topflightpro

I am insomniac. Here are a couple things my sleep therapist had me to do help improve sleep.

• Turn off all screens at least 2 hours before you go to bed.
• Don't look at your phone.
• Don't watch TV - especially in a bedroom.
• Don't drink any caffeine after noon.

My neurologist wanted me to go through sleep therapy instead of taking medication as the body tends to adapt to sleeping pills, requiring ever increasing doses.

Cypress

Thanks, boys. The phone thing is definitely an issue.

I'll pick up a copy of that book, Hermes . And a copy of Draft Animals. Come to think of it, I haven't read much of anything non-electronic lately.

Hermes

Cypress Here are a few tips from the book to fall asleep and stay asleep.

Set a time to go to bed that affords you an opportunity for 8 hours of sleep and do not use an alarm clock to wake up. Reverse the paradigm that most everyone uses.

Have the bedroom cool. There has to be a body temperature drop to fall asleep.

Block out all ambient light.

Do not allow blue light to enter your eyes in the evening from laptops and iPads. I use the night setting on my electronics to eliminate blue spectrum.

Do not exercise hard in the evenings. Exercise increases metabolism and body temperature.

No alcohol as it disrupts the brain's sleep routine and wakes one up. And it can wake you up several times per night and you do not know it.

Caffeine... everyone is different with respect to the metabolism of caffeine. It is genetically determined and if you are a slow metabolizer, you cannot tolerate very much in the afternoon or evening. Caffeine inhibits sleep.

One interesting fact about humans versus all other life on the planet is that we are the only species that intentionally reduces the amount of sleep we need. And another fact about humans is that both sides of our brain go to sleep. The brains of some animals only allow 1/2 of their brain to sleep at a time while the other half is used to sustain life or protect against predators.

However, humans CAN go into 1/2 brain sleep especially if we fear for our safety. That "fear" is extended to something as simple as going to a hotel. The new sleeping environment causes our brain to assess the requirement to monitor our surroundings. Hence a poorer quality of sleep. So pro teams that travel and stay in different environments try to mitigate the impact of poorer quality sleep due to travel.

Melatonin is okay / good but the actual amount of melatonin in the dosage of over the counter pills may be way off.

Cypress

Caffeine is probably one of the issues. I never used to do caffeine in the afternoon, but I was promoted to my own office about a year ago. The 2:00 pm cup of coffee has become somewhat of a ritual that carries me through the last 1.5 hours of work, then onto my bike.

At this point, it's probably compounding the sleep issue AND giving me extra junk calories.

Time to give it a boot.

furiousferret

I take a ZMA sleep supplement, definitely helps. I also find that when I really train going to sleep at 9pm instead of 10 is probably a bigger performance gain than most things on the bike. Going to bed that early I may not sleep all 9 hours (I usually wake up for an hour than nod back off) but I never wake with with a poor night's sleep.

First real week of training. Had to drop my FTP by 10 and tone down my volume. First race is in 3 weeks (Santa Barbara RR) hopefully. I'm on call for it so I'm going to have to be able to swap it out.

TheKillerPenguin

This sleep discussion is relevant to my interests. It takes me forever to fall asleep.

Hermes

Thursday was a track workout with my coach 3x(10x(2 laps (250m) on and 1 lap off)) Power was FTP or better / race pace. 90 laps of effort plus 60 laps of warmup. We could make it as hard or easy as we wanted. Fixed gear interval work is much harder than on a geared bike. I did 94 gear inches for the first set and then changed to 92.

Saturday and Sunday were endurance work with some over under work on Torrey Pines on Sunday.

Nice weather with low cadence 60s temps and light winds.

caloso

Team ride, 60-ish miles, base pace with a few sprints, really a fun day. Really nothing better than going for a bike ride with friends on a nice day. I missed this.

Cypress

Was supposed to get a hard group ride in on Saturday, then 2 hours of Z2 on Sunday. The weather has been so miserable here that Saturday devolved into a hard 2:20 on Zwift. Sunday was a mess. The wife planned a bunch of stuff for us, so by the time my day opened up for a ride I had to make the horrible choice between a nap or Zwift. Hit 1:10 of Z2 on Zwift, then made dinner.

big john

60ish miles Saturday with climbing. I tried not chasing the fast kids for the first 25 miles and it paid off later on the climbs as I was not last. In fact, I have not been last in a few rides lately. Didn't know if those days would ever come back. Baby steps.

Naps are good.

TheKillerPenguin

Finished up the block feeling great. Today I'm wrecked af though. Glad for rest!

hubcyclist

Been following, it's the kind of training I wish I could be doing, I do about 10hrs a week of just sweet spot intervals, I'd really like to do more of a hybrid approach of sweet spot on weekdays and 4-6hr endurance on the weekends but the other people in my house probably wouldn't want me spending that much time on the trainer lol ("normal" people think 2hrs is too much time!).

TheKillerPenguin

My experience is, there is no substitute for good base volume. You can get like 95% of the way there without it, but I find that for me at least, it's really needed.

I'm pretty stoked because this is the first winter I've been able to do this sort of volume consistently since 2015-16.

Cypress

Reply to my text, you scoundrel.

TheKillerPenguin

I didn't get the dang thing! hold on.

burnthesheep

3x8 solo after riding one lap on RR recon ride with the team. Today was Z1 in TT position. All workouts here till 02Feb will be in TT now. Woot.

Going to do a mock ride Friday, I hope. All race kit. This will set me up some targets and workouts till the race. I'm also going to try to negative split it to get a better feeling of not starting off too hard. I always start too hard then taper. People watch my HR data instead of power and just see the HR tapering up over time like it normally would. What they don't pay attention to is that the power drops like a rock. I have to stop that crap.

