Cycling Training Plan For Beginners
Cycling Training Plan For Beginners
If you’re new to cycling, first of all, congrats! Cycling is a great way to stay fit, have fun, explore new places and accomplish your goals.
One of the best parts of cycling is seeing your fitness improve. Cycling goals that once seemed impossible to you are now commonplace. There’s nothing more satisfying than completing that epic ride, winning that race, getting that category upgrade, or simply beating your friends!
On your quest to gain new cycling superpowers, it can be a little bit overwhelming to navigate the plethora of information on how to become a faster cyclist. Many sources will contradict one another, while others are downright confusing.
FTP, VO2-max, Sweet Spot, Tempo, Polarization, Recovery, Volume, Nutrition, Specificity, Strength Training, Periodization, Base, Build, Taper…. The list goes ON AND ON!
This can create more questions than answers and you’re in the middle of the crossfire, trying to find the best path forward. To make matters more complicated, what works for someone else might not work for you.
Everyone is different and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for a beginner cycling training plan. It’s like making everyone wear size 11 shoes! Fortunately, we at EVOQ are here to help share our experiences and help make you fast. We have tons of free content available on our blog about a wide array of topics.
See Also: Criterium Racing For Beginners Training Plan
We’ve created a “FAQ” guide to help answer the most important questions regarding cycling training for beginners. While every one’s beginner cycling training plan will look different, there are a few things that will be the same for everyone. Here are the answers to the beginner cyclists most burning questions:
See Also: How To Increase FTP
CYCLING TRAINING FOR BEGINNERS – COMMON QUESTIONS
How many days per week should I ride my bike? If you have the time, almost every day! Perhaps the biggest tenet to successful training is consistency. Resistance trained athletes know they ought not do legs two days in-a-row, but with cycling– riding most days of the week is essential if you want to get really fast.
What kind of cycling intervals should I do? That’s a tricky one! Beginner cyclists can do just about any workout and get stronger, however, just because you got stronger with one type of workout doesn’t mean it was the best workout you could have done and it doesn’t mean that’s the only workout you should do. Just because you made gains with a certain tempo training workout does not mean you should do it over and over again. Unfortunately, we can’t offer a specific answer to this question, but there is a time and place for almost every type of interval workout in a cycling training plan for beginners.
See Also: Interval Training For Cycling — The Complete Guide
How many recovery days should I take from cycling? Usually, you should take 2-3 recovery days per week. These days are crucial to helping you get stronger. Training causes damage to your body and it is the recovery that gives your body time to repair and adapt. Recovery days could be EASY rides for about 30-60 minutes, a walk or hike, or just taking the day totally off. The idea is to not cause any strain on your body.
Related Post: Cycling Recovery Tips
How many hours per week should I ride? If you are a beginner cyclist, it will take time to get used to doing big miles. Professional cyclists routinely train between 20-30 hours per week! If you are a beginner cyclist, you need to gradually progress your training.
First start by increasing your training frequency. If you ride 3 days a week, try increasing to 4, and so on. Once you’ve gotten that down, add time to your training rides. If you only have time to ride for an hour or two on the weekdays, begin by incorporating a longer ride on the weekends. This can give you huge gains!
See Also: Mountain Bike Training Plan
How many days per week should I do cycling intervals? In general, you want to limit intervals to two days per week. Any more than this will likely not give you any added benefit and just fatigue you further.
Many beginner cyclists ascribe to the “no pain no gain” myth and feel like if they’re not going hard all the time then they are not training. Don’t fall into this trap, this will leave you overtrained and burnt out.
However, on your two interval days per week, be prepared to give your best effort. Make it count! The other days should be spent riding Zone 2 “Endurance Miles,” as this is the foundation for every cyclists’ training.
What should I eat? What is the best cycling food? Cycling burns a lot of Calories. Many riders unknowingly hold themselves back by not eating right. Read our guide to cycling nutrition here. Read our supplement cycling blog to learn more about certain supplements that can improve your performance
Do I need a power meter? If you want to get really good at cycling, then a power meter is a good idea. If you already have a power meter and hav done a cycling FTP test, we offer a free Power File Analysis. One of our expert coaches will analyze your data and provide you with feedback on how to optimize your training.
There are likely many more questions you have, fortunately, we have many resources available on our blog. You can also join the EVOQ.BIKE Discord to chat with other cyclists in the EVOQ community about anything cycling related!
See Also: Should You Use TrainingPeaks Fitness Score?
Related Reading: How to Train for a Bicycle Race
OUR BIGGEST TIPS FOR BEGINNER CYCLISTS
If only we knew then what we know now! Here are our biggest tips for beginner cyclists:
Don’t ride hard every day! We talked about this above, but it warrants a little more discussion here. One of the main problems with riding hard every day is that you will dig a hole that you can’t climb out of. You will not be giving your body adequate time to repair the damage you are causing through training and eventually, your progress will stagnate, or worse, you end up overtrained and lose progress.
