Block periodisation: one signal at a time

Conventional training plans spread the work out: a threshold session on Tuesday, a VO2max session on Thursday, a long ride at the weekend, every week for months. It is comfortable, it is easy to write, and for a rider in their first couple of years it works perfectly well.

Block periodisation does the opposite. It concentrates one kind of work into a short, intense block, then backs right off and lets the adaptation land. It is a sharper tool with a narrower handle, and it is genuinely better than a mixed week for some riders and genuinely worse for others.

The idea: one signal at a time

The argument for concentration is that a mixed week sends your body several conflicting instructions. Tuesday says "get better at clearing lactate", Thursday says "raise your oxygen ceiling", Sunday says "get more efficient at low intensity". Each signal arrives, does a little, and is interrupted by the next.

A block sends one instruction, loudly, for long enough that the body has no choice but to respond — then goes quiet so it can. You get fewer adaptations at once, but the ones you get are larger.

A three-week VO2max block

Two details decide whether this works. The first is that the easy riding in week one must be genuinely easy — if you sneak tempo into the recovery rides, you have not concentrated anything, you have simply had a very hard week. The second is that week two is not optional. Riders who feel flat after the block and respond by pushing through it get the cost without the benefit.

Why it feels like it is going wrong

During a concentration block, performance usually drops. By session four your power targets are a struggle and your legs feel dead. That is expected: you are accumulating fatigue faster than you can clear it, deliberately, and the payoff arrives a week later.

This is also why block training requires more self-honesty than a normal plan. The signal that a block is working and the signal that you are digging yourself into a hole look identical from the inside. What separates them is what you do next — and overtraining vs overreaching is the article to read before you start, not after.

Who it is wrong for

Where it fits for a time-crunched rider

The strongest practical case for block training is not elite. It is the rider with an unpredictable life, who can find one exceptional week — a quiet fortnight at work, a week off, a training camp — but cannot promise two hard sessions every single week for four months.

For that rider a block is a way of turning an unusual week into real fitness rather than just a lot of riding. Do the concentration when the calendar allows, absorb it properly, and accept that the weeks either side are maintenance. That is a more honest plan than one that assumes a consistency you do not have — and a training plan around a full-time job covers the rest of that problem.

Watching a block in the numbers

A concentration block produces a very distinctive shape in your load metrics: fatigue spikes hard, form goes deeply negative, and then both recover while fitness sits higher than it started. If you have never seen that shape, it is worth watching, because it makes the logic of the whole approach obvious at a glance — fitness, fatigue and form explained is the primer, and ramp rate: how fast to build covers how steep is too steep.

Moveee tracks that curve from every ride you upload, so you can see whether week two actually brought your fatigue down before week three started asking for more. Have a look at yours — and if your last "recovery week" left fatigue flat, you have found the reason the last block did not deliver.