Originally Posted by
channelz28
I've been a bike commuter most of my life, 50-100 miles a week, so I'm not new to biking. Since Covid hit, I started taking up riding for exercise as my other activities got shut down and I don't have much else to do. I find when I ride really hard, which is most of the time, I'm almost too sore to ride again the next day. Sometimes for 2 days even. I'm not trying to get faster particularly, I just feel like if I'm out for exercise, I might as well go as hard as I can. I've been riding about 200 miles a week, but I'm not sure if riding while I'm really sore is doing more harm than good. I've tried to take it easy on some days, but it's almost impossible. I also get bored.
I've worked out how different heart rate zones affect me in terms of need for recovery, and plan accordingly. If I plan on riding several days in a row I'll just maintain a heart rate that I know is sustainable several days in a row. If I want to do a particularly long or high-effort ride I just plan it in, and will often time it so the highest effort ride is the day before my rest day. When I'm in high exercise mode I always plan in one day completely off per week. That's usually been Sunday, but now that I'm cycling again Sundays are just about the best cycling days, so the rest day will usually be Monday. If you don't have a heart rate monitor it might help you to aquire one, and learn to map what you experience in terms of performance and recovery needed to heart rate zone it was in. If you're not used to governing your level of effort by reference to something like heart rate it could take some getting used to, but I've been doing it for a long time and it's trivial for me now.