Base Training For Cycling

Tis the season: “We’re riding base miles today”.

There might be a good chance that you aren’t riding base miles if you’re getting sucked into too many large group rides (where you aren’t pedaling), and missing a lot of aerobic gains that will be stacked year after year with proper base training for cycling.

At the same time, it’s important to understand that Base Training is not just easy zone 2 miles. Sure, you can do that, but you’ll be better prepared for the next season if you have the mindset that a modern base phase includes multiple aerobic-building intensities, as well as training specifically for next season.

You’re not trying to be race-ready in December — but you are trying to develop the tools you’ll need in early-season races.

Base Training = Get Strong As Hell For Next Year! Aerobic, Resilient and Durable.

Don’t worry, I won’t go on a rant about how group rides aren’t great for improving endurance performance; you’re all on top of that by now!

Cycling Base Miles / Winter Training

Base Miles is the term often used to describe cycling endurance training rides on the weekend. These rides are where you get tired from the duration, rather than from the intensity, of a long ride. I’d encourage you to consider overall training volume when you lay out the plans for your Base Season Training.

The more volume that you can do during your cycling winter training, the better. Of course, that does mean volume that your body is tolerating and absorbing, and not just driling yourself into the ground. Many of us don’t have this issue due to our jobs and time constraints, but it is worth mentioning!

Big volume in base season might not be possible for everyone, especially those living in cold climates, and we’ll get to that down below. However, I’d encourage you to remember: If you can go from 12H a week to 13H a week, that’s an 8% increase in training volume! That one hour is huge!!

Ideally the Long rides are longer in duration by an hour or two than most of your normal training rides. If you’re riding 1.5 hours during a weekly session, your weekend rides are 3 hours, or even 4 hours if you can get out for that long.

If you’re a Cat 1 or 2, you will benefit massively from 4-6 hour rides.

On an endurance base miles ride, You are riding in Zone 2 (55-75% FTP) with consistent pedaling, so as to avoid coasting in Zone 1. I would recommend that you target 60-70% of FTP, with 75-80% being the upper limit. Mostly aim to stay away from tempo.

Optimize Your Cycling Performance with Our Proven Base Training Plans

Why Ride Endurance?

We have a video on why we should ride at endurance pace as cyclists. The effect of this pedaling makes important changes at the cellular level that will not only increase your ability to ride longer at intensities below threshold, but it will also increase your abilitiy to ride hard at intensities like VO2Max! This is extremely important to cycling performance.

There is no substitute for long rides, and getting 2-3 of these in during a month’s time will catapult you to the next level of cycling. If you can do them every weekend, even better!

If you can’t get the longer ride in, you need to bank on your consistent 2.5-3 hour weekend rides.

(Endurance Sports: There are no shortcuts!)

One big key to Base Season is volume. (It isn’t the only one though!) If you can train with volume, at endurance pace, that will set you up for big success. How much is too much? It’s okay to be tired after long endurance rides, but you should recover quickly and it should not hamper your normal training routine. If you are always tired, or have lost libido, those could be signs that you are training too much.

This endurance cycling workout doesn’t sound hard and it isn’t sexy, but wait until you get 60% through the ride and you might start feeling the fatigue. That’s a good thing.

🚨 Base training for cycling is a different tired feeling than when you go out and crush a group ride. That’s more of a neuromuscular tiredness or stress, whereas this base miles stress is simply from the duration of the ride. This is an important distinction to make!!

[From 2019] I’ve been training for Tour of Southland in New Zealand, and when I go on 5-6 hour endurance rides, it takes everything possible in the last 30 minutes to complete these when I’m not 100% fresh. I’m changing cadence, I’m sitting, then standing, all while riding between 60-75% FTP. There will definitely be a large chunk of low tempo riding in this since your power meter will drift above and below that exact percentage, but with practice you can get close.

Below is an image of my 7% base miles ride. If you need help understanding the images, give a quick listen to this audio file that describes them.

