Tips for Improving Cycling Fitness and Power

I ride regularly on Zwift, and when I am working to improve my fitness, I often turn to the many training plans offered within the app. Zwift often adds more training plans to their app, but I have some favorite interval plans that I like to ride for my performance improvement. I am partial to Emily Short Mix and the Zwift Academy workouts. I credit both types of workouts with improving my fitness and power.

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Additionally, there is some good advice about how to improve your performance on the bike. For example, according to Training Peaks [https://www.trainingpeaks.com/], there are at least four simple ways to increase bike power. They argue that increasing your bike power is the key to improving performance and getting faster. If you ride regularly, you should be able to do these things to increase your strength and speed.

“Power is the Holy Grail of cycling. The more bike power you have, the faster you can ride over a given distance.” – Tyrone Holmes

Ride in bigger gears

The first recommendation is to ride in bigger gears at the same cadence in a particular set of conditions. You can begin to accomplish this by spending progressively longer time, in a bigger gear, during a typical ride.

Ride up hills

Riding up climbs is a great way to increase muscular endurance, which is the ability to pedal in a relatively large gear at a moderate cadence for an extended period of time. I recommend a progressive increase in the steepness and distance that you climb. Be patient when building your climbing abilities.

Train in “blocks”

Training in blocks means doing hard workouts for two or three consecutive days, followed by an equal amount of recovery (days off or very easy rides). Doing hard workouts, riding in bigger gears, or riding up hills puts your muscles under severe stress. This stress makes your muscles rebuild more strongly. The key is to make sure you give your body enough time to recover after a training block.

Follow the 75-percent rule

Tyrone Holmes says, “The 75-percent rule states that during a given training week, at least 75 percent of your miles (or time) should be at or below 75 percent of your maximum heart rate (MHR). In other words, at least three-fourths of your weekly training should take place in Zones 1 and 2 (50-70 percent of MHR, 65-85 percent of lactate threshold heart rate, and a maximum of 75 percent of functional threshold power). That is right, most of your cycling should consist of easy recovery and endurance-building rides. So how do you get faster? That is the other part of the 75 percent rule. Ten percent of your weekly mileage should be in Zone 5 (90-100 percent of MHR, 105 percent of LTHR, and 106 to 150 percent of functional threshold power). In other words, it should consist of really, really intense riding. This is what allows you to modify your physiology—A relatively small amount of very intense effort combined with endurance work and adequate recovery.”