While pros used to rely on long, slow, distance kilometers to build aerobic fitness, waiting until they were only a few weeks out from the starts of their seasons before doing their first intervals, EF Pro Cycling Performance Director and coach Nate Wilson now recommends including intensity in your training plan early in the winter. It’s a method that works well for the athletes he coaches. By incorporating high-intensity intervals early on, you can increase your capacity to build power over the long-term.

“Over the past 10 years, we have definitely shifted in the direction of including more intensity during base periods so riders have a longer runway to improve,” Nate said.

Shifting away from old-school, huge volume winter training will give you more time to focus on your weaknesses and get stronger in a more fun, more efficient way.

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And read on to understand why modern base training will beat endless kilometers as Nate and EF Education-EasyPost sports director and former pro Tejay van Garderen share their seven best tips to get strong over the winter.

When Tejay turned pro, base training still meant long, slow days in the saddle. He and his teammates would grind out endless kilometers, through rain and snow. It would be months before they did their first real intervals. The idea then was that slow endurance work would give them a base of aerobic fitness they could use to get fast later on. Looking back, with his wealth of WorldTour knowledge and experience, Tejay now thinks that many of those kilometers were a waste of time and effort.

“I started out with that completely old-school, just-long-base-miles thinking,” Tejay said. “We would show up on the group ride and just pull through for hours. Three hours into the ride, you would stop at a coffee shop and warm up, grab a pastry and a coffee, and then do the other three hours home. We were bundled up with balaclavas and thick gloves and just going out there for hours and hours on snowy days in Boulder. I look back and I’m like, that was probably not all that smart. Now, the thinking has totally flipped around.”

Pros now focus on building strength and power early in the winter, adding volume later. Ambitious amateurs should be reassured. You don’t need to spend months away from family and work doing 30-hour weeks to be competitive. Focus on building power from the start of your winter schedule. Tejay points to world-class cyclocross riders who transition to road racing in the spring and track racers who have gone on to be champions on the road.

“It is not like the riders who race ‘cross are adding in six hours on top of their cyclocross races,” he said. “They are just doing super short, high-intensity, quality riding. Look at the Great Britain track program. Those are all really short, super high-intensity events. The guys who came from that were the ones who ended up being good in grand tours.”

First, you need a couple of weeks to get used to pedaling again. Rides of one to two hours are sufficient. Visit the gym a few times a week to work out any strength imbalances.

“You have to give yourself a couple of weeks just to get comfortable again on the bike and make sure that your ligaments and your joints and everything are working properly, and then you can add in a little bit of tempo, and after a couple of weeks start with the intensity,” Tejay said.

“If there is a warm weather day, and it is the weekend, and you want to go for a long ride, of course, that is not going to hurt you, but it is not like you have to toil away in freezing cold temperatures just because you have to get the hours in. Keep it short and engaging with the quality.”

That principle — keep it short and engaging with high-intensity sessions — should guide you through the winter. A well-thought-out program with specific intervals is going to be much more effective and time-efficient than just going out and riding for hours.

“If you only have 10 hours a week, and you think, ‘Oh man, I don’t have time to get all of these base miles in, because I have a job,’ I think you can put yourself at ease, because all those base miles aren’t actually necessary,” Tejay said. “The quality is what is going to give you the most bang for your buck.”

Nate recommends including intensity in your training plan early in the winter. Don’t overdo it, but including small doses of high-intensity stimuli soon after you resume training will pay dividends later.

“Rather than periodizing training plans from low intensity to high intensity, we’ll include small blocks of intensity early on, ramping up the volume of that intensity as we get closer to the season,” Nate said.

At first, the volume of the intensity should be low. Maybe in the first week of December, your intensity session is two sets of two-minute intervals, and by February, it’s 12 two-minute intervals, to keep the example simple. By introducing those intervals early, you ensure that your system doesn’t go a long time without that stimulus. That way, your body has the chance to absorb a high enough dose of that stimulus to actually make an improvement.”

Tejay encourages you to have a go at cyclocross. It’s a ton of fun and just about the hardest workout you can do in an hour. Sprinting up and down muddy hills and into and out of corners is an excellent way to build your VO2 max, the key to performance in modern bike racing.

“One of the biggest trends over the past decade is how much training has shifted from being focused on threshold optimization to VO2 max optimization,” Nate said.

All of those short, sharp accelerations will help you improve your top-end power in a fun, engaging way. Cyclocross is also one of the best ways to improve your bike-handling skills so you can race through corners faster without wasting watts on challenging terrain.

Riding your Wahoo Kickr should be exciting. TrainingPeaks Virtual offers immersive indoor workouts and provides the opportunity to race online against cyclists from around the world. You’ll finish each session full of adrenaline and looking forward to racing again, instead of dreading another day of toil. Racing indoors will benefit your racing on the road.

“Riders started doing these indoor competitions that were 45 minutes to an hour long and super high intensity and once things opened up and they were able to get outside, they added the volume in on top of that, and the speeds just shot up,” Tejay said. “That was thanks to that different approach of first the intensity and then the volume.”

You don’t even have to ride a bike to get in a high-quality workout. Some winter days are better suited to other sports. Go cross-country skiing or hike on snowshoes. It will do your body good to get out of your crouched cycling position and go through a fuller range of motion.

“Your internal motor will get the same benefit,” Tejay said. “Your heart and lungs don’t know the difference between pedaling a bike or going skiing or out on a jog. Those are great ways to balance out some of those monotonous motions that you put yourself through on the bike. When it comes to transferring muscle fibers over, you have plenty of time throughout the season to get those dialed.”

As your first races of the spring approach, you will want to focus your efforts on the bike and add in enough volume. You want to be fresh for the long season ahead and prepared to get the most out of your early races.

“If you are just hanging about in the gruppetto and can barely see the front, then you are not actually letting the race make you better,” Tejay said. “That whole old-school mentality of long, long hours in the winter is terrible because you are just flattening yourself out, so when it is time to do the intensity, you don’t really have that snap anymore.”

That snap is what will determine whether you make it into the front group at the crux of a race, or whether you can go with the accelerations. Hone it this winter.