Shorten training with intervals? (endurance vs intervals)
 

Hi. I wasn't sure where to post this. Sorry if it's been posted before. I tried searching. I'm kind of new here. I try to mix up my riding a lot. I like to do long (to me) endurance rides which are about 30 miles at around 18-20 mph. This usually takes me around 1 1/2 hours. Sometimes I will go on the trainer if I'm in a hurry and only have a half hour or so. I'll warm up for 10 minutes and every 3-5 minutes after I will go all out for a brief period. I guess what I'm asking is can i get a workout equivalent to my long ride in a short session and is there a formula to figure it out? For example: say I burn 1000 calories on the long ride, how many will I burn on the trainer?etc. I am 160 pounds and 41 yrs old. I have read articles that talk about what I am describing and can't remember how they were written. I am not into racing or anything. I just love riding. Thanks.

Are you interested in training for longer rides or is this just for faster 30 mile rides? If you want to increase the mileage/duration via a once-a-week ride on weekends (let's say) then you will need to have increased saddle time for this.

Can you get an equivalent workout? Not necessarily, it really depends on your goals. I like to have those interval days mixed with a hill day and a medium distance day (easy cruising) to build up to the big weekend ride. You can still get a good workout with intervals but it really doesnt match up to overall ride time involved in the fast 30 you are doing.

Make any sense? :D

I wouldn't call 90 minutes a long ride, but leaving that aside...

It's complicated. I can promise you that you cannot put out and sustain enough power to burn as many calories in a half-hour as you are currently burning on your 90-minute ride. You'd have to be anaerobic the whole time and that can't be done. However, the 30-minute workout you describe, despite burning fewer calories, will give you some benefits that your longer ride doesn't. Interval training will tend to push up your threshold and, over time, increase your cruising speed. The answer is you need to mix up your training and do LSD - long steady distance - most of the time, with periods riding close to your threshold (the amount of effort you can sustain for an hour) and some interval sessions. Personally I wouldn't recommend doing intervals more than a couple of times a week, you need to recover effectively.

+1 to c54.

You may be able to do workouts that are roughly equivalent in total calories consumed (but as c54 sez, it's hard), but the energy sources won't be the same and the physiological benefits will differ. Short intense efforts increase demands on the anaerobic systems, burn quickly available but limited supplies of glucose in muscles and liver, and are good for developing speed and ability to cope with, well, short intense anaerobic or anaerobic+some aerobic efforts. Longer moderate activity has to be aerobic and shifts towards using greater but slower-to-access fat-based energy stores. A well-rounded rider needs both.

There is a lot of info in books & on the web (including this forum) on the benefits of different types of riding. And for most of us normal folk, 2-3 interval sessions per week are about all we can handle and get the necessary recovery time. And unless your goal is 90 minute rides, you need to work in longer rides, if only to figure out your nutrition and hydration needs. I can seriously under eat/drink for an hour to 2-hour ride and get away with it usually, but I pay for it if I try that on a 3-4+ hr ride as you can't catch up.

Well as pointed out above, you are not going to be able to burn up as many calories in 30 minutes as you do in 90 minutes even if you crank up the intensity. Doing a 30 minute ride with a warm up, several intervals and a warm down, will help you develop some high end speed which could be quite handy in your longer rides.

The concept i think you are researching would be known as "overall" training volume.

This is an idea that time and incremental sessions of power can be interchanged to surmise or otherwise understand the total training stress in an individual training program. I could go on - but i won't. You ask smart questions - you'll figure it out.......

Some training plans are based on the observation that a. a lot of people have limited time to train b. the races amateurs do are typically pretty short and c. going long and (relatively) slow doesn't help a lot beyond basic conditioning when it comes time to race for an hour or less.

In short: no intervals aren't equivalent to longer rides, but depending on what you want to accomplish, they might be better. Let's say you had planned to go out for a couple of hours at a moderate pace, because this is what you enjoy. If a storm came through and you did some quality intervals on the trainer instead, you'd probably actually gain more fitness, since I assume you're pretty well acclimated to riding for a couple hrs in one go. The same can't necessarily be said of replacing a fast, 4 hour group ride with intervals (those are higher intensity and volume) or even trying to do a fast century (huge endurance component).

If you want to win crits, intensity will be key. If you want to do RAAM, then you'll probably want a greater training volume. If you just want to stay quick and enjoy cycling, you'll probably do a little of both. If you just want to bike a lot, and don't care about speed at all, then just do whatever you want.

It gets easier to train when you have something to train for.