For the most part, we have found the branded apps to be less polished and user-friendly. However, there are a couple of exceptions, which have made the list below. Rouvy contains a mix of virtual riding and interval training. The company offers augmented-reality riding that allows you to race your friends, similar to Zwift, but instead of a fully animated world, the app adds avatars, road signs and finish banners to real-life footage.
You can specifically train for UK sportives on simulations of Yorkshire hills the pros rode in the Tour de France. For more, read our complete guide to Rouvy. Bkool previously made indoor trainers, alongside offering an app, but the Spanish company is now focused exclusively on software.
Its virtual world comprises thousands of courses and offers similar social and racing features to Zwift. There are also outdoor courses with real-world footage, as well as the option for targeted interval training. With more than ,km of video courses from around the world, Kinomap changes the resistance on your smart trainer based on the terrain in the video.
Kinomap also offers interval training, with two modes either based around training with a power meter or fixed resistance on a smart trainer.
You can train solo or join sessions with users anywhere in the world. FulGaz offers more than 1, high-definition POV videos from around the world, with everything from famous climbs such as the Tourmalet to popular group ride routes such as Akuna Bay in Sydney, Australia.
The app uses your weight and power output to adjust the speed of the video and the resistance on your smart trainer. Mixing the approach of quite a few of the apps above, Kinetic Fit combines interval training using bright and blocky bar graphs with video integration. That allows you to watch pre-selected YouTube playlists as you ride, or even movies downloaded to your device without the need for a second screen or to navigate away from the workout.
If you own a Tacx smart trainer, such as the Neo 2T or Flux S , then the Dutch brand offers its own training software. The Tacx Training app features films of real-life roads such as Mont Ventoux and the Paterberg, as well as training plans, customisable workouts and the ability to replicate your own routes from GPS data.
The free service allows users to create custom workouts, analyse training data and ride to two demo films. Simon von Bromley is a senior technical writer for BikeRadar. As the name implies, the Sweet Spot zone is a narrow power zone between tempo and threshold. This type of base training allows for greater productivity than Tempo riding, but with less incurred fatigue than with Threshold workouts. It essentially allows athletes to efficiently target their aerobic base fitness in less time when compared to traditional base training.
Targeting the Sweet Spot zone, instead of the endurance zone, offers a more time-efficient way to target the aerobic energy system without the need for endless hours on the bike.
Sweet Spot is one of the most efficient ways to go about cycling base training, making it the ideal approach to base for most athletes. Traditional Base takes the conventional approach to base training—low intensity for long hours.
Our traditional base training plan consists of workouts between 90 and minutes with intervals, primarily in the Endurance and Tempo zone. These workouts are longer than the sweet spot base workouts and at a lower intensity and ultimately require a significant time commitment upwards of 20 hours a week. We generally only recommend the traditional base phase to a small sub-set of athletes.
In particular, athletes who have a lot of time they can and want to dedicate to training. With this information in mind, you can begin planning your base training. Planning out your season is easy to do. With this information, you can use Plan Builder to plan your cycling base training plan.
The best part about base training for cycling is that you need absolutely no prior fitness or established strength to get started and be productive.
You can begin base training at any time with any level of fitness. Plan Builder will add or subtract weeks of training to your plan to fit everything in, and base training is likely to be included in that progression regardless of the time frame. After the off-season, vacation, or time off can be a good time to jump into base training. With that said, if you have any tangible goals, like a particular ride you want to achieve, and you want to tie it to a date, consider starting to build your aerobic base well in advance of those goals.
That way, you can complete an entire Base , Build , and Specialty progression. It takes time to build a broad aerobic base. Twelve weeks gives you just enough time to complete both phases of a Sweet Spot Base plan or all three phases of a Traditional Base plan. Depending on your time constraints, this might mean that you do a full twelve weeks in Base, and cut out a few weeks from your Build and Specialty phases.
Or, if you have more experience with training and intervals, you may be able to do just six weeks of Base and then start Build and Specialty. If you have more than twenty-eight weeks until your goal event, you can also benefit from adding an additional Base phase, after your first Build phase.
