Cycling Training Plans And Programs

Cycling training used to be a case of miles, miles and more miles, now things are a bit more scientific, with the use of pulse rate monitors and power cranks.

Now, it is possible to train in your country while having your coach on the other side of the world. You can send him all your daily training data, distance, duration, altitude, speed, pulse, and power output in watts, all from your bike via the internet. Your coach can tell if you are training correctly or going to the coffee for too many cakes.

PLANNING YOUR SEASON FOR THE WHOLE YEAR

If you want to compete at your top-level, then you will want to periodize your training. Periodizing your training can be done by planning for the year carefully. Read all info about Mesocycles here .

The main thing is to enjoy your cycling when it becomes a chore that’s when to stop and do something else until you want to ride your bike.

Pulse monitors, advanced power meters, or GPS computers can take the guesswork out of training, but you must listen to what your body says, rest when you don’t want to do it and ride hard when you do, but have fun.

STRENGTH ENDURANCE CYCLING TRAINING

Like in many other sports, having a good body condition is essential to succeed in cycling. There are still lots of riders who haven’t noticed yet how important it is enhancing their strength. The first idea to comes to mind is gaining weight. That’s why riders do not put too much attention to their muscles and never go to the gym.

I know you’re not going through bodyweight champs or fitness, but there is a direct relationship between improving pedaling and leg muscles.

 Read more about strength training for cyclists here.

HOW TO MEASURE SUBMAXIMAL ECONOMY OF A CYCLIST

Cycling is included within the top 3 aerobic activity sports group. Means that cyclist needs to know exactly where aerobic and anaerobic thresholds are. In the following article, I’ve talked about measures for determining the submaximal economy. The most important of those are blood lactate threshold and laboratory-based time trials.

Go through the ins and outs of the submaximal economy in cycling

STAGES IN A SYSTEMATIC CYCLING TRAINING

Any sports activity constitutes a systematic training for the participant to develop body strength, endurance, and skill to maximize his capability for winning the competition. A cyclist can understand the principles of training and follow the mentioned guidelines to succeed in this activity.

A WORD ABOUT OVERTRAINING

In the following discussion, we talk about the idea of overtraining to help you to improve your natural abilities. But you must be careful not to hurt your body with too much time on the bike. If you want to make yourself a better rider, sometimes you end up overtraining or maybe not.

LEARN TO OVERCOME STRESS AND TRAIN BETTER

If you’re an athlete, you can face two kinds of stress – one is physical, and the other is psychological. Both can be threatening to your performance because it can reduce your capability to work hard.

Physical stress can be due to some wrong angle while Triathlon training and can be recovered by taking precautionary measures like a proper diet, drugs, and low-intensity exercises. While psychological stress can commute from your daily life factors like a business, targets, deadlines or tension, etc.

Dr. Victor Thompson – a sport psychologist and Ironman triathlete (www.sportspsychologist.co.uk), published a guest post at Triradar that talks about how to beat stress and ease yourself by having a good time with your family and friends. Head over there for more details.

ACCESSORIES FOR BIKE TRAINING

PULSE MONITORS

There are many different pulse monitors, some cycling-specific, and some only read your pulse, and these are good but are an extra thing to clutter up the handlebars on your bike or wrist. Cycling-specific heart rate monitors give much more information at the touch of a button.

Polar, and especially its triathlon heart rate monitor, the Polar S725x, is perhaps the most known brand for fitness rate monitors. Most give you information on how far you have gone and how long it has taken you and what speed you were doing, as well your pulse while doing it.

Spend a little more money, and your monitor will tell you your altitude, the steepness of the climb, the temperature, pedal revolutions, and will work out approximate power output, and you can download all of this to your computer for you or your coach to analyze later.

POWER CRANKS

These are an expensive piece of kit; you replace the existing cranks on your bike with this special chain-set.

The readout from these special cranks tells you all that the pulse monitor does, plus your power output and with some power cranks, the difference between the left and the right leg. It’s mainly used on cycling high-intensity training.

HOW TO TRAIN WITH A HEART RATE MONITOR

The old ways of training made you strong, possibly fast, but definitely tired. These days’ people make more of there time training. You still have to do the miles, but after you have the essential fitness, you can turn to specialized training methods.

This is where a pulse monitor can come in helpful. Interval training has been around for years, the best way is to go with a group of others and take turns to ride hard at the front and rest behind, the smaller the group, the more times you have to ride hard and fewer places to hide from the wind.

On your own, you can do the same, but you have to pick points were to ride hard and when to rest. With a pulse monitor, you have it to tell you when to try hard and when not to and when to go home because you have done enough.

There are also some accessories for warming up and body care I’d like to mention:

• Warming Oil : If you are racing or going to be training hard you need to prepare the muscles for the coming efforts, the warming oil helps that preparation for physical activity by increasing blood circulation and oxygenizes the muscle thanks to the presence of Ozonides
• Reskin BioRacer cycling patches: protecting inner-thigh/buttock areas from irritation and friction

The best way for a successful season is by setting a proper training plan. This could be done simply by having a four-season cycling training program. However, if you are new on cycling, or have just started riding bikes, and don’t know how to train with some improvement, we HIGHLY recommend reading first our beginners cycling program.

WINTER AND INDOOR BIKE TRAINING

Indoor Cycling with Effective Training Programs

You can find a list of benefits associated with indoor cycling. It’s excellent for your cardiovascular fitness and takes less time as well. Moreover, this may be the only training option in winter for many.

This also saves you from other boring routines and training techniques like a home trainer, spinning, and stationary bicycling.

Just make sure you start with a proper indoor cycling training program, and that’s when you can find valuable insight on this issue at Training4cyclists.com. Head over there and read their programs for indoor training.

Vartan (one of our newsletter readers) wants some pointers on training on rollers, the dos, and don’ts. We give him and anyone else contemplating home training some help with how you should go about it and warn about the boredom and the heat.

Read our full article about indoor training for the winter here…