Below is a group ride with a lot of coasting, and then the second half alone, building my endurance capabilities.

The group ride was fun, but really poor for training. Hey, there are trade offs in life. I don’t want you to give up the group ride for the social aspect, but I just want you to be cognizant of the effect it might have on your training.

If you want to ride true base miles in a group setting, leave space between each other and draft less. Try keeping the group to 4-6 riders. Even better, have stronger riders on the front more often and for longer pulls, and the newer rides can still be in zone 2 in their draft.

Base Miles For Cycling

Winter is the time to build a foundation and play the long game. There are no, or very few, races and weekend rides out of town, which leaves tons of time to WORK ON YOU. Consider a building: it can only be build so high dependent on its base, amongst other things, but let’s keep the analogy simple.

If you only have a couple base rides in, when you go to stack rides with higher intensity on top (sweet spot, threshold, VO2Max), your system can only handle so much stimulus before it begins to topple.

The bigger the base, the more you can handle when the race season nears and you begin your Build Phase. You should watch this video to understand why you should ride base miles.

While you are building this massive skyscraper on the weekend, with the dark hours of the work week looming, this is a great time to utilize the gym and strength train for cycling. You can accomplish SO MUCH in under 1 hour.

The long winter months of the northeast don’t have to kill your Spring Racing.

I raced the Pro/1 Tour of the Battenkill on a steady diet of 4-5 hours during the week (three 90 minute rides) and 6-10 hours on the weekend (3-5H rides). It was a horrible winter. Even though I had a smaller base and small match book than I’d hope for come April, I still got 3rd place because of the optimized training that I spent indoors and on my strength work.

At the end of the article, we’ll look at what you can do if you are training inside all winter and don’t have access to big volume cycling training.

Related Post: Indoor Cycling Training Guide

Base Training Will Improve Your Top End

Consider two scenarios. You do the same exact intervals during the year, however, in one scenario you ride 15 hours a week and in the other you only ride 5 hours per week. Which scenario do you think you will get faster?

While cycling base miles are great for building endurance, they also build your top end fitness. One of the primary things that sets apart a pro riders training from an amateurs is volume, not intensity.

Base miles for cyclists allow you to build a big aerobic engine without being too taxing. As a result, training stimuli can be performed day-after-day and you can “stack” your gains consistently, day after day, year after year.

A lot of athletes don’t understand that base miles will improve their ability to go hard, and therefore faster. There is a lot more going on physiologically behind the scenes.

Cycling Base Training Checklist

Torque Training: Temp to start, and then TorqueMax™

Sprint Training (seated and maximal wattages, 10, 20, 30s)

Strength Work. Can be found in these blogs.

Why High Torque / Low Cadence?

It’s not just low cadence that we are after, but producing high amounts of torque. This will make you an absolute beast on the bike, but it also makes pedaling at higher wattages feel so much easier.
Another great benefit is that self-selected cadence on long endurance rides also feels much easier. You’re just effortlessly flicking the pedals over after making gains from your high torque production in Torque Workouts.

Start your Torque Training with 4 x 6m intervals at Tempo wattages, probably producing 30-40nM of Torque. Elongate these out to 10 minutes. Once you can complete those, you’re ready for TorqueMax™.

TorqueMax Training™

These are shorter, 2-4min intervals, where you’re aiming for 1nM of Torque per 1kg of Bodyweight. This is really tough if you’re a bigger rider, so maybe a touch less on the top end.

Utilize RPE on this, along with power. Slight changes in Cadence and Power can really affect the Torque.

You want these to be very challenging, but make sure your body is feeling good while you do it. Ideally, we are improving your raw torque, so the goal is to get the cadence real low and increase power.

Roughly 8 x 3 at 50-55 rpm and 100%++ of threshold is a good example of this (tough!) -- these ones are shorter because they're a lot harder

Sprint Training (Seated, Maximal 10s, 20s, 30s)

November through January is the perfect window to work on technique without the pressure of performing. This is when you dial in your gearing intuition: knowing exactly what gear you need to launch from Zone 2, 3, or 4 so you’re never caught over- or under-geared when it matters.

