I suddenly have alot of opportunity to get out and train and alot of motivation to do so and get quicker. I’ve just been getting as much as possible and pushing as hard as I can but I’ve read a bit about intervals and found loads of different schemes on t’internet.

Can anyone advise a particular method that has worked well for them? I’m not training for any particular goal other than to ride further and faster on and off road and maybe do better in some local enduros

Find hill. Ride hard up hill. Ride down, getting breath back not pinning it, shredding no gnar. Repeat.

Sounds simple put like that.. not much fun though

Was training/getting fit ever fun?

Easy really.. You can devise one yourself in a matter of moments.

As above ^^ Find a Hill, set a tempo that you can breath normally at then climb, turn around and again start at the bottom, set a tempo and climb harder.. keep going until you feel both the burn in your legs and lungs.
Once you have that do it all again and time it. Make sure the hill is above 6% gradient and 5mins long (at least)
Then do that rep 10 times.
Then..
Seek to do that rep 3 times in a morning.
You’ll soon get bored and want to try something else so..
Find a bit of flat road, must be somewhere where you can go flat out and rest in succession (doesn’t matter if you have to turn around etc.) So, from a moderate pace 80rpm/140bpm accelerate to Max that you can and hold it for as long as you can.. stay in the same gear, then slow down and let your heart drop back to where it was before the start.
And repeat 10 times, and 3 times in a morning.

Always best to time stuff so get yourself a GPS/Watch etc. and set your watch on intervals 30sec blasts and alarm etc..

To avoid blowing up stay seated, then gauge where you blow point is and pace off. You’ll be hitting some threshold stuff here and will get used to backing off once the burn peaks.

If you are doing it properly you will want to both vomit and stop, if this happens you’ve gone too far into it, pace back until its uncomfortable and burning but not vomit enduring (until you are used to it)

Get a spreadsheet together and log all this stuff down, then build a plan based around what you’ve just done and then start to inquire intensity over a month..

I’ve managed to do my own plans for years, I use a GPS for tracking and it’s the only way for me now.

You could join Strava and try collecting KOM’s, segments and the like but I’d suggest these are always moving targets and unlikely to stay static for any length of time.

Or..
Join in on GCN on YouTube and follow their plans, they are both easy and informative and a great motivator and funny to watch. I use GCN all the time because I like what they do and how they do it and they’re Ex Pro’s and I like that.

HTH

Chris, eat loads of pies, drown yourself in beer and maybe once or twice get out a do a nice easy ride on some tow paths. Not that I’m worried about playing catch up on any enduros…. 😉

If you have no particular goal then there is no particular training plan which will be best suited to you.

If you want to ride further, consistent rides without breaks and pedaling downhill etc will be good for endurance.

If you want to ride faster. Ride fast. In particular polarize your riding. Either go hard or easy and not much in between.

There are loads of names for this but it all amounts to roughly the same thing. You can try and log everything, stick to training zones and plans etc but for general fitness I think it is overkill.

I find long consistent road rides good for endurance
2hr ish MTB rides where the interesting stuff is flat out and the boring stuff is taken as recovery are great for non mentally challenging intervals.

In particular polarize your riding. Either go hard or easy and not much in between.

This was something I was advised to do, either work hard or take it easy / recover. Either by setting a pace for the whole ride, or by sections within a ride. Recovery is as important as the hard work.

That and the advice there ^ about hill reps. I did get good results from a turbo plan added into more structured riding/training of sorts but the turbo intervals were simply more focused, efficient version of what I’d do during a hills session. 10-12 weeks of that and you’ll see the gains.

i was given the following advice by a guy who is an excellent XC racer.

1. Just a standard road or off road endurance ride of 2 hours or more and make sure it has some long steady climbs in it. Stay seated on all the climbs and try to keep your cadence above 60rpm. Heart rate zone 2 or 3 max and focus on just keeping it steady, no breaks and no rest at the top of the hills. Try to average a zone 2 heart rate for the whole ride. So that’s just steady base endurance and try to get a couple of rides in each week like that.

2. Big gear his climbs : Find a road or fire road if on the mtb that’s a medium gradient. Something like the fire road climb to the Buzzards Nest carpark at Glentress would probably do. Climb it in a higher gear than normal, low rpm (50 to 60rpm) and heart rate in Zone 4 or just a wee bit higher. Focus on smooth force round the entire pedal revolution. Climb for 2 maybe 3 mins max then rest for 3 mins between. Do this 8 or more times in a workout. The rest can just be free wheeling back down the hill then just spinning at the bottom in an easy gear.

I also do High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) which is a workout where you go to max effort for 4 mins then 2 mins rest to bring heart rate back down, repeat 4 times. It builds endurance very quickly but you do need to go to your absolute max effort during the intervals.

This really works for me, my endurance is way better than it was when I started it four weeks ago and that’s after a week off due to back problems.

resting is the most important part of training

resting is the most important part of training

+1 though getting the balance between work and rest might be important

What professional sports people get isn’t the time to train when they want but to rest when they want/need to. As one said to me many years ago: “On rest days I don’t even get an erection”! 😀

Personally I wouldn’t do intervals/hill reps more than once a week to avoid overtraining. When I was fell running I did hill reps on the bridleway that runs past the house. In three months of just one session a week I took my PB for the loop to the top of the nearest fell down from 64mins to 49mins. As much as anything you learn to dig deep and know just how far you can push yourself when things start hurting.

