On Group Training and why I'm not a fan

I just finished up a metabolic test with a client this morning and during the session came across a frequently recurring theme that goes a little something like this...."I ride with a bunch of friends every weekend and I seem to always be maxing out just to keep up with them. What do I do?"

Well, my simple answer is, STOP RIDING WITH THEM! :)


And here's why. With this particular client and most who come to me with this problem, the metabolic testing showed a low level of aerobic fitness and a high level of anaerobic fitness. Very poor fat metabolism, peaking out at a very low heart rate in relation to Anaerobic Threshold with a lot of time spent near or at virtual oxygen debt. This type of fitness is typical of the "too hard, too often" method of training and in the long run is not going to get you very far. In fact if continued, spending too much time at or near your AT too often in your training cycle will end up reducing your overall fitness level, and therefore your speed on the road. As with most people in this situation, he was very close to heading down the dangerous road of "I'm getting slower so I just need to train faster"...but fortunately he came to me just before he took himself too far.
In order to get faster and fitter in the long run, he needs to pull things back, take himself out of the group atmosphere for awhile and do what his body needs for optimal fitness and performance. And in this particular case that means a month or so of moderate to easy spinning at a low heart rate to build aerobic base fitness, improve fat metabolism and increase his Aerobic Endurance Threshold so that he can go faster for longer and eventually rejoin his group with a fitness level that will allow him to maintain pace at far less of a metabolic cost.

All this brings me to why I'm not a fan of group rides. On any given day, you take a group of 30 cyclists and every one of them is going to be at a different fitness level and a different stage in their training cycle with a different focus. Even if all 30 cyclists are training for exactly the same A race, unless they are all clones, fitness levels, heart rate zones and required intensities are going to vary widely.

So, you take these 30 cyclists and tell them all to go out on a 2hr group ride over rolling terrain, and tell them to stay together the whole time...what happens? Some of them are going to be going too fast, some of them are going to push too hard on the hills to keep up, some are going to be going too slow, and a few may just get it all right.

If we look at their varying fitness levels on a bell curve, perhaps it will help illustrate the point. Visualize a standard bell curve and break it into three equal parts. Taking our 30 cyclists and putting them on this curve, 10 will fall to the left of the peak (too easy), 10 will fall around the peak (just right) and 10 will fall to the right (too hard) which means that out of 30 riders, 20 of them are not going to get an optimal ride for their unique fitness needs on that day. Twenty cyclists are essentially wasting that two hours on the bike, and ten of them are going too hard and potentially doing more harm than good to their current level of fitness.

We live in the age of the "time crunch" and this holds even more true for the typical age group athlete. Between family, work, home and friends it can be tough enough to fit training time in to your week. Why would you take a chance on potentially wasting that time by  training at a non-optimal intensity just so you can ride with some friends?

That's not to say that the group experience is completely without benefit. There's no discounting the positive effect that friendly competition and time with friends can have on the enjoyment of a training session. The point I'm hoping to make is that you need to make group training work for you, not against you.

How can you do this? Focus group sessions around interval style training in a smaller, repeatable space. Hill repeats, track work, short tempo intervals all work great for group sessions. Each athlete is able to work and recover at the needed intensity and do the exact amount of work they need for their place in the training cycle, all while enjoying the company of others doing the same. Misery does love company!

If you keep your base/endurance training solo you'll be able to ensure that each minute you spend out there is focused on improving your fitness and performance, which in the long run will only serve to further increase your enjoyment of all the time you spend on your training.