Bicycle race training program

Nina lives and coaches in Brevard, North Carolina. For information on coaching and camps, visit trainright. This is the best article I have read so far about gravel racing. I have probably read this few times before the race and finally read it again after two gravel races. All the successful ingredients for the gravel races are written here in this article.

Thank you! Looking forward to the next article. Any chance it will come out before the Mid West event? I am curious it mentions low cadence in the soft stuff. If I am on my game when I see that coming I shift so my cadence will be ish and this seems to provide momentum and a degree of stability if I bog down.

Am I doing this backwards? If I am at low cadence I have no where to go if it gets softer and I cannot I increase my power to keep my momentum. Anticipating the loss in momentum and increasing your cadence is great to avoid getting bogged down when you see an obstacle. I hope that makes sense. Give some of those workouts a try and see if you feel more comfortable riding through soft stuff.

Your email address will not be published. Share This Article. Comments 8. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. The first half of the week programme focuses in particular on changes of pace, which are vital in racing whether for responding to an attack or tackling tough sections of terrain.

It'll also improve your anaerobic threshold. In the last five weeks you'll work delivering short, explosive bursts and recovering quickly. This will allow you to produce strong efforts even when tired. You'll also work on your VO2 max power and anaerobic capacity. This programme isn't about big miles; too much volume will just make you fatigued, so the priority is to target specific race intensities in a strategic way. Start now: Cycling Training Plan for road racers.

Just starting out the sport of cycling? Or want to reach an achievable milestone? This training plan will help you get there. This plan is for riders who are aiming to ride 60km but who may not have ridden a bike in a long time or just starting out in the sport and want to improve their fitness from a base level.

Start now: Cycling Training Plan from sofa to 60km. For our training plans, different parts of the rides are described using numbered training zones. The plan is to work at that level of effort for the time given. Making the most of your time means working at the right effort level for you. Z1, meaning Zone 1. The Borg scale, from one to 10, provides a guide to how these effort levels should feel:. To find your functional threshold HR and power needed to develop your zones , you will need to complete the following procedure:.

After warming up, perform an all-out minute effort, either inside on a turbo or outside on a quiet road. This effort is similar to a time trial effort. Once you have your average HR and power number for this minute test, use this number as your per cent threshold figure. Take your average power for the 20 minutes and multiply by 0. This number is your Functional Threshold Power — and your zones are based on a percentage of this figure.

The above is based on both the Borg scale of intensity and the training zones developed by Andrew Coggan. The point at which lactate begins to accumulate more quickly than it can be processed is your LT or, in riding terms, the fastest pace you can maintain for minutes. Aerobic Ride: This is generally a short ride one hour or less at low intensity.

It works your aerobic system without putting too much training stress. When you individualize interval training to meet the demands of your goal event, you are effectively focusing on training the different energy systems. This is a big strength of interval training. So, when we refer to a VO2 max interval, this means that the interval will mainly, but not exclusively, improve your performance and physiology around VO2 max.

Other areas of your physiology will improve too, but the improvements revolve around the targeted intensity. Below are the different CTS training zones. Each of these zones has a number of different workout prescriptions within them that will work to improve your capabilities at different intensities and prepare you for specific event demands. As another example, if your goal is to adapt to repeated maximal efforts, such as accelerations in criteriums or bridging gaps in group rides, the most effective approach would be to build Power Intervals into your plan, since they fall within the VO2max training zone.

Each of these training ranges corresponds to the improvement of a specific area of rider development via interval prescriptions. For all of these interval prescriptions, there is a proper recovery ratio you would want to adhere to in order to maximize your session.

Use the following framework and examples to decide when you should include intervals and what type:. A good place to start would be a workout like 4x10min Sweet Spot. Functional Threshold Power is the highest average power that you can sustain for minutes depending on your level of fitness. By spending targeted amounts of time at an intensity near FTP, you would be raising your maximum sustainable pace over time.

How does this trickle down to a faster gran fondo time? That would put you around a watt average. If you were able to raise your FTP through the application of steady-state interval training to watts, suddenly the power you may be able to average for the entire gran fondo increases to roughly watts. You can see from this example that regardless of course conditions a roughly 20watt increase in average power over the course of a gran fondo could yield you a significant increase in speed, and lower your overall time.

For example, a road racer working towards a hilly road race would want to narrow the focus of their training to specifically replicate the demands that race will require of them. So, if the road race features a variety of climbs in the second to 5-minute range, you would want to spend a good deal of time targeting workouts on climbs within that time duration. These could be workouts like speed intervals, power intervals, hill accelerations, or climbing repeats.

They can help prepare you for steady pushes above your lactate threshold on longer climbs, as well as your ability to accelerate hard on short power climbs. When looking at the race profile and evaluating your strengths as a rider, you may decide to narrow your focus even further. If you are a rider who is stronger on longer, more steady climbs, workouts like climbing repeats and hill accelerations could prepare you to lay down a devastatingly high pace on climbs in the 5- to 8-minute range.

As you get stronger and improve your fitness, your workouts have to deliver a greater workload in order to keep your progress going. A more experienced athlete might do an extra week of hard training while an older or less experienced rider might trim it down to two weeks on, one week off but three on and one off will work for most riders. More Cycling Articles. Look for this banner for recommended activities. Cancel Yes. Join Active or Sign In. All rights reserved.

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