I do short hill sprints and long hill reps as a matter of course, but for variety I’m wondering what exercises people might do given an hour and say 20 mile road loop.

Smash it? Constant power? Over/under? Threshold intervals? Loop has a flat half but isn’t that great for intervals, having some traffic lights and roundabouts.

What you trying to achieve?

Umm…. everything 🙂

General all round fitness, and exercises I can do without making myself too hungry I suppose. The sprints never feel like a good workout, somehow. More interested in experimenting and find out which I like.

Maybe ride in a totally inappropriate gear?

My 30k outdoor loop has the following:

1 x 3km flat warm up
1 x 50m 12% sprint climb (KOM!)
1 x 2km false flat to…
1 x 2km 6% climb (smash)
1 x 1km down
1 x 3km 6% climb (smash)
1 x 4km rolling (OU’s using the ups as the Overs)
1 x 1km flat to down (rest)
1 x 8km -1.5% average rolling 8km (TT)
1 x 3km return cool down

I realise the distance doesnt add up but it is 30.1km. Fastest I’ve done it is 59 mins – the first & last 3k is in traffic.

10 minute warm up
1 min hard gear
1 min recover
2 min hard gear,
1 min recover
3 min hard
1 min recover
4 min hard
1 min recover
5 min hard
1 min recover
4 min hard
1 recover
3 min hard
1 recover
2 min hard
1 recover
1 min hard
10 min easy

Enjoy….

Intervals, wors has a fairly good start there actually.

Try:
10 mins warm up
30 secs at 9/10 intensity (or as close as you can get anyway), 30 secs rest.
Repeat x 5
10 mins rest
30 secs at 9/10 intensity (or as close as you can get anyway), 30 secs rest.
Repeat x 5
10 mins rest
30 secs at 9/10 intensity (or as close as you can get anyway), 30 secs rest.
Repeat x 5
10 mins warm down

You can add another internal set in their if time allows. You can also cut the rests down.

It’s a proper beasting.

Can’t really do intervals on the flat round here. Too many downhills and traffic lights and roundabouts and stuff. I do hill reps for those.

Recovery rides.

Find a better route.

I sometimes do hill reps on a 3 min hill of 2 mins threshold into 1 min full gas. Rather than time it, I have a tree where I attack. Not sure if it has any real performance benefits but it’s fun.

Hard Intervals interspersed with sets of 50 burpees and 100m bear crawls.

Find a better route.

This. Even in central Bum I could find a flatish section that I can do flat out for 1 minute on. Sure, it may not be picturesque but I’ll be too busy trying to breath to notice that.

But, you could do it with hill repeats.
10 min ride to hill
1 min max, 1 min rest.
Repeat as you see fit, perhaps using downhill bits to recover.
Ride home.

That was easy.

Even in central Bum I could find a flatish section

😆

If you can find a decent 5 min stretch of uninterrupted road you could do 30 sec hard sprint then hold threshold for the rest of it, turn around and z2 back to the start, then repeat. Do that three or four times and see how it goes. Then complete the loop at z2.

tbh when out on my MTB I find that I’m not fully warmed up until at least 30 mins of effort, and/or the end of the first decent climb – so could even be an hour in before.

If I’ve only an hour and am after ‘smashing it’ I’d reckon that a turbo is probably best.

A good point there. Op maybe a Trainer road sub is for you.

It’s oDD this thread should appear becuase now that I’m fully focused on XCO and TT only I’m torn between my road route posted above, or swapping it for an XC route in the local forest – the latter is 20 mins to get there including a 12% road climb, 30mins of singletrack and the road back. It’s harder to measure the performance benefit but I guess there’s the technical,practise element of it for XC.

Otherwise, Turbo will be my friend due to the lack of faring required to get going. I can also and have performed several reps of said 12% climb on the road bike X 7 is a 35k ride there and back with the reps. Just harder to do those around work at 5am and 8pm 😀

Trying to be more dedicated this next year though.

I’m finding that with increasing age I’m taking longer to warm up, it can be the best part of an hour now 😳

I wouldn’t try to work on everything in an individual session, I’d use one for hill reps, one for sprints, one for tempo riding, etc., but making sure that you do at least one ride a week that is a recovery ride and you take that ride really easy.

I already do intervals on hills. I wanted ideas for sessions based on riding a 20 mile loop that are not sprint intervals.

Mix it up, sometimes smash the climbs sometimes the flat sometimes do 30s repeat efforts sometimes longer 5 min efforts.