Benefits of a Cycling Group Ride
For many riders, cycling group rides are what they live for. The camaraderie, the enjoyment of going fast in a pack, beating your friends up a climb or for the town line sprint, and the post ride get together. These are all fun and exciting ways to enjoy riding your bicycle, but it isn’t always the best training.
Before you say, “But I don’t want to train and lose my love for riding”, read on.
OR, LISTEN HERE!
This post is for cyclists looking to optimize the time that they spend on the bike, and get faster, while still having fun.
One of our first rules with any athlete is that the process of getting faster has to be fun. You will not succeed and make long term gains if you aren’t having fun doing it. We all have a ton of other things going on in life, so for the 99% of us that aren’t making a living by riding a bike, it has to be fun.
Sure, VO2Max intervals aren’t exactly fun, but the feeling of achievement and excitement when you finish and conquer them sure are!!
So, without digging into every aspect of why interval training is beneficial, let’s take a look at when you shouldn’t be doing a group ride, and when you should be doing a group ride.
Cycling Group Rides
Whether you want to believe it or not, most group rides of 5 or more people consist of two states: coasting and hammering. Many riders get excited and want to pull so hard to show that 1) I’ve been training! And 2) Look How Strong I Am. They then peel off, and let the next rider take over.
Then you coast coast coast until it is time to do it again.
A Sprint Line ahead! Hammer to the finish, coast and recover.
A KOM ahead! Hammer to the top, coast down.
Even if the group is more controlled and riding at a tempo pace, you’re only working a portion of the time, and I’d bet that when you come home, 30% of your ride is in Zone 1, coasting. So while the group ride may be good for smashing, it might not be the best for aerobic fitness gains.
So let’s pause here and say this: we get it, big group rides with friends are fun, but more than likely, they aren’t optimized training.
Sometimes this “fartlek” style of intervals, going hard when the group dictates, is just what you need: you need a hard stimulus but are deep in a block and it will be hard to mentally push yourself on your own. You need that carrot.
A lot of matches were LIT in this group ride
BUT GROUP RIDES ARE HARD. Aren’t I getting faster?
The first time you do a cycling group ride, you’ll really start to see how hard you can push yourself when you are chasing someone else! It’s extremely hard to push yourself to your absolute max when you’re training alone, but unfortunately the pushes and surges that are created in group rides rarely transfer over to the specific interval durations that YOU need to conquer YOUR next event.
You will come home tired and exhausted, but you didn’t train specifically enough for your upcoming event (unless you’re riding the same route that the event will be on, with similar competition), and you didn’t focus on the physiological system that you want to improve. You’ll get really good at that group ride, and then eventually stagnate, since it’s the same efforts over and over again.
Small Group Rides
Small groups of 4 or more are much more productive for aerobic based workouts because you can have a say in the pace. You’re either pulling, or only one rider back, so if needed, you can leave a little space in between and not catch much draft. This greatly increases your chances of actually pedaling the bike. Putting out watts into the pedals is part of building your aerobic engine, and cycling is an aerobic sport, all the way down to short sprint races.
You can all have the same game plan of “riding endurance” or “vo2maxing the climbs”, whatever the group’s goal is for the day. Make sure this group’s plan lines up with your training plan. If it does, the small group ride can be quite productive.
Below is what a solid tempo ride should look like. The rider gets out of the city, stays on the gas, and heads home. Bravo!
Below is what a garbage ride looks like: tons of coasting in zone 1, way too much hammering (the yellow portions above the green dotted line), and lots of wasted time.
If the point was ONLY to accumulate TSS and “go hard”, then this would be okay, but they never went deep enough to make a physiological change, and train their Lactate Threshold or VO2Max (except for maybe that one quick effort after the 1.5 hour mark).
Again, we get it, the 2nd ride may have been fun, but we are teaching you to optimize your time on the bike if you want to get faster.
See Also: Understanding Power Meter Data
When You Should Group Ride
New Riders
Group rides will teach you how to ride in a group while cycling and you will be able to learn group ride strategies for cycling, and many cyclists don’t ride within big groups on a regular basis. If you don’t, attending a gran fondo or charity ride can be very intimidating. The more you ride with people and eventually get used to the feeling of someone bumping you, the safer you become as a cyclist and the more events you’ll want to participate in.
See Also: Cycling Training Plan for Beginners
Indoor Cyclists
The world of Zwift, TrainerRoad, and e-sports in general have created a platform for more and more individuals to get involved in the sport of cycling. That being said, riding inside on a trainer is much different than riding outside! If you ride indoors, once you go outside, it will feel very different and you might have a tough time “holding your line” (riding in a straight line). You want to master this before jumping into a group ride, or others will surely bark at you for not having proper group ride etiquette.
Related Post: Indoor Cycling Training
Pace Changes and Reaction Time
The staccato of a group ride is very different than riding alone, because you need to respond to the surges of other riders, and they may come when you aren’t expecting it. Working on this type of random acceleration and just digging as HARD as you can is extremely beneficial to newer riders.
