therhodeo

For me and my personality your way is torture. Its what I have to do because of my schedule but I would do anything to have the free time to just get out on the road and enjoy some riding. For someone jumping into cycling though I would recommend getting out and falling in love with being on the road before I told them to turn it into a chore.

SirHustlerEsq

I ride with faster groups on the week day group "sprint rides" and drop, hopefully a little further every day. Three day weekends that keep me away from the bike (racecars) probably helps more than anything else.

Hiro11

Lots of good advice here. A few other points:

1. There's a technique to cycling to new riders often don't appreciate. It's all about energy conservation, smoothness, knowing when to push it and knowing when to hide in the draft and recover. The best way to learn this is to see it in action. Find an experienced rider. Get behind him/her, note the constant pedaling, note the spinning, note the still upper body. Shift when they shift, stand when they stand, use the drops when they do, follow them closely through corners, ask questions, concentrate on their rear hub and stay 18 inches behind them. Learn how to ride in a straight line (this is surprisingly difficult).
2. Learn to guage your own effort level. Learn to identify what a "yellow zone" feels like vs. a "red zone". A powermeter might help you quantify this, but your own body is a damned good guage of how much effort you're putting out.
3. Don't be afraid of pain. Every ride should have a few tough efforts that leave you gasping. Tooling along at 16 MPH is fun and a valuable aspect of cycling, but it's not going to make you into a lean, mean machine. Intervals are probably the best way to get stronger and faster.
4. Once you've ridden for a couple years, try racing. This doesn't have to be hardcore at all. A training crit is generally fun, low key, safe and challenging. It's the absolute best way to break through plateaus.
5. Join a group. This is an absolute necessity for a serious road cyclist, IMO.

BaseGuy

At what do you want to get better? I ride to have fun and feel good. I'm great at having fun already; all I have to do is ride.

So I suggest the same for you. Just ride.

BoSoxYacht

Get out and ride. Cycling is fun, and riding more will help you get stronger.

If you want to race, look into a training plan that fits your needs. If you just want to improve your health, eat right and ride.

Drew Eckhardt 

First you get some easy "base miles" under your belt to strengthen joints to avoid injury where 500 is an accepted number.

Along the way you gain endurance by riding farther. Many people use a 10% weekly increase as a rule of thumb.

Then you get faster by riding faster. Obviously you can't ride fast for far, but the same fitness you use for distance can be spent on shorter more intense efforts which will grow capillaries to get more oxygen into your muscles and mitochondria to process pyruvate which would otherwise become lactic acid. You alternate those intense intervals with rest periods to process the excess lactic acid and recover.

As you gain fitness you up the number and length of your intervals. In decent shape I like 3x10 minutes or 2x20 with 5 minutes of reset between. Having slacked off 3x5 twice a week at the same intensity is an OK starting point

So that you're fresh enough to have hard days you have rest days, make every fourth week slow, etc.

There are articles, books, etc. addressing cycling training for various interest levels and time commitments which get more into specifics of what you do on the hard days, between them, rest weeks which may be one out of four, how fast to increase your efforts, etc.

"Hard" can be calibrated in terms of Rider Perceived Effort effort or using tools like heart rate monitors and power meters where RPE is free, heart rate can be had for $100, power $300 at the wired used end of the spectrum through $800ish for affordable new wireless hardware through thousands for professional grade tools suggesting one of the first two options is a good starting point.

Fitness gained riding hard can also be spent riding hard can be spent riding much farther at lesser intensity. I like to use an example with a trained cyclist riding 3x20 minute threshold intervals at 23 MPH on flat ground with 30 minutes of rest / warmup / cool down getting the same endurance effects of a 138 9 hour 15 minute ride at 15 MPH.

I rode 100-120 miles a week including 3 hard 20-25 mile rides leading up to a week long 418 mile supported tour with 30,000 feet of climbing and felt great.

Cookiemonsta

Ride a lot and really push yourself. That is the basics of it I guess.

dangerd

If your goal is to loose weight here are a few things that I found helpful.
If you have a smart phone get an app called loseit! and keep track of everything you eat like it is a religion. This way you know how many calories you have to burn (I have found that losing calories is the key to losing weight). Make sure that you eat a balanced diet though.
At the end of the day leave a buffer of a couple of hundred calories under your allowance and the weight WILL come off.

You can enter the time you ride and the speed (from a cheap bike computer) into the app and it will give you a pretty good idea how many calories you have burned as well as keeping track or your overall diet.

Get a bike good computer like a Garmin 500 / 510 whatever and a cadence and heart rate monitor and you will get better calorie tracking that you can upload to somewhere like mapmyride / strava etc. and it can be hooked right into the loseit! app. I use mapmyride.

