Time off the bike is the enemy of fitness but how bad is the damage and how best to reverse it? James Shrubsall investigates the science of detraining and retraining
Arriving back at my front door, I leaned heavily against the jamb. Despite the discomfort, there was a small swell of pride at what I’d just achieved, and now I was ready for a very long sit down. We’ve all been there at the end of a long ride, exhausted and aching, the sofa beckoning. But I wasn’t returning with 100km in my legs. Rather, I had hobbled the 50 metres to the end of my road and back without a walking stick, for the first time in months.
My back issues had set in over a period of weeks and months in 2019 as I attempted to keep riding through yet another round of disc-related niggles. Lifting weights in the gym only succeeded in making things worse. By mid-July I could barely ride; by the end of the month, I had to stop. The next time I rode a bike was mid-November, and a five-minute spin at 85 watts on the turbo was all I could manage. At that point, after four months of complete rest, my fitness levels were almost certainly the worst they’d ever been, not just because of the lack of cycling, but the lack of any movement at all. I refused to let go of the belief that one day I would be OK – my back would eventually recover. But what about my cycling fitness and form – what would it take to get that back?
In this feature, I want to investigate exactly what happens to our fitness when we rest and detrain, and how long we can expect to have to work to get that fitness back. Detraining and quite so straightforward. Grudgingly, we attempt to ease back in.
For pro cyclists, collarbone breaks and worse are part and parcel of making a living – time off followed by a rebuild of form is a familiar foe. With full-time doctors and coaches closely monitoring their comebacks, they often manage to hit form again surprisingly quickly. It took Visma-Lease A Bike star Wout van Aert just two months, for example, to return to top-level racing after a devastating crash in the spring Classic Dwars door Vlaanderen, which saw him break his collarbone, sternum and seven ribs. At his comeback race, the Tour of Norway last month, he was not on sparkling form, but he finished the four stages without any pain – a key recovery marker.
The cause of detraining isn’t always a crash or injury. Elite road racer Alice Lethbridge, for example, spent a long time returning to form last year after contracting Covid in January. The Lightning Cycling Team rider was fully off the bike for around 10 days with numerous false starts, but it took her nearly a year to recover her pre-Covid fitness. “I was really unwell, and it had a huge impact on my breathing,” says Lethbridge, a biology teacher. “I was at the point where I couldn’t even get up and walk around the classroom at work without feeling out
