Ongoing, brief rides are the quickest ways to enhance your fitness and cycling performance.
Just about everyone who rides does so to get in better shape. It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional or a newcomer, though, experience is irrelevant. The same rules apply to everyone.
Training is a regulated approach to giving our bodies a challenge, and ongoing training lets the body get in better shape by adapting to it. To progress, we must raise the difficulty of such challenges on a continuous basis. This can entail riding harder or further. Your fitness game won’t improve – or perhaps even go in the opposite direction - if you don’t regularly stress your body out with new physical challenges.
Enhancing your fitness warrants proper amounts of training. It must be ongoing if stress is to be applied, yet balanced with proper recovery time to let the process of adaptation transpire.
Continuous, brief training sessions are more impactful than long, irregular sessions. Over-balanced durations and interval sessions enhance performance more than steady ongoing endeavors.
If all you have is a few hours a week, you can still enhance your fitness with a few 60-minute sessions. Even several half-hour rides are better than one lengthy ride.
If your rides are limited to once a week, you might have thought it was odd that you weren’t showing any signs of improvement in spite of keeping things consistent. The reason for this is that after a week without cycling, your body begins to lose the fitness gains you achieved. To enhance and progress your fitness, you only need to ride every 2 or 3 days. Even a turbo-trainer workout for this frequency will do. At the very least, you’ll see enough fitness improvements with a few weekly rides.
Important cycling training sessions for fitness
Try out one of these rides each week (at a minimum) for the fastest fitness routes.
Long Ride
One Hour Minimum
To enhance your fitness, lengthy rides at a conversational pace are the staple. Your breathing will be rhythmic, deep, and regular at this pace, and you won’t feel ragged or strained. You should stick to rolling or flat terrains for these rides, as opposed to hills. Concentrate on maintaining a high, smooth cadence. To become accustomed to drinking and eating while in motion, use your long ride.
Your body will become conditioned to efficiently burning fuel with this ride. Your riding posture will also be enhanced, allowing you to become accustomed to sitting on that bike seat for long durations.
Hilly Ride
Half-hour to a full hour
Lengthy progressive climbs are suitable for this session. They can be achieved with high resistance on a turbo trainer, or on the flat in a big gear. Once you warm up for 10 minutes or so, pedal for 5 minutes at a hard pace you can regulate. Breathe deeply and try to keep your chatter to a minimum. Take a minute to recover, then repeat the process.
Try to cycle for at least 20 minutes per session at the hard pace. If time permits, go for a hard-paced 10-minute ride before your minute of recovery.
Your climb will be simplified, and your muscular efficiency will be enhanced with these sessions.
Hard Ride
Half-hour to a full hour
HIIT (high-intensity interval training) has been proven to improve endurance and cardiovascular fitness, as well as raise the amount of calories burned. You’ll need to work hard during the intervals - it will warrant your full effort, even though the intervals are brief. After warming up for 10 minutes, go back and forth between a full effort for 30-seconds to a recovery time of 30 seconds, and keep at it for five minutes. Spend 5 minutes pedaling leisurely before repeating the endeavor.
If time is short, a few HIIT training sessions weekly are optimal approaches to enhancing your overall fitness.
By Vogue Cycling Team