Check out this full blog on transforming your Sprint.

It’s also the time to refine the coordination between upper-body pull and lower-body drive, turning your sprint into a fluid, efficient movement. With concurrent strength work and torque training, your legs are primed to produce all-time numbers—winter is honestly when many riders hit unexpected PRs simply because they’ve built the raw strength and are finally practicing the mechanics behind it.

The other major goal is learning how different sprints feel. A max-five-second surge, a 10-second sprint, and a 20-second power-fade sprint are not the same effort—each has its own RPE and pacing strategy.

You want that understanding baked into your muscle memory so that when a race or group ride gets chaotic, you can react instantly. Riders like Scott McGill incorporate reactive sprints—exit a corner and sprint to a sign, or responding to a friend’s attack. Real-world sprints rarely happen with perfect setup.

Finally, use winter to accumulate meaningful time at high wattage. If your max sprint is 1200W, track how much time you spend over 900W; even two total minutes per session is huge for building durability. And yes—mix in town-line sprints with friends. The competitive stimulus hits differently and prepares you for actual racing. Nail all of this through January and February if you're outside, and you roll into your build phase in March with sharper instincts, higher power, and a sprint that’s second nature.

Biologic Durability

This is hard to quantify because we’re looking at the cellular level of the athlete. We talked about this earlier in 2019 in this blog.

There’s no metric in WKO5 or Xert or Golden Cheetah or whatever software you’re using to tell when you’re recruiting fast twitch fibers to ride at endurance.

These building blocks allow you to add the sprinkles of high intensity on top, where your body takes this stress and absorbs it, as opposed to just getting a beat down. Listen to the analogy in the video of what it would be like if your untrained non-cyclist friend magically could perform just ONE 1-minute effort like you can…they’d be crushed. That’s the extrapolated version of what happens when there’s no base.

These long rides create a durability in an athlete that ALLOWS you to THEN GO AFTER THE REPEATABILITY.

Building repeatability isn’t about just doing more intervals in the summer. It’s about building the base in the winter.

Watch the video below and let us know what questions you may have so that you come out CRUSHING in the spring…not only with speed, but with the ability to grow as a cyclist in terms of durability and repeatability.

When should you be working on Base Miles / Endurance Riding? 12 months out of the year.

Indoor Cycling Base Training Plan

What if you live in an area where volume isn’t possible due to terrible weather and dark days, and you spend a lot of your time riding the indoor trainer? Well, if you like riding zone 2 endurance rides indoors, bless you! You can do more volume inside and then do your high intensity session or cadence work on the weekends.

For me, that just wasn’t working! I hated riding endurance on the trainer, and could only do it on the weekends if I really forced myself to, knowing that other athletes in warmer climates were getting their long base miles in.

I grew up riding in Rochester, NY, a frozen tundra, so I know this problem well. I completed a lot of 1 - 1.5 hour weekly rides and then I would force myself to do 3-4h on the rollers on weekends.

Volume can be amazing, unless it would burn us out and make us hate the trainer. So, I wanted to create something for those athletes who can’t get a coach, but need some guidance. And voila, here is an indoor cycling winter base training plan that I’ve put together with some of my favorite indoor sessions. Many people are looking for a 12 week base training cycling plan, but I’ve put together a 20 week cycling plan, for a really inexpensive cost. Check it out!

A quick shill, for those looking for a coach, hit me up! I’m looking to take on a few new athletes like yourself! Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE

Email Brendan for Coaching

Okay, back to the blog. Now, let’s talk about Base Training Focus Points.

Your FOCUS is aerobic volume and Strength work (get in the gym)! The “offseason” is where so many of the gains are made! It is the ON Season!!!

