How many riders do you know that talk of experiencing burnout? They lose motivation, feel fatigued and have to take a break from their training. Burning out, and having to take a couple of months away from the bike, is no way to keep your development as a rider going. It isn’t any fun either.
Riders often talk of burnout during the summer. The summer, the time of the year we all train for, and these poor riders are sitting on the couch trying to recover! What has happened to them? Are they burned out physically or mentally?
Patience: managing your workload
As a rider looking to train properly one of the most important things to do is to have some patience. Real training adaptation - not a 6-week get your VO2 up type of adaptation - takes years. It is important to understand that our bodies cannot always be training at threshold, or doing HiT training. Perhaps more importantly, our minds cannot sustain that training load either.
Real physical burnout is a state that is hard to reach. It does happen, but typically only when a rider is consistently not eating enough. We have seen in our workouts that there is a direct linkage between energy in and power out. Create too much of a negative energy relationship with your training and you are on the road to deep physical fatigue.
When a rider is talking of burnout they are more likely experiencing mental burnout. They have lost their motivation, don’t want to see the bike anymore, and have no interest in riding. They have emptied their “bucket”.
The bucket
The bucket is a great analogy for how to manage your training approach. Imagine a bucket full of water. This bucket of water has to last you the whole season. If your bucket ever gets empty you reach burnout. Every time you do a ride, you take a bit of water out of the bucket. The harder the ride, the more water is taken out of the bucket. Every time you rest, the water in the bucket replenishes in accordance with how much rest you take. In training, we want to stress our bodies to elicit adaptation - emptying the water a bit. But in order to adapt to that training stress we need to rest and allow the water to replenish itself. The balance lies in how much water you are taking out, and how much you are letting it replenish. Getting the balance right will keep you training consistently.
Ultimately, the path to developing as a rider is through consistency and repeatability over days, months and years. This doesn’t mean training easy all the time. It does mean paying attention to the realities of training timelines, the status of your “bucket”, and managing your overall workload so you never have to stop your training.
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