I'll have a go later today just for you.

Wow, 30 for a 76 year old. Hell yes!
Do you do pushups regularly?
Also, were they cheating in form?

Try the squat count when you're recovered.
Very curious of your data.

The bike duration is just a rough proxy of how serious a biker you are.
My average ride is 5 mins. Another's may be 3 hours. Breaks don't matter.

You new here? CFB is a stud.

63 but there is a lot of mileage on the odometer and the oil hasn't been changed much. I was able to do them using slowtwitch muscles probably because that is all I have.....LOL

This thread is still dragging on?!

OK, let me ask another serious question. What are you fit for?

I can't think of any job or sport, other than generic gym rat, where the number of pushups and squats you can do would impress me. Manual labor? No, if your average bike ride is only five (5) minutes, it doesn't sound like you'd have the endurance to be able to carry packages of shingles around a rooftop, or pick up lumber and carry it from where the delivery truck left it to where the journeyman carpenter needs it, or even shoveling dirt or gravel into or out of a bucket, for any length of time. Probably not until the first break, much less a full day's work. Sports? Better knock out your boxing opponent in one round, or you'll get pounded. Football? are you going to be shuttled off after three downs? Baseball? Hope you hit a homer or strike out, it's a long way between bases after 7-8 innings.

Or do you perceive bicyclists as 95 pound weaklings, and decided to come over and kick some sand?

Not whom you were quoting, but an interesting post. Work in my shop was very physical, even aerobic once one got good at it. I was always on my employees to go to the gym so they'd get strong enough to do repetitive hard manual labor, which wasn't sufficiently continuous to make one really fit just by doing the work. Manual labor is really tough that way. If you're a roofer and don't get to roof every day, it sucks. I run into folks with injuries from doing that kind of thing all the time. Workman's comp is a drag on the system. I like the Chinese system, where everyone exercises on break! OTOH, I was never such a tyrant as to make my employees do that.

It really is exactly like you say. If you want to play at any competitive sport (or do manual labor) and be successful, you work your butt off every day. I remember Lance answering a reporter's question about how they tapered for the Prologue. He said, "Until 3 days ago we were on our bikes 6 hours a day." That's just what one does. You want to get good at whatever, you train, it's what you do. You try to fit your life in around that.

No, I don't cheat on form with any exercise. That's how one gets injured. I do pushups regularly if I'm not going to the gym regularly, like during the Covid time. I mostly ride outside on our tandem, which takes quite a bit more upper body endurance than riding my single. I need the pushups to be able to ride long distances on the tandem. Hand strength also gets to be an issue because the cable runs are long. BTW, pullups for cycling are useless IME. Lat pulls make more sense. That said, I do dumbbell curls in the gym just for balance. Dumbbell work is good for hand strength, too.

Recovery is going to take a while. I'll try to do a recovery ride on my rollers today, but I expect very painful quads. Speed of recovery becomes the issue.

Did a quick 4 mile ride today. Had a 10% hill for maybe .2 miles. Was draining !!
Bikers must have insane conditioning to do these intervals for hours on end.

I don't know how many push ups and squats I can do because I never do maximum reps to failure...My average bike ride is 2-4 hours long.

Nobody does intervals for hours. Intervals aren't meant to be done for hours on end.. Anything that last few hours isn't an interval, it's all aerobic work.

Fit for whatever life throws at you. That's one of the reasons why I don't believe in maxing out on the reps and weights or training to failure or wearing myself out with constant intervals. I don't want to be in a recovery mode for the next 2-3 days unable to function properly because of pain, DOMS and that tired feeling that people get after training very hard. I train in such a way that I don't need to be in a recovery mode for the next few days. Don't train for pain, train to prevent pain.

Not at all.

I'm a little slow, but I'm finally starting to get the drift here. Firstly, cycling fitness has nothing to do with the three things about which you show a great deal of curiosity. If there were one measure of cycling fitness, it would be how far one can ride in a day, you know, stopping for a snack and water every 2-3 hours and simply pedaling along. When one can do a century, that's maybe the time to think about trying to ride a little faster..

Everyone started just like you're starting. Increase the length of your weekly total miles by ~5%/week. The motto is, "See hill, ride up it." It'll happen for you too, just takes consistent effort. Intervals and structured training aren't necessary, in fact aren't even a good idea for the first couple of years. Build a yearly mileage base first. When you get to 100-150 miles/week and are comfortable with that, yes, there are training options to help you go faster, but that's totally not necessary. My first training mode, way back when, was to ride away from home until I was tired and then ride back. One has to ride a bit beyond what one thinks possible to make any rapid progress. It's a multi-year endeavor however one does it. The bike will develop whatever muscles you need to make the thing go. It's really good for your back.

As I started to ride more distance, I came up with a priority list of the importance of things:
1) Clothing, including bike shoes to mate with clipless pedals. This can be surprisingly tricky if one intends to ride year 'round like one kinda has to do so one doesn't have to reinvent oneself every spring.
2) Learning to eat and drink on the bike and not to bonk or dehydrate.
3) Learning to maintain your bike and fix a flat on the road in any weather.
4) A decent bike, I started with an old used bike, upgraded to a better old used bike. After maybe 3 years and riding a double century, I'd acquired enough knowledge to be able to buy an appropriate new bike, which is still my best single bike.
Note that there's nothing there about any sort of training, any sort of metric.

