Let’s face it — there are times when indoor training is a lot more convenient, and potentially more effective, than riding outdoors. As I’ve moved from being a bike racer with unlimited training time to a working parent and career professional, I’ve learned to embrace indoor cycling as a means of keeping fit and lean so I can have more fun on my outdoor rides. As a coach, I also work with a lot of time-crunched athletes who look to indoor cycling to maximize the impact and effectiveness they can get in 60 minutes. Below, you’ll find three indoor cycling workouts you should incorporate into your training.
How to Incorporate Indoor Cycling Workouts Into Your Training Plan
But before we get to the specific workouts, let’s talk about what you should do with them. These are individual sessions, not a training program. If you’re training three or four times a week, then two of these workouts per week would be a good starting point, with the other ride(s) focused on moderate endurance miles. If you’re training five or six times a week, you could do three of these harder interval sessions per week. Just remember to allow for adequate recovery between sessions and adjust the intensity of your endurance and/or group rides to make sure your total weekly workload is appropriate for making progress.
You can also do these workouts outdoors. Either way, the workouts below should start with the following 10-minute warmup:
- 3 minutes easy pedaling
- 1 minute fast pedal (low resistance, fast as you can pedal without bouncing in the saddle)
- 1 minute easy pedaling
- 1 minute max effort (100+rpm)
- 1 minute easy pedaling
- 1 minute max effort (100+rpm)
- 2 minutes easy pedaling
The intensities featured in the workouts below are available to all athletes using TrainingPeaks. Simply go to your zone settings in your account, select ‘CTS’ in the auto-calculation drop menu, and enter your CTS Field Test power. The CTS Field Test is two, eight-minute time trials separated by 10 minutes of easy spinning recovery, and you should input the higher of the two average power values you record during the test. You can read more about how the CTS Field Test compares to other performance tests, including a 20-minute time trial, here.
Indoor Cycling Workout #1: 3 x 9-Minute Over Under Intervals
OverUnder Intervals are a lactate threshold workout that features surges or accelerations to mimic the real-world demands of taking pulls in a paceline or breakaway. As an indoor workout, the alternating intensities make it more engaging.
Each interval is nine minutes long, but during those nine minutes, you start at Steady State intensity (perceived exertion 8/10) for two minutes, accelerate to Climbing Repeat intensity (perceived exertion 9/10) for one minute, return to SS intensity for two minutes, CR for one minute, SS for two minutes, and then finish with one minute at Climbing Repeat intensity. Spin easy for four minutes of recovery and then repeat. Complete three intervals and then take 10-15 minutes to cool down.
A more advanced version of this workout is to increase the “over” efforts to Power Interval (10/10) intensity. As you get stronger you can also increase the interval length to 12 minutes. With a cooldown, this will push the workout to 68 minutes.
Indoor Cycling Workout #2: 8 x 2-Minute Power Intervals
Power Intervals are dead simple but incredibly effective for generating a great training stimulus in a short period of time. These two-minute VO2 max intervals (perceived exertion 10/10) improve power at VO2 max. That may seem counterintuitive to indoor training in the winter, but when you’re short on training time, high-intensity intervals are a good way to achieve a training stimulus. The other nice part about high-intensity intervals is that they’ve been shown to improve performance at all intensity levels, like a rising tide lifting all ships.
Use the first 15 seconds of each effort to ramp up your cadence and power to the maximum intensity you can hold for the remainder of the interval. This power output will be lower than what you could hold for a series of one-minute Power Intervals; you have to define “max effort” for these by what you can hold for the duration of these specific intervals. Recovery between intervals is two minutes of easy pedaling. Beginners may want to break this into two sets of four, two-minute Power Intervals with four minutes easy spinning between sets. The total “work time” is the same, but the added recovery can improve the quality of the final four efforts.
Indoor Cycling Workout #3: 3 sets of 8 x 30-Second Speed Intervals
Speed Intervals this short are essentially accelerations. You’re going to accelerate for 30 seconds, let the gear spin down as you pedal lightly for 30 seconds, and then accelerate again. And again, and again until you’ve completed 10 accelerations. The first few of these will seem very easy, but this workout will get hard quickly! This is a great workout for cyclocross and criterium racers, and on an indoor trainer, the time passes really quickly!
To increase specificity for racers, remember to do some or all of these accelerations in the drops. Make sure the accelerations are full efforts — imagine you’re accelerating to bridge a gap or establish the winning breakaway! After finishing your interval set, spin easy for at least another 10 minutes to cool down. And remember that for short workouts like these you won’t need to consume calories on the bike, but you should consume at least one bottle of fluid.
