YOUR MTB SEASON IN REVIEW: HOW TO ENJOY YOUR OFF-SEASON AND COME BACK BETTER NEXT YEAR
The riding season is winding down.
That doesn’t mean you have to stop riding.
Some of us will keep riding all winter. Some will get out whenever the trails and weather cooperate. Others will happily put the mountain bike away for a few months and go skiing, running, climbing or doing something completely different.
All of those are perfectly reasonable ways to spend an off-season.
Because this isn’t supposed to be your punishment for everything you weren’t good enough at this year.
It’s the off-season.
Enjoy it.
Ride when the riding is good.
Go skiing.
Do another sport.
Spend a Saturday doing something that doesn’t appear anywhere in TrainingPeaks.
But there’s also a pretty great opportunity sitting in front of you.
For most of us, riding volume naturally drops through the fall and winter. That frees up some time and recovery capacity to work on things that are harder to develop when we’re trying to ride as much as possible.
And whatever you decide to do this winter, there’s probably one thing we all have in common:
When the good riding comes back next year, we’d like to be better.
Stronger.
Fitter.
More durable.
Less bothered by that back/knee/shoulder that’s been nagging us.
Better able to handle big days.
Ready for that race, trip or riding goal that’s been sitting in the back of our minds.
So rather than filling the winter with random workouts, let’s use the season you’ve just finished to figure out what might actually move the needle.
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YOUR SEASON JUST GAVE YOU A LOT OF INFORMATION
Before deciding what to train this winter, think about what actually happened on your bike this year.
Not what your Garmin says your VO2 max is.
Not what your friend thinks you should train.
And not whatever fitness quality Instagram has decided mountain bikers desperately need this month.
What actually limited your riding?
Think about the rides that mattered.
What happened when the climb went on for 20 minutes?
Could you put in another hard effort immediately after the last one?
Were you still riding well three hours into a big day?
What happened after your fourth or fifth descent?
What hurt?
Where did your friends drop you?
Which trails or rides did you avoid?
And what started falling apart when you got tired?
You’ve just spent an entire season collecting useful information.
Let’s use it.
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YOUR SEASON REVIEW
Take a few minutes and answer these honestly.
1. What was your biggest riding win this year?
Maybe you completed your first race.
Rode your biggest day ever.
Cleaned a trail you’ve struggled with for years.
Kept up with a faster group.
Got through an entire season without the back pain that used to stop you.
Don’t skip this question.
Your winter doesn’t only need to be about fixing problems.
Knowing what worked is useful too.
2. What frustrated you most?
Think about those moments when you thought:
“I wish I was better at this.”
What was happening?
Don’t just write fitness.
Try to identify the situation.
3. Where did you most often lose performance?
Was it:
* short, steep climbs?
* long sustained climbs?
* repeated hard efforts?
* long rides?
* technical climbing?
* rough descents?
* bike-park laps?
* consecutive riding days?
If climbing was the problem, dig a little deeper.
Maybe you could punch up short, steep climbs but couldn’t maintain a decent pace for 20 minutes.
Maybe you were good on the first climb but couldn’t repeat those efforts all day.
Maybe your climbing was fine for the first couple of hours before disappearing later in the ride.
Those aren’t necessarily the same problem.
4. What changed when you got tired?
Could you still produce power?
Could you maintain your climbing pace?
Could you still stand in a strong position on the bike?
Were you braking more?
Did your cornering deteriorate?
Did your back start hurting?
Could you still make good decisions on technical terrain?
Being capable of doing something fresh and being able to keep doing it after three hours of riding are very different things.
5. Did pain or injury change how much you rode?
Not simply:
“Did anything hurt?”
Did it actually change your behaviour?
Did you ride less?
Avoid certain trails?
Stop strength training?
Reduce your climbing?
Take extra recovery days?
Change how you moved on the bike?
If an injury repeatedly dictated what you could do, improving your capacity to tolerate riding may deserve a significant place in your winter.
6. What did you avoid because you didn’t feel prepared for it?
A huge ride?
An Enduro race?
Bike-park days?
A technical trail?
Three days of riding with your friends?
Sometimes the things we didn’t do tell us more than the rides we completed.
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NOW: WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM NEXT SEASON?
Reviewing last season tells us where you’ve been.
Now we need to know where you’re going.
What would make next season a great one?
Maybe you want to race.
Maybe you’ve got a massive trip planned.
Maybe you want to comfortably ride 1,500-metre days.
Maybe you want to keep up with a particular group.
Maybe you’re 55 and your goal is simply to keep doing this ridiculous sport for as long as possible.
Write it down.
My big riding goal for next season is:
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I want to be ready for it by:
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Then ask:
What does that goal require me to be good at?
Because the thing that frustrated you most this year isn’t automatically the thing that deserves the most attention this winter.
We’re trying to connect where you are now with where you want to go.
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NOW BUILD AN OFF-SEASON YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO DO
This is where I think a lot of winter plans go wrong.
Mountain bikers suddenly become full-time gym athletes in November.
Or decide they’re going to ride the indoor trainer six days a week.
That might work for some people.
But you don’t get bonus points for making your winter miserable.
Ask yourself:
What do I WANT to do this winter?
Do you want to keep mountain biking?
Great.
Ride.
