The road season is reaching its finale. The professionals will sign off in Lombardy at the Race of the Falling Leaves (Sunday 11th October) or a week later in China at the Tour of Guangxi, while the likes of The Peaks Tour (Saturday 27th September) and L’Etape Ireland (Sunday 28th September) will provide the 2025 curtain call for hundreds of amateurs. After months of preparation and monastic(-ish) living, you can finally slip into your compression socks, doff a whisky-protein shake and ease back until Father Christmas descends a la Pidcock down your chimney… Which is, of course, an option but not the correct one if you’re looking to shift up a performance gear in 2026.
That’s right, new PBs and lifelong memories wait for no one. Enjoy a (brief) period of R&R but then hop aboard your pride-and-joy safe in the knowledge that your off-season will be smarter and optimised thanks to what follows: knowing the physiological variables that impact your performance and how you can elevate them…
Bellows on two legs
“What’s the single most important metric for a recreational cyclist? It’s got to be VO2 max.” That’s Dr Garry Palmer, experienced exercise physiologist and head of human performance centre Sportstest, which is based in Cannock in the Midlands. “VO2 max is crucial for both performance and health. It’s eminently trainable and will really impact the outcome of your road cycling. Not only that, it’s also the number one indicator of health, well-being and longevity. In short, it’s essential.”
As many of you will know, VO2 max is a measure of aerobic fitness. Seen through a cycling lens, a high VO2 max is a sign that you can use huge swathes of oxygen during intense exercise. It’s impacted by myriad factors including training status, age, gender and body size.
“Weight is particularly important and you see why when you unpick the VO2 metric,” says Palmer. It’s expressed as ml/kg/min, which breaks down as millilitres of oxygen per kilogramme of bodyweight per minute. So, if you lose weight, your VO2 max is naturally higher and, in general, you can ride further and faster. “It’s like if you have two three-litre vehicles, but one is a lightweight supercar and the other a heavy van. You’ll drive much faster in the lighter car despite them having the same engine.”
Typical VO2 max scores for professional male cyclists sit between 70 and 85ml/kg/min with professional females around 60 to 75ml/kg/min. Greg LeMond famously registered around 92.5ml/kg/min. The highest-ever recorded in any sport for a male is Norwegian cyclist Oskar Svendsen’s 97.5ml/kg/min. For a female it’s 78.6ml/kg/min by American runner Joan Benoit. Good recreational cyclists possess VO2 max scores of over 50ml/kg/min, depending on gender, meaning the pros can process nearly twice the oxygen of a fit amateur, allowing them to sustain extreme power outputs for longer durations.
Greg LeMond has one of the highest recorded VO2 max scores recorded in professional cycling (Image: Getty)
Arguably more importantly than performance, studies reveal that a high VO2 max is also a strong predictor of cardiovascular health and longevity. Take 2004 research that revealed an 18% lower risk of coronary death with every one MET gain in VO2 max. MET stands for ‘metabolic equivalent’ and is equal to 3.5ml/kg/min. All in all, for the recreational cyclist, VO2 max is a key metric to focus on this winter.
Boost your VO2 max
A high VO2 max is a sign that you’ve laid a huge aerobic foundation, which will clearly pay dividends when riding for hours on end. But what’s the most proficient way to elevate yours? Ultimately, it comes down to stressing your cardiovascular system so it adapts to deliver and utilise more oxygen to fuel working muscles. That can be achieved in myriad ways but, for Palmer, you can’t ignore the basics: long endurance rides at a steady intensity.
“Yes, I’m talking relatively low-intensity zone 2 work,” he says. Zone 2 work, for the unfamiliar, is the not-so-secret weapon behind Tadej Pogačar’s rather crazy palmarès. The Slovenian became the poster boy for zone 2 riding after his former coach, Inigo San Millan, was almost evangelical of its importance in helping Pogačar to the top step of the podium. Again and again. He’s not the only one as WorldTour riders in both the men’s and women’s fields spend the majority of their training hours in zone 2, especially over the off-season. Palmer explains why they do and why you should.
“It’s down to building a strong aerobic base,” he says. “Many committed road cyclists might have a bit of a down phase after their final race of the season, whether that’s October off or into November, too. They’ll still be riding or exercising but not as structured. But that means riders have from at least December through to springtime where they can build a really big aerobic base, which is essential for every sportive no matter what your ability or experience.”
