Training notes
Sleep before intensity
A short night is not automatic. How you feel decides the hard session.
If you slept less and still feel good, and you want to do the work, that can be fine. Do the session.
If you slept less and you feel like crap — you wish you had slept longer, you want a nap — skip the hard session. Easy riding is still fine. The intervals can wait.
The rule
Go off how you feel, not the hour count.
- Short night, feel good, motivated: the hard session can stay.
- Short night, feel wrecked, want a nap: move the VO2, threshold, or race-pace work. Easy ride or day off.
- Do not add a second hard day later to make up for it.
When in doubt, ease off.
A short night can make the next hard session worse. It is not always that simple. Some days it holds. Some days it does not. That is why the feel call matters.
Hours are not the whole story
People have been told they slept well when the night was not that good. They felt better and thought better. The other way around too.
The watch number is not the whole call. How the night is read, and how you feel, matters.
What people get backwards
Forcing the quality session when you feel like garbage feels like the disciplined choice. It can also be how the work gets sloppy and the next day gets worse.
Skipping every short night, even when you feel fine, is the other miss. Hours alone do not make the call.
An easy ride does not throw the week away. A hard session on no sleep, when you already feel done, can.
What to do instead
If the hard work is off: keep the bike in the week if the legs want it. Spin. Easy. No targets.
The hard session moves to a day when sleep and feel are back. Not two hard days stacked to catch up.
Race morning is different
A bad night before an A-race is not the same as a Tuesday interval day. The race still happens. A training session can move.
Citations
- Chase JD, Roberson PA, Saunders MJ, Hargens TA, Womack CJ, Luden ND. One night of sleep restriction following heavy exercise impairs 3-km cycling time-trial performance in the morning. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2017;42(9):909–915.
- Dean B, Hartmann T, Wingfield G, Larsen P, Skein M. Sleep restriction between consecutive days of exercise impairs sprint and endurance cycling performance. J Sleep Res. 2023;32(5):e13857.
- Walsh NP, Halson SL, Sargent C, et al. Sleep and the athlete: narrative review and 2021 expert consensus recommendations. Br J Sports Med. 2021;55(7):356–368.
- Saw AE, Main LC, Gastin PB. Monitoring the athlete training response: subjective self-reported measures trump commonly used objective measures: a systematic review. Br J Sports Med. 2016;50(5):281–291.
- Draganich C, Erdal K. Placebo sleep affects cognitive functioning. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2014;40(3):857–864.
- Gavriloff D, Sheaves B, Juss A, Espie CA, Miller CB, Kyle SD. Sham sleep feedback delivered via actigraphy biases daytime symptom reports in people with insomnia: Implications for insomnia disorder and wearable devices. J Sleep Res. 2018;27(6):e12726.
Notes from training and coaching. Building VeloForge for serious riders making these calls with their own data. Product waitlist: join.veloforge.app.