Cycle training heart rate programs

There is no point training just to accumulate hours sitting on a bike. For each workout, you can check how much time you have spent in each of your training zones using a suitable application such as TrainingPeaks, Garmin Connect, Suunto, Polar, Strava, etc, some of which you have to pay for and some are free.

A really good training diary and analysis application is Final Surge , which is free and very nice and functional. Check each workout to make sure that you are spending around the right amount of time in each zone.

Check the time in zone for each week to see how your overall mix of intensities works against your plan and make adjustments to your plan based on your needs. Should I do strength training?

If you have time, doing some strength training will probably help your cycling and certainly should improve your endurance if you ride off road. I have written an article on how to schedule strength workouts within a training programme, which you might find useful. You can find it here:. How do I know if I am improving? You can also do tests using things like segments on Strava to tests your performance over shorter efforts.

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So what is base training? The focus is on extending the longer endurance runs and creating training volume with other easier runs to improve running efficiency.

It is sometimes difficult to know what cycling workouts to do and why, particularly with all the information available nowadays. This article considers how you can determine the demands of your goal event and set workouts to help you train for those demands. However, is it any use to help you build your cycling fitness? So, is Strava good for beginners cycling training? In my opinion as a professional cycling coach, yes it is an excellent tool that combines elements of social interaction, manageable competition and challenges, and features that allow you to track and direct your progress according to your needs.

Like any endurance event, mountain bike stage races are fundamentally about managing your energy. Training for the event is simple in many respects but the added dimensions of off-road riding make it important to develop fitness for harder efforts that are dictated by the terrain as well as your competitors.

It can be demoralising when you are unable to do your workout to the targets that you have set and it can be less effective if your targets are too easy. Riding up hills at the right pace can make a huge difference to how well you perform in endurance cycling events, so I thought I would write down some details of how to get the pacing right.

So, how should you ride hills in endurance cycling events? You should ride up hills a little bit harder than you ride on the flat and use downhill for recovery.

Because of the way wind resistance works, riding harder up hills is more efficient. We recently had a workshop on goal setting for our training group and I thought it might be useful to write an article to explain the details of how goal setting can support a successful finish in a bike packing event or any other sporting event.

So, how can goal setting help you succeed in a bike packing race? There are three types of goals used in sport: Outcome Goals, your dreams; Performance Goals, measurable things; and Process Goals, things you do.

These goals integrate into a plan for both training and your event that if followed effectively should lead bring success. A question that people often want to improve is how to get faster at cycling up hills.

Improving your overall cycling fitness and managing your energy effectively alongside improving your fitness for cycling up hills is likely to give you the biggest improvements in your climbing speed. Many of us question how much training we need to do to meet our goals. It is an interesting question, as is how much training is too much? I thought I would take some time to write down my thoughts and experience on the subject in the hope that it will help you towards your goals.

You should first focus how much training you can sustain now and then build up from there. The optimum amount of training at any time is a bit more than you are comfortable with but not enough to be overwhelming physically or mentally.

So how much sleep do endurance athletes need? A general rule of thumb is between 7 and 9 hours per night for adults, but studies suggest athletes may in fact need closer to 9 or 10 hours per night for optimum performance. Rest and recovery is an essential part of getting fitter and faster for any sport. There are many ways to incorporate recovery into your training and in this article, I share some of the ways I have found to be most effective during my years of experience as a cycling coach.

Interval training is an essential part of becoming a fitter and faster cyclist but what should you do, how much and how often should you do it? Racing off-road adds complication with the skills element and what aspects of training should be on technical terrain and what should be on the road or perhaps even an indoor trainer. Many of us like to enjoy different sports now and again so I thought it would be useful to explain how you can fit them into your cycling training in the most effective way.

So, how should you fit other sports into your cycling training? You need to think about how the sport will complement or hinder particular cycling training workouts:. What is the sport that you will be doing? Is it explosive with lots of sprints and recoveries like football or hockey, extremely explosive like racket sports or circuit training, more sustained like running or swimming or applying lots of force like weight training or heavy gym work?

