Best Cycling Fitness Plan For Everyone

One of the best ways to lose weight and stay fit is to pick up a bike and start cycling. It is in fact, the best form of cardiovascular exercise you can participate in.

It has over the years proven to be an excellent way to build physical endurance, burn calories, and improve cardiovascular fitness. This is one of the reasons women will rather ride a bike to a supermarket than ride the bike.

But one thing some fitness enthusiasts who want to use cycling to lose weight fail to understand is that just cycling alone isn’t enough training you need for your weight loss. If you want cycling to have a significant impact on your body shape, then you’ll have to incorporate other forms of training into your cycling too.

Cycling targets the lower body by just pedaling which rotates the wheel or a fixed flywheel. It also affects the upper body to a lesser extent, by using the triceps, biceps, and deltoids.

Cycling not only helps to shed a few pounds, but it also burns calories, tones your body, and helps you stay fit at all times.

And the good thing about this is that it doesn’t only work for pro cyclists, even as a beginner or someone who just rides bicycles as a form of recreation you can do it as there is a cycling fitness plan that is suitable for everyone.

Here are some of the best cycling fitness plan that is ok for everyone and you can also do. Trying covering up at least one of each of these rides per week and you’ll be on the quickest possible route to fitness;

1. Long Rides

Taking long rides at a conversational pace is the best improving your endurance and one of the best fitness plans. At this pace, your breathing is rhythmic and regular. While doing this training stick to flat or rolling lands rather than hills.

Try keeping a smooth high cadence, as this ride will train your body to get used to burning fuel efficiently. It will also help you to improve your riding posture and help you to get used to sitting on the saddle for extended periods.

2. Hilly Ride

Just taking long gradual climbs is ideal for this session. It can also be done on the flat in a big gear or with high resistance on a turbo trainer. Warm up for like 10-minutes then pedal for five minutes at a pace that feels hard but controllable.

You should be breathing deeply at this point. Try going 20 minutes at the hard pace per session, and then 10 minutes at the hard pace before your one-minute recovery.

3. Hard Ride

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is training that boosts endurance, increases calorie burn, and improves cardiovascular fitness. During the intervals you have to work very hard – it needs 100 percent effort – but the intervals are very short.

After a good 10-minute warm-up, spend five minutes alternating between 30 seconds of all-out effort and 30 seconds of recovery. Pedal easily for five minutes and then repeat.

4. Cross-training

This training involves mixing up a variety of workouts by alternating between activities. This is the perfect training for those who are not willing to stick to just one activity. For instance, one can choose to cycle and head to the gym for lifting weights simultaneously.

For this kind of training, to burn more calories, cycling for a longer period would be required.

5. Strength Training

Cycling builds muscles like calves and quads. But again, it is not enough to offset the general muscle loss that happens over time. Losing muscle hurts your metabolism and makes it difficult to lose or even maintain body weight and also limits the amount of power you can put into your pedals that will enable you to burn more calories and fat.

This is why strength training is recommended. Lift weights 2 to 3 days a week to build lean muscle tissue.

6. Sweet Spot Training

Sweet Spot training is a workout that contains intervals at 88-94% of your Functional Threshold Power (FTP). It achieves positive physiological adaptations because it is the optimal balance of difficulty and amount.

This training is one of the most effective and efficient ways for cyclists to improve and also keep fit. It aims at improving your ability to resist fatigue while putting out relatively high power over a long time.

7. High Cadence Drills

The high cadence drills begin at your normal cadence, and every 1-2 seconds increase your cadence a bit until you can no longer increase. At first, you may hit 100-110 rpm as your maximum, then you recover 3-5 minutes and begin again.

By allowing the muscles to generate less force per pedal stroke, the rider will rely more on a strong cardiovascular system than the more fatigable muscular system, so greater endurance and speed can be achieved. This training will enable you to improve your cycling technique and provoke specific adaptations while also increasing your strength.

8. Tempo Training

This training is done simply by adding a set tempo or speed into your training to help you build more muscle, improve strength, and aid fat loss. In other words, this means that you have another factor added to your training, which is the speed at which you perform your reps.

Also, tempo training can help build strength which is relevant for injury prevention.

9. Aerobic Cycling Training

Aerobic training is one of the primary methods to tap into your body’s ability to burn fat as its primary fuel source. Continuing to train your body to use fat for fuel instead of its muscle glycogen stores is just as valuable in your fitness and weight loss journey.

This shift in your body’s usage of fuel becomes increasingly important as your race or training rides last more than a couple of hours. While hard efforts like sprinting to bridge a gap or climbing a steep hill may use anaerobic energy, the majority of your effort will be aerobic.

8. Endurance Riding

Just like the name implies, endurance riding is the traditional endurance ride with distances ranging from 50–100 miles. The most common distance is 50 miles, though longer distances of 75 and 100 miles are also completed in one day.

But it’s not just its name that makes it this way, it’s also because while building your endurance at cycling you are also training your arms, thighs, stomach, and back and at the same time also losing fat in these key places.

Cycling is an amazing activity. Whether you are doing it in form of a sport or an exercise it is one sport that makes you realize that what you thought was your limit is not it, but your breaking point. Cycling can help tone your body, and ensure you lose weight too. So when next you want to engage in fitness cycling, try out one of these training.