HR cieling

velotrek said:

My legs have been up and down throughout this entire year. They seem strong now, but recently I've not been able to raise my heartrate above 169 and my max is 186. I'm not training more hours than normal, and am eating and sleeping normally. What could this be an indication of?

If your not sick or have some other unforseen problem, then the most likely cause is over training. Do you do any recovery riding. Recovery riding would be several days to a week of riding with a self imposed HR ceiling of 60-65% max. I would start with a good solid week of this first and then ease back and see what happens. Depending on how deeply overtrained you are it could take several weeks or more of this to get back to where your HR responds at the upper limit.

During periodization training this is a key sign that its time for some recovery riding. If your just over reaching and not over training then the results of the recovery riding are that you come back stronger with the full benefits of the hard work you put into training.

Most people think that you need 1 week in 4 of recovery riding during periodization training to recover and get the benefit of your training.

Thanks, this is what I suspected. I've been looking through the Joel Friel book for some confirmation of this, but haven't seen it yet.