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Top Fitness In
7 Hours A Week
Sorry. More mileage, by itself, is unlikely to make us better riders. And that's good consolation for riders fighting a time crunch.
Let's examine why a modest amount of training time allows you to unlock nearly all of your genetic potential. Then I'll show you how to reach a very high level of fitness by training only 7 hours per week.
More Mileage Doesn't Guarantee More Fitness
When some people start riding, 10 miles is a real demand. But soon they can ride longer, and their average speed improves markedly. However, after some months they reach a depressing plateau. Average speed stagnates and it's harder to tack an additional 15 miles on weekend rides. Even when they increase training mileage substantially, performance refuses to budge — and it may even deteriorate if they wind up overtraining.
Each of us has inherited limits to our abilities. Simply adding mileage won't shatter that genetic ceiling. In fact, riding too much can slow us down rather than make us faster when we exceed our capacity to recover.
There's one more fallacy of wishing for unlimited time to ride: you'd probably get bored with cycling. Isn't gonna happen — you love to ride, right? But if all you did was ride — no weight training, no hiking, no leisurely Saturday mornings puttering around the house — you'd eventually come to dislike the bike.
Deciding How Much To Train
Pro cyclists often ride 20-30 hours a week. Riders training for ultramarathon events may log even more. Recreational racers (category 3, 4, 5 and masters) usually put in about 10 weekly hours, although some get by on 5 or 7 quality hours if their events are short. Most people with careers, families and other time constraints find that 7 hours a week is plenty of riding to meet their goals. Fast centuries require occasional training rides of 4 or 5 hours, but other weekly jaunts can be shorter.
All of this said, trying to ride a set number of hours each week — and getting frustrated if you don't meet that goal — is exactly the wrong approach.
You're an experiment of one. That's what running philosopher and physician George Sheehan used to say and he was right. We're all individuals. The training program that makes Lance Armstrong fit enough to win the Tour de France would make most of us too tired to get a leg over the bike. The secret? Ride when you can, and have fun when you do. You shouldn't punch a time clock when you get on your bike.
7-Hours-A-Week Training
You can get in excellent cycling shape on an average of only 60 enjoyable minutes of riding each day. This leaves plenty of time to mow the lawn, buy the groceries, say hi to the spouse and maybe even hold down a job.
Even though this program allots 7 hours, avoid simply riding an hour each day. That can't give you endurance or recovery. Instead, ride longer some days and take other days completely off the bike. Your personal schedule will determine the exact mix, but most people ride more on weekends when they're off work. They schedule non-cycling days for weekdays. Here's a weekly schedule that works for many riders:
7-Hours-A-Week Training Schedule
- Monday — Rest day with 15 minutes of resistance training.
- Tuesday — Ride 1 hour with 3-8 sprints or other short, hard efforts.
- Wednesday — Ride 1 hour at a steady, moderate pace.
- Thursday — Ride 1 hour including 20 minutes of hard effort (time trialing, jamming short hills, ascending a long climb, pushing into a headwind, and so on).
- Friday — Rest day with 15 minutes of resistance training.
- Saturday — Ride 1 hour at an easy pace.
- Sunday — Ride 3 hours at a varied pace (group rides or hilly courses are good choices).
Remember, intensity is one key to this program. If you could ride 200 to 400 miles per week, sheer volume would guarantee a high level of fitness. But you can't. Instead, make up for missing miles by including intense efforts. Mix short, hard efforts like sprints with longer, steady efforts on hills or into the wind. Spirited group rides raise intensity, too. Aim for efforts at or above your lactate threshold.
Lactate threshold is also called "anaerobic threshold." It's the exertion level beyond with the body can no longer produce energy aerobically, resulting in the buildup of lactic acid. This is marked by muscle fatigue, pain, and shallow, rapid breathing.
The key is varying the intensity during the week. If you always go at a medium pace, your fitness will be mediocre. So, when you go hard, go really hard. When you go easy, go at a pace that Colorado cycling coach Skip Hamilton calls "guilt-producingly slow." You must learn to go slowly.
A second key is sufficient rest. Intense workouts boost your speed and power, but this increased fitness comes at a price. Put the hammer down too often and soon you'll be tired, irritable and slow — all the hallmarks of overtraining. This is why I recommend staying off the bike at least 2 days each week. Lift a little, take a relaxing walk, prop up your feet and read a good book. When the time comes to train hard or to beat up your friends on weekend rides, you'll be rested and ready.
