Build Your Base With Endurance Training

Spend less time surviving your long rides, and more time enjoying them.


Bryony McCormick |

Spend less time surviving your long rides, and more time enjoying them. – By Bryony McCormick

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A solid endurance base will better prepare you to sustain higher-intensity sessions as you progress in your training plan. It also means that your aerobic capacity will be greater, so you can spend less time surviving hard rides, and more time enjoying them.

“Endurance itself can be a bit of a misnomer; it just means how long you can go at a given intensity. But you can have endurance at high intensity or low intensity,” says Ian Rodgers, a top-level coach with 20 years of experience in South Africa. Here are his best tips for building up a solid endurance training plan.Do it if…
…you’re an intermediate or beginner cyclist. According to Rodgers, “endurance is your entry point to riding.” You should do it from the moment you decide to enter an event, particularly if you’re new to the sport. Endurance builds your base, and if you have a solid base, you can choose what you want to do with your cycling next.All you need is…
…your bike and your time. You can do endurance training on a stationary bike, but indoors is the worst place to do endurance training, says Rodgers. “Low-intensity exercise indoors is a killer, because it’s terminally boring.”Commit to…
…a minimum of four hour-long sessions a week for the initial four weeks of endurance training. You can do less, but you’ll gain more if you can get four in. Someone with less time can still do endurance training; the level of intensity just needs to be raised. So their endurance training would involve more sessions a week, but shorter ones with slightly higher intensity.Spend…
…an hour at a time as a starting point if you’re a beginner, and about two and a half hours in a session if you’re someone intermediate. Intermediate cyclists can shorten their training to a degree, but they should have some previous experience and ability if they do so.In a session…
…ride consistently for the amount of time you have committed to; maintain a steady, continuous effort. It’s a comfortable intensity; in heart-rate terms, do not go over 75 percent of your max heart rate—or, if you don’t own a heart rate monitor, the effort must feel “comfortably hard.”

Progress by…
…increasing the volume of training without losing the moderate intensity. You will reach a point at which you stop improving. To progress from there on, start doing more intense sessions, and tone down the endurance.

You’re overtraining if…
…you start going slower, you feel tired all the time, your sleeping patterns become infrequent, you’re always hungry or you have no energy. It’s not that difficult to spot when you’ve done too much.

Taper for an event by…
…reducing the total loading of your training, not by stopping altogether. Tapering is reducing the total volume of training but preserving the higher-intensity aspects, and it usually starts a good two weeks before the event. (Very few people benefit from training in the two weeks prior.)

Maintain by…
…including at least one or two endurance rides in your training program each week, and maintain a consistent but moderate pace.

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