Rowe & King

01/09/2026

This is the least you can do and still call it training. 🗓️

Not a maintenance plan in the apologetic sense. A deliberately minimal week, built to hold what you have through to your last event of the year without asking for the summer's hours.

Two sessions carry it. One at threshold, one above it. Everything else on the card is optional and should be treated that way - if the Saturday endurance ride gets cut to ninety minutes because the weather turned, cut it. If it disappears entirely for a fortnight, you will survive that too.

What you cannot do is soften the two. Houmard's 1991 review of reduced training in endurance athletes found performance held through volume reductions of 60 to 90% across one to three weeks, provided training frequency stayed roughly intact and, critically, intensity was left untouched. Cut the intensity instead and the same volume buys you nothing.

Most riders do precisely the opposite in September. They keep riding the same length of time and quietly stop going hard, then wonder why October feels flat.

Save the card. Run it until your last event.

31/08/2026

Nobody decides to lose their fitness, they just stop deciding to keep it.

September does something strange to riders. The target has been and gone, the mornings are darker, and nothing formally ends - you simply find that three weeks have passed and you've ridden twice.

Here is what those three weeks cost. Coyle and colleagues (1984) followed trained endurance athletes through complete detraining and measured VO₂max down 7% at three weeks, settling 16% below baseline by eight. That is the headline. The mechanism is the more useful part.

What goes first is not the engine. Stroke volume fell to untrained levels within weeks, and separate work puts blood volume down 9 to 12% inside a month. But capillary density never declined at all, and the oxidative enzymes in the muscle were still 50% above untrained after twelve weeks. You lose the delivery system, not the machinery it feeds — and the delivery system is the half that intensity defends.

Which is the good news. Holding form through the back end of a season does not require the summer's volume. It requires that the hard sessions stay hard.

Swipe for the numbers. Tomorrow: the week that holds it together.

30/08/2026

Carbohydrate isn't a reward for training hard. It's the reason you can. 🥖

There's a habit of mind we meet often, particularly in riders who came to cycling to lose weight: food as something to be earned. Ride well, and you've bought your dinner. Ride badly, and you haven't. It feels disciplined. It's the fastest way we know to stall a season.

Fuel isn't the prize at the end of the work. It's the thing that makes the work possible in the first place - and then makes it stick. Adaptation is an expensive process. Repairing muscle, restocking glycogen, holding hormones and immune function steady all cost energy, and the body pays for them only if the energy is there. Take it away and training stops being a stimulus and starts being a debt.

Anne Loucks' work on energy availability put a number on it: drop below roughly 30 kilocalories per kilogram of fat-free mass a day and the body starts economising - on bone, on hormones, on the very adaptations you're training for. You don't feel it as hunger. You feel it as a flat third interval, a cold you can't shake, and a power curve going the wrong way.

Eat for the rider you're becoming.

29/08/2026

This is what a hard training day should actually look like. 🥣

Not a diet. A day. Most riders can tell you their interval targets to the watt but have never once planned the twelve hours of eating around them - which is odd, because that's the half of the equation they control completely.

The session here is a standard threshold day: 2 x 20 minutes, roughly ninety minutes door to door. The fuelling isn't complicated. A carbohydrate-led breakfast two to three hours out so you start with a full tank. Something in the pocket if you're going past ninety minutes. Protein and carbohydrate within the hour afterwards, then a normal evening meal that doesn't pretend the session never happened.

Louise Burke's intake guidelines put a rider training one to three hours a day at roughly 6–10g of carbohydrate per kilogram of bodyweight across the day. For a 75kg rider that's 450–750g. Very few amateurs are anywhere near the top of that range on their hardest days, and it shows in the third interval.

Save this card and run it on your next quality session. Then compare how the last twenty minutes feel.

28/08/2026

Most riders aren't under-trained. They're under-fuelled. 🍞

We see it constantly. A rider comes to us frustrated that their intervals have gone flat, convinced they need a harder programme. Nine times out of ten the training is fine. The fuelling underneath it isn't.