Most ‘fun’ way is to go out to your local trails and search out the climbs before good descents. My local trail (Nant-yr-arian) had a 3 minute climb before High-as-a-kite, 2 minute climb before Hippity hop and a 6-7 minute climb before Italian Job. Sprint up hill as fast as you can maintain all the way up and then cruise down the descent (or practice no braking/choosing different lines) and repeat 4-5 times. It is almost going back to the old school method of seasoning descents, but doing the training on the climbs as well. 15-20 minute intervals I tend to spread out on 3-4 hour rides as it is a bit anal to climb for 20 minutes and then cruise back down to repeat. You can do leg burner repeats at Nant and short cut down the moorland section and Mark-of-zorro, which makes it mentally easier. Been working a treat for me, so much that I sold my trainer, though could do with it at the moment with all the snow and ice about, as it makes getting to the trails safely a tad more difficult

Echoing whitestone, I wouldn’t do short intervals of less than 4 minutes more than once or twice a week, the longer ones are fine as they are done at a lesser intensity

High impact interval training on a static bike = 3 min warm up, then alternate 1min flat out (80+% maxHR) 1min recovery for 20-40mins, then 5 min cool down

get a copy of the 1st 20 minutes for good summary of the myths of exercise and simple benefits of HIIT

Cheers all, plenty of stuff to try out. Will try the HIIT This morning and see how that goes, found a handy app that will beep every 4 and 2 minutes through my earphones which should be handy, not sure it will work out perfect with hills but I might have to sprint down the odd hill and back right off on the odd climb to make it work.

Frequency wise doing intervals twice a week, one long hard road ride, one long mtb ride and couple of odd playing about mtb outings plus the mon-fri 8k round trip commute wouldn’t be overdoing it would it?

In particular polarize your riding. Either go hard or easy and not much in between.

Sounds like pretty much all of my singlespeed rides…..

eg; last saturday’s singletrack ride around Swinley and Crowthorne

Total time 2:21

Time in ‘easy zone’ <80% effort 33 mins
Time in ‘tempo’ 80-85% effort 40 mins
Time in ‘ow this hurts’ 85-95% 56 mins
Time in ‘I’m about to vomit’ 12 mins

and looking at the hr curve, most of the tempo time was a steadily decreasing bit as I went from OW to EASY, as opposed to any substantial periods in it.

I don’t have a hrm, considering I have no specific end go can I just gauge effort on pain or is it worth getting one? Do the cheap bluetooth ones work decently and link up with Strava?

wouldn’t be overdoing it would it?

I’m no expert but it could be, unless you’re riding a similar volume already or have a good base endurance fitness. That’s 12hrs plus commuting roughly? You need to build up to a training volume or try 3 weeks on / 1 week off at easy low intensity, so depends where your fitness is now. 2 hard interval sessions a week can leave you with fatigue that carries over to the next session and be counter-productive unless you’re used to it and recovering well (1 session on the turbo a week was plenty for me!). Quality not qty there. The commute could be ideal recovery/easy-pace riding though, or a short sharp one here and there.
You could make that long hard road ride a longer easier road ride and get a benefit from it and less fatigue – 4 hours+ in Z2 is training in itself and it’s easier to keep it low and constant on road. Do a long tough one every few weeks for variety? Make the MTB ride a fun mixed-pace ride with 1-2hrs (2x 45mins or 2x 60) at sweet spot pace or include other things like power work to get a benefit w/o too much fatigue or boredom. MTB is great for getting benefits without needing much ‘drill focus’, too much session structure would kill my motivation.

can I just gauge effort on pain

fwiw as a non-power meter using dabbler in all this; personally for steadier hard climbs and efforts from fresh, that point where the acid feeling starts to build in the legs is approx my threshold pace or upper Z4/90-95% max – the red line. Go over that and I’m out withing a minute or 2. Let it hover at that level and I can hold it for 20, 25 mins or a bit more but it’s grim. Matches up with the HRM and 20-30 mins max tests but I’ve not used a power meter. On steady road rides, I’m out of Z2 when I start to breath more than I would when walking briskly, ie if I notice I’m starting to take deeper breaths on a climb I back off. It’s all a useful guide when I’m riding w/o the HRM, but also have to recognise that my actual power output will vary from that – I could be in Z3 on a climb but still only be putting out low-level power if I’m not fresh. That’s where a regular route with the same bike helps – gearing, speed and cadence is a fair guide to relative power. (As ever on this stuff, posting to share a beginner’s pov that’s worked for me and always interested to know where the flaws in this are from those with more experience.)

Peaks Coaching: What is Functional Threshold Power (FTP)?

A series of articles here that are useful background reading, if only to understand more about what you’re aiming to gain.

Well that was painful! Think Ill get a HRM to gauge effort as I felt like I was close to passing out a couple of times, and then felt quite sick when I got home!