Off-season training

So here are the basics:

My main objective for now is to drop some pounds and 'reset' my body for a tough year to come. For the next several months I'll be doing about 75-90 mins of base conditioning each weekday morning, combining both jogging and spinning. The spinning is specific to my efforts and helps with biomechanical and metabolic efficiency. Although non-specific to cycling, the jogging helps a bit with mental freshness, joint strength, muscular balance (think hamstrings) and flexibility, impact tolerance, and because I'm so inefficient at it, I burn more calories than spinning for the time invested. Also, it will prep me a bit to survivie the SLC marathon in April.
For the base work I'm keeping my HR at around 65% of max (ie. 125 bpm) to hopefully gain a bit more metabolic efficiency, while not overworking (which will just tempt me to overeat). On Saturday mornings, I'll do between 3-4 hrs of mixed training and with the same lower HR. My total base hours will be around 10+ hrs.

To rebuild my structural strength and my muscular fatigue resistance in the off-season, I'll do some high rep squats 1-2 times per week. It will take me 2 months to *comfortably* get to 3 sets of 100 reps with a 95 lb bar (at about 40 reps/min). And usually the weight is low enough and the reps high enough that I don't hypertrophy much. Instead I typically gain a huge amount of muscular tolerance and endurance, while keeping my bone density up and my joint strength high. Depending on weight loss, I may work up to the same sets/reps with 135 lbs. Man these hurt! But in the end, my legs are much more capable of pushing serious power and the strength work complements the pure base training well for me.

Finally, I'll add in 2 brief "pain cave" sessions per week, which tends to keep my anaerobic threshold high and my mind happy. The pain sessions and the weights will add up to around 2 hrs per week, which is roughly 15% of my total hours.

For a significant portion of the training, I'll work with Brutus, who is amazing at motivating me when I don't want to train, and who is willing to suffer until he absolutely has nothing more to give. Also, I'll be in regular contact with B-Horn to keep on track with my diet and efficiency. B-Horn is immensely knowledgable about nearly every aspect of training and diet and has proven more than anybody that he can even break my bad eating and training habits. What's more, he has changed his own body from a grande burrito to a lean machine, so he knows exactly what I'm up against.

I'll detail more as the weeks progress.

J-Naut