Work out once a week.
I deal with biomechanical visits since 2015 and more than 1000 cyclists have passed by ours Bikeitalia LAB in Monza. Many of them were what are defined in the jargon of “weekend warriors”, that is, people who carry out a long session of physical activity a week, without a codified training plan. This approach to the bike, often determined more by work or family needs than by a real methodology, what effects does it have on the physical fitness of the cyclist who applies it? Let’s find out what the science says.
Photograph of the weekend warrior
A single long bike ride, often at the weekend, more frequently on Sundays, usually in the company of 2-3 friends who also ride once a week. This is the photograph of the weekend warrior, a cyclist who uses the bike once a week with different goals. During the biomechanical visits that we carry out in the Bikeitalia LAB in Monza, I happen to meet cyclists who have competitive goals despite being able to train once a week or who use that single bike ride as a relief valve from work stress or as a method for maintenance. of your health.
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Usually the Sunday outing of the weekend warrior is always very similar in terms of kilometers traveled and accumulated altitude differences. The weekend warrior, by definition, does not alter the volume and intensity of his training much.
But what effects does being a weekend warrior have on our health, fitness and competitive potential?
Training once a week: a longitudinal study
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In the scientific field, a longitudinal study is the study that goes to see the effects that a given training has on the participating subjects over a very long time. In this way it is possible to determine the long-term effects and chronic adaptations induced by a certain type of training. And Dutch researchers went to evaluate the long-term effects of just one workout per week. In the studio “Long-term time-course of strength adaptation to minimal dose resistance training: Retrospective longitudinal growth modelling of a large cohort through training records” (SportRxIv, 2021), 14,690 subjects were monitored for 6.8 years. These subjects practiced a type of training called Fit 20: resistance training exercises were performed in one session of 20 minutes a week such as presses, lat machines, bench presses and exercises for the adductor muscles. The 6 exercises were carried out in low repetitions performed very slowly, causing a momentary muscle failure.
By manipulating the data it was seen that in the first year of training, even training only once a week produces a very high increase in muscle strength (between 30 and 50%), but then produces a stall in subsequent years. This does not mean that the subjects lost the physical form gained in the first year but that they struggled to improve it. In essence they remained stable, with small annual increases in strength gain.
Training once a week: tips for the weekend warrior
Researchers in the cited study determined that exercising once a week can be defined as the “minimum effective dose” for the maintenance of health, reducing the impact of diseases such as sarcopenia (which is the progressive reduction of muscle strength, which we all suffer from after the age of 30).
Training once a week for the weekend warrior means applying a “minimum effective dose” to maintain health. The practice of the bike, even if only once every seven days, allows to keep the cardiovascular and muscular system efficient. However, there are some things that need to be underlined and which we must take into account if we really want to optimize the fact of training once a week:
- Consistency is the key: among the 14,690 subjects evaluated in the study, those who had managed, in 6.8 years of practice, to maintain high strength gains, were those who had remained constant over time. The body is structured according to the function we make it do and it is only with the constancy and continuity of training that the adaptations caused by the one bike ride per week become structural and chronic. We can be weekend warriors and still get results in terms of physical health but we must be every week, constantly, for a long time (years, to be honest), otherwise our body will lose the adaptations gained and we will always be stung and head;
- Varying your training is essential: what emerges from the study is that untrained subjects who train once a week tend to have very sudden gains in physical fitness in the first year, and then “stall” and no longer progressively improve. This happens because if we always subject the body to the same physical load, it will end up entering what Tudor Bompa defined as “A plateau of stagnant fitness”, from which it is difficult to get out. If I always ride the same ride every Sunday, without ever changing, I’m just keeping the adaptations but I’m not really improving. For this reason it is important, even if you train only once a week, to vary the volume (ie the duration or the length of the ride) and the intensity (the sustained speed or the accumulated difference in height);
- What is good for health is not necessarily good for performance: as he points out Alex Hutchinson, who first evaluated this study, applying a minimal effective dose of cycling (or strength) training is good for health but not the right strategy if we want to compete. Because training to compete requires a different approach, which is made up of load variations and denser training density than just training once a week. If we want to stay healthy, being a weekend warrior is just fine but if we want to train for performance, it is good to turn to a preparer to carry out tests and define their goals and follow a structured plan
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