Whether you’re racing the sprint distance or a full Ironman distance triathlon – the bike makes up the biggest proportion of your total race. Which means improving your cycling speed can have a significant impact on your overall finish time. If you’re looking to hit that next triathlon PR, the winter months are the perfect time to use indoor training to tick off quality indoor cycling workouts that will help you to get fitter, faster and stronger on the bike.
We look at the key areas to focus on to become a faster cyclist, and share our top picks of the best ROUVY workouts to improve your triathlon bike split.
Build your aerobic base
Bad weather and dwindling daylight hours doesn’t mean you have to neglect your longer aerobic rides over the winter. It’s important to work on your aerobic base, because this will set the foundations so you have the capacity to take on the higher intensity work. Aerobic training helps your body to become more efficient at delivering oxygen to your muscles, clearing lactate and utilising fuel. Coming out of the off season with a strong base of aerobic endurance will put you in a good place to be ready to up your mileage and up the intensity without risking injuries or too much fatigue.
This doesn’t mean you’ve got to sit on the turbo trainer for 4 hours at a time. There are some really great workouts on ROUVY which are time efficient, but ensure you’re working at the correct intensity to stimulate your aerobic energy system. Tick these off consistently over the winter months and you’ll see a steady and sustainable improvement in your cycling fitness that will lay the foundations to help you get faster.
‘Maximise your fat burning’ workout on ROUVY
This 1hr 10 minute workout features 3 x 15 minute blocks of Zone 2 riding. This intensity is ideal for your body to improve it’s ability to utilise fat as a fuel source, helping you to ride for longer periods before your body has to switch to using carbohydrate as fuel – which produces lactate as a by-product. Breaking the ride up into 15 minute intervals will help the time fly by, making this an ideal workout if you’re relatively new to completing longer rides on the turbo trainer.
‘Ride slow, race fast’
This workout is a good substitute for your weekend long ride over the winter months. At 90 mins, it’s long enough to help maintain or build your endurance – without taking up your entire morning. Ideal if you’re looking to tip the training-life balance more towards the ‘life’ end of the spectrum during the off season.
Raise your lactate threshold
Lactate is produced as a by-product when the body uses carbohydrates as the primary fuel source. As exercise intensity increases, more carbohydrate is necessary to meet the muscle energy demands – which means more lactate is also produced. Up to a certain intensity, the body can clear this lactate and break it down to use as fuel. But once you go beyond this intensity, the body can’t clear lactate as quickly as it’s being produced. This is the point at which lactate accumulates in the blood, along with hydrogen ions which create that ‘acid’ burning sensation and begins to inhibit muscle function. This is where you feel fatigue, and ultimately have to slow down or stop exercising.
Lactate threshold training improves your body’s ability to clear lactate efficiently. In simple terms, this means you can ride at higher intensities, for longer, before fatigue kicks in. It’s important to note that training at lactate threshold doesn’t mean going as hard as possible. It’s the ‘comfortably-uncomfortable’ sweet spot, that you’d be able to hold for a maximum of 30-60 minutes (depending on your fitness level).
The ROUVY workout below created in collaboration with Pro Tour cyclist Mads Pedersen will have you working at the correct intensity to raise your lactate threshold – helping you to ride faster, for longer, before you start feeling the burn.
Lactate threshold – Mads Pedersen’s favourite
After a warm up and some zone 3 work to get the legs ready to work, the main set of this workout incorporates 3 x 7 minutes at threshold. The efforts will feel relatively tough, but you’ve got a decent amount of recovery in between so you should be able to recover enough to consistently hold the power through to the end of the workout.
Improve your FTP
Improving your FTP (functional threshold power) in many ways goes hand in hand with raising your lactate threshold. Your FTP is a way to quantify your fitness on the bike. In triathlon we’ll typically ride at a % of our FTP to ensure we’re not going too hard on the bike so we still have energy left for the run. For short distance triathlon, that will typically be around 90% of FTP – whereas for long distances you might need to drop down to anywhere between 65-80%. Therefore improving your FTP will give you the capacity to ride at a higher intensity for the same perceived effort.
Learn more about FTP and check out our top picks of the best workouts for improving your FTP here.
Develop mental toughness
If you want to ride fast, you’ve got to be willing to suffer a little bit. Breakthrough performances don’t happen in your comfort zone! Taking on some hard sessions in training will not only give your cycling fitness a big boost. It’ll also help you to develop the mental toughness to push yourself that bit harder.
The following workouts are tough, so really you only want to be doing one of these a week and ensuring you’ve got an easier recovery focused day the next day to avoid too much overload.
Sufferfest
On paper, 10 x 40s of effort doesn’t sound that bad. But you’ll be amazed how long 40 seconds feel when you’re pushing top end zone 6 watts! A spicy take on a classic 40s/20s session, this workout will help you to develop the physical and mental capacity to keep pushing hard even when fatigue kicks in.
‘It’s a mental game’ – Puncheur’s plan
This session puts a block of hard zone 6 efforts between two blocks of zone 4 intervals, like some sort of quad-busting sandwich. You’ll need to stay focused and stay determined to go all out on the zone 6 section, knowing you’ve still got another block of zone 4 to come. Tick this work out off a few times and you’ll find both your ability to push power, and your ability to recover faster between efforts, starts to improve.
Ramp Rusher Plus – Puncheur’s plan
If you want a longer ride that will really test your limits, give the Ramp Rusher Plus workout on ROUVY a go. At just over 90 minutes, you’ll want to make sure you’ve fuelled up before you jump on the bike – and consider having a carb/electrolyte mix in your bottle while you ride to maintain your energy levels.
This double ramp workout starts comfortably, but gets progressively more difficult – demanding you to hit a blast of top end watts when you’ve already accumulated fatigue in your legs. This is a session that will develop your grit and resilience to keep pushing all the way to the finish line.
Using structured workouts on ROUVY to strike the balance between working on your aerobic base and adding top end power and speed will turbo charge your bike fitness. Putting you in the best position possible to be able to ride further and faster with confidence next triathlon race season. Check out our full ROUVY section for more workouts, route inspiration and insider tips to help you make the most out of the indoor cycling platform.