Cycling Off Season Break

Before doing that though, I’d be mistaken if I didn’t highlight the importance of a season break: MAKING GAINS also includes taking a mental and physical break. Take a week off, then some unstructured riding. You can still ride a bunch, but get away from the numbers. You won’t lose fitness and the gains that you’ve made. we do need to take a step back in order to take two steps forward. We won’t keep all of the fitness that we’ve gained this season going into the offseason and that is normal! You will come out stronger if you take the appropriate break!

PURCHASE OUR BASE TRAINING PLAN FOR MEGA BASE GAINS

Indoor Base Training Focus

I know we are talking about INDOOR training, but get OUTSIDE as much as possible. Even if you have a specific indoor workout planned, no workout is magic, GO RIDE OUTSIDE when time and weather allows. Why? It will keep you fresh and focused, I PROMISE.

Long rides are gold for converting those fast twitch fibers to more aerobic ones. These will keep you hyped for your overall training so that you can hit all of the specific trainer sessions that are to come!
Try other things like skiing and hiking or snow shoeing. Don’t get overwhelmed by “cycling volume” TSS and hours and all that; STAY CONSISTENT with activity.

Our heart doesn’t know the difference in what aerobic activity that we are doing! While this might not be “optimized” and perfect, sometimes optimized IS just staying active and realistic with what we can do!
Don’t slack off with random 3 days off and eating like trash because you aren’t out riding. Stick to your base training cycling plan! Eat healthy, focus on your body, and lose any extra pounds early. You don’t want to wait until January 1 to lose weight, as you might be entering Build Phases then! That is the time to increase watts and not worrying about dropping pounds.

These were huge drinking times for me which was a massive mistake. Learn from my mistake!
Cadence work can be magic, and High Torque/Low cadence is extremely valuable. Check out Landry Bobo’s blog for more details on that!

Indoor Base Training Cycling Plan

The actual training:
For the first block, I’d start up your Low Cadence (High Torque) work and some relatively “simple” tempo blocks, which we will build from in coming months.

For indoor endurance rides, keep things undulating so they are more palatable. Play with high cadence and don’t hate the indoor trainer; keep it intersting without just smashing too hard. We do want the focus to be aerobic, but not mind-numbing and boring.

I have created some aerobic ramps on the weekends that range in 60-100% FTP, with more time near the lower end there, but again, just to keep things interesting.

As we work into the second and third block of winter base training, I’ll incorporate some burst exercises and over unders. These are very similar, but I consider bursts to be more quick blips that don’t have a major focus on creating lactate, which is what the Overs are used for in Over Unders, or Lactate Clearance intervals.

Continue the low cadence work during the week and over unders on a long weekend ride.

You’ll want to elongate some of the interval blocks, whether you’re doing tempo or lactate clearance work.

In the third block I still like stair climbs, even though they are a bit old school, elevating the wattages from low tempo, through low threshold or Sweet Spot, and finishing at low VO2Max.

On the weekend, I always made a 3 hour ride goal…you’ll feel amazing if you do it, and then you can still get 10-14h in during the entire training week! Don’t cheat yourself and only ride 2h. Stay motivated and get a longer ride in. No, it’s not a long one like 4-5 hours, but 3 hours is so much better than 2 hours!!

Fourth block: I need to do some intensity, and recommend supra threshold 4m efforts, over unders with back to back workouts, and possibly some harder VO2Max sessions if you’re racing in the coming months. If I am indoors, I do shorter VO2Max sessions and hard start intervals, as those are both more palatable than 5x5’s or longer 8-9 minute VO2max intervals. I might even give some 30/15s before the first races even though we’re on the trainer and those stink to do inside!

If you need help selecting your VO2Max workouts, check out this whole VO2max Training Guide that we created and have in the TrainingPeaks store.

It is REALLY critical in the last weeks that you hit anaerobic power and anaerobic stamina workouts. If you need more training, you do want to hit this earlier in the offseason. Check out this video on why we need to hit harder than 130% FTP training.

Last thing, get in your more specific race training! Double down on strengths, address glaring weaknesses, and anything that is event specific!

You can do this!

Check out this video for all my thoughts on Indoor Base Training!

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