It is common for people to get tired at this time of year when the better weather comes around. This can be for a number of reasons and I thought it would be useful to write an article describing why you might feel overtired and explain what you can do to get back on track. So, should you change your training plan if you are tired? As stated, a training or cardio zone is a percentage of max heart rate.

To determine your zones, you will need a heart rate monitor and a stationary bike. It is an easy test to administer and base in part on perceived exertion. This assessment is good and puts you in the ballpark for setting your zones and associated heart rate thresholds for each. I start with 3 zones only its the simplest.

After testing you can figure your upper and lower heart rate limits as well as your performance thresholds T1,T2. Now that we have our zones, how do we use them to maximize training and conditioning? For the beginner I always recommend warming up in zone 1 for min. Try to spend at least 15 min per day in Zone 1. This is a recovery zone.

Zone 2 is where the biggest gains can be shown. You should spend most of your training time somewhere in this area. Towards the top of Zone 2 we really can stimulate Lactate Threshold barriers to increase fitness and endurance. It not the best way to measure or evaluate strength training, neuromuscular fitness e. When you are training, you must consider the purpose of your training. Do you need to monitor heart rate?

Are you training aerobically? Or are you training strength? Or anaerobic power? Or skills? Or leg speed? Or recovering? The legs develop more strength in bigger gears.

However, when you ride big gears, the intensity of your workout is not matched by your heart rate. High-level aerobic work preceding anaerobic effort is generally needed to see such high heart rates. Your heart responds to changing exercise intensity, but this response lags behind true effort. In addition, monitor readings lag true heart rate. These lags mean that you may already be recovering before your monitor has the time to reflect true effort.

That may not be necessary. Training with new aero-bars? Perhaps you want to adapt to the position, not train aerobically. You might ride an easy workout at a heart rate of beats per minute. You are training. You are training your back muscles, your forearms, etc. You may be resting your legs, and recovering from a recent hard ride. Recovering—that is an important part of training too! Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

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The test consists of taking blood from a finger stick during a VO2 max test so it can be analysed for its blood lactate concentration. Yet there is a way of estimating your lactate threshold without hiring out a laboratory to conduct the test. Complete a similar minute time trial effort, but only begin recording your heart rate for the final 20 minutes of the sesson. After recording your heart rate for every minute of the testing period, working out the average of these results will give an estimate for your lactate threshold level.

Lactate threshold, for an untrained person, usually coincides with per cent of VO2max, ranging up to per cent of VO2 max for an elite athlete. There are many different theories on the number of zones that should be used and the way they are distributed - but we've used a five zone format. The chart above shows each zone, what length intervals you should ride in this zone, and what percentage of max heart rate or power FTP you should aim to ride them at.

If you've not got access to heart rate or power meter, you can use the 'you can' column - simply assess your ability to talk to work out which zone you're in. Training by zones has lots of advantages over training without any guidance. However, it requires perseverance and patience. Your data may be affected by outside conditions such as whether you are training with a group of riders, the weather or terrain — which all needs to be factored in.

Once you have established your target outputs, you need to understand how and why you are training at those specific levels.

One of the many misunderstandings within cycling training is in deciphering the jargon and discovering the difference between thresholds and training zones. Secondary to this is the lactate turn-point, [the point at which] blood lactate levels deviate from a steady state during exercise.

You can also establish threshold data using expired gas analysis and some other methodologies, and each of those brings in its own terminology. Once thresholds for these certain measurements are found, your training zones can then be determined. Zones do not only relate to how you should feel when riding and how to structure training, but each zone also results in different outcomes for race fitness and physiological adaptations.

These training zones are related to the three energy systems the body uses when exercising: oxidative, glycolytic and ATP-PC systems. These energy systems are employed at different levels of exercise intensity. For example, a zone-five effort mainly uses energy from ATP-PC energy system, which provides a huge amount of energy but only for a short period of time.