How to Work Out Your Cycling Training
A proper cycling work out will help you develop your physical conditioning and improve your anaerobic threshold. Outside of swimming, cycling will give you the very best possible work out because of the all the muscle groups that you bring to bear on the effort. Additionally, the volume of air that you take in and circulate throughout your body when cycling is also on par with swimming which is regarded as the most perfect exercise possible. Cycling chiefly trains your respiratory system, and provides the obvious ‘cardio’ benefits you would expect from using your largest muscle group (the legs).
Image via Wikipedia
Despite the strong cardio-vascular benefits, cycling by itself has limitations, and these can be attributed mostly to the fact that riders must sustain workouts that force them to spend long periods of time in a fixed position, often with much of their body weight bearing down on their arms and shoulder muscles. Riders who spend a lot of time bending over to grip the handlebars risk fatiguing the hands and fingers which can cause them to lose their grip. If this happens at high speeds then serious accidents and injury can occur.
A proper cycle training workout would include strength exercises to build up the shoulder and arm muscles and that will allow the rider to maintain control over the bike and go faster. None of this of course requires a bike, and can be done indoors. The key to a proper cycling training program is balance, and, indeed, understanding the importance of balance and variety in connection with speed and tempo will improve the odds of developing a cycling workout that you can stick to, and at the same time, reduce the risk of injury.
The goal of the superior cyclist workout is to get you an overall physically fit body, and a healthy immune system. Cycling is a sure path to optimum conditioning, and as a side benefit you will experience increased muscular strength in all the right areas. If you stick with your program, you will notice the improvement in the utilization of oxygen in your system, and begin to significantly change for the betterment of your body’s ability to process lactic acid. This will be accompanied by an improvement in your overall body mass index.
To realize all of these important benefits, it is critical to obtain an understanding of all the factors that make up a superior cycle training work out before you commit to a firm plan. At the top of the list of factors to consider is the idea that if you are doing the same thing every day, then you are doing it wrong. Like all forms of exercise, your body will habituate to the same old thing. This means that you have to take into account above all else the means to which you are going to provide a varied workout for yourself.
There are two ways to train on a bike. There is indoor training and there is road training which is, of course, done outdoors. Indoor cycle training is known as ‘spinning’. Needless to say, if you are limiting yourself to just spinning then it is going to be very much more difficult to find ways to vary your training. If this is so, then perhaps the first order of business in working out how to vary your spinning exercises is making it a point to include actual outdoor cycling as part of your workout.
Taking a look at the next factor you need to ponder is how you plan to manage rest. Yes, rest is that important because without it, you are only going to tear down the muscle fiber that you have developed in earlier sessions. Every weight lifter knows that you bombard the muscle groups you want to develop one day, then you rest them the next. It is during this recuperation process that the body is actually building muscle. You need to schedule days off where you are not on the bike, and it is on those days that you should be lifting weights and playing at other sports like basketball and soccer. The essential concept here is to avoid the classic mistake of over training.
Always start with a good warm up is the very next rule you want to incorporate into your regimen. The warm up is critical so your body can respond to the stresses of hard work and not succumb to injury. Starting out cold does not give your body a chance to circulate the blood and convey the extra oxygen to the joints and muscles that you will need when you start pressing harder. A good warm up could include a short jog on foot starting at a slow pace then working your way to a short sprint. You can also do some running in place and jumping jacks.
The very next thing on your list deals with your actual equipment. When you are first starting out, it is strongly suggested that you select a somewhat higher gear on your bike. You want to start out by putting some good pressure on your leg muscles as you ride. Doing this will expedite ideal conditioning and will have the side benefit of giving you more explosive speed out of the blocks.
If you want to achieve peak performance then consider adopting what the Olympic athletes use in terms of interval training. The best of the best use something called ‘pyramid intervals’, which are more challenging and therefore accelerate your personal growth. Pyramid interval training requires that you work for sixty seconds, then two minutes, and then three minutes, with the very same amount of rest in between the intervals. What this does is ask your body to put in maximum effort in the shortest period of time. When you do your interval training out on the road, try to do so in the same spot each time. In this way, you can take notice of how much more quickly you are covering the distances cycled, and that will help you keep track of how much more distance you are covering in the same amount of time.