The story so far……

Started MTB riding again just over a year ago having had a 25 year break from any form of cycling. Knocking on the door of 40 soon and have really improved my bike fitness since starting again.

Dropped 12kgs and got down to 70kgs which I am really happy with and go out 3-4 times a week on the MTB and in the last couple of months Ive started road riding..approx 2 rides a week.

Now the tricky bit….

Although happy with how far my bike fitness has come, I seem to have hit a wall whereby no matter how many rides a week I am doing, I am not improving any longer.

So question is, how best to step up a level?

I dont run, or do gym’s, but a friend did suggest perhaps doing some weights.

Turbo trainer, intervals?

Drugs

Ask a cycling coach not people who have read the joe friel book who are instant experts.

Even from a non experts point of view it looks like too much volume (of possibly poor quality) and no rest days.

The thing that impoved my fitness most was Strava.
Intervals are obviously worth giving a go.
Explosive bodyweight exercises like burpees will help too, but you might feel like too much of a prat doing them, like me.

First – decide what you want from your training (goals)
Speed? Endurance? Climbing? 100K? 100 miles?
Second – determine how much time your lifestyle can dedicate to your cycling.
Third – choose a training schedule which fits to your lifestyle and training goals.
Fourth – diet!

Unless you have huge amounts of cycling time – inevitably – some of your training will end up on a turbo.

Thanks all….being thick, what is meant by intervals?

Currently I do:

2 lunchtime road spins (1 hour, approx 20-30kms)
Tues Night MTB Ride – 2 hours (20kms)
Thurs night MTB ride – 2 house (20kms)
Sat morning MTB ride – 2/3 hours (20-30kms)
so no lack of rest days.

Would like to increase my climbing speed for MTB and endurance ability for road.

Intervals are where you do repetitive hard efforts at or close to maximum effort, with periods of easy effort inbetween.

So it might be 30 seconds hard effort (sprint) followed by 60 seconds easy. Repeat 10 times.

But the length of interval can vary, as can the number of reps, and can the recovery period in between. There are also pyramids where the recovery time decreases between each hard effort as you go ‘up’ the pyramid and then the recovery time increases as you go back ‘down’ the pyramid.

Someone will probably explain a bit better.

For your climbing, it sounds like you need some hill reps (essentially intervals up a hill) and endurance is generally gained by low-mid heart rate for long durations (long slow durarion).

You should probably use your lunch time sessions for intervals. Cos one hour of general pedalling won’t necessarily do you any good since you’ve got the basic capacity/fitness to cycle on consecutive days.

Ah, time to break out the turbo then.
Thanks mtbtomo 🙂

Really hard intervals that make you puke, at least one total rest day every week.

Get a gym ball/Swiss ball and do hundreds of wall squats.

GB

Congrats on the progress so far

Get a heart rate monitor, log the rides and analyse the data. Plenty of online resources to help you. IMO you’ll will train harder with some form of company/competition to egg you on and/or enter some events.

As for “really hard intervals until you puke” please don’t do that, that’s what gave Andrew Marr his stroke – doing that in your teens or twenties is one thing but later in life it can be very dangerous.

Jambaylya you know thats not quite true right ?

Andrew marr had a stroke because he did not hae any base line fitness to build on and jumped straight into hiit

Thats like starting a new built engine from cold and taking it to the redline and keeping it there.

Aye, if the OP had stated no base fitness I wouldn’t have posted it, but riding 3/4 times a week over the past few months should have built a decent level up.

Until you puke might be a bit much but your not going get very far going ‘as hard as you can until you feel slightly out of sorts’

It has to hurt a bit otherwise your making slow progress.

You don’t say how hard your pushing on your rides. A longer ride at least once a week and realy push hard on a couple of the shorter ones. Second the strava idea worked wonders for me 😀

Scratch +1 with the base plus intensity model, also second the going out and entering races- you may be pleasantly surprised!

Like others have said kinda depends on what sort of fitness you want to get. But my advice would basically be to push harder at somepoint get really really out of breath and tired.

Whether that involves intervals or just going out full tilt from the begining is up to you. My personal experiences with both running and mtbing is you dont even need to do that much exercise to improve your fitness but you do need to push yourself so it hurts.

What we have probably happened is you had to push your self to begin with. You just had no choice or you couldnt have completed the rides, hence your fitness improved. But once you get to a certain level of fitness you normally have a choice whether to really push or just ride with in your self, so you fitness level may plateau then.

It’s quite simple – do some intervals, do some squats, do some core exercises (no point having strong legs and lungs if the bit that connects the two is all floppy) and you’ll go faster. I really think power meters/heart rate/RPE etc adds complexity and misery way above the level of what most people need. You’ll know when you are really trying on an interval without a gadget beeping at you. Just do it in a repeatable fashion e.g. same setting on the turbo, same resistance on the bike in the gym so you know where you’re at. Think about rides in three colours – white, grey and black. White is recovery, black is an interval and grey is pushing on but not really trying.

From riding in groups the biggest single thing most people could do to improve their fitness is not stop for a rest/chat etc at the end of every section of trail. In my usual 8hr N Downs loop my actual time out of my house is about 8hrs 20mins.

Works for me. That said, I’m not the quickest but I think I enjoy my riding more than most.

GB