Here's the physiology. Your muscles store roughly 400–500g of glycogen — around two hours of hard riding, and no more than that. Every quality session draws that tank down. If you don't refill it, the next session starts from a deficit, and the one after that starts lower still. Power doesn't collapse, it quietly erodes. Most riders blame form, or age, or motivation.

The fix isn't eating more, all the time. It's eating in proportion to the day in front of you. Impey, Morton and colleagues (2018) called this "fuel for the work required" — carbohydrate matched to the demands of that session, not to a fixed daily habit. A three-hour endurance ride and a rest day are not the same nutritional problem, and treating them the same is why so many riders are both over-fed on Tuesday and under-fed on Saturday.

Swipe through for how the day should look, then send this to the rider who trains hard and eats like they don't.

27/08/2026

You don't lose strength by lifting less. You lose it by lifting nothing. 💪

There's a fear that keeps riders lifting hard right through the summer: the sense that if they ease off, everything they built over winter will slip away. It's an understandable worry, and it's backwards. Strength is remarkably durable once it's built - what it needs to survive isn't volume, it's a signal. Take that signal away completely and the adaptation fades. Keep sending it, even lightly, and it stays.

That's the whole logic of in-season maintenance. Rønnestad, Hansen and Raastad found that a single heavy session a week was enough to preserve strength and late-ride power across a full competitive season, while stopping altogether undid it. The choice was never lift hard or don't lift. It was keep the thread, or cut it.

So through the racing months, don't grind. Don't quit either. Send the signal, once a week, and let the legs stay strong.

26/08/2026

One session a week. That's all it takes to keep it. 💪

The mistake most riders make once racing starts isn't lifting too much - it's stopping altogether. The winter block goes in, the events arrive, the gym slips off the calendar, and by August the strength you worked for has quietly drained away. It doesn't have to.

This is the maintenance session: heavy enough to hold the adaptation, brief enough to leave no mark on your riding. Fewer sets than your off-season work, the same load, plenty left in reserve. You're not chasing new gains here - you're paying a small weekly premium to keep the ones you already have.

Rønnestad, Hansen and Raastad (2010) tested exactly this in competitive cyclists. One heavy session a week through the racing season preserved their strength and their power late in a long ride, while the group that stopped lifting lost both. One day. That's the price of keeping what winter gave you.

Do it on an easy day, well away from your key sessions. Save this one for the season.

25/08/2026

The gym work that made you strong in January will slow you down in July...

Strength training isn't one block you complete and forget. It's a thread that runs through the whole season, and the dose has to change as the racing arrives. Get the timing wrong and you either arrive at your target event carrying gym fatigue, or you spend the summer quietly leaking the strength you built over winter.

Here's the shape of it. In the off-season you build - a hypertrophy phase to add contractile tissue, then a heavier max-strength phase to teach your nervous system to use it. As racing approaches, you stop trying to gain and start trying to keep, dropping to a single heavy, low-volume session a week. In the days before an A event, a little sharp, explosive work primes the nervous system without draining the legs. Then, close to the event, you put the bar down entirely.

Rønnestad, Hansen and Raastad (2010) showed that a single weekly maintenance session preserved strength and late-ride power across a competitive season - while riders who stopped lifting altogether lost the adaptation within weeks.

Swipe through for the season-long map, then save it for your calendar.

13/07/2026

09/07/2026

FTP is the most overrated number in cycling.

Strong words. Here's the science.

FTP is a single point on your power-duration curve. Useful - but it tells you nothing about what happens either side of it. Critical Power (CP) and W′ describe the whole curve: CP is your sustainable ceiling, W′ is the finite work you can spend above it.

That's why two riders with identical FTPs can race completely differently - the one with the bigger W′ can more easily close gaps, follow critical attacks and win the sprint.

The honest caveat: FTP is still a brilliant practical anchor for pacing and everyday training. We're not binning it - we're saying it's incomplete. Know your CP and W′ too.

Save this and rethink your numbers.

Let us know what you think?