When I first started out in triathlon, my bike + workouts training never really had a specific focus.
I would either go out for a 2-3 casual ride, or spend 45 minutes going hell for leather in the hope of performing better.
After a while I started to wonder why I didn't get quicker or feel stronger in my triathlon races.
So I decided to research specific cycling workouts that would help me go faster for longer in my next triathlon.
Maybe you're in the same boat, or even if you just enjoy cycling and want to give your rides a bit more variety, then I hope this blog post will help you :)
So, the 6 different types of cycling workout I discovered are:
Sweet Spot
Over/Unders
VO2 Max
Aerobic Tempo
High Intensity Intervals
Active Recovery
Each workout has it's own benefits and will improve your cycling performance in different ways.
**NOTE ** For these workouts to be highly effective, I recommend using a power meter. For the purpose of this article I'm basing workouts on an indoor trainer using Zwift.
These workouts can be done outdoors without a power meter using the RPE (Rated Perceived Exertion) scale.
Train Using Power Zones
Here are our power zones as set out on Zwift. Training with power zones gives you laser focus on the area of your fitness you want to target.
Ok, let's take a closer look at each of these cycling workouts, what they are, how to do them and what benefits they bring.
Sweet Spot Training
No, sweet spot training doesn't involve eating lots of chocolate and cake whilst riding a bike - although sometimes that's one of the reasons we ride our bikes!
Sweet spot refers to the intensity of the workout, like it's in the sweet spot where you're working hard, but not too hard that you can't sustain the power for long periods of time (20+ minutes). It's the sweet spot between volume and intensity.
Sweet spot training will help you improve your FTP and endurance.
The sweet spot is around the upper end of zone 3 and the lower end of zone 4, roughly 86% to 95% of your FTP.
Matt Bottrill of Matt Bottrill Performance Coaching says "“Sweet spot offers the most bang for your buck in terms of training. If you’re limited on time, you want to maximise what you do have.
Because sweet spot training is aerobic and not anaerobic, the sessions are repeatable and rewarding, helping to keep motivation up compared to a painful, lung-busting threshold or HIIT workout.
Once you’ve built up an initial base level of fitness, Bottrill recommends including one or two sweet spot sessions per week in a training plan
The SST (Med) workout on Zwift is a super effective workout lasting 1 hour and 25 minutes.
It has 2 x 30 minute intervals, with each interval consisting of 5 minutes at 95% FTP and 5 minutes 86% FTP. This is repeated 3 times for a total of 30 minutes, and earn yourself a 5 minute break between each interval.
Key Benefit: Increased sense of fitness – in terms of ‘engine size’, threshold and ability to produce energy
Over + Unders
Over and Under Intervals are a lactate threshold workout that features surges or accelerations to mimic the real-world demands of taking pulls in a train or breakaway.
Tom Skully, who rode with Chris Froome in the Tour de France in Team Sky, said that "Chris Froome went over his threshold to catch Nairo Quintana, but having done that he had to continue riding at close to threshold with the Colombian while clearing lactate from his muscles. ‘Under-over' or training helped him do that."
The unders are designed to "push" up your FTP and the overs will "pull" up your FTP.
The Purple Unicorn workout on Zwift is a good example of "over unders".
The 3 main intervals include OVERS of 1.5 minutes in zone 5 (red) and UNDERS of 3 minutes to recover in zone 3 (yellow).
Over under workouts will typically be based around 5-10% under and 5-10% over your FTP.
By going over threshold and holding it and then backing off gives you the chance to recover just under threshold before you may need to have a big push again.
These sessions have a positive effect on raising your anaerobic threshold, VO2 max and the ability to clear lactate.
Coach Chad explains some science behind it all in the clip below in a process known as lactate shuttling.
This trains your body to clear lactate efficiently, while still cycling at a brisk speed – though not so brisk that you are still accumulating lactate.
Flood the system. Clear the system. Rinse and repeat!
Key Benefit: Train your body to clear out lactic acid and recover quicker after a hard effort.
VO2 Max
One of the most common abbreviations that you'll hear banded around in the world of triathlon + fitness!
You're in the VO2Max is when you are going VERY HARD for longer than about 1.5 minutes or so. If you can't hold the pace for that long then you're probably in the anaerobic zone (zone 6).
To put VO2 max into a feeling, you're likely gasping for air, and there is absolutely NO WAY you’re having any type of conversation!
