Yup 
Also doubles as a training diary providing @TMC doesnât accidentally nuke it
Sheâll soon get you fit Rob! (especially if you have to keep chasing after her - glad she got back home by herself)
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I can definitely feel that i have pushed my limits and itâs time for an easy week. Based on my experience i should expect a jump in fitness on the bike but the challenge for me this week will controlling my eating. My lunch was very fillingâŚI am not hungry, but I have an appetite.
She will, and thank you! 
We did a fitbit challenge in the office last week ⌠managed 103k steps in the week.
Linking in a group is good for motivation.
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I know nothing about cycling but would it not be ok to gain a bit of weight if it was muscle getting added to your legs. Could you not still have a high performance?
The urge is to eat rubbish 
pretty sure it would only work against my fat loss
âŚand, I donât really know, but when Iâve looked into that kind of thing it turns out that itâs a highly contentious issue on bike forums!
I think the bottom line is that for most if not all situations in road cycling the limiter is cardio fitness, you donât actually need much leg strength or muscle size. So, weighing less is better.
I donât want to be overly focused on cycling performance though, because itâs just a hobby, and even if I build muscle from push ups or whatever I think itâs still probably healthier in the long run.
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Depends on the type of cycling really - sprinters like Hoy look very different from endurance racers like Froome!
Iâd have thought at a level leg strength translates to torque which can be useful when pounding up hill or trying to sprint at the end of a race?
yeah, I think the idea is that the strength required is not that much compared with the strength that it is relatively easy to build up by doing strength training
Itâs endurance riding I enjoy (not racing though!)
Sundayâs ride was fucking awesome. Windswept misty moors, birds of prey hunting, deer flinging themselves into barbed wire fences
Managed 3 x 8 push ups but fuck the last couple of reps on the last set were hard
Not sure if I should repeat 3x8 next time before going on to 9,8,8?
Interestingly, I did Sundayâs ride on the single speed and I could feel that my upper body had been worked as well (pulling on the bars to get up steep hills)
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Once Iâve shed some of the accumulated fatigue this week Iâll look again at introducing kettle bell swings
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I thought this was encouragingâŚcompare my heart rate profile from yesterday
âŚwith the profile from when I did the same route from mid-December
I was faster yesterdayâŚand in December I stopped at two cafes, for a total of 1 hour 20 minutes 
whereas yesterday I stopped for 10 mins to wolf down flapjack every so often.
Reckon thatâs progress
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Just a couple of humbling exercises today:
Chins
5 x 3
Press-ups
5 x 5
And so the journey beginsâŚ
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How long are you resting between push up sets out of interest?
No idea to be honest. I alternated between chins and press-ups and left enough time to kind of âcalm the oceanâ, to just breathe and clear my head ready to start the next set.
Will be way longer than you if youâre doing your sets all together.
Should be a minute for upper body exercise, and two minutes for lower body compound movements like squats, deadlifts, weighted lunges etc.
I feel much less fatigued compared with yesterday. I still find it difficult to trust that a week of reduced volume will leave me fitter, when I feel better alreadyâŚ
My mistake last spring wasnât to not recover well enough on rest weeks, it was that when I resumed training weeks I felt so good that I ramped the volume up more than I should have! I then got to the point where I didnât quite shed the fatigue in one rest week and it accumulated.
Deloading isnât about getting fitter itâs about giving your CNS a change to recuperate and then give you a platform for upping the intensity again.
You canât compete or train at max intensity all the time - youâll burn out. So the idea is to do this in cycles which have incremental volume/ load/ intensity.
Possibly getting into semantics around what fitness is. I agree, but Sundayâs ride could take 3-4 days to fully recover from and get the full benefits and then losing fatigue faster than fitness means after 7 days youâre effectively fitterâŚfaster anyway. I agree the mental break contributes as well.
Graeme Obree claims that some of his training sessions would take >7 days to fully recover from
"One of his biggest strengths was to listen to his body and react to its condition, he knew when to rest and when to push and also how hard to push when it was receptive to training. Graeme did not train when tired, he knew the value of rest and did not panic if he did not feel right, he knew why he felt the way he did and would remain patient in the knowledge that whilst resting his body was repairing ready for the next physical onslaught.â
Read more at http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/training-the-obree-way-39421#95biL4KhTuM4yjo0.99
Iâve said it beforeâŚI think itâs an interesting book to read even if youâre not into cycling. Itâs a stream-of-consciousness view into his mind