Alias530

If you took 7 days off the bike, would you go back at it hard on your first day back or ease back into it? Not due to sickness, vacation. This will be the longest time off a bike so I don't know. 4-5 days off the bike doesn't seem to hamper me at all, I come back fresh.

spdracr39

After a good warmup you will most likely be stronger after a short 7 day break. Your body loves a good healing period once in a while.

Alias530

Is there a point of time off the bike where you would want to have a few days of easy riding to ease back into it? 2 weeks or more?

TheManShow

Seven days IMHO is not a long ​break in my world.

Homebrew01

Just ride and do what feels right at the time.

banerjek

You never need to ease back in. If you're off too long, your fitness gets so messed up so you're unable to do as much -- the process is self regulating.

FLvector

Do a good warmup and let your body dictate how you feel on how hard you hit it.

RPK79

How laissez faire.

Alias530

I guess a better question is... if I'm taking a week off, would it be stupid to plan a 6 hour ride my first day back on?

PepeM

If you can do a six hours ride now, you will be able to do it after a week off just fine.

f4rrest

Your form should be high after only a week off if you were steadily training before.

The fitness/freshness curve (Strava) is useful for predicting your form when you take a few days off. (Strava was inspired by other systems that use the same model with different terms: chronic training load, acute training load, training stress balance.)

For example, suppose you're at 48 fitness and 60 fatigue, your form would be -11. With time off, your fatigue drops much faster than your fitness, so form skyrockets. After 7 days off, you'd be at 41, fatigue at 22, and form at 19. You should be able to knock out a hard workout.

bt

If it was a Femur, I'd say start slowly, if it was a finger bone, hit it hard out of the gate.

Alias530

I've only had a power meter for 2 weeks and it's only on one of my bikes so that seems to skew the results. For example, my form just with power meter is -22 right now but with heart rate only it's +5.

bobones

I am pretty old (50) and I think I feel the effects of a few days off the bike quite acutely: my heart rate is noticeably higher and it generally feels harder to complete a ride. I am actually in the midst of an enforced break after a couple of months of solid riding due to straining my Achilles last week. My last ride was Sunday and my Strava (fitness, fatigue, form) scores were (62, 69, -7) on Sunday and are now (56, 39, 17) so fitness has done down at little, but fatigue and form scores have improved significantly due to the rest. My injury is almost completely gone so I'll be very interested to see how I go when I next ride either tonight or tomorrow. My gut feeling is that I will struggle!

banerjek

Not at all. Depending on how hard you normally ride, you might even do better than normal.

CliffordK

There are plenty of weekend warriors who do most of their riding once a week.

After my recent 181 mile ride, I don’t think I was fully recovered for about a week (including riding).

Anyway, if you've been hammering it hard, a week rest before a long ride would be nice.

You will have some deficit if you take a few months off in the winter, or worse break a bone and hobble around for a few months with a cast.

Shuffleman

I think that you will be at about the same level as when you stopped riding if it is less than a week. I have always been under the assumption that after two weeks you start to see a drop in endurance.
I just had surgery on my hip on Friday, so I am nervous to see how far my conditioning has dropped when I come back. I hope that I am not riding with the "C" group upon my return. The pace is bad enough but their number of stops and the duration they stay at them would drive me crazy.

FLvector

Seven days off isn't long enough to be concerned. You should be well rested. If you can do some cardio and weights during those seven days, even better.

RPK79

If you think you can catch the break without blowing up I say go for it.

Jeremy_S

Due to what I do for a living, I'm pretty much a constant in this sort of thing. I work 14 on 14 off so for 14 days, I probably get 10-12 rides in and when I go back to work for two weeks, I get exactly 0. Usually the day I come back I hop on my bike (I'm tired, I put in 220ish hours or more those 14 days) and I'll do a quick ten mile spin around the neighborhood simply to get my form back. I'm a BAD knees out kind of guy and it takes focus to remember to tuck my knees in and use the right muscles. The next morning, I wake up and do 50 miles and it's usually faster than my normal speed. Because I ride so much when I'm home, I can tell as my average speed drops off a pretty good bit by the time I'm ready to go back to work. Now I'm nowhere near the fitness level of a lot of you guys, I have a train wrecked right knee and I ride because I used to be a runner and that's simply not a possibility anymore, can't take the impact so I adopted cycling as my next sport of choice. My average rides are 40-50 miles and not at a ridiculous pace (like 16-17) but I honestly see no drop off in endurance with 14 days off every month.

Oldhead

I'd say take a little longer warm up then it is game on