Training camps: the week is only half of it

A week of riding somewhere warm is the most enjoyable training an amateur can do, and one of the most frequently wasted. The riding itself is rarely the problem — riders who go on camp tend to ride plenty. What goes wrong is the shape of the week, and what happens in the fortnight after it.

What a camp actually is

Mechanically, a training camp is a deliberate load spike: two or three weeks of normal training compressed into seven days. That is a legitimate and effective thing to do, and it is the same logic as block periodisation — concentrate the stimulus, then absorb it.

Which means the camp is only half the intervention. The other half is the recovery week that follows, and skipping it converts a productive spike into a deep hole. If you only take one thing from this article: book the easy week when you book the flights.

A sensible week

Note what is missing: there is no day where you attempt your longest ever ride on the back of four hard days. A camp that ends with everyone destroyed feels heroic and produces less fitness than one that ends with everyone still riding well.

How much volume is sensible

A reasonable rule is that a camp week can be roughly double your normal weekly hours — not triple, and not "whatever the group does". A rider doing eight hours a week can handle something in the region of sixteen across seven days. A rider doing four cannot suddenly handle twenty, however good the weather is.

The failure mode is social: mixed-ability groups where the strongest rider sets the week. If you are the one who needs less, take the shortcut, sit out day five, and be entirely unapologetic about it. Ramp rate covers what happens to riders who ignore this.

Four ways riders waste the week

Eating like it is part of the training

Five hours a day for six days is a very large energy requirement, and it arrives alongside disrupted routines, restaurant meals and unfamiliar food. Riders lose weight on camp and interpret it as a bonus; frequently it is a deficit that is also costing them the adaptation they travelled for.

Eat on the bike from hour one every day, eat properly at every meal, and treat the buffet as fuelling rather than indulgence. Fuelling a training camp covers the logistics, and low energy availability and REDs covers what a week of under-eating does on top of a week of over-riding.

Coming home

The week after is not optional and it is not a reward — it is the part where the training becomes fitness. Ride easily, sleep more than usual, and expect to feel flat for several days. Around day ten to fourteen, most riders find the legs have come back better than they left.

If you track load, the shape is unmistakable: fatigue spikes hard through the camp, then falls away while fitness settles higher than it started. Moveee will draw exactly that curve from your rides — watch your fitness and fatigue across the three weeks either side, and you will see precisely when the camp paid out. If the fatigue line never came down, you know why the next block went badly.

Before you go

Two practical notes. Sort the gearing before you fly, not after — alpine gradients punish a cassette chosen for home roads, and gearing for climbing has the arithmetic. And plan at least the first two days' routes in advance: a camp that starts with an hour of arguing over a map at a junction starts badly. Moveee's Route Engine will build routes from wherever you are staying, which is a better use of the first morning than improvising.