been cycling since the new year started and i feel as though i’m not getting better at all. i normally cycle weekends and try to push 20-25km and call it a day. any tips on how i could improve these stats
by AcanthisittaShoddy71
been cycling since the new year started and i feel as though i’m not getting better at all. i normally cycle weekends and try to push 20-25km and call it a day. any tips on how i could improve these stats
by AcanthisittaShoddy71
16 Comments
Keep pushing. It doesn’t get any easier, you just go faster
What are you trying to achieve?
Speed alone is the worst metric, you should at least record heart rate to see progress, it should become lower with every ride. But with only speed you can never tell if you got better, just that you were faster or slower. Best thing would be a power meter, then you have an average where you can see progress (so even if its windy outside and you ride felt slow, you will see that you had a normal power curve and it wasnt you)
If you want to ride farther, ride farther. If you want to sprint, sprint. You train for the goal you want to achieve, so it really depends on you to choose a target.
Quit obsessing over data and start enjoying your rides more
Go further. Ride places that are interesting to you. Bring snacks and plenty of hydration and put some more time in. Sometimes just ride hills and try to get more elevation.
Mix it up. This is a very basic ride. Nothing is pushing to build muscle or endurance or any of that.
You’ll get there though.
Also what kind of bike are you riding. Some bikes are geared for comfort making it kind of hard to get over some hurdles.
Sometimes go for shorter distance but really fast, sometimes go longer but slower
So at maximum, if you’re riding weekends only, you had 16 days total to ride, it would be hard to get much out of that to be honest, and the course you’re riding doesn’t look like it lends itself to holding a sustained speed anyway
Go long. It’s all about time in the saddle. Have a day each week where you go for 4 or 5 hours. See if you can ride up some mountains too! Keep going.
One thing that differentiates endurance sports from, let’s say, gym training, is that if you have 6 hours to exercise per week, you’re better off riding 5 days doing variable rides than riding for 2.5 hours on two days.
Most beginners make the mistake of riding too hard most of the time. The pace that builds your base endurance* feels like a warmup that never ends, but you stay at that exertion level for a long time.
* base endurance exercise enhances fat metabolism, increases muscle stamina, increases your “cruising speed”, enhances your ability to recover, creates new capillaries in the working muscles, all this at an exertion level most beginners would describe “too easy to do anything”
Go (further) to interesting places. This ride looks boring, i’d quit too after 20km. Make your rides fun first, then you can go after speed.
Judging by the map this route looks like hell😅 I couldn’t ride fast either…
Hard to draw a conclusion without details.
Weight, fitness level and the bike all play a big part in speed. After that the smaller details, average hours spent on bike weekly, your sleep and nutrition routine, tires and bike specs. Also the fit of your bike to you matters a lot.
Best way to improve is by spending more time cycling, everthing else requires money to invest in better gear.
Progressive overload. This applies to distance/time, and intensity. I would look at doing some HIITs a couple times a week and then spend time doing longer, slower rides.
Also, you can weight train and get benefits; would focus on legs and core if you just plan on road riding.
Back in the day nobody had all this data and they just went out for a good workout and had fun. I’m assuming most of us are non-professional “athletes” here… if you’re not getting paid to get faster I wouldn’t stress too much about it. In a few years you’ll be much faster as long as you stay consistent.
Find some hills xx
You’ve got very many sharp turns there. There is a limit to how fast you can go around those due to simple physics. Because of this, even if you would be able to have a sustained speed 10 or 20% higher than you can now, which is huge, it would hardly make a dent in your stats.
It looks like you’re riding in a flat city or suburb where the conditions are limiting your intensity.
If you’re going to ride in a place like that you’re going to need to carefully craft intervals around the conditions.
Even then riding a route like this your average speed won’t go up much as it will be severely impacted by all the intersections if you’re riding safely.
In a “good place to cycle” I’d want to be climbing 10x more on a ride that took this amount of time to help get the intensity in. Not easy if you live somewhere super flat.