The cycling year: how to plan twelve months from off-season to peak

A training year is not a straight line from unfit to fit. Fitness built in one way plateaus, fatigue accumulates, life intervenes, and the event you care about falls on one weekend, not spread evenly across fifty-two. Periodisation is the practice of dividing the year into phases with different jobs so that the pieces arrive in the right order and you are at your best when it matters. The traditional model is simple enough to draw on a napkin, has decent evidence behind its main pieces, and a real critique behind it too. This post walks through a twelve-month plan for a rider with one main goal, says what each phase is for, and is honest about where the neat diagram and the messy reality diverge.

The model in one paragraph

Classical periodisation, as reviewed by Issurin, divides the year into a preparatory period (build general capacity), a competitive period (convert it to race-specific form and race), and a transition period (rest and recover). Cyclists usually call these base, build, race or peak, and off-season, and slice them into blocks of a few weeks. The logic is that different qualities respond to different training and interfere with each other if you chase them all at once, so you sequence them: a large aerobic foundation first, higher intensity on top of it, then a sharpening and a taper into the goal. The transition afterward lets the body and the head recover before the cycle repeats.

The honest caveat before the plan

Kiely's critique of periodisation is worth reading before you commit to a spreadsheet. He points out that the classical model grew out of Eastern European coaching practice for athletes with few competitions a year, that its neat phase boundaries have little direct experimental support, and that the same athlete responds differently to the same training block in different years depending on sleep, stress, illness and everything else. His constructive conclusion is the one to keep: periodisation should be a framework you adjust in response to how the athlete is actually responding, not a calendar you obey. Hold the plan below loosely. The phases are a good default; the dates are a guess you revise.

Month by month, for a rider with a summer goal

Assume a target event in late June or early July, and a rider with six to ten hours a week. The block lengths below are our estimates for that rider, not laboratory prescriptions; a rider with more or less time compresses or stretches them.

October to November: transition

Two to six weeks of reduced, unstructured riding. Not zero: the detraining literature is clear that a complete stop costs aerobic fitness quickly, and a Norwegian study of well-trained cyclists found that one short high-intensity session a week through the off-season preserved performance that a low-intensity-only group lost. So ride when you feel like it, do something else, and keep one short sharp session in the week. This is also when to start strength work if you plan to do it, because it is the phase where being sore does not cost you a key session. We cover the length question in the off-season: how long to rest.

December to February: base

Roughly twelve weeks. The job is to build the aerobic engine: volume at low intensity, with a small amount of hard work to keep the top end alive. Seiler's review of intensity distribution in successful endurance athletes found a remarkably consistent pattern: around 80 per cent of sessions easy, around 20 per cent hard, with very little in between. The base period is where the 80 comes from. Long steady rides, frequency, and one interval session a week. Strength training fits here too; the review by Rønnestad and Mujika found that heavy strength work added to endurance training improved cycling economy and performance, and the base is when it interferes least with riding.

What you are changing, physiologically, is covered in base, build, peak: what each phase changes. What matters here is that base is boring by design and cannot be shortcut. A rider who replaces it with intervals will feel fast in February and stall in May. For more on the sessions themselves, see base miles.

March to May: build

Roughly twelve weeks. Volume holds or drops slightly, intensity rises, and the hard sessions become specific to the event: threshold work for a long climb, VO₂max intervals for a hilly road race, longer sweet-spot for a gran fondo. The proportion of hard sessions can rise toward the 20 per cent mark and briefly beyond it in a concentrated block. The Norwegian group compared ways of distributing high-intensity sessions across a twelve-week period and found that concentrating them into a heavy block, then a lighter period, produced similar gains to spreading them evenly, so either structure works; what did not work in their data was doing too much for too long. Recovery weeks every third or fourth week are where most of the adaptation from the build actually shows up.

Build is also where your weekly load, tracked as fitness and fatigue, should be climbing steadily. The Fitness & Form chart in Moveee shows whether that is happening or whether you are just accumulating fatigue; the principles are in fitness, fatigue and form explained.

Late May to June: peak and taper

Three to six weeks. The last hard training, then the taper. The meta-analysis by Bosquet and colleagues is the reference here: across studies in endurance sports, the best results came from cutting volume by around 40 to 60 per cent over about two weeks while keeping intensity and frequency, and the average performance gain was about three per cent. Three per cent is not dramatic; it is the difference between arriving fresh and arriving flat. The mistake most amateurs make is to keep training hard until the last week and then stop entirely, which is the wrong shape: intensity is what you keep, volume is what you cut. Our taper post goes through the last fourteen days.

Tønnessen and colleagues' analysis of the year before an Olympic gold in an endurance sport shows what this looks like at the top: training volume peaked in the general preparation period, fell through the competitive phase, and the athletes reached their best form after a period of reduced volume and maintained intensity. Their year had the same shape as the napkin drawing.

July to September: race, recover, second goal

After the main event, two options. If there is a second target within about eight weeks, a short recovery, a compressed build of three to four weeks and a second taper can produce a second peak; we discuss how in how to peak twice in one season. If not, this is the time for riding that is not training: long days, trips, group rides, no power target. Fitness lasts for weeks with light riding and it is difficult to hold a peak for more than a few weeks anyway. Then the transition period arrives, and the year turns over.

The year at a glance

The month labels assume a summer goal in the northern hemisphere. Shift them for a spring sportive or an autumn hill climb; the sequence is what matters, not the calendar.

Where this goes wrong

• Too many goals. One main event, perhaps two, and everything else is training. Riders who treat every weekend ride as a target never build.
• Skipping base because it is dull. The most common amateur error. The build has nothing to build on.
• Building continuously. Fitness rises in steps: three weeks up, one week down. A plan without recovery weeks is a plan for a mid-April cold.
• Obeying the calendar when the body disagrees. Kiely's point. If a build week lands on a week of bad sleep and a work crisis, it is a recovery week now, and the plan moves.
• Tapering by stopping. Keep intensity, cut volume.

Doing this in Moveee

The plan wizard builds this structure from a target date, your weekly hours, the days you can train and any dates you cannot. Free plans are fixed blocks that follow the sequence above; the adaptive plan, which is a Pro feature with a 14-day trial when you build your first plan, re-tunes after each ride syncs, easing the next hard day if you overreached. That is the Kiely correction built in: the framework stays, the dates move with you. For riders who prefer other structures, we have written about block periodisation and reverse periodisation, both of which fit inside the same year.