- Morning, Trainiacs!
12 times
15 second max,
two minute rests.
Woo woo.
Whoa.
So, when people start taking up cycling,
if they start wanting to get faster,
and, actually, do something structured with it,
there becomes this huge amount of confusion.
Should you ride long?
Should you ride steady?
Someone might see me doing low RPM strength intervals.
You might see me doing 15 second bursts like this,
or even four minute intervals.
So, developing cyclists are questioning,
"Well, what should I do?"
I don't have time to do all
of these workouts every single week.
Well, I'm going to give you two workouts
that you can focus on as a beginner cyclists,
that are going to allow you to ride longer, ride faster
with just two bike workouts per week,
and hardly any suffering involved.
It'll work.
For real.
Okay. So, let's say you are a new cyclist.
That's just got into the sport.
And as opposed to just going and riding around aimlessly,
you want to actually start getting faster.
Typically, what most people start thinking about
is they want to do two things.
They want to ride faster,
and they want to be able to ride faster for longer.
So, you want to be faster with endurance.
When I first got into cycling,
I ended up thinking that you just go out and you ride,
and sometimes you ride fast, and sometimes you ride slow,
and sometimes you ride long,
and sometimes you just try to push it here, there,
but what ended up happening with me, because I didn't really
have any sort of plan or any sort of structure,
or any sort of guided workout,
I rode for the first three years
that I got into endurance sports
without really making any progress.
When I went into triathlons,
I was really no faster than average.
When I went and joined group rides,
I was getting spit off the back,
or people that were way older, clearly less fit
that were able to drop me
because they'd have more years
of doing these structured workouts that actually
are designed to make them stronger, faster,
and be able to do that for a longer period of time.
So what I'm going to give you is just two workouts.
And in our book, Triathlon Bike Foundations,
which can apply to triathlon or cycling in general,
we talk about the two workouts per week that athletes need
to do in order to be able to go faster and longer.
We did a podcast with Dr. Martin Gibala,
who wrote the one minute workout,
where he talked about all of the research that's being done
about super short, intense interval training.
And what's being found in study after study
is that this common misconception of you have to grind.
You have to be putting in huge hours to constantly
be suffering so that you can actually get faster.
It's really just not the case.
If you want to, a, just be healthier,
it takes a lot less work than people originally thought.
And what they're actually finding is that even
in already trained cyclists that are really well-designed,
but short and intense workout,
can be enough to make a huge amount of progress.
So, what do these workouts look like
that are short and intense?
Well, they look like a really short,
but actually very easily intense kind of workout.
They might be about 30 to 40 minutes. And on average,
what they include is roughly three to four total minutes,
that's it, of really intense work that's broken up.
So, I'll give you an example.
The workout that I just did was 12 times 15 seconds
at maximum effort with two minutes rest in between.
And it doesn't have to be that,
you can make up your own different version of it.
But here are the guidelines.
You want somewhere in between about two and a half
and four minutes of really intense workout,
and the rest should be anywhere
from about a one to three work to rest ratio.
So, something like 20 seconds on, 60 seconds off,
all the way up to a one to nine work to rest ratio,
like 30 seconds on, four and a half minutes off.
So, you can start playing with that,
play with these really, really intense intervals.
Here's the key to it.
You want it to be broken up with efforts ranging
from about ten seconds to about 40 seconds.
This is your neuromuscular power.
This is your top end power.
And as you're developing as an athlete,
that top end power is really critical
because it's going to make you faster.
It's going to make steady efforts less painful.
It's also going to burn a huge amount of fat.
It's going to increase your VO2 max.
So the amount of oxygen that you
can process every single minute, ends up raising.
And it's a really good bang for your buck,
as far as time spent, versus the benefits that you get.
When I say intense, they need to be intense.
They need to be like tossing your cookies kind of intense.
And if you end up fading in the last few, that's okay.
What we're really just trying to do is push
as hard as we can to create that hormetic response,
where the body adapts to be able
to perform the tasks that you're giving it.
So that's workout number one.
Workout number two, much more simple,
much more easy, as long as you like riding long.
That first workout is going to have an endurance benefit
because you are going to be stronger,
you're going to be able to process your energy a lot
more efficiently, but to ride long,
you really just need to ride long.
And how I recommend athletes do this
is with a three-step process.
The first is to ride comfortably along
at a very low intensity. How much is a low intensity?
You can go online and find your zone
to your easy effort heart rate cap,
and stay under this. You're staying a long way under this.
It's in your zone one or two,
and right under that heart rate cap
for a comfortably long distance. This is your endurance cap.
This is you burning a lot of fat as fuel,
which is going to help you ride longer.
The second thing that you need to do is increase that,
and you can increase that by around 8 to 10%, each week,
drop down every third or fourth week to about 60%.
So let's say you ride 60 minutes,
then the next week ride 66 minutes.
then the next week ride 73 minutes,
then drop down to around 45 minutes.
Then come back and do 10% more than your previous longest.
So, up around 85 minutes.
And by going up in these 8 to 10%, roughly increments,
you're going to gradually be able to adapt
to riding longer and longer.
The third thing that you need to do in order
to actually make this really beneficial, really easy,
is I believe in a timed carb approach.
When you end up having carbohydrates before this ride,
you blunt your body's ability to actually burn fat as fuel.
Your blood sugar goes high
and your body stops accessing fat as fuel as easily.
So, I recommend before these low intensity rides,
don't have carbs, but certainly eat.
So, this is something like eggs, or a protein bar
or sausages, maybe a Bulletproof coffee,
something like this that is going to give you lots of fuel
and fuel during the ride,
but just restrict carbohydrates until after the ride.
What this is going to do is really teach your body
to burn a ton of fat as fuel,
which is going to allow you to ride for ages.
Until I started doing this,
I would always get those achy legs,
no matter how fit I got around the two hour mark,
because my body was just out of fuel.
With those two rides, you are going to be faster, stronger.
You're probably going to lose body fat because they're
designed to burn a ton of fat during and after the workout.
You're going to be able to ride longer.
You're going to be able to join all kinds of groups,
and do all kinds of races that you never expected
that you could possibly do.
You're going to feel strong,
and you're going to feel healthy,
and enjoy cycling a heck of a lot.
This is when it starts getting really fun
where there's no workout or no group that you fear.
And that's when you can start building a community
around race plans and race goals,
or even just adventure goals. And it becomes really fun.
There is links in the description below
to studies that we've got
to the Triathlon Bike Foundations book that we've got,
if you want some structure,
or if you want a full training plan,
we have not just triathlon training,
but bike training at our app
that you can get a free 14 day trial of it.
app.mymotive.com.
Later, Trainiacs!
Ride strong, fast and far.