Doing an additional phase of Base later in the season will reinforce your aerobic fitness and endurance at a heightened level of fitness. How much cycling base training you should be doing each week depends on how much time you have available to train and how much training stress you can productively handle.
To address your individual needs, you have three different options — low-volume, mid-volume, high-volume. If you can dedicate yourself to three structured workouts per week, a low-volume approach is the best fit. If you can handle a bit more training stress and have a bit more time, then a mid-volume plan with five workouts each week will be the best approach.
If you opt for a mid-volume plan, you will start base training with between five and six hours of training each week. If you have multiple years of structured training experience and a consistent daily window to train, then you may be in a position to take a high-volume approach.
A high-volume base plan will have you doing six structure workouts per week with a minimal time dedication of nine hours and at most ten or eleven.
A structured base training plan begins with an FTP assessment. It progresses from there with workouts that target your aerobic fitness, muscular endurance, as well as your ability to handle a high level of work. Taku is a thirty-minute aerobic endurance workout between sixty and seventy percent of your FTP. Endurance workouts like these aim to improve your aerobic power production capabilities in a steady, low-stress manner. Over time, Endurace workouts like these can productively increase fat metabolization and muscular endurance—both vital in base training for cyclists.
Mount Field is technically a Tempo workout, but it serves as an introduction to Sweet Spot training, with three twelve-minute intervals at eighty-five percent of your FTP. This type of base training is designed to improve your ability to resist fatigue at reasonably high power outputs over substantial lengths of time.
Additionally, base training provides cyclists an opportunity to target specific aspects of climbing form, aero positioning, and cadence. Some of these techniques include:. Perceived Exertion Scale. The RPE levels go from 1 to 10 and are equivalent to:. Circuit Training. RPE 4. Interval Training. Interval Training Program 2: Although this routine is low intensity, it lasts a long time to help you build or maintain your endurance. RPE 5. HIIT Program Then, slow the to 55 to 65 RPM for 15 seconds.
Repeat once. Tabata Program Pyramid Program 2: With this drill, the resistance should be high when sprinting and then reduce it for the recovery period. This drill only needs to be done one time, but you can repeat it if have the stamina to do so. Pyramid Program 3: As with the previous program, the resistance should be high when sprinting and then switched to a lower level during recovery.
Should the intervals be on climbs, rollers, flats? Interval workouts should be done on terrain that most similarly matches the terrain of goal events or key sections of goal events. Indoor cycling is another great option for interval workouts due to limiting variables such as stop signs, traffic, and bike control. One good starting point is that the longer and lower the intensity of the workout, the shorter and less intense the warm-up, and the shorter and more intense the workout, the longer and more intense the warm-up should be.
I also recommend that you read our article on some of the biggest mistakes athletes make with High-intensity interval training HIIT.
Cyclists, particularly professional cyclists have a reputation for being mentally tough. How does an amateur cyclist tap into that other-worldly mental strength that professional cyclists have and apply it to their own interval sessions?
This is especially true when it comes to mental strength and pain tolerance. When you begin interval training, you must be willing to accept that the workouts are going to be uncomfortable and challenging. There is a sweet spot between attainability and difficulty that takes some time to figure out, but you should be prepared to have a lot of hard sessions in the early days of an interval-based training plan.
This is a good thing, though. Adaptability and mental toughness, or grit, result from prolonged exposure to discomfort and hard efforts.
Learn from mistakes and move forward. Practice appropriate perception and give yourself a break from time to time. Being realistic with performances is an important step to maximizing long-term success.
Practice positive self-talk and visualize goals. Be sure to include subjective feedback, because it provides valuable context to your training data. Above all, be realistic and have fun. Cycling interval training can be challenging, and when done correctly can yield huge gains in training and be extremely rewarding. If you want help building interval training into your training program, I encourage you to explore working with one of our coaches or our TrainRight Membership which provides science-based training plans and advice from coaches.
I have an early edition of the Time Crunched Cyclist. I seldom see a discussion of training specifically for long distance events. I put a cap on long efforts, though I will go much harder for short periods with a clear benefit.
What sort of interval training might best benefit these long efforts on rides like this?
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