A made a post a few days back titled “How much more do you need to ride?” and I wanted to confirm something. After talking with a friend of mine about it I realized that I may not have explained my viewpoint very well.

I LOVE to ride – I pretty much live for it. If you want to ride more then fine, but if you are talking about “training” then there may be a point of diminishing returns. You have to ride your bike to be good at riding your bike but when does adding another hour of riding not make you better than an hour in the gym would?

If you currently ride 5-6 hours a week and do no strength, power, mobility or technical skills training, would adding another hour of riding make you better than spending an hour working on any of the other factors you are ignoring?

I am not saying that you shouldn’t ride more than 5-6 hours a week, I am saying that if you are at all worried about training to be a better rider then you should make sure that you are not ignoring everything else simply to ride more.

Riding is a very important training tool for us – it  is the most important one. However, like I said in the previous post it is a limited training tool and at a certain point it stops paying the returns on extra time that you put in. At that point you need to start adding in other components to see dramatic improvements.

Hope this makes sense – I would never tell you not to ride more if you simply want to ride more. I am just trying to get people to look at training from a different perspective where adding in more riding doesn’t always lead to the best performance gains on the trail.

-James Wilson-