Need to lose a bit of weight, i’ve read of people doing ‘fat burning rides’ at a lower HR intensity but longer duration. How long is a longer duration ride?

I usually only have a couple of hours for my rides at the moment due to work + kids, would this be too short?

Or should i just eat less and give it all in my 2 hr rides?

cheers

You will burn more Fat at a higher HR but will also burn more calories from other stores.

Maybe just revise your diet and try to ride more frequently or for longer?

20-40min HIIT sessions on the turbo?

or just work some of that into your rides, 30 secs balls out (and I mean throwing up/prolapse) followed by 2-3 min recovery x 8

As above, the idea of a “fat burning zone” is a bit of a red herring. You’ll lose more fat with shorter, higher intensity work (particularly HIIT) and just eating less.

Need to lose a bit of weight,

much easier to lose weight through diet than exercise ime.

Interval rides for weight loss.

Long (90+ mins) at low intensity are good at training your body to burn fat as fuel.

However for weight loss you should be more interested in caloric deficit, and you can better achieve this with high intensity intervals. Not only will you burn more calories during the ride, but they will boost your metabolism, and you’ll continue burning more calories for a few hours afterwards.

Be sure to include plenty of good quality protein in your diet to maintain your muscle mass whilst losing weight

Long and steady burns fat. Fat burning does drop off as intensity goes up, but not by enough to really worry about (and negated by the continued burning of fat whilst muscles repair afterwards).

Simply put you need to do as much as possible, which means not straining yourself and missing the next ride as a result. Better to do a 1 hour ride you can repeat every day, than a 1 hour ride you need days recovery from. Even better, a 3 hour ride you can repeat every day.

So as many miles as possible, with as few hills as possible. Within reason, you need to want to go out riding, so keep it interesting! No harm in swapping a ride for a 40min spin class or goin out chasing stava leaderboards on the local hill if you really don’t feel like a long ride, or vice versa, go for a pootle round the country lanes if you don’t feel like tacking that killer loop you had planned. Staying motivated to ride every day is as hard as the actual physiological effects of riding.

I find riding to work, then riding to the shops a mile away rather than get my lunch downstairs motivates me more to go out riding in the evenings than not riding, so it becomes a self fulfilling thing.