Training & Nutrition - Training Enough

I've been reading through some past threads and was a bit taken aback by the sheer amount of time that you need to put in to feel the results. You really need to spend hours on the bike rather than an hour on the bike when training. Here is my question though, if you want to be able to do a 30 KM spin comfortably does that mean you need to do training spins of like 60 km? To get good at shorter spins do you really need to hit yourself with longer distances when training?

Thanks!

I would say that depends on your goals, whether you are competing, want to stay with your local group on a ride, riding for fitness or just trying to make an 18 mile ride more comfortable so that you enjoy it more.

For all but the last I would say that you will benefit to some degree from longer rides but you don't need to be doing them every day or every week. Just try and go just a bit farther once every couple of weeks and it will help your cycling improve. The same can be said for going on some faster shorter rides.

First of all, the surgeon general and other health "experts" recommend 30 minutes of exercise a day in order to maintain your weight and fitness level. They go on to recommend 60-90 minutes a day in order to lose weight and improve your fitness level. That's PER DAY. So if you plan to take a rest day, your 90 minutes should be divided up between the other days of the week. Right there we're talking more than 1 hour a day.

Now, if you want to ride 30 kms by yourself for your own enjoyment ... go ride 30 kms. You don't have to do anything extra.

However, from my experience, if you want to ride 30 kms well and comfortably and be able to do it without feeling like you've done much of anything at all, build up so you can ride twice that distance comfortably. If you can ride 60 kms comfortably, 30 kms isn't going to feel like anything at all. Same goes for centuries. I get questions all the time about how to make a century feel more comfortable. That's easy ... ride a double century. All of a sudden the century won't seem like much of a ride.

I've been reading through some past threads and was a bit taken aback by the sheer amount of time that you need to put in to feel the results. You really need to spend hours on the bike rather than an hour on the bike when training. Here is my question though, if you want to be able to do a 30 KM spin comfortably does that mean you need to do training spins of like 60 km? To get good at shorter spins do you really need to hit yourself with longer distances when training?

Thanks!

You don't necessarily need to ride longer. You can just ride harder. If you have an hour to train, make sure it's a quality hour. Just don't try to ride hard every day. 3-4 days a week, ride hard, and the other days do a recovery ride or take the day off.

Increasing power at "LT" (I prefer Coggan's Functional Threshold) is the way to go. The faster you become at riding for ~ 1 hour, the better your performance at other durations or distances because you will be riding at a lower percentage of your maximum sustainable pace.

One of the most effective methods of increasing power at threshold involves accumulating 30-60' at threshold during your workout. Don't try to go hard for the whole hour, unless it's a test day. Warm-up, and then do 2x20' intervals at threshold, separated by 5-10' of easy spinning. By the end of each interval, your heart rate should be at or slightly above what you consider your threshold heart rate. Cool-down for 10' and your done.

Or you can do 4x10' intervals at a slightly higher pace. Or 2x30' intervals at a slightly lower pace. Once a month you can even try the "dreaded" 1hr TT. After a good warm-up, go as hard as you can for 1 hr. Be sure to restart your HR monitor, or mark an interval at the beginning of the test. Your average HR for the hour will be your FTHR (functional threshold heart rate).