You're Allowed to Train Less. I Want You To.
As race season winds down, I want to make you a case for something that feels counterintuitive after months of racing: doing less, on purpose, is what makes next season better.
1. You're allowed to train less. I want you to.
What changes in the off-season is intensity and specificity, not whether there's structure at all. Fewer hours and a lighter load are great. They unlock the holidays, travel, family, and the freedom to add other things you love, whether that's yoga, skiing, gravel biking, or HYROX. But make sure your week still has a shape, and the sessions still have a purpose.
2. Here's what actually happens to your body when you back off
This is the part athletes get wrong most often, and it's worth understanding because it changes how you'll approach the next few months.
Not everything you built this season fades at the same rate. Your fitness is really two different layers stacked on top of each other, and they behave completely differently once you stop training as hard.
The fast-moving layer is biochemical. Plasma volume, stroke volume, and the enzymatic machinery inside your muscle cells respond to training load in days to weeks — and retreat just as fast. Research on highly trained athletes has found VO₂max can drop 6–20% within two to four weeks of complete cessation (Mujika & Padilla, 2000a, 2000b), and cardiac MRI has shown measurable left ventricular mass regression after just one month of detraining (Swoboda et al., 2019).
The slow-moving layer is structural. Capillary density, heart chamber geometry, and the underlying balance of muscle fiber types were built over months and years, and don’t unwind on the same clock — full normalization of cardiac remodeling may not occur even after years away from the sport (Petek et al., 2022), and the deeper fiber-type population balance is a much slower, more durable adaptation than short-term subtype shuffling (Plotkin et al., 2021).
Here's the practical version: an off-season of four to twelve weeks will cost you some real cardiovascular fitness, and it should — that's the point. It will not meaningfully erase the capillary bed, the cardiac remodeling, or the muscle fiber profile you spent years building. Those come back fast, and they're not what's actually at stake in your off-season.
Think about what happens if you stop drinking coffee for a couple of weeks and then have a single cup — the effect is way bigger than it used to be, because your system adapted to the absence and is now more sensitive to the input. Training works the same way: the same session that used to feel routine can produce an outsized response, good and bad, once you’ve backed off for a while. The upside is that retraining is efficient — a case study found most physiological markers not only recovered after 12 weeks of retraining but some exceeded baseline (Zanou et al., 2024). The body doesn’t relearn from scratch. But the first few weeks back still deserve real respect, not a hero week.
3. Stop chasing fitness.
For these few months, we don't train to get faster, we train to set up next season. The paradox is that athletes who do this will end up faster anyway. And usually by more than the ones who spent the off-season chasing fitness in the classic sense.
4. Don't spend three months at one intensity.
The old idea of off-season as endless Z2 mileage is outdated, and it will make you slower. There's some easy aerobic work in a good off-season, of course. But the body thrives on variety, and if the only thing you do between October and February is ride and run easy, you'll arrive at next season with a lower ceiling than you have today. Continue to do short, sharp, high-end work across disciplines.
In the off-season, bike and swim go genuinely polarized — hard days are hard, easy days are easy, with very little time spent in the in-between tempo zone. Running is the exception: mostly easy, with hill work and some tempo layered in, since running carries more injury risk and doesn’t need the same top-end stress to get the benefit.
The easy volume builds your aerobic foundation. The hard efforts raise your anaerobic ceiling — the top end you can’t build once you’re deep into race-specific training. Then the model flips: the build phase shifts to a traditional pyramidal distribution, spending more time at moderate-to-threshold intensities to raise power, pace, and time to exhaustion. The off-season raises the ceiling. The build phase teaches you to live closer to it for longer.
5. Make strength non-negotiable.
This is the one I will push hard. Two sessions a week, thirty to forty minutes, so it's short enough for you to be consistent and long enough to be effective. Lift heavy too — endurance athletes default to light weights and high reps. Off-season is time to build strength and power. Build it in properly over these months so it will still be there next race season when you need it.
6. Pick one weakness and go after it.
Not three. One. This is the stretch of the year where you're fresh enough and don't have race training demands to actually change something rather than manage it.
This is where our Athlete Archetype Assessment (A3) earns its keep. Early off-season, before training load ramps back up, is the ideal window to run it: a full physiological workup across swim, bike, and run that classifies where you sit from Diesel to Balanced to Dragster in each discipline and turns that into a clear picture of your strengths and limiters. Done well, it catches the glaring issues before you build a winter of training around the wrong problem — a “weak bike” that’s actually an aerobic ceiling, a run that’s threshold-limited rather than speed-limited, a swim that’s technique-limited rather than fitness-limited.
The plan written for you. Coach support through the winter. A seat on coaching calls like next week’s.
Schedule a Coach Consultation One on One CoachingCoach Ted Geddis, USAT Elite Level 3 · Catalyst Endurance Coaching · catalystendurance.com
References
1. Mujika I, Padilla S. Detraining: Loss of Training-Induced Physiological and Performance Adaptations. Part I. Sports Med. 2000;30(2):79-87.
2. Mujika I, Padilla S. Detraining: Loss of Training-Induced Physiological and Performance Adaptations. Part II. Sports Med. 2000;30(3):145-154.
3. Petek BJ, Groezinger EY, Pedlar CR, Baggish AL. Cardiac effects of detraining in athletes: a narrative review. Ann Phys Rehabil Med. 2022;65(4):101581.
4. Swoboda PP, et al. Regression of Left Ventricular Mass in Athletes Undergoing Complete Detraining Is Mediated by Decrease in Intracellular but Not Extracellular Compartments. Circ Cardiovasc Imaging. 2019;12(9):e009417.
5. Zanou N, et al. Cardiovascular and muscular plasticity in an endurance-master athlete following 12 weeks of detraining and retraining: a case study. JCSM Commun. 2024.
6. Plotkin DL, Roberts MD, Haun CT, Schoenfeld BJ. Muscle Fiber Type Transitions with Exercise Training: Shifting Perspectives. Sports. 2021;9(9):127.
