Cycling is hard!!! Forget what anyone told you before you started cycling, whether you are doing it as a form of sport, exercise, recreation, or a means of transport it is hard, especially in the beginning. But then it pays off in the long run and then it no longer gets hard, but rather becomes an integral part of your daily routine. But for you to have gotten to that stage you must have learned how to endure the pain to get to the glory.
For you to improve in your cycling or become a pro at it you need to first learn to endure the pain in your arms, back, and thighs that may want to discourage you from continuing. And to do that you need endurance training.
Here are a few cycling endurance training you can do as a beginner to help you improve in your cycling;
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1. Keep It Simple
Just ride your bike. If you try to cycle like someone who has been cycling for 3-10 years you will get overwhelmed. Take it at a slow pace and build up your endurance gradually, you’d catch up with people who you think are riding better than you right now, but you need to do it the right way so that you don’t get burnt out so soon.
2. Eat High Energy Food For Endurance Cycling
Eating right should become a lifestyle for you, but more than eating right, there is certain food you need to avoid, and some others you need to eat more to enable you to achieve this endurance while cycling. Consume more carbohydrate meals, cut out junk foods, and eat more foods like bananas, nuts, seeds, dried foods, electrolyte-infused water, homemade energy bars, and more can help you when next you go out to cycle.
3. Engage in endurance workouts
Some workouts can help you build your endurance, some of them are long slow distance and aerobic threshold. These workouts help build your arm and thigh pain endurance. They may not seem like a lot compared to cycling but continuously doing them will pay off in the long run.
4. Consistency
The best way to get fast is by consistently putting miles in on the bike. Something as simple as riding 4 days per week year-round will give you a huge benefit. Increase your mileage by starting slowly. First focus on increasing the frequency of your rides rather than your duration. Once you’ve become adapted to riding most days of the week, you can then look at increasing the duration of your rides to continue your progression.
5. Try Interval Training
Unlike what you may think, interval training does not necessarily mean high intensity, it is rather descriptive of how a workout is organized. Try breaking your ride up into smaller “pieces” to keep your cycling endurance training plan fresh and engaging while logging endurance miles. A simple Aerobic Ramp cycling endurance workout can help you do this.
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6. Add Progression
Adding progression to our long-distance cycling training plan is a primary way to optimize your endurance base by continually adding duration and intensity. A natural progression of duration might be to add a 5th set (30 minutes) to the ride during week two and a 6th set (30 minutes) in week three.
That would represent a total 12.5% increase in training for the 8-hour-a-week athlete over 3 weeks just by focusing on the progression of one workout. Adding duration and intensity to your workouts helps you build an endurance base and avoid stagnation.
7. Always Stay Hydrated
Taking energy drinks is cool, but it can’t take the place of water. At any time you may be cycling, staying hydrated is very important.
8. Work with a cycling coach
There are Professional endurance coaches who have degrees in exercise science, licenses and certifications specific to coaching, and careers devoted to improving performance for athletes of all ability and experience levels.
Through frequent communication and sound sports science, a professional coach will help integrate training into your lifestyle and guide you through the ups and downs till you are strong enough to go all out.
9. Manage your stress
One often-forgotten component of endurance is how well you can handle stress. This could either be emotional stress or physical stress, but being stressed puts your body in a compromised state. Your immune function declines, hormone imbalance occurs due to elevated cortisol and adrenaline, your sleep gets interrupted and all these can cause a breakdown that will prevent you from being able to endure cycling.
Two of the best ways to manage stress are meditation and yoga. They help to calm the nervous system, fight inflammation, and relieve muscle tension.
10. Indulge in strength training
Strength training should be a part of your training routine regardless of whether you’re an experienced or beginner cycler. This will help you develop muscle and joint strength, allowing you to activate key muscle groups more easily. The better muscle recruitment, the better physical performance, and this can translate to cycling faster. Some strength training you can do includes; Squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, lunges, and bent-over rows.
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Cycling requires stamina and endurance so that you can uphill and longer without getting tired. These tips will help you to cycle without stopping and maintain a lower heart rate throughout your cycle.
Immediately after you’ve mastered endurance, you can increase your pace. Your 5K cycling pace might become your training pace, as your cardiorespiratory system is better able to handle the demands of the work. These will also make you mentally tougher and can push your body harder.