Our reaction time will also increase which is extremely important. Many times, there really isn’t time to THINK: “Should I follow this move or not?” There needs to be an innate voice in our head that guides us—our cycling reaction speed. The only way to develop this is from races and group rides, so this is a great benefit of the cycling group ride.
HOWEVER, once you have done this over and over again, you reach a peak of making gains from this. Once you’ve done these types of rides, you’re not responding to more and more of these; random surges won’t increase your repeatability to do these over and over again. Rather, do some Tabata style intervals; workout below.
Warm up 20m
2 sets of 20 x (30s FULL GAS, 30s recover)
Just go over and over again... Recover 5m between sets.
Time Trial Practice
If you know that you are going to be one of the stronger riders at this group ride, you REALLY should be avoiding it. Or, try to drill it off the front, so that 5 or 6 riders are leading a chase that might actually catch you.
This type of ride will teach you to:
keep the biking moving fast over the rolling sections. A group will naturally go faster than you over these, so you’ll get great practice hitting the suprathreshold and having to fall directly back in 100% FTP, or you’ll soon be caught
You’ll learn to stop staring at your power meter and you might just set a new PR; RIDE THIS RIDE BY FEEL. FREAKING GO FOR IT. Don’t ease up because your HR is high; that is the lamest reason in the book to stop. HR monitors aren’t accurate all the time and there’s tons of variability to them. Test your legs on these group rides. If you blow up, at least you’ll learn something and that piece of knowledge makes you stronger
Testing the peloton...the longer you stay out there, the group loses motivation. It is a great skill to be able to see this from down the road. As you get tired, you need to learn how to stop being a carrot in their eyes. This is a soft skill for sure, but sometimes you can just tell, “If I get over this next climb / roller / whatever and they haven’t closed in on me, their motivation will be toast”
Related Post: How to Pace in a Time Trial
Massive Build
If you’re 3 weeks out from a big omnium or long road or gravel race, there is a ton of opportunity to use a group ride to add on a lot of Training Stress, or TSS. This assumes that you don’t go on a group ride that is explained above where you are just sitting around and coasting. You must be pedaling and using the other riders to push you harder than you would be able to at the end of a long training ride.
Maximal Efforts
Sometimes you can go deep enough on a segment with other riders motivating you, whether it is a 90 second roller or 9 minute climb. We will almost always have the best performance when we are chasing another human, or a Strava KOM, or some sort of external motivator. Cycling group rides can beneficial for this type of effort! We will simply go harder in the group than we would alone.
Riding With Stronger Riders
Riding with people that are stronger than you is a real treat. You can learn things from them such as how to handle a bike, watch how they pedal in different situations, how do they corner, what do they eat, when do they drink, etc etc.
You will dig harder than you normally would in order to keep up! They will really push you when you get tired. These types of rides will make you stronger, just as hard races do.
If you can ride with stronger riders, go for it! If you get dropped ASAP on a drop ride, maybe they’re a little too strong. Ride with people where you can at least make it 60% of the ride, or one where they regroup at the top of climbs or after “hot zones”. Otherwise, have a game plan for what you’ll do with the remaining time. Tip: it’s not Zone 1.
Make sure you don’t do the same hard ride over and over again, or you’ll find yourself only improving on the durations of the few hard sections. It’s amazing how fast we adapt and then stagnate if we do it over and over again.
When Not To Use The Cycling Group Ride?
You do not want to go on the group ride when your training focus is on aerobic power—zone 1, 2, 3 (on a five zone model). There are exceptions to this as mentioned above—if it’s a small group of 4 with a strict focus on aerobic base work—but if the group gets too big, many times you can get stuck at the back coasting, and not optimizing your training time. This occurs especially as riders on the front get tired at hour 2-3 and the pace slows…the coasting increases dramatically.
The other time is after a big block of racing. I had an athlete that just completed a ton of criteriums and road races, and then wanted to immediately jump back into the group ride scene. I recommended that he really focus on rebuilding his base, and aerobic power, before the next block of racing began with St. Francis Tulsa Tough. He agreed, and the compromise that we came up with was that he would go to the group ride to see his friends, ride out of town with them, and then peel off when the pace picked up. He was quite please with that ride!
Conclusion
Group rides are fun, but rarely do they help you become a faster cyclist or better prepared for your events coming up because they don’t focus on your specific weaknesses.
They most likely are just making you tired, because anaerobic efforts do just that: make you tired; not faster.
If you limit your group rides to 1x for every two weeks, you’ll get faster. If you need to go every week, make it part of your long ride on the weekend.
Dial in your training during the week so you drop everyone on the weekend.
Now, doesn’t that sound fun?
About Brendan Housler
Email: Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE
Instagram: @BrendanHousler
Twitter: @BrendanHousler
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