Your Struggles in Cycling

Let’s Talk About Your Struggles

 

Thank you for filling out our survey it helps us to create better content, answer your questions, and help you to overcome your struggles in Cycling. We encourage you to fill it out if you didn’t do it yet so we can address your problem too.

You really would like to see more training tips and training analytics.

We are working on the new series which will analyze specific workouts, how and when you can implement them in your training plan.

But today we would like to give you a few tips around the most common problems.

“Time Constraints”

 

Many of you have this problem, busy lives, jobs, families, and millions of things to do. We all have one thing in common, we all have 24 hours during the day that we can use.

No meter what we do there is no way to get more time!

First thing is to organize your time, it is crucial to be on schedule if you want to have time and energy for a good workout. A good habit is to start with planning your perfect week. How would your perfect week look like that you are still able to do 6, 8, or 10 hours of workouts?

And I really mean it, take a calendar planner or piece of paper and write down your perfect week. Starting from Monday when you wake up, ending on Sunday when you go sleep. Hour by hour, organize your tasks, and stay focus on them. You would see that actually there is still time available during your busy week, and you can fit extra workout or two.

Always plan your longer or harder workouts during the weekend or when you have days off, so you have more time and you can recover better.

With limited time you have, it is so important that every single workout is focused on specific goals. Starting from the coffee ride and ending on HIIT workouts, they should be planed and fitted into a training plan. Unfortunately, there is no that much time for “empty miles” and just enjoying riding a bike. If you have family time try to do some biking with them :).

“Knowing What to Focus On”

 

There are 3 main points of how we craft training plans in Cyklopedia.

1. Your fitness level
2. Available time
3. Your goals

Knowing what to focus on is related to your goals.

If your goal is time trial that you know your main focus will be around steady hard workouts around your FTP.
If your goal is 60 miles Fondo with 3 x 10 min uphills you know you have to focus on having endurance for 2,5h- 3h race and working on efforts at and above your FTP with at least 3 repeats of 10 min. Including lower cadence.

Your training plan will be created that you can achieve your peak at the time of your main event and be able to accomplish it in the best possible place.

By doing revers planing, you create your whole training plan 5-6 months before your event and you can implement periodization and tapering to achieve the best results. Going deeper into the weeks, every workout is created to achieve specific results. This way you exactly know what you are doing and why.

“Making Sure I Am Progressing”

 

That is what you really want, week after week, month after month is passing. You would like to know what is going on with your body, are you becoming stronger? Are you becoming faster? Can you ride this climb faster?

The best way to make sure you are progressing is to test yourself.

The very popular 20-min test can tell you what is your actual Functional Threshold Power (FTP) or Functional Threshold Heart Rate (FTHR). We recommend to test it every 6 – 8 weeks and see if you are getting stronger. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see progress right away, it takes time to become stronger as well as you could have the worst day. Always track on long term trends even on a yearly basis. Don’t forget that “higher numbers” are not the most important thing, another important thing is how long you can keep those numbers! Even if someone has lower FTP but can maintain it for 60 min instead of 40 min can easily beat those “stronger” riders.

 

I hope it helps out with some of your struggles! Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions.