Fiction vs. Reality: Supercompensation

You have to loose fitness to gain power. Never heard of supercompensation? Well that’s why consistency is so important. Let me explain this. 

As you can see in the picture, supercompensation is – if you’re doing it right – a rising wave. After every hard training session you first loose fitness, then your body adapts, meaning the curve goes up and then, with the next training, the wave starts a little bit higher.
The rising part is equally important as the falling part. To make an adaption, you have to exhaust your body. Means you have to do a training session, that is a little bit too hard for you. If you go out riding, come back and don’t feel exhausted, your body don’t need to adapt.

But you also can’t ride out your lungs every time you’re out there. This would be too hard on your joints and muscles. Injury will follow here. For a constant growth in fitness, your supercompesation should look like this.

That’s reached by a training regeime with “fitness holder sessions.”  
You first do a hard training session, to get into the supercompensation, then – after recovery – you do a few easy ones. This moves you from plateau to plateau without too much risk for injury. 

So consistent training in variying intensity is key. If you don’t train often enough – every two or three days – then the curve will drop down, eliminating all the hard training that you did 😉

How often do you train?