Bike Training

 

Whether you are a recre­ational cyclist, a bicy­cle racer or a triath­lete, you will ben­e­fit by under­stand­ing the basics of cycling train­ing and by hav­ing a struc­tured train­ing plan.

I have dis­cov­ered a must-​​have guide that will help take your cycling to a new level. Your bike train­ing will be reju­ve­nated and refreshed with a wide vari­ety of new work­outs that will chal­lenge you and help develop you into a bet­ter and fit­ter cyclist. The work­outs form the basis of a com­plete train­ing pro­gram that works on endurance, aer­o­bic and anaer­o­bic fit­ness, strength, speed and power. Use these work­outs to train harder, smarter and more effi­ciently by mak­ing the most of your valu­able train­ing time.

David Ertl’s 101 Cycling Work­outs gives you a huge vari­ety of ways to train. Once started, you’ll never have an excuse to get bored with your train­ing again! The 101 work­outs are grouped accord­ing to the type of phys­i­o­log­i­cal sys­tem they train, let­ting you eas­ily find work­outs for the day’s objec­tive. Every ride or work­out meets the goal of improv­ing some aspect of your cycling fitness.

The dif­fer­ent work­out inten­si­ties are based on 6 train­ing zones that are com­pat­i­ble with both heart-​​rate mon­i­tors and power meters. An expla­na­tion of the zones is included along with instruc­tions for deter­min­ing your own zones which you then apply to your work­outs. The pur­pose of each work­out is described, with a descrip­tion of the type course that the work­out should be done on, a descrip­tion of the work­out pro­to­col, and ways in which you can mod­ify the work­out and still achieve its objective.

There are tips to help you put the work­outs together to cre­ate your own struc­tured train­ing plan that is var­ied by sea­son to pro­duce opti­mum results. You plan your week by decid­ing how many work­outs you can do based on your abil­ity, goals, age and avail­able time.101 Cycling Work­outs is essen­tial to my train­ing, and I am con­fi­dent it will be to yours too!

• For all-​​around cycling fit­ness or road rac­ing, you should do work­outs from every chapter.
• If you are more of a time tri­al­ist or triath­lete, you’d need to focus on endurance, tempo, thresh­old and strength workouts.
• If your goal is to improve your abil­ity to ride long dis­tances, you’d want to con­cen­trate pri­mar­ily on endurance,tempo and strength workouts.

Improve­ment comes by con­tin­u­ally chang­ing up your rou­tine and throw­ing dif­fer­ent work­outs at your body. The work­outs con­tained within this eBook will do just that.

Let’s use Tempo rid­ing as an exam­ple of what you’ll find when you pur­chase 101 Cycling Work­outs: Tempo rid­ing is an impor­tant train­ing com­po­nent that is effec­tive for improv­ing your level of fit­ness and increas­ing your basic speed. In 101 Cycling Work­outs, a chap­ter is devoted to Tempo Work­outs, intro­duced as follows:

 

EXCERPT: Zone 3 — Tempo Work­outs
 

Tempo pace is faster than endurance pace, but slower than thresh­old pace. This pace requires some con­cen­tra­tion to main­tain as it is get­ting into the range where it begins to become slightly harder and is more work to main­tain than endurance pace. But they are not ‘hard’ efforts and shouldn’t be painful, they just take con­cen­tra­tion to do.

Tempo work­outs are good to build speed for fairly long dis­tances. It’s often the pace that occurs when rid­ing with oth­ers. Cyclists tend to push the pace when rid­ing with oth­ers. It’s good to incor­po­rate some tempo rides in with endurance rides as your base fit­ness improves. This will stim­u­late your body to get used to a faster pace and avoid get­ting into a rut of zone 2 training.

How­ever, because zone 3 is harder than zone 2, you need to be care­ful of not doing too many zone 3 rides each week as they can fatigue you and pre­vent you from get­ting in qual­ity work­outs on other days. One tempo work­out per week should be enough if you are doing other workouts.

Work­out 8: Tempo Endurance Ride

Pur­pose of Work­out: This is an endurance ride but is rid­den at a faster pace than endurance pace. This pace shouldn’t be uncom­fort­able but also should require some focus to keep the pace up. This ride will increase your abil­ity to ride long endurance rides more com­fort­ably and to ride them at a faster pace.

Course Descrip­tion: Find a route that allows you to go the dis­tance required to get in the length of ride you want. It can either be a loop or an out-​​and-​​back route. For vari­ety, you can ride some hills of vary­ing difficultly.

Work­out Descrip­tion: Fol­low­ing a 15-​​minute warmup in zone 2, increase the pace to low zone 3 for the bulk of the ride. On hills your heart rate may move into zone 4 for brief peri­ods. Avoid let­ting your­self drift back into an endurance zone 2 pace. This will require con­stant atten­tion to your pace. A tempo endurance ride should be at least 90 min­utes in duration.

Total Work­out Length: 90 min­utes to three hours.

Mod­i­fi­ca­tions: These are great rides to do with oth­ers as long as you avoid the temp­ta­tion of going too hard and turn­ing it into a thresh­old ride, which is the ten­dency when rid­ing with others.

Next, Coach Ertl describes 3 addi­tional types of tempo rides, includ­ing with a group or when you’re indoors on a trainer.

 

 

Table of Con­tents

Pro­logue

Chap­ter 1: How to Use This eBook

A. Expla­na­tion of work­out formats

B. Deter­min­ing your train­ing zones

C. Mod­i­fy­ing work­outs to fit your ability

D. Putting work­outs together to form a struc­tured train­ing plan

Chap­ter 2: Recov­ery Workouts

Chap­ter 3: Endurance Workouts

Chap­ter 4: Tempo Workouts

Chap­ter 5: Thresh­old Workouts

Chap­ter 6: Anaer­o­bic Workouts

Chap­ter 7: Sprint and Power Workouts

Chap­ter 8: Strength Workouts

Chap­ter 9: Leg Speed Workouts

Chap­ter 10: Cross Train­ing Workouts

Chap­ter 11: Test­ing Workouts

Chap­ter 12: Races as Workouts

Chap­ter 13: Recov­ery Exercises

Chap­ter 14: Work­out 101 About the Author

 

 

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