Originally Posted by
work4bike
I understand it does not count as a recovery activity; however, it does give the body another form of stimulus. Doing too much of one exercise leads to issues of overuse injuries, plateauing and mental fatigue. I'm not sure if this is an issue for the OP, but it's a possible factor. I know this seems counterintuitive for some, but weightlifting can very much help with cycling, at least that's been my experience.
I knew this was a controversial topic, but it is becoming less so, because more and more cyclists are turning to weight training as indicated in the above video and here's just one more example:
https://www.bicycling.com/training/g...in-like-a-pro/
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IMO, you're getting a bit off topic. Please let it rest, pun fully intended.
Otherwise, the body responds to stimulus when you give it a chance to. This feeling is perhaps the body rebuilding fibers, mitochondria, plasma volume. A necessary part of adapting/growing your ability on the bike.
The time for that kind of recovery is within your plan to get ready for racing. If you're close to a race, you taper. You lessen volume and maintain, or increase, intensity. Instead of hours of sweetspot each week before TT's, reduce volume and get into threshold. Then get into upper threshold and low low vo2, but low volume week with days off in between.
This is where folks say you only ever truly have a couple A races per year as you can't do the A race taper every week for everything you do.
When I do cross season, two of the home course races are A's, the rest are B/C's. Meaning for the C's I don't adjust training volume/intensity at all other than not doing something stupid a day from the race. For B's I might be more careful from Thurs/Fri to Sat/Sun than just being off on the day before.
If you treated all like A races, your first one or two A's would go fine. Then you'd start losing fitness as the season progresses because your volume plummeted and you can't repeat the all-out efforts all the time.