Base Training For Cycling

Tis the season: “We’re riding base miles today”.

There might be a good chance that you aren’t riding base miles if you’re getting sucked into too many group rides, and missing a lot of aerobic gains that will be stacked year after year with proper base training for cycling.

Don’t worry, I won’t go on a rant about how group rides aren’t great for improving endurance performance; you’re all on top of that by now!

Cycling Base Miles / Winter Training

Base Miles is the term often used to describe cycling endurance training rides on the weekend. These rides are where you get tired from the duration, rather than from the intensity, of a long ride. I’d encourage you to also think of Base Season, where your biggest ally is overall volume.

The more volume that you can do during your cycling winter training, the better. This might not be possible for everyone, especially those living in cold climates, and we’ll get to that down below.

Ideally these rides are longer than most of your normal training rides. If you’re riding 1.5 hours during a weekly session, your weekend rides are 3 hours, or even 4 hours if you can get out for that long.

If you’re a Cat 1 or 2, you will benefit massively from 4-5 hour rides.

On an endurance base miles ride, You are riding in Zone 2 (55-75% FTP) with consistent pedaling, so as to avoid coasting in Zone 1. I would recommend that you target 60-70% of FTP, with 75-80% being the upper limit. Mostly aim to stay away from tempo.

Why Ride Endurance?

We have a video on why we should ride at endurance pace as cyclists. The effect of this pedaling makes important changes at the cellular level that will not only increase your ability to ride longer at intensities below threshold, but it will also increase your abilitiy to ride hard at intensities like VO2Max! This is extremely important to cycling performance.

There is no substitute for long rides, and getting 2-3 of these in during a month’s time will catapult you to the next level of cycling. If you can do them every weekend, even better!

If you can’t get the longer ride in, you need to bank on your consistent 2.5-3 hour weekend rides.

(Endurance Sports: There are no shortcuts!)

The biggest key to Base Season is volume. If you can train with volume, at endurance pace, that will set you up for big success. How much is too much? It’s okay to be tired after long endurance rides, but you should recover quickly and it should not hamper your normal training routine. If you are always tired, or have lost libido, those could be signs that you are training too much.

This endurance cycling workout doesn’t sound hard and it isn’t sexy, but wait until you get 60% through the ride and you might start feeling the fatigue. That’s a good thing.

Base training for cycling is a different tired feeling than when you go out and crush a group ride. That’s more of a neuromuscular tiredness or stress, whereas this base miles stress is simply from the duration of the ride.

I’ve been training for Tour of Southland in New Zealand, and when I go on 5-6 hour endurance rides, it takes everything possible in the last 30 minutes to complete these when I’m not 100% fresh. I’m changing cadence, I’m sitting, then standing, all while riding between 60-75% FTP. There will definitely be a large chunk of low tempo riding in this since your power meter will drift above and below that exact percentage, but with practice you can get close.

Below is an image of my 7% base miles ride. If you need help understanding the images, give a quick listen to this audio file that describes them.

Below is a group ride with a SHIZALOAD of coasting, and then the second half alone, building my endurance capabilities.

The group ride was fun, but really poor for training. Hey, there are trade offs in life. I don’t want you to give up the group ride for the social aspect, but I just want you to be cognizant of the effect it might have on your training.

If you want to ride true base miles in a group setting, leave space between each other and draft less. Try keeping the group to 4-6 riders. Even better, have stronger riders on the front more often and for longer pulls, and the newer rides can still be in zone 2 in their draft.

Base Miles For Cyclings

Winter is the time to build a foundation and play the long game. There are no, or very few, races and weekend rides out of town, which leaves tons of time to WORK ON YOU. Consider a building: it can only be build so high dependent on its base, amongst other things, but let’s keep the analogy simple.

If you only have a couple base rides in, when you go to stack rides with higher intensity on top (sweet spot, threshold, VO2Max), your system can only handle so much stimulus before it begins to topple.

The bigger the base, the more you can handle when the race season nears and you begin your Build Phase. You should watch this video to understand why you should ride base miles.

