don't need more hours. They need the hours they have to be doing a clearer job.
I've written the full framework — how to score your own sessions for return per hour, and what to swap in when one of your regulars comes up short — in the best and worst cycling sessions: how to rank your training by fitness per hour. If you're working with six hours or fewer, pair it with how to get faster on 6 hours a week.
Ready to write your next cycling chapter? We've opened applications for our "Not Done Yet" coaching programme at www.roadmancycling.com/apply — we combine training, nutrition, strength and recovery protocols.
Come and argue about the rankings with us in the free Roadman community on Skool: https://www.skool.com/roadmancycling
One of the tools you will have heard Anthony chat about in this podcast is TrainingPeaks. Without this platform we can't get into the detail required to precisely train within zones. If you want to go and check out this incredible training tool go to https://bit.ly/4qWyEKK and use ROADMAN – 20% off an annual TrainingPeaks Premium subscription.
Thanks to Vittoria for supporting this episode — their terrain-based gravel range makes picking the right tyre simple: https://int.vittoria.com/. And to AG1 — head to drinkag1.com/roadmancycling for an exclusive listener offer.