I use a bike computer like most folks, but I never look at my speed. That's silly. One goes as fast as one feels comfortable doing and doesn't worry about it. I watch my cadence and heart rate or power, if I happen to be on a bike which has a power meter. One doesn't even need those 2 latter measures, just cadence and a sense of how hard one is breathing. Many, maybe most, riders don't even watch cadence, but I've found it a valuable learning tool.

Yea, that's why you need to DO THEM to find out

That's kinda the entire point.
The thread is titled "Baseline fitness", not "How to determine cycling fitness"
If I wanted to know how good a cyclist you are, I'd just ask for cycling times!

I'm not looking to get into serious cycling, just an occasional cross train from my pushups and squats.
Please post your 3 numbers once you determine them, which will take a whopping 2-3 minutes.

A person's CTL or what they can handle for TSS in a day is not a direct correlation with how strong they are on the bike.

While you seem to understand the concept of ramping volume over time, you also need to at some point introduce intensity. And that time is not once you "can do a century". That's a measuring stick of a starting point that is unitless, useless.

A more realistic starting point for "getting faster" is simply being able to ride a time duration of a meaningful workout with enough intensity to cause adaptation. So, warmup plus cooldown a few beginner sets of work and rest..........that's only 45min or so.

So if someone can ride for an hour without stopping. You're probably good to go.

IME simply riding one's bike introduces intensity. OTOH, I don't live in Florida. So maybe in Florida you have a very good point. However most places have hills, and my advice "See hill, ride up it" is the natural, organic way to introduce intensity without burdening the rider with researching the many different systems for increasing intensity. Many riders find that latter approach foolish and unnecessary. I actually know few riders who practice structured training as it is understood on BF. None of the fastest riders in my group do so, they simply "ride lots," as someone once said. My point with riding that century is to create an adequate base on which to build intensity, if that's desired. One can't do anything interesting without developing endurance. Being able to ride for an hour is not endurance. Maybe talented young riders like yourself don't get that, but you're a small minority.

No thanks. This forum exists to assist and give advice to folks who are interested in same, not to provide amusement for trolls. Note the title of this sub-forum. This whole thread has been a waste of everyone's time.

Time to close this thread.

Let's not confuse fitness/enjoyment riding and "training". If you want to win the point with "fitness and enjoyment", go on ahead. But your ideas just make zero sense, as I take it, that you think someone needs to be able to ride a century to have enough base to build fitness with intensity. Bikes have these things called gears. Folks new to riding don't go out with a 53/39 and 11-25 combo to learn. No. They probably start out with a triple or generous double with enough range to get up.....uhmm........hills. So that kinda defeats that whole idea.

There's a difference between "riding lots" and "riding lots while having structure". Even in the days before anything computerized, structure was riding base X days a week for X hours, then doing repeats of your local TT loop or local climb on the other day. Those folks timed themselves on that stuff. They knew. That's structure. Pros don't just randomly "ride lots". Never have. Lots of BS is lots of BS. Lots of good structured training is lots of good structured training.

We've a ton of folks in town that "ride a lot" for a century every weekend who can't crack 250w for 20min if their life depended on it. You simply don't need a century ride's worth of base to be a pretty darn fast amateur. Grand tour riders have massive bases because grand tours last 3 weeks. Pros need massive bases that don't do grand tours so they can do more intensity.

I hear this all the time "these weak wannabe racers who couldn't even finish a century". Interesting. I know probably a dozen local racers who probably only do one a year and a long ride is maybe 150min that can do a century alone well under 5 hours. Including them all having weekly volume of less than 7 hours. I've done a metric under 3 with 100ft per mile of elevation, by myself. Not doing more than maybe 150min long rides during the year. On probably only about 6.5 hours a week.

Nice try a crap little jab.........but I never claimed an hour was endurance. I said it was a good place for a from the couch beginning rider to get to before getting into intensity.

Nah, I get it just fine home slice.

No such thing, you can master anything if you practice. I squat twice my body weight at 64 years old but I’d probably lose my balance and fall over if I tried an air squat without the weight on my back. Mastering any physical activity is just as much about your nervous system as muscle mass.

1. Depends - Do you want the cheating pushups you see in lots of cross-fit where the bods use momentum to help them along? Or do you want actual, quality push-ups where you do one push-up every six seconds, never pausing at any point, same speed up as down, sternum just barely making contact with ground before changing direction, elbows never locking?
2. See answer to #1.
3. 100minutes (not because it's a round number, but just because that's where my most common turnaround point lands me).

Quality pushups

Here is the baseline for anybody to get started in cycling.

1) Pushups- one. Just enough to push yourself out of bed or off the couch.
2) Air Squats- one. Just enough to stand up after putting on your shoes.
3) How long cycling- long enough to maintain balance after pedalling several turns of the crank.

not sure how many push ups that i can do and i don’t even know what an air squat is, but i ride on average a bit over 17 mi/day over an entire year. It’s more like 30 mi/day at this time of year and more like 8-10 mi/day mid winter. I do actually ride a bike, but i’m not sure what an active cyclist is and whether or not i qualify.

Or, the cheating type you see lots of places where the total movement of the body is about four to six inches... and then they crow about how many pushups they can do and how fast. I may be slow, and I may not do as many, but I'm going all the way up and all the way down, guys.