While you are building this massive skyscraper on the weekend, with the dark hours of the work week looming, this is a great time to utilize the gym and strength train for cycling. You can accomplish SO MUCH in under 1 hour.

I raced the Pro/1 Tour of the Battenkill on a steady diet of 3 hours during the week and 6-10 hours on the weekend. The rides were more in the 6 hour range because it was a horrible winter.

Granted that I had a massive base from years prior, I went in with a small match book and small base and still got 3rd place! The long winter months of the northeast don’t have to kill your Spring Slaycation.

At the end of the article, we’ll look at what you can do if you are training inside all winter and don’t have access to big volume cycling training.

Related Post: Indoor Cycling Training Guide

Base Training Will Improve Your Top End

Consider two scenarios. You do the same exact intervals during the year, however, in one scenario you ride 15 hours a week and in the other you only ride 5 hours per week. Which scenario do you think you will get faster?

While cycling base miles are great for building endurance, they also build your top end fitness. One of the primary things that sets apart a pro riders training from an amateurs is volume, not intensity.

Base miles for cyclists allow you to build a big aerobic engine without being too taxing. As a result, they can be performed day-after-day and you can “stack” your gains consistently, day after day, year after year.

A lot of athletes take base miles at face value and can’t understand that base miles will improve their ability to go fast. Understand that there is a lot more going on physiologically behind the scenes.

Biologic Durability

This is hard to quantify because we’re looking at the cellular level of the athlete. We talked about this earlier in 2019 in this blog.

There’s no metric in WKO5 or Xert or Golden Cheetah or whatever software you’re using to tell when you’re recruiting fast twitch fibers to ride at endurance.

These building blocks allow you to add the sprinkles of high intensity on top, where your body takes this stress and absorbs it, as opposed to just getting a beat down. Listen to the analogy in the video of what it would be like if your untrained non-cyclist friend magically could perform just ONE 1-minute effort like you can…they’d be crushed. That’s the extrapolated version of what happens when there’s no base.

These long rides create a durability in an athlete that ALLOWS you to THEN GO AFTER THE REPEATABILITY.

Building repeatability isn’t about just doing more intervals in the summer. It’s about building the base in the winter.

Watch the video below and let us know what questions you may have so that you come out CRUSHING in the spring…not only with speed, but with the ability to grow as a cyclist in terms of durability and repeatability.

When should you be working on Base Miles / Endurance Riding? 12 months out of the year.

Indoor Cycling Base Training Plan

What if you live in an area where volume isn’t possible due to terrible weather and dark days, and you spend a lot of your time riding the indoor trainer? Well, if you like riding zone 2 endurance rides indoors, bless you! You can do more volume inside and then do your high intensity session or cadence work on the weekends.

For me, that just wasn’t working! I hated riding endurance on the trainer, and could only do it on the weekends if I really forced myself to, knowing that other athletes in warmer climates were getting their long base miles in.

I grew up riding in Rochester, NY, a frozen tundra, so I know this problem well. I completed a lot of 1 - 1.5 hour weekly rides and then I would force myself to do 3-4h on the rollers on weekends.

Volume can be amazing, unless it would burn us out and make us hate the trainer. So, I wanted to create something for those athletes who can’t get a coach, but need some guidance. And voila, here is an indoor cycling winter base training plan that I’ve put together with some of my favorite indoor sessions. Many people are looking for a 12 week base training cycling plan, but I’ve put together a 20 week cycling plan, for a really inexpensive cost. Check it out!

A quick shill, for those looking for a coach, hit me up! I’m looking to take on a few new athletes like yourself! Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE

Email Brendan for Coaching

Okay, back to the blog. Now, let’s talk about Base Training Focus Points.

Your FOCUS is aerobic volume and Strength work (get in the gym)! The “offseason” is where so many of the gains are made! It is the ON Season!!!

