How to Use Seasons for Year-Round Cycling Fitness
Cycling seasons are unique to every athlete. With Seasons, you can analyze your power PRs over custom time periods. Whether you want to compare growth over multiple years or multiple disciplines with one year, get more personal records and prove your training is working with Seasons.
For more on Performance Analytics check out our Ride Analysis YouTube Playlist.
What Are Seasons?
Tracking your personal power records over multiple timeframes provides a wealth of information that will make you a faster cyclist. Seasons allow you to compare PRs over any timeframe that you choose. You can create custom cycling seasons to focus on a specific discipline, a particular training phase, or even for a time of illness or time off the bike. Additionally, you can examine all of your past rides by importing ride data with Ride Sync.
We designed a PR chart to provide applicable data. The problem with most PR charts is that they don’t give you an accurate comparison. Because fitness is cyclical, you will be more fit at the end of a season than when it began. Additionally, calendar years don’t line up with cycling seasons. Custom Seasons offer a helpful way to measure PRs over any timeframe you wish. You can go a step further by using SeasonMatch to compare the progress in one season to the exact same point in another.
How do I Create Seasons
You can quickly add your seasons by clicking on “Manage Seasons” on the Personal Record page.
Then, create a name for your season, choose a start and stop date, and select “Save Season.”
Comparing Seasons
You can now use your season as part of the Personal Records chart to help analyze and compare your training progress. Let’s look at some examples.
2019 MTB & 2017 MTB
In this example, we are comparing two different MTB seasons and in different parts of a calendar year. The 2019 MTB season was from February to August, while the 2017 MTB season was from April to September. From the PR chart, we can see that the athlete has a 26w increase for 2:38.
2018/19 Road & 2017/18 Cyclocross
Here, we’re taking a look at a cyclocross season (August 2017 to January 2018) and an overlapping road season (December 2018 to June 2019). Looking at the data, you can see the transition in fitness from one discipline to another. They have dropped in short power, but have an increase in wattage in the 30-45 minute range.
2018/19 Road & 2017/18 Cyclocross with SeasonMatch
These are the same seasons as the example above, but with SeasonMatch selected. We are comparing the exact same point in each season; 27 weeks. SeasonMatch compares where you are in your most current season to the same point in a previous Season.
More Ways to Use Seasons
We asked our athletes how they use Seasons. Here are a few ways they use Seasons to compare:
- Different bikes
- Changes in bike fits
- Power meters
- The same event over multiple years by creating a one day season
- Fitness during or after vacation, illness, or a stressful time in life.
To learn more about PRs, check out Why You Should Measure Your Power PRs.