Get fitness by turning your everyday ride into a training ride.
How can you improve your fitness on an everyday ride?
If you don’t have extra time to train, and hiring a coach is out of the question, you can start by turning your everyday ride into a training ride.
For most of us, our days are busy with work and family, which may stress the amount of time we have for the bicycle. Sure, we ride when we can during the week to prepare for that, long distance ride, group ride or race on the weekend, but to find the time to prepare for those more challenging rides, you need to train on your bike… not just ride your bike. How can you do that? Well, ride smartly and use your time for cycling more wisely. You need to take the little amount of time you have for the bike during the week and make quality rides. No more throwing a leg over the bike and taking a meander down the road, there is no time for that, and no gains either. You need to make a plan before you leave your door step on every bicycle ride.
Make a plan before going out on the road.
Before the start of each ride, you should ask yourself, what am I going to accomplish on the bike today? Instead of routinely getting on the bike and doing the same old ride, at the same intensity and speed, day in and day out! Your body gets complacent and plateaus in fitness by doing all that! You need to re-stimulate your body with different intensities to break this mundane routine and push your body to a new level of fitness.
Mix it up!
Use the terrain you ride on to determine the intensity you add to your new program, whether it be long or short hills for power or flatter grounds for sprints. If you have short hills on your ride, try going as hard as you can on every up hill and recover until you reach the next hill. On another day use the same principal, go as hard as you can on every uphill but perform it out of the saddle …sprint up the hill the distance of the short climb. Try telephone pole sprints …sprint from one telephone pole to the next and then recover or sprint to a specific landmark several times during your ride. Work on your cadence, spin for the duration on your next ride or push a bigger gear out on the road. One day spin at a higher cadence, say 100 plus rpm and another day ride your bike at a slower rpm say 80 rpm in a harder gear for the whole ride. After a week or so do the same loop ride but in reverse and mix it up in the other direction. These are a few suggestions to use for your ride, a starting point if you will, use your discretion as you build your program with different intensities.
When a bike ride is essential on little time, stop the habit of just riding your bike for the sake of riding. By adding a creative twist of intensity to your everyday bicycle ride it will help bring your fitness to a new level and turn a lackluster ride into a quality ride. This is the starting point of turning a bicycle ride into a training ride and those mundane rides you used to do will become your recovery ride!
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