“Take the Marmotte,” adds Palmer. La Marmotte is an annual French one-dayer for amateurs that starts in Bourg d’Oisans and finishes atop Alpe d’Huez. It’s just under 180km and racks up over 5,000m climbing. Many of you will know that or raced it. But how many of you know it’s named after the large squirrel that inhabits the slopes of Alpe d’Huez. Back to Palmer. “I’ve always seen eight hours as a good, achievable time for many entrants, and I’ve always broken down the Marmotte into two hours for each of the four climbs [Col du Glandon, Col du Télégraphe, Col du Galibier and Alpe d’Huez], and to get anywhere near that you need a strong aerobic foundation. Zone two work, which is around 60 to 70% of maximum heart rate or around 65 to 75% of functional threshold of power [FTP), helps you achieve that.”
We’ll come back to how you should accurately find your zone 2 and other zones. For now, know that this inflated aerobic base is really an umbrella term for a host of physiological adaptations that are conducive to improved cycling. These include increasing the number and efficiency of mitochondria, the power furnaces in your cells; boosting capillaries branching around muscle fibres for better oxygen delivery; becoming a more proficient fat-burner, preserving precious glycogen for harder efforts; and cranking up stroke volume, meaning each pump of your heart sends out more blood than before your zone two work.
Building a good base allows you to come back to the next season raring to go (Image: SWpix)
“In short, the majority of your rides over the off-season should be zone 2,” says Palmer. “What scares me is when people knock on my door in April and go, “Gary, I’ve got L’Etape in three and months’ time and haven’t laid their aerobic base. Good luck!” Do that and you’ll improve, which will be fed back to you via hitting higher power outputs at the same heart rate. For instance, before your next training block, your heart rate might be 130bpm when sticking to 150 watts. As your fitness grows, you might hit 165 watts for that same 130bpm heart rate.
VO2 max followed by threshold
So, VO2 max is important to cycling performance. It’s something you should train and cultivate over the off-season. But, as Palmer explains, there is another metric that might not have equal billing for amateur riders but is definitely a worthy support act.
“I undertook my PhD in sport science in Cape Town, South Africa, in the mid-90s,” he says. “Professor Tim Noakes was one of the lecturers and he managed to attract a number of international runners for a study by Adele Weston examining fatigue resistance in African and Caucasian runners.
“Interestingly, their VO2 max scores were near identical but the Kenyan runners’ time to fatigue was around 20% longer than the Caucasians. They could hold a higher intensity of their VO2 max without fatiguing. Their lactate threshold, functional threshold, anaerobic threshold, ventilation threshold, whatever you call it, was higher.”
Your threshold, which we know as FTP, is the highest intensity you can sustain before lactate starts to accumulate faster than your body can clear it, raising the acidity of your blood and dropping power output. It’s all very well having a high VO2 max but if you can only harness a low percentage of it for harder sections of a parcours, you’ll lose out to a rider who might have a lower VO2 max than you but their threshold is much higher.
A strong aerobic base is vital to get the most out of your training (Image: SWpix)
Like VO2 max, it’s trainable, albeit shouldn’t be your priority right now. “If your goal race is mid-summer, we’re looking at around April time when we start focusing more on raising your threshold,” says Palmer. “That might mean rides with more climbs, for example.”
Threshold training is known by many names – sweet-spot, tempo, lactate threshold intervals… – but they achieve the same goal of lifting your body’s ability to clear out lactate and buffering capacity.
Sessions tend to be shorter and harder with rest periods in between. Examples include two 20-minute efforts at around 90 to 95% of FTP with five to 10 minutes’ rest in-between. Another is three 12-minute bursts at zone 4 with equal recovery. Or go for a sweet-spot session of 30 to 60 minutes at around 88 to 94% FTP.
This is just a snapshot. Nailing your intervals, the intensity, recovery and number is both an art and science – so much so that noted exercise physiologist and long-time collaborator with Visma-Lease a Bike, Bent Ronnestad has written a tome on that very subject, which is authoritative and in-depth.
Real-world reality
On paper, there’s a clear divide between off-season zone 2 work and pre-season threshold sessions. In practice, intensity can fluctuate wildly during every ride all- year-round, especially if you live somewhere hilly like Cornwall. That’s not such an issue in flat parts of the world – unless you’re one of the many who regularly take part in online racing via apps like Zwift or ROUVY. Zone 2 and beating one of your contemporaries from the other side of the world are incompatible. But don’t fret, says Palmer. Progress can be made, even if it doesn’t follow textbook dogma.
“The likes of Zwift are brilliant but avoid racing all the time. Do that and you just won’t build the aerobic base you need for a strong 2026. Still, once a week is fine. Just look to ensure around 70% of your off-season is zone 2. If you can do one to two hours of predominantly zone two work, two or three times a week, plus a long, easy- intensity ride at the weekend, Wednesday can easily be a Zwift night. That should work, but only if you’ve nailed your specific zones at the start of your next journey…”
Indoor training during the off-season can be a good way to gain fitness (Image: Wahoo)