Gary Mckeegan, physiologist and lecturer in sports science and coach with Dig Deep Coaching explains, “If less oxygen is available than required, i.e. when riding harder than normal, the body has to find other ways of providing that fuel. A by-product of this is lactic acid, which will slow you down. Therefore if you can get more oxygen into the bloodstream the less lactic acid will be produced for a given workload.”
Easy!
Doing VO2 max Intervals is the best way to train your lungs to work at their most efficient.
These intervals are too long to be an all-out sprint, but too short to settle into a steady state-type effort.
While a 15-second sprint may be the difference between winning and losing, a VO2 Max interval determines whether you will be there at all.
A good example of a VO2 max workout is the LOX workout on Zwift.
The main set consists of 5 intervals of 3 minutes at 115% FTP followed by 3 minutes at 55% FTP for recovery.
Key Benefit: Train your body to use more oxygen so you can sustain a very hard effort over a couple of minutes
Aerobic Tempo
As cycling is an endurance and aerobic sport, it follows that you would obviously want to develop that type of fitness.
Pro coach Chris Carmichael says, "developing aerobic endurance is one of the primary goals of cycling training, and there are a few workouts that work best for building endurance"
He goes on to explains that "aerobic Tempo intervals are completed at the lower end of the Tempo intensity range (76-84% of FTP) and are effective for improving aerobic endurance have to be challenging enough that they stress your aerobic system, but not so strenuous that you are approaching lactate threshold.
An example of an aerobic tempo workout could be 3 x 20 minute intervals at around 80% FTP with 5 minutes rest between each interval.
The Zwift Academy 2016 includes an excellent zone 3 aerobic tempo workout, Low Cadence Zone 3 Steps.
In this workout we have a set of pyramid-style intervals going from an initial 8 minute interval to a 12-minute interval and back down again
Key Benefit: Higher upper-end aerobic fitness and able to ride for 60+ minutes continuously at a solid pace.
High Intensity Intervals
No doubt you've of heard of HIIT workouts or intervals before, and these are simply a vareity that you can do on the bike.
They're great for the time-strapped cyclist, helping you boost aerobic and anaerobic fitness, and they're also fantastic at burning off fat post-exercise through the EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) effect.
The intensity of zone 6 HIIT workouts means that you're targeting the top-end training that might otherwise be missing from other workouts such as sweet spot or aerobic tempo rides.
Matt Rowe of Rowe & King Cycle Coaching explains, "when you go out cycling, most people ride steady and they think they’re going quite hard,” says Rowe. “But you’re not really engaging your fast-twitch muscle fibres that much.
“The fast-twitch fibres can make all the difference in cycling. If you need to get up a climb and use a big surge in effort, that’s your fast-twitch fibres that you’re relying on. HIIT training does that perfectly.”
You will see both VO2 max and FTP increase by including 2-3 HIIT workouts into your weekly training plan. Any more than this and you won't give your body time to recover and you won't be able to hit the proper intensity to reap the full benefits.
A classic HIIT bike workout on Zwift are 40/20s - 40 seconds of full gas effort followed by 20 seconds of rest. During the 40 seconds you'll be close to reaching lactate threshold and the 20 seconds of rest will give your body a short time to recover and clear out some lactic acid ready for the next interval.
Over time, your your body will become more efficient at clearing lactate, meaning you can hold a faster pace for a longer period of time. Bingo!
Key Benefit: Short + highly effective workout to train your body in clearing lactic acid more efficiently allowing you to ride faster for longer!
Active Recovery
One final word is to try and incorporate some active recovery rides into your training. Low-intensity cycling has been shown to speed up recovery better than complete inactivity.
An example of an active recovery ride on Zwift
In here we've got an easy 5-minute spin to warm up, followed by intervals of 3 minutes at 73% FTP and 2 minutes at 53% FTP.
Key Benefit: Speed up recovery quicker by increasing blood flow to affected muscles
Final Thoughts
Hopefully you now have a much clearer idea of specific workouts you can do on your bike to improve your performance.
Best of all, most of them can be done in less than an hour!
When planning your workouts, consider your goal and what type of race you are competing in. Mixing up the workouts will not only improve your performance but make training more fun!
Too many VO2 max sessions and you'll get very tired very quickly and will need to stop training. Too many sweet spot sessions will help overall fitness but not give you the burst of speed (should you need it).
