OFF Season Training

Why it's wrong stop training for more than a week during OFF season?

Because you will loose so much fitness that you would need to spend 3-4 months of the new season just to make up for that loss in fitness. This is every good recipe not to improve year after year.

Training has a cumulative effect, so the level you want to reach the next season depends upon how much training you have been doing and the level of physiological adaptation that you have been creating in the past years.

Especially after 35, detraining occurs already after only one week of doing nothing.

Therefore, if you stop training for few weeks or even months, you will loose VO2max (even more rapidly that the normal decay induced by aging), you will start accumulating lactic acid at lower effort or power-output, and your plasma volume will decrease making your temperature regulation less efficient.

My suggestion is: keep training 4 times/week and keep 2 significant workouts with some intensity and interval structure in it.
Also, do not forget to include 2 weight sessions/week (one session is only for maintenance, it won't induce any adaptation). Make sure that your weight routine are specific for cyclists, and are focus on strength improvement, since strength is the main reason why masters (35+) loose power-output.

Read more about this on:
http://http://www.davanticycling.com/mastercyclists.html

Talk to you soon
Luisa