Don't forget to squeeze in some resistance training. Cycling is great in many ways, but it doesn't do much for the upper body. Maintaining muscle volume is crucial as we age. So, cheat on the 7-hours-a-week maximum and find 15 minutes 2 days each week for some basic upper-body exercises. Pushups, pull-ups, crunches for the abs and a low-back exercise (such as back extensions) are all you need. Knock off a couple of sets of each to complement your saddle time. A good time to do this simple-but-effective resistance program is right after easy rides when you're warm.
Are you so busy that finding even 7 weekly hours looks like mission impossible? The trick is to examine your daily schedule and look for small segments of free time. For example:
- Can you get up early and ride before work? With modern lighting systems, pre-dawn rides are safe. It's cooler, less windy and traffic's often lighter, too.
- How about a lunch-hour workout? With a little planning, you can change, get in a brisk 60-minute ride, clean up and be back at the desk in 70 to 75 minutes. Eat half your lunch at your midmorning break and the rest during the afternoon.
- Late evening is a good time for many people to exercise. Dinner is over, you've had some family time and a great workout is a lot better for you than slouching on the couch in front of the cardiac tube. Again, modern lighting systems make after-dark rides a snap.
- Ride indoors. If you don't like riding in the dark or nasty weather, consider pedaling on a trainer. An hour passes quickly if you vary your workouts, use a big fan for cooling, drink plenty of fluids and watch race videos as you pedal.
- Commute. A 5- to 10-mile ride to work with a longer loop home provides an automatic 1 or 2 hours of cycling each day. Why sit in a car and stress about finding time to ride when you could use your bike for daily transportation?!
Finally, ride smart. Is there a negative to this 7-hours-a-week program? Of course. In lengthy events such as centuries or week-long tours, you won't have the endurance of riders blessed with more training time. The solution is to realize your limitation and ride accordingly. Sit in a paceline, back off a bit on climbs, eat and drink often. You'll do fine.
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On your bike
Can an intensive two-minute workout in the gym really have the same result as a gruelling two-hour session? Andy Darling finds out
The Guardian, Tuesday 7 June 2005
As a rule, papers that are published in the Journal of Applied Physiology don't generate much interest outside of the publication's small community of specialist contributors and subscribers. The latest edition, however, has made an unprecedented splash, with cries of "Please let it be so!" from reluctant exercisers fed up with spending long hours working out for little apparent reward.
The cause of the fuss is a study conducted at McMaster University in Canada by Professor Martin Gibala, who compared the effects of different workout regimes on 23 individuals. Group one cycled for two hours each time, at a moderate, manageable pace. The second group did 10 minutes of cycling per session, including some reasonably intensive 60-second bursts. Group three pedalled like billy-o for four 30-second periods, each interspersed with a four-minute rest. Two hours, 10 minutes and two minutes, then, were the durations of the sessions.
At the start of the three-week study, everyone did an 18.6-mile cycle time trial, and they did the same at the end, to measure and compare progress. The results, music to the ears of so many gym-goers heartily fed up with plodding away interminably, were all exactly the same. Despite those wildly differing times spent in the saddle, everyone had improved to the same degree, and the rate at which their muscles absorbed oxygen, also known as VO 2 Max, and a good gauge of cardiovascular fitness, had also improved by the same amount. Gibala concluded: "Short bouts of very intense exercise improved muscle health and performance comparable to several weeks of endurance training."
Get fit in two minutes per day: it sounds like the answer to the increasingly obese and time-limited western world's prayers, the kind of system that even the Homer Simpsons can adhere to. Rather than follow the Department of Health's three to five sessions per week of 20-30 minutes of gentle aerobic exercise, six minutes of full-pelt intensity is all that's required.
