Training Program

Ali wants to know how much training he should be doing to get strong, so we have written him a basic “training program”. We don’t know how much time he has to spare for his training so this is only a suggestion, but it is one that anyone could use.

Question:
Hi my friend,
thanks for this amazing site.
I have a problem that how many times training in week is enough to
have a strong body for cycling?

Hi Ali.
Thanks for the nice words on the site, we like to hear what you all think.

Ali, the easy answer is to do as much as you can! What that means is; take a good look at you schedule for work, study, family life, seeing friends and all the things we all need to do. From that you can see how much time you have left over for cycle training.

You should start with an hour a day, maybe every other day and once you start to feel stronger then step up to an hour every day, but remember to take a day off every week to rest and give your body a chance to recover. Rest is as important as training.

Build up the hours on the bike considering how much time you have to spare for cycling. I would suggest a schedule of:

Monday: an easy 1 or 2 hours or rest day.
Tuesday: hard 2 to 3 hours.
Wednesday: a long easy ride.
Thursday: hard 2 to 3 hours.
Friday: an easy 1 hour or rest day.
Saturday: 3 hours.
Sunday: a long (hard) ride, 4 to 5 hours with a stop.

As I have said you should build up to this amount of training. Start easy and then build up to over 10 hours a day. Once you have trained up to 10 hours a week then keep to that amount for a while and then step up again if you have time. Training with other riders makes your training more fun and can also make it much harder and faster, simulating road race conditions.

If you are short of time, then once you have a good basic fitness you can start interval training twice a week, say Tuesday and Thursdays. This can be done in different ways, you can either pick a set distance of 1 kilometre and ride as hard as you can for that kilometre then rest and then hard again whilst watching your pulse for taking it too high and then for recovery. You can do the same on a climb.

One of the most enjoyable ways of interval training is to pick a circuit that you use regularly and ride hard between certain objects, like street lights or similar and then rest between the next one.

We hope this helps?