Winter riding might not provide the same volume or consistency as summer riding, but it can absolutely remain part of your week.
Do you want to ski?
Go skiing.
Ski tour?
Nordic ski?
Run?
Climb?
Play hockey?
Do CrossFit?
Great.
Your winter training plan needs to acknowledge that you are a human being with interests other than optimizing your mountain-bike performance.
And those activities aren’t invisible.
They create training stimulus and fatigue.
Three Nordic ski sessions per week are contributing a significant amount of aerobic work.
A day smashing downhill ski laps isn’t a rest day just because you didn’t enter it into your MTB training plan.
Hockey provides another completely different stimulus.
Some activities will help develop qualities you need.
Others might simply be things you love doing.
Both matter.
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HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU ACTUALLY HAVE?
Now we need some reality.
Not:
“How much could I train during my perfect week?”
How much can you consistently train when work is busy, the kids need something, it’s dark at 4:30 and life is behaving like life?
I can realistically train:
_____ days per week
_____ hours per week
That’s an important number.
Because the best training plan isn’t the one containing the most training.
It’s the one you can consistently do and recover from.
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BUILD YOUR WEEKLY FOOTPRINT
Now we can start putting some boundaries around your winter.
I call this your weekly training footprint.
It isn’t your training program.
It’s simply the space training occupies in your life.
For example:
Monday — Gym
Tuesday — Aerobic training
Thursday — Gym
Saturday — Longer aerobic session / ride
Sunday — Ski / fun ride / other sport
Your footprint might look completely different.
Maybe you only have four sessions.
Maybe you ride three times per week all winter.
Maybe Saturday is always a ski day.
That’s fine.
The goal is to create a weekly rhythm you can actually live with.
And here’s the important bit:
Your weekly footprint can stay similar while your training changes.
Two gym sessions might remain in your calendar throughout the winter.
But what happens inside those sessions should evolve.
Early in the off-season, you might be building training volume, movement quality and tissue capacity.
Later, those same two spaces in your week might contain heavier strength work.
Later still, the emphasis might shift toward power and preparation for riding.
The same applies to conditioning.
The aerobic session you do in November doesn’t necessarily need to look anything like the session you do six weeks before your first race.
The footprint stays relatively stable. The stimulus changes.
That’s an important distinction between having a schedule and having an actual training program.
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YOU DON’T NEED TO IMPROVE EVERYTHING AT ONCE
Now take everything you’ve written down and start sorting it.
I like three buckets.
DEVELOP
What deserves a meaningful chunk of your training resources right now?
Strength?
Aerobic capacity?
Climbing durability?
Repeatability?
Tissue capacity following an injury?
You can’t aggressively develop everything simultaneously.
Something gets priority.
SUPPORT
What needs enough attention to help you accomplish that goal?
MAINTAIN
What are you already pretty good at?
What simply needs enough exposure that you don’t lose it?
This is one of the most useful things you can do during the off-season.
Stop treating every physical quality as Priority #1.
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YOUR WINTER TRAINING BRIEF
Now put it all together.
My biggest riding goal for next season:
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When I need to be ready:
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My biggest riding win this season:
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The thing that frustrated me most:
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Where I most often lost performance:
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What deteriorated when I got tired:
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Pain or injury that affected my riding:
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Something I avoided because I didn’t feel prepared for it:
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The thing I think I most need to DEVELOP:
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Things I need to SUPPORT:
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Things I’m happy to MAINTAIN:
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Realistic training availability:
_____ days / _____ hours per week
Things I want to do for fun this winter:
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How much I actually want to ride:
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My realistic weekly training footprint:
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And one final question:
When life gets busy and I can only get three training sessions done this week, which three matter most?
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THAT’S YOUR OFF-SEASON. NOW WE HAVE TO PROGRAM IT.
If you’ve worked through those questions, you should have a much better idea of what you want from this winter.
Hopefully you’ve also created an off-season that doesn’t sound miserable.
That’s important.
But you might now have more questions than you started with.
If strength is your biggest weakness, does that mean you should start lifting as heavy as possible next week?
If you faded after three hours, do you simply need longer rides?
If you’re skiing three days per week, how much additional conditioning do you need?
Where does that previous back injury fit?
If you only have four hours per week, what gets cut?
When should you start training power?
When does riding become more important again?
What changes if your first race is in April rather than July?
And when should your training emphasis change?
That’s programming.
A good program isn’t a collection of good workouts.
It’s a series of decisions about what deserves your limited training time right now, how much stimulus you need, what you can recover from, what can wait, and what should come next.
Your weekly footprint gives us the structure.
Your goals, riding history and limitations give us direction.
The training stimulus changes inside that structure as you move through the winter.
And ideally, you get to arrive next spring having actually enjoyed the process.
You’ve ridden your bike.
You’ve gone skiing.
You’ve had weekends where training wasn’t the most important thing in your life.
But you’ve also consistently moved the needle on the things that matter.
So when the trails are good again, you’re not simply picking up where you left off.
You’re coming back better prepared to do more of the riding you actually want to do.
That’s the point of the off-season.
And if you’ve worked through this review and can see what you want to improve—but you’re not quite sure how to fit all the pieces together—that’s exactly what I help mountain bikers do.
Start with my MTB Fitness Assessment, and let’s figure out what deserves your attention this winter.