If your New Year's resolutions involve health and fitness goals, indoor cycling training can help you pedal them down. In particular, finding ways to boost how many calories you're able to burn each indoor cycling session can optimize your training.
Measuring Out the Burn
When many people start indoor cycling training, they assume that pedaling harder for longer is always best. However, this approach isn't sustainable and can lead to mental, physical, and emotional fatigue. Instead, consider these two approaches.
Aerobic Growth. Indoor cycling training should always follow a plan. For aerobic development, you need to be mindful of how you stack your training sessions. A winter fitness coach can help you pay attention to a few key metrics during your sessions. For instance, adjusting your training to hit heart rate zones can promote aerobic development, which can help you burn more calories during your training. This calorie boosting involves focusing on heart rate zones that ensure that you pedal hard enough to burn fat, but not so hard that you're depleting your glycogen stores in the process. For most indoor cyclists, these heart rate zones range from 120 to 160. Following workouts that help you stay in these zones for longer can help you burn more calories more sustainably.
Anaerobic Sprints. Humans are fueled by oxygen. When sprinting, people exert more force and energy than they can sustain by breathing. This is why you can only sprint for a short time. Although sprinting efforts burn through calories, they need to be carefully sprinkled into your indoor cycling training. Focusing on heart rate zones can be helpful, but you can also pay attention to wattage output. This metric helps measure force, which is a more reliable measure of sprinting speed. Adding short bursts of sprinting into your indoor cycling training should be done strategically. For instance, you might have a short sprinting segment sandwich between longer, easier, segments. You can also add short sprints to the end of your workouts to help you "drain your tank" after you've already successfully logged some mileage at ideal heart rate zones.
Cycling Your Indoor Cycling Training
Some indoor cycling routines fail because riders attempt to do too much too soon. Your better bet is to follow the super-compensation adaptation cycle.
- Phase I: building volume and intensity, make sure your ratio of volume to intensity feels difficult but not overwhelming.
- Phase II: maintain intensity and volume for 18 to 21 days.
- Phase III: dramatically reduce your volume and intensity for 6 to 8 days.
Repeat this cycle, adding more volume and intensity to Phase I as you repeat the cycle. You can contact companies like Plan 7 Coaching to learn more about indoor cycling training programs.
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