What is the What is the best way to reach your best cycling condition? Your best bet is to combine those beautiful outdoor miles with the quality and efficiency of indoor training. Here’s how to try to reach your maximum fitness levels with minimal effort.
For some, nothing beats the feeling of getting on the bike. The fresh air in your hair and the feeling of accomplishment when you’re cracking an interval on the local climbs.
But for those of us with busy lives and jobs, there’s a much more efficient way to train. Indoor riding means no traffic lights, no cars, no rain and is easily the highest quality workout you can get.
However, very few of us want to ride exclusively indoors or outdoors. There must be a sweet spot. Let’s talk to a trainer to find out how you can combine the two to maximize your fitness.
And as a bonus, we’ll tell you about some free Garmin software you can use to make the process incredibly easy.
How to try to reach your maximum physical form
Before we get into that little nugget of information though, let’s get an expert opinion on how you can achieve fitness levels you’ve never seen before. We spoke with Garmin ambassador Matt Rowe, a highly-skilled cycling coach and brother of current Ineos pro Luke Rowe, to find out how to maximize his fitness.
Matt has designed a sample training week that you can use to get you through the winter months. It’s designed for a physically fit rider looking to ride a longer sport in the spring.
The plan accommodates time constraints and sessions can be made more challenging with progressions as you get fitter. Each session can also be done indoors with a trainer like the Tacx Neo 2T, or outdoors with a central unit like the Garmin Edge 1040 to guide you through the session.
Monday – Rest day
If you have any kit to wash, or work to do on your motorcycle. Today could be a good day to make them.
Tuesday – 20/40s
Target – This is great for helping you get used to reacting to the increases in pace you would encounter on group rides or on undulating roads.
Session
- 10 minute warm up
Z1 in Z2 - 15 repetitions of
20 seconds over threshold
40 seconds Z2 - 5 minutes Z2
- 15 repetitions of
20 seconds above threshold
40 seconds Z2 - 5 minutes from Z2 to Z1
Progression: Extend the number of repetitions or eliminate the 5 minute recovery between sets.
Wednesday – Z2
Objective: Cycling is an endurance sport and even with limited time availability, zone 2 work is useful. This session is best done indoors to maximize the quality of the session. Turn on the TV or music to keep you entertained and remember that tomorrow’s session is tough, so keep the intensity low.
Session
- 1 hour of Z2
Progression: Build this up to 1.5 hours if you have the time.
Thursday – Sweet spot
Purpose: In a small number of hours, the sweet spot offers the best value for money in terms of training effect. Mix up interval times to suit, starting with several shorter periods and increasing intervals as you get fitter. These are great when mounted indoors or outdoors.
Session
- 10 minute warm up
Z1 in Z2 - 10 minutes higher Z3
- 5 minutes Z3
- 10 minutes higher