That being said, we do want to ride hard some, just not every single day. If you ride hard every day, you will be too fatigued to truly give it your maximum on your interval workouts. By allowing time for your body to rest and recover with a day off or an endurance ride, you can show up to your tough interval sessions with fresh legs and tons of motivation. You’ll be able to reach higher power outputs, dig deeper, and make greater gains as a result.
See Also: Gravel Racing Training Plan
Hard workouts should be HARD! While we don’t do intensity every day, the interval workouts we do should be HARD. This doesn’t mean going out and smashing yourself for 6 hours so that you’re too tired to ride for a week, but it does mean selecting workouts that will overload your body to induce adaptations. If you want to make progress, you’ve got to give your body something challenging.
See Also: VO2max for Cycling
Eat (and drink) on the bike. This is really easy to get wrong. Every cyclist has “bonked” at some point in their cycling journey. Unfortunately, many riders continually make this mistake over and over. The problem with underfueling is the quality of your training will suffer. You won’t be able to keep the power down till the end of the ride or recover as fast. If you want to get the most out of your cycling, you’ve got to fuel.
The primary source of fuel for cycling is carbohydrates. Your body can only store carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen) in very limited quantities. As such, you need to continually top up the tank so you can maintain energy levels. Read our blog here on what you should eat or drink while cycling.
Listen to your body. If you’re not feeling it, or something feels wrong, it’s okay to stop. As cyclists, we often want to push through no matter what. However, the body is a complex machine and there are lots of moving parts.
If you feel unable to complete a workout or mentally not there, it’s okay to change the plan. You’re better off recovering or taking it easy and saving it for another day.
See Also: How to Become a Pro Cyclist
Zone 2 “Endurance Miles” are king. Yes, riding relatively easy is one of the biggest components to successful training. Zone 2 riding (usually between 60-75% of FTP) gives you huge gains, without adding a ton of fatigue! There’s a reason professional riders will spend up to 95% of their total training time within this zone.
See Also: Power Zones For Endurance Rides
Strength training is a total game changer. For years it was thought that strength training was useless for cyclists. We should all just ride our bikes more, right? Not so! Much research has shown the immense benefits of strength training for cyclists. However, you’ve got to do it the right way to see the benefits (Avoid these common gym mistakes!. We have lots of resources on EVOQ.BIKE to get you started.
Work on your technique. One of the most important things for beginner cyclists to work on is their cycling “form” and technique. When you watch a Tour stage on TV, you’ll notice just how silky smooth and rock solid the pros are on their bikes, even when they’re hammering it up massive climbs or going all-out in the breakaway. Generating power is one thing, but we also need to teach ourselves the fundamentals of good cycling form. If you can get your form dialed in early on, this will set you up for long-term success as your engine continues to grow. We have a blog dedicated to neuromuscular training that will give you a guide on some ways you can improve your cycling technique.
See Also: Master’s Cycling Training
CYCLING GOALS
One of the most important keys to cycling success is setting goals for yourself. To become great at cycling requires hard work and dedication, and having hard-set goals can help keep you motivated to train each day and accountable to give your best. Goals can be both personal goals and event goals. It’s good to have a mixture of goals.
Any cycling goals that you should set should be realistic, but also challenging… pick something that excites you! Here are some potential ideas for what your cycling goals could look like:
A goal to ride “x” amount of miles or hours each week
A goal to ride a certain mileage in a year (this is a great goal to keep you committed to training the whole year!)
A goal to reach a certain FTP
A goal to set a time on a certain Strava segment
Any kind of event goal: completing an epic century ride, getting a podium at a criterium, upgrading to Cat 3, etc..
CYCLING SCHEDULE FOR BEGINNERS
The best way to get fast? Not through a cookie-cutter cycling training plan for beginners. You’re one of a kind, and your training plan should be, too.
At EVOQ.BIKE, we offer one-on-one bike coaching personalized 100% to YOU! Each of our coaches have logged tens-of-thousands of hours on the bike, completed countless epic rides, and won hundreds of races.
How does training with EVOQ work?
Cycling is more than just what you see on a watts per kilo chart, The accountability of a coach can’t be replaced by a template or computer generated training plan. Nothing replaces experience in the field. We’re familiar with the common pitfalls that often befall beginner cyclists.
We are here to share our experiences with you to help you reach your cycling goals. With close one-on-one communication, power file analysis, training plan adjustments, nutrition guidance, and much more– you will have everything you need to accomplish your loftiest of ambitions. You’ll have the competitive edge on the competition that will accelerate your progress to new heights.
Click below to view our training offerings.
Questions? We’d love to hear from you!
Email: Landry@evoq.bike or Brendan@evoq.bike or fill out the form below