More mileage, more fitness, this is not the right concept to make yourself a better rider. A modest amount of time may allow you to unlock your maximum potential in cycling. This article shows how you can get a high level of fitness by training or riding 7 hours a week.
Why More Mileage Cannot Bring More Fitness?
When people start riding as a beginner, they need to achieve riding 20 kilometers. But as time goes, they achieve it and they can ride longer, and the average speed improves significantly. However, if they start to increase the mileage, the performance is down. Overtraining deteriorates the performance.
Riding about 170 to 250 kilometers a week is suggested for the cyclists, which takes 6 to 9 hours. The champion of Olympic road cycling, Connie Carpenter Phinney said that a maximum of 10 hours of riding a week is a lot for the full-time cyclists.
How Much Training Is Required?
Professional riders ride 20 to 30 hours per week. The cyclists who are preparing themselves for ultramarathon events may ride even more. The recreational racers need to ride dedicatedly for 10 hours in a week. However, people who do not have big events and are in other professions, 7 hours a week is enough for them. Buying a standard hybrid bike on sale may help you while practicing.
However, when it comes to deciding how much to train yourself, it is a wrong approach to set the number of hours for a week. It may make you frustrated when you fail to achieve the goal. Every person does not have a similar quality. The training that Lance Armstrong got to win the Tour de France, can make you too much exhausted.
Schedule for 7 hours training program
Each day, if you can enjoy 60 minutes on an average of riding, you will be in great cycling shape. It is not a good way to ride continuously for an hour. You can divide the time.
- Monday – You can ride a rest day with 15 minutes of resistance training.
- Tuesday – On this day you can ride for 1 hour with 3 to 8 sprints.
- Wednesday – Riding 1 hour by maintaining a moderate pace is recommended for this day.
- Thursday – You can ride 1 hour that includes 20 minutes of hard effort.
- Friday – Schedule it like Monday, rest day with 15 minutes of resistance training.
- Saturday – On Saturday, ride 1 hour at an easy pace.
- Sunday – It is time to ride the most, for 3 hours at a different pace. You can arrange group rides for that day.
Intensity is one of the major aspects of this program. You can gain a high level of fitness if you make it possible to ride 300 to 600 kilometers a week. However, if you cannot do it, make up the extra miles with intense efforts. Hard efforts like sprints and steady efforts while riding on hills, these can improve your intensity.
Changing the intensity during the week is the key to success. To gain the topmost fitness, you should avoid going at a medium pace. Maintain the schedule and decide when you will ride at a hard pace and when at a medium pace.
The second important factor to gain fitness is taking an adequate amount of rest. Intense effort can increase your power and speed, but it will make you exhausted. Taking proper rest and staying off for 2 days a week can keep you away from being too tired. These two days you can get a light workout.
Conclusion:
Cycling is a great exercise, but it cannot do much for your upper body. To gain the highest fitness, you should schedule at least 2 days a week, for 15 minutes each day, to do some upper-body exercise. Pull-up, crunches and low back exercise can help you out.
