Eventually, you outgrow your old workouts and need to go even harder if you want to keep your fitness gains going along an upward trajectory. That means more high-intensity intervals training. – By Selene Yeager

When you push yourself to your absolute upper limits, everything—endurance, power, lactate threshold, efficiency, and speed—rises up and comes along for the ride, even in well-trained riders. In a study of 38 conditioned cyclists, Australian researchers found that those doing high-intensity interval training twice a week slashed their 40km time-trial time by nearly three minutes (about five percent), and improved their average speed by nearly 1.5km/h.

“We know even highly trained riders can increase their stroke volume [how much blood the heart pumps per beat], increase the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to muscles, and improve the muscles’ ability to extract oxygen,” the study author and exercise physiologist Paul Laursen, PhD, told me during an interview for Bicycling magazine. Intervals also seem to make your powerful sprint-centric fast-twitch fibers become more fatigue-resistant, so they behave more like slow-twitch fibers, allowing you to go really fast longer.

The beauty of this kind of training is that although it’s kind of painful, you don’t need to do much to reap great gains. Even the shortest bouts—just 20- to 30-second micro-intervals—have been shown to increase max VO2 (the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during all-out exertion), improve fat burning, and boost endurance performance. And they work fast.

“Just two weeks of training can enhance performance,” says Laursen. Here are the best short workouts for all your riding needs. For each interval session, warm up for at least five minutes. Cool down as needed when you’re done. Do these no more than twice a week, preferably midweek if you’re riding long and/or hard on the weekends. “Intervals are a potent stimulus for rapid improvements. But too many per week can rapidly lead to signs of overtraining,” says Laursen.

The Intervals

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