Cycling Off Season Break

Before doing that though, I’d be mistaken if I didn’t highlight the importance of a season break: MAKING GAINS also includes taking a mental and physical break. Take a week off, then some unstructured riding (you can still ride a bunch, but get away from the numbers. You won’t lose fitness and the gains that you’ve made. we do need to take a step back in order to take two steps forward. We won’t keep all of the fitness that we’ve gained this season going into the offseason and that is normal! You will come out stronger if you take the appropriate break!

Base Training Focus

I know we are talking about INDOOR training, but get OUTSIDE as much as possible. Even if you have a specific indoor workout planned, no workout is magic, GO RIDE OUTSIDE when time and weather allows. Why? It will keep you fresh and focused, I PROMISE.

Long rides are gold for converting those fast twitch fibers to more aerobic ones. These will keep you hyped for your overall training so that you can hit all of the specific trainer sessions that are to come!
Try other things like skiing and hiking or snow shoeing. Don’t get overwhelmed by “cycling volume” TSS and hours and all that; STAY CONSISTENT with activity.

Our heart doesn’t know the difference in what aerobic activity that we are doing! While this might not be “optimized” and perfect, sometimes optimized IS just staying active and realistic with what we can do!
Don’t slack off with random 3 days off and eating like trash because you aren’t out riding. Stick to your base training cycling plan! Eat healthy, focus on your body, and lose any extra pounds early. You don’t want to wait until January 1 to lose weight, as you might be entering Build Phases then! That is the time to increase watts and not worrying about dropping pounds.

These were huge drinking times for me which was a massive mistake. Learn from my mistake!
Cadence work can be magic, and High Torque/Low cadence is extremely valuable. Check out Landry Bobo’s blog for more details on that!

Indoor Base Training Cycling Plan

The actual training:
For the first block, I’d start up your Low Cadence (High Torque) work and some relatively “simple” tempo blocks, which we will build from in coming months.

For indoor endurance rides, keep things undulating so they are more palatable. Play with high cadence and don’t hate the indoor trainer; keep it intersting without just smashing too hard. We do want the focus to be aerobic, but not mind-numbing and boring.

I have created some aerobic ramps on the weekends that range in 60-100% FTP, with more time near the lower end there, but again, just to keep things interesting.

As we work into the second and third block of winter base training, I’ll incorporate some burst exercises and over unders. These are very similar, but I consider bursts to be more quick blips that don’t have a major focus on creating lactate, which is what the Overs are used for in Over Unders, or Lactate Clearance intervals.

Continue the low cadence work during the week and over unders on a long weekend ride.

You’ll want to elongate some of the interval blocks, whether you’re doing tempo or lactate clearance work.

In the third block I still like stair climbs, even though they are a bit old school, elevating the wattages from low tempo, through low threshold or Sweet Spot, and finishing at low VO2Max.

On the weekend, I always made a 3 hour ride goal…you’ll feel amazing if you do it, and then you can still get 10-14h in during the entire training week! Don’t cheat yourself and only ride 2h. Stay motivated and get a longer ride in. No, it’s not a long one like 4-5 hours, but 3 hours is so much better than 2 hours!!

Fourth block: I need to do some intensity, and recommend supra threshold 4m efforts, over unders with back to back workouts, and possibly some harder VO2Max sessions if you’re racing in the coming months. If I am indoors, I do shorter VO2Max sessions and hard start intervals, as those are both more palatable than 5x5’s or longer 8-9 minute VO2max intervals. I might even give some 30/15s before the first races even though we’re on the trainer and those stink to do inside!

If you need help selecting your VO2Max workouts, check out this whole VO2max Training Guide that we created and have in the TrainingPeaks store.

It is REALLY critical in the last weeks that you hit anaerobic power and anaerobic stamina workouts. If you need more training, you do want to hit this earlier in the offseason. Check out this video on why we need to hit harder than 130% FTP training.

Last thing, get in your more specific race training! Double down on strengths, address glaring weaknesses, and anything that is event specific!

You can do this!

Check out this video for all my thoughts on Indoor Base Training!

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