When you first start out, Mountain Bike Training can be daunting. From experience, the unique challenge in cycling training is taking in enough fuel during those long rides. A few years ago, my friend and I took part in the London to Brighton off-road cycle in support of the British Heart Foundation. Within a few hours, I ran out of energy gels, and hit the wall. Long story short, there were way too many times when we were tempted to stop and take a nap or call a taxi.
Sheer will power got us through to the end. At our next stop, we made certain to re-stock on energy gels and bananas and inhale as many calories and fluids as possible. So, this post is to encourage you to build up your fitness, and remind you fuel is essential.
1. Build Your Base Fitness
When you start mountain or road biking, you should get used to spending time in the saddle. The sore butt stage eventually passes as long as you have a good saddle. Two-hour sessions are ideal to build cardiovascular and muscular fitness. Of course, if you’re starting out slowly build up and celebrate every small increase in time when you’re training. Don’t worry, if a two hour goal seems far out, you’ll eventually get there!
As your lungs and heart get stronger, your body develops more energy powerhouses, called mitochondria. Your body will get better at burning fat for energy once you’ve depleted your glucose and glycogen stores. Do this once or twice a week and you’ll struggle not to lose body fat.
2. Mountain Bike Training to Conquer Hills
A seriously good training video that uses perceived intensity to let you control your own training. If you push yourself to the high levels of intensity shown, it’s recommended that you have a nutrition plan in place to ensure you have fuel on and after the cycle.
This video gives you a challenging interval training session for conquering hills, but the bad thing is it gives you a challenging interval training session that will burn you with lactic acid like never before. I’d give it a try but don’t feel guilty for dialling it back to be more comfortable. It’s beneficial for you to be able to carry it out more regularly rather than going away traumatised after a single overly intense attempt. Unless you’re cycling competitively, you’ve got to balance the fun with the fitness. Even if fitness is your goal, you want to be keeping strictly under the excruciating levels of perceived intensity. The video will help you do that if you’re a serious cyclist and you’ll avoid the trauma and fatigue of overdoing it.
3. Basic Strength Training to Demolish Your Cycling Goals
To really build up strength it helps to do some strength training – the clue is in the name. You can get a lot of bang for your buck specifically training for strength rather than slowly developing it on the bike. All the exercises they show are going to help core strength and some will help your legs. For the squats and lunges, I’d recommend thinking about weights once you are used to doing them with good form. Also plyometrics can add explosive strength to your repertoire – absolutely brilliant for any sprints.
If you are hitting the weights or even doing body weight exercises regularly, think about adding protein to your diet. You should also add extra fruit and veg to get extra minerals and vitamins and aid recovery.
4. Nutrition for Cyclists
A good intro to some of the diet considerations of cyclists. Be weary of tucking into too much of the rice they suggest unless you’ve completed a really tough cycle. Like the mentioned, vegetables, nuts and fish can be ideal because you can’t easily eat tonnes of them – the same can’t be said for sweet snacks or rice. Try look into the Scandinavian and Mediterranean diets because they have stood the test of time as recommended diets so in my books might be better than a fad diet.