High intensity interval training (HIIT), as the regime is known, has actually been around for several decades, and there are sports science studies aplenty extolling its virtues. The breakthrough paper, by Tremblay and Bouchard, was published in 1995, and came up with similar conclusions to Gibala. Over a six-week period, the "sprint" cycle group lost more than three times as much body fat as the slow, aerobic group, despite only expending about half as many calories during the actual exercise. The aerobic group did its same-speed sessions for up to 45 minutes up to five times per week, while the interval crowd spent a piffling 30 minutes in total (including warm up and down and recovery spells) three times per week doing their thing. The fat loss would appear to have come from the post-exercise elevated metabolic rate that followed the intervals. A 1996 University of Alabama study found this higher rate of metabolism resulted in the burning of an extra 160 calories 24 hours after an HIIT session.
Bodybuilders are big HIIT fans. Steve Blades, a Peterborough-based personal trainer, specialises in devising workouts for bodybuilders, and he's also an advocate of HIIT. "Doing steady state cardio, the easy pace stuff, means that when you finish, you almost stop burning calories," he says. "With HIIT, you go into a state of Epoc [excessive post-exercise oxygen consumption], which means you burn more calories afterwards. The shortness of the actual sessions means you're not using up muscle as fuel, so it's ideal for retaining muscle and losing fat. I recommend people do it on the bike, the stepper, the rowing machine or cross trainer. I think it's good for intermediate and advanced trainers. Lower levels of fitness aren't able to reach those peaks: they can't cane it to the same degree."
That's the big proviso. Rather than getting fit via HIIT, it's imperative that you're in pretty good nick in the first place. Those cyclists in Gibala's study weren't couch potatoes; they were all "reasonably fit and active".
"We need to be careful that we're not advocating this approach for the majority of the population," says John Brewer, director of the Lucozade Sports Science Academy. "I don't disagree with the study, but to suggest that this is all you should do is misleading. Good-quality interval training has been carried out for years, and this is a version of that; it elevates your heart rate, and the impacts and forces that go through the ligaments and tendons can lead to strength increases.
I think the fat-burning angle is slightly misleading; you're not going to be burning much more than 15 calories per minute during a hard session, and if it only lasts a few minutes then that's not a huge total of calories burned, before or after. Intensity is important, but so is duration. You have to have a reasonable level of fitness to start with, though; you have to have trained regularly for some time before incorporating these sorts of sessions into your programme. For the majority of the population, three to five sessions of 20-30 minutes per week still holds true."
Brian Mackenzie, a senior coach with UK Athletics, concurs. "As a component of your exercise schedule, once you've got a good aerobic base, then it's good. If you're doing any sport, it's likely that running is going to be involved, and if you do your intervals as running sprints, they'll develop that elastic strength that you need, the ability to rush for the ball, or to the net in tennis or badminton, or whatever. Being an ambler doesn't help anyone when they're competing. People who are quite fit should also consider it if they are constrained by time. Without a good fitness base, though, it shouldn't be done. It's like going up to someone in the street and getting them to run 100m flat out. They will tear every muscle in their body."
Athletes trained by Mackenzie do benefit from the occasional HIIT session. "The stresses put upon the body cause an adaptation including capillarisation [artery and vein improvement], strengthening of the heart muscles, improved oxygen uptake and improved buffers to lactates. All this leads to improved performance, in particular within the cardiovascular system."
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, "I come to the weights room to make progress, not friends", and that is the kind of mindset that is required by those doing HIIT sessions. It is far removed from the community-based world of exercise classes, and in a parallel universe to yoga.
"One of the things I love about the classes that I do," says Hot Yoga practitioner Deborah McIntyre, from Brighton, "is that feeling of everyone being in there together for an hour and a half, drawing on a kind of common energy that we create. The idea of going to gym, head down, rushing through a routine and then getting out as quick as you can is so unappealing. It sounds like torture!"
[FONT="]Paul Larkins, editor of Running Fitness magazine, competed for Great Britain as a middle-distance runner in the late 1980s, having been on a sports scholarship at Oklahoma State University. "When I arrived there, intense interval training was the order of the day, and it definitely worked. It gave rise to some very successful runners. It appeared to give better results quicker than doing slow, steady distance work. The trouble was, the burn-out factor was so high. A guy in my year ran 800m in 1 minute, 46 seconds, very fast for his age, but he retired as soon as he left college. The thought that every time you trained, you had to do all those flat-out sessions was just too much. I much prefer the sport-for-all approach, where you enjoy what you do, you almost look forward to it, and you're able to carry on doing it for ever."[/FONT]