I just remembered I can find my old clip on's for the gym erg instead of using a towel and making my elbows hurt. Score.

If I can get my 20ish min TT power up to within even 15w of my road "climbing" position.........I'll be a happy man. And a faster man.

Hermes

I am pretty sensitive to hip angle v power production such that a couple of mm can change power but not affect CdA that much, if any. It is hard to find the sweet spot hip angle due to so many variables and fatigue. And turtling your head makes a huge difference in CdA and not much difference in power. However, it is hard turtle and hold the head still for long periods of time.

Phatman

Its been a while since I've posted on here, but I found the sleep discussion when googling and thought it was interesting. So, with that said, what're people's thoughts on training with very little (or relatively little) sleep? We had a baby 11 weeks ago and I don't think I've slept over 6 hours/night since, and before that I was always a solid 8-9 hour/night sleeper. I don't feel awful, but my numbers are down and a stupid knee injury that hasn't bugged me for over a year has started to flare up.

Obviously I need less riding, but my volume isn't very high anyways. Before baby I was doing 2-3 trainer mixed interval rides per week, 2 weekday after work rides and a 2-2.5 hour weekend ride, now I'm on 5x trainer rides on weekdays (2x 30 minute spin watching netflix/ 3x interval, then flip every week) and a 2-2.5 hour weekend ride outside.

So, where do I cut? Less intensity on the trainer? Shorter trainer rides? Shorter "Long" ride? All of the above? Any rules of thumb for volume reductions in proportion to sleep loss? I'm not racing right now, but I'd like for my fitness to not take too much of a hit. Maybe my expectations are too high.

Cypress

I would think reducing intensity would aid with the knee issue. I would also warn against HIIT on reduced sleep. I'd get more endurance in, then try to get your intervals in on days where you know you'll be getting more sleep (if possible) that night.

Doge

Depends a bit on age and how hard you are training. Sleep is when you rebuild. Late 30s+ you are not going to build so much. For elite kids and low 20s picking up 2 more hours a night makes a difference. Target by several elite trainers is 9-10 hours after working out. A lot of working out is weight based. I think if you don't do weights, you can get by with less.

I would think the numbers are related. I can speak to the knee and sleep. My kids trainer/s had him elevate legs, read in bed, keep body prone state when he could.

...
Depends on goals. I have seen huge speed gains adding weights - and sleep, vs miles. But most like miles, because they like cycling. Few USA races need a pile of miles.
My kid won the CO state crit championship with a quick acceleration off the front on 2 hours/week on the bike, 5 in the gym and about 9 hours sleep - in a military academy. Some talent was missing, and he has a lot, but point is - made by both his trainers, you don't need so much miles for speed. Note he did not even enter Nats RR for 1st time in years, and ITT was even too long for a good performance. But speed up, due to weights and sleep.

Wylde06

I got almost 5 hours in last week. And im starting to actually look forward to riding again.

Need to get an FTP test in soon. I set it down to 210 back in October, because I wasnt riding and it seemed right..the last few rides I can tell that it isnt. I dont want to test...but I feel like I need to, especially if I am going to actually be training again.

Phatman

Gotcha. I've been battling this knee thing off an on for the last 4 years. The last time it flared up was last winter and it responded pretty well to a week off, lots of foam rolling and some hip/hamstring work. So that's what I'm doing, no riding until next weekend. I'll try dropping the intensity when I start back up again.

I guess what you're saying is to take the time I'd be riding and sleep instead?

burnthesheep

Score! Found all the parts I needed. Took measurements off the TT bike and transferred to the Cycleops pro in the gym. Clipped on the old bars.

Did a 3x8 in TT today and power was closer to road than it's ever been. Or road power is up a good amount and I don't realize it yet since I haven't tested it recently.

But, it'll be good. I think I had a bad habit on the ERG of sitting too buck shot upright in road setup when doing intervals work. I think the TT and on-road stuff will help a lot in real race scenarios where you're bent over hiding in the wind. Even for road. You don't ride road races like you'd ride a granny Dutch bike.

Doge

I'm trying to summarize here.
You are sleeping <6 hours and you were sleeping 8-9 hours and your numbers are down and you knee hurts and you train ~8 hours/week.
" 5x trainer rides on weekdays (2x 30 minute spin watching netflix/ 3x interval, then flip every week) and a 2-2.5 hour weekend ride outside."
I assume you want to race as you posted here.

Having babies is tough, certainly worth it IMO but certainly less than ideal for training. Yea, I'd sleep more and I'd give up the idea of racing. Ride for mental health. I don't see hope of doing long competitive events with that.

If, however getting the numbers up is the #1 priority I think you could maybe get crit numbers up from what they are, but you don't have a lot to work with.
Almost always resistance exercise (weights) will increase strength. With that you need to sleep to build. You don't have time to do a 3X hour each a week routine with lower and upper body AND recover. You could actually dig yourself into a fatigue hole lifting and not sleeping.
I think it is possible to increase speed by maybe adding 2 days 30 min of resistance (weights) focusing on the legs, and add 60 min sleep those nights. See if the weights hurt your knees. If they do, stop of course. Sometimes spinning is more irritating than force. If weights hurt too, you may want to visit a professional. Ride 2X a week on the the trainer mid week and 1.5-2 hours on the weekend, or race (if there is any) instead.

TMonk

Took the day off tomorrow, gonna put in what will likely be my biggest one all year outside of BWR. I'll probably accumulate more saddle time than I did during my entire rest week last week...