Hi all,


I am new here and just after some advice really:
I currently cover about 10-15 miles per day but wondered. . .


How do you increase your ride speed?


1) Do I say in a easy gear but conatant & non-stop pedalling then in time progressively increase and up to a harder gear AND REPEAT.


2) Or Do I start as from now in a hard gear (even if slow at times) with constant non-stop pedalling then let my speed come later naturally?


I see more professional cyclist riding with non-stop pedalling & consistent with it all the time for miles.Their must be a method or training theory to progress with it surely
Please HELP

Intervals

Yep ... intervals.

a lot of #1 (spinning).

a little of #2 (mashing).

eventually, sessions of sustained intervals, both spinning and mashing style.

1. In general no matter what your fitness, you will have the best average speed for your whole ride if you aim to keep a relativly constant pedals speed (say, 80-90rpm) no matter how fast your bike is moving...so uphills, that means easier gear, downhill harder gear, but whatever gear lets you keep that pedal speed. Doing this will also increase your cycling fitness more than pedaling for while, then coasting, then pedalling...etc.

2. As far as increasing your cycling fitness over time, there are 2 proven ways to do it:
(a) ride longer. If you were to gradually increase your ride distance to 30, then 50 miles or more, even without trying to increase speed, your fitness would increase such that you could then do a 10-15 mile ride faster than you can now, because it would seem easier and short by comparison.
(b) ride faster. You can work on intentionally riding faster, either riding harder the entire 10-15 mile ride (this will make you faster, but not as fast as intervals)..or focussing on high-intensity intervals followed by easy pedalling recovery...however EVEN here, you will mostly want to focus on keeping a steady cadence as in #1. So you instead of pedalling 90rpm at 10mph and going slowly and easily, you would pedal 90rpm in a harder gear and go 20mph or more, and be working much harder.

3. As mentioned above, occasional focussed work on leg strength could include intentional low pedal cadence drills for a limited time (ie, pedal a hard gear at 50rpm, or climb hills so steep that you have no choice but to pedal slow), but if you ALWAYS pedal at 50rpm, you will be working hard, but not going as fast as if you pedaled a faster cadence. You can also practice very fast pedalling 120+rpm.

Definitely the best way to double your speed is to add a second wheel magnet.

Pedal faster...

By pedaling faster.

*edit* rmfnla buy me a Coke.

OP, maybe some background on you and your ride?

ride with a fast group, paceline, dont fall off the back.. the people in front of you will leave a wind shadow to save work .

This i will agree with in part. find a group; i find that i never ride as fast as i can for a sustained amount of time when i am on my own, but when i am with a group of riders who are just a bit faster than myself i find that i ride faster for longer periods of time than i thought i could. this has been proven many times through research in psychology, want to go faster, ride next to someone.

Since it's important to not coast and also helpful to vary your cadence at different efforts, maybe try a fixed gear for high intensity rides.

For me, 20 minute intervals of the highest effort I can manage plus randomly going all out improved my speed in a general sense. As opposed to 5 second sprint power, or 1-minute power etc, which may be specifically trained with HIIT and other methods.

You get faster by riding faster. Seriously, I can't make this stuff up. Intervals is a good way to improve strength. Also good is getting a HRM and doing some fast rides with as much time in zone 4 as you can stand with some zone 5 thrown in. Always have a rest/easy day right after a hard workout, so your body can recover and get stronger.

If you don't ride with some sort of monitoring device, get one. The latest rage is power meters, but they're expensive. A HRM can be relatively cheap.

Are you wanting a higher average speed or a higher top speed. Either way, you will need a larger effort than you currently have. Intervals are excellent. I would first make sure you are in a good gear. If you are proposing this question then you aren't as experienced. I'd take a gear off and spin faster then gear up for more intensity for the up hills or tougher efforts.

It might be counter intuitive, but I'd definitely use the tougher patches of road for your higher efforts and practice turning your legs over faster during the even pavement parts of the ride.

Loose big nasty dogs?

Really tho,,,,,,, I've seen a lot of BIG dogs give up pretty quick. It's the skinny medium-sized ones that seem to do the 1/2 - 3/4 mile sprints just to get to me... And all the while they look like they're just having fun.

Not enough here. How long have you been riding this way?

This will either sound like snark or a zen koan, but it is in fact the only correct answer: To ride faster you must ride faster.

Now, this doesn't mean riding as hard as you can for the entire ride, every day. Instead, you will break up your ride into shorter segments and ride those hard, take a short break to recover, and repeat. That's basically interval training in a nutshell. Although there are various expensive gadgets to measure exactly how hard "hard" is, and although there are many ways of tracking and planning your workouts, the main thing is higher effort for shorter intervals. As you get fitter, you'll produce more power and go faster during those intervals and consequently over your whole ride. This actually takes a fair amount of discipline, because these intervals suck (particularly the shorter ones).

Another way of getting faster that doesn't require as much self-discipline is to ride with faster riders. Whether that's one person or a hundred, if you ride with faster riders you'll dig harder to keep up and not get dropped. Of course, you probably will get dropped (everybody does), and that sucks in its own way but you'll come back stronger the next time and hang on a little longer.

I agree, forces you to ride faster. Alone it's easy to get lazy..