---
title: "The volume question. A new study with a useful answer."
date: 2026-05-24
categories: ["Training"]
url: https://www.semiprocycling.com/digest/the-volume-question-a-new-study-with-a-useful-answer
author: Damian Ruse (SEMIPRO Cycling)
---
# The volume question. A new study with a useful answer.

[Listen to this issue as a podcast](https://www.buzzsprout.com/6262/episodes/19225884)

![](https://www.semiprocycling.com/digest/images/e48977a7ecb4832276105cf9.webp)

There's a tug-of-war in every serious cyclist's training week.

Intensity is exciting. Volume is boring. So when a new block of intervals shows up on the plan, the temptation is to clear the decks. Pull back the long rides. Drop the easy days. Make room for the "important" work.

A study just landed that puts a number on what that costs you. Not in a lab full of beginners. In well-trained cyclists who already knew how to suffer.

## What they did.

Christensen and colleagues took eighteen well-trained male cyclists. Average VO2max around seventy-one. Closer to your strongest training mates than to a WorldTour pro, but quick.

They ran them through seven weeks of intensified training. Three high-intensity sessions per week. A mix of four-minute efforts and thirty-second efforts. All during the competitive season.

Half the group kept their normal moderate-intensity volume. The other half cut it by about a third, roughly five hours a week less.

Both groups did the same hard work. The only thing that changed was the volume sitting underneath it.

## What they found.

Both groups got fitter. That is the headline. Intensified training works.

But what they got fitter at was different.

The group that kept volume up improved the foundations. Higher power on an incremental test. Lower oxygen cost and lower blood lactate at submaximal intensity. The boring stuff that lets you ride strong for hours.

The group that cut volume improved the sharp end. Better repeated sprinting deep into a long ride. They got punchier when they were tired.

Same intervals. Different adaptations. The volume underneath chose which one you got.

## How to read this.

A few honest caveats before anyone gets carried away.

Eighteen well-trained men is a small sample. The differences between groups were modest. And nobody in this study was a 40-year-old amateur balancing work, family, and a real-world training week.

So treat it as a useful arrow, not a verdict. The arrow points like this. Adding intervals is the right instinct. Slashing the easy hours to make room for them is not.

## What to do.

**If you are adding a HIT block:** keep your easy volume. Defend the long ride. The intervals are the spark. The volume is the engine they run on.

**If you race endurance events** (gran fondos, road races over two hours, long gravel): protect the moderate stuff. Cut it and you will get sharper but ride a worse race.

**If your event is short and punchy** (crits, hill repeats, an hour or less of repeated efforts): the reduced-volume pattern might actually fit. You are trading endurance economy for repeated sprint capacity. That can be exactly the trade you want.

**If you have eight hours a week or less:** do not try to live in both worlds. Pick the dominant goal and let the volume reflect it.

## The bottom line.

Volume is not the cost of intensity. It is the thing that decides what your intensity becomes.

*Christensen, P.M. et al. (2024). Importance of training volume during intensified training in elite cyclists: Maintained vs. reduced volume at moderate intensity. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 34(5), e14362.*

## On my mind: The fight response on the way back

I had a coaching call this week with an athlete coming back from a crash. Won't get into the details. But the call sat with me all week, and the pattern in it is universal.

Right at the top of the call I could hear it in their voice. The fight response. When you are forced off the bike, the motivation does not disappear. It pools. By the time the body is ready, the fight in you is bigger than before. The instinct is to channel that frustration into productive training. To push harder, sooner, faster, longer.

That instinct is correct in direction and wrong in dose. Almost every time.

A few things I keep coming back to when I watch this play out:

**You are not starting from scratch.** A few weeks off after a solid block does not reset you. The endurance base you built across months, the mitochondrial density, the fuel-handling, the deep aerobic architecture, stays. What goes first is the top end. Sharpness, repeatability, snap. The rest is a long tail. You are starting much higher than your CTL number says you are.

**Do not chase the number on the comeback.** Fitness scores and acute load totals lag and lie when you are rebuilding. Use the evidence in front of you on the day. How did the ride feel. How was the recovery. What did the first long ride tell you. That is the signal.

**Use the first rides as tests, not workouts.** Different durations. Different intensities. Report back honestly. The first two weeks back are diagnostic. They are not where you make gains. They are where you find out what gains you have to work with.

**The biggest danger is not the injury.** It is the overtraining on the way back. Aside from aggravating what is already there, doing too much too soon is its own slow-burn disaster. And rising motivation plus better weather make it harder to see coming, not easier.

**Each comeback is a chance to add a tool.** Last injury, this athlete added strength training. This time they are talking about sleep and recovery habits. The forced pause is a real opportunity to upgrade something. Don't waste it.

And one more. **It is okay to say it sucks.** You do not have to immediately reframe the injury as secretly a gift. Sit with the frustration first. Channel it second. The people who skip step one tend to overshoot at step two.

Damian