5 fundamentals of Cycling Training

The enjoyment of cycling comes from many places:

• exploring
• being outside
• environmentally friendly travel
• ...and many other worthy reasons.

If you take your cycling more seriously and see it as a platform to challenge yourself and increase your fitness with lower impact to your body, you need to commit to a more regimented approach to your time in the saddle. A cycling training plan is going to be an important companion alongside key elements such as stretching, good hydration, and thoughtful nutrition.

That training plan should include a balance of principles in its overall approach: frequency, intensity, duration, consistency, and evaluation. 

Any time you try to improve your fitness in a specific way, you need to think about how often you are going to hit it. In muscle training, you have basic approaches like more weight, fewer reps to break down and build muscle vs. more reps, less weight to hone and define muscle. The same principles apply to your cycling. 

If your goal is to build more explosive power, you will focus on intensity and challenge like hill repeats and do so with more rest in-between for recovery. 

If you want to build up your endurance, you increase the distance and ride time in a sustainable pattern to enable continuous power throughout those long century rides. 

To find the explosive tigress within, you need to look at the intensity elements you include in your regimen. Setting a day or a week aside for exercises like hill repeats, long climbs, and (something describing the constant changing of pace) will offer a breakdown and rebuild cycle to increase the power output and inner reserve to push yourself beyond the draft and lead the charge.

One of the most understood aspects of cycling is endurance. Whether that is time or distance, being able to reach the outer limits of capacity and then increase those limits requires a pattern of time and distance goals that are always pushing a bit more than what is comfortable. (research the suggested rate of distance increase for training). 

When you training ride is focused on increasing your explosive power, put your distance at a range that you can cover with minimized effort. You can accomplish this through a warm up and cool down range that is your normal levels.  

The whole process of training is about consistently challenging specific muscle groups and other fitness levels of your body. Keeping a pattern of exercises is a key to seeing results and reaching your overall goals. You may find times where you are faced with choosing your workout or something else important. It's best to preempt these moments by always calendaring your workouts and then looking ahead where you might have to make different arrangements.

If you do find that you miss a workout, just pick it up as soon as you can. The sooner you get back into the program, the less impact the miss will have on your overall progress. Not giving up is the real difference between success and failure.

Once you have crafted the activities and approaches, having a plan with measurements is critical to long-term growth. You may find that there will be times that you are plateauing with the current regimen and need to adjust the balance. Keeping good records with tools like Strava and the various athletic devices will help see a broader scope of your progress. This will all depend on what your training goals are and your target activities (ie. endurance goals for longer-format races or power increase for track events). Keep that goal in mind and keep advancing by evaluating your training plan.

A well-balanced cyclist has the resources within to handle a variety of circumstances, challenges, and distances. By designing your training schedule to include an appropriate number of training rides, varying the intensity of those rides and always pushing the limits of your ride times you will be better prepared to accomplish the goals you want to crush. Just commit to a consistent workout schedule and constantly evaluate where you are at and make adjustments to the challenge level is helping you grow.

Of course,  you want to make sure that your bike and other equipment is well-maintained to avoid missing a workout because of gear failure. This is also why the Tannus airless bike tires are so helpful as you will never find yourself delayed because of flat tire repair. These solid bike tires will keep you rolling through every work out in rain or shine.

You can download them here.