A good computer will let you see your cadence and heart rate. Like someone else said riding behind someone to learn this works but having the computer tells you exactly what you are doing till you can feel it is better.

Watching your heart rate helps too. I try to ride right below or above zone 3. Below conserves energy at high cadence and above builds up your lactate threshold.

Don't forget to go UPHILL!!! YOU GOTTA CLIMB TILL IT HURTS AND A LITTLE BEYOND SOMETIMES!!

I am sure everyone on this board has set off on a climb they didn't think they could do then made it to the top which ALWAYS makes you feel good and builds confidence to do something bigger the next time. Push yourself you will be surprised what you are capable of.

Most of all HAVE FUN!

Good riding to you

koolerb

Ride with people "better" than you.. Faster, more experienced, etc.

caloso

+1

RoadMike

"Ride lots."

-Eddy Merckx

ThermionicScott 

+2. The social/fun aspect of riding with other people is important and motivating, too.

cyclezen

it is sortta fun isn;t it?

all of the above - there's every reason in the world to ride a bike...

get some basic lights, find a nice easy ride you feel safe for a nighttime ride, do it while there's still some warm temps (cold temp rides are an acquired taste, like stinky cheese...)
it's a drug...
do it with someone whom you have a close connect - you will be a junkie... so will they...
enjoy

Ice41000

Ride lots and ride hard.

hhnngg1

Correct, but at the same time, I never liked overly simplistic quotes like this.

It's directly analogous to telling a budding piano player - how do you get to Carnegie hall? Practice lots, and practice hard. While yes, it's true, there's a lot of method in the madness - without things like a plan to guide you, goals to reach for, peers to motivate you by their example, a teacher to show you where the best place to expend your time and energy, nobody can just practice the 6 hours per day needed to be a top-flight concert pianist from youth, but with all those things in place, it actually becomes almost easy.

Similarly, tell a noob cyclist 'just ride a lot' oversimplifies it - if that's all you give them, odds are high they won't accomplish much.

However, give that noob a progressive plan, education about what the bike does, some phyisology knowledge of how their body responds to improvement, group rides and even an occasional event/race to train for, some videos and history of the sport that are really inspiring, and regular rides with slightly faster riders, and all of a sudden riding a lot and often becomes eminently doable.

BoSoxYacht

That's all you needed to say.

The rest was just blah, blah, blah.

hhnngg1

Nah, it's not blah blah blah.

The #1 error that non-experts make when trying to figure out how to get good at something is that they think exactly like that - just spend 'gobs of time and effort' and you'll get better, when in reality, it's nothing even close to that kind of thinking involved.

Ice41000

For someone one month into riding that is enough.

After a year of having fun and "just riding", and when his body get used to position and effort he can start thinking about "how" and "how much" and "how hard".
Any kind of "structure" or "plan" will only overwhelm a beginner and ruin it for him.

M2C

BoSoxYacht

I don't disagree, I was just commenting on how long winded your answer was.

rumrunn6

just realized my avrg speed went up by 2mph over last year.

StephenKTHill

My apologies for the late reply! Work has been extremely busy and being a newly wed adds to it lol.

I have been following the advice given..pretty much riding as much as I can and getting rest as well...I think I am nervous about developing bad habits early on..Weight has been falling off though. 279.8 this morning...Down from 325...Gonna keep it going. I am looking to find some cyclist in my area but no one seems to wanna ride with the new guy lol

aaronmcd

Yep. As soon as you think you can't climb much more, you can likely still double the climb.


Here is what I did. Commute all the time, and have fun with it. You learn to start and stop, know your surroundings, trackstand at the lights, ride no hands, stand, sit, spin fast and mash, accelerate, dodge pedestrians, dodge buses and salmoning skateboarders. Try to ride on the line. Try to weave the dashed lines. Bunny hop the man holes. Motorpace as long as you can. Catch up with every rider you see. Beat your time to work. Use the drops, tops and hoods. Sit forward and back on the saddle. Get off the side of the saddle and lean the bike. Sit and spin as smooth as possible, then stand and sprint wildly. Don't loose speed on the overpass, and don't shift up going down the other side.

merlinextraligh

Which will invariably get quoted in these threads, but is completely out of context.

Bah Humbug

He didn't say he had a bunch of money he wanted to spend on performance.

rgwinn

Older book, but Greg LeMond's Complete Book of Cycling has a lot of good info

Also, check with your local bike shop to see about group rides, get to know some other riders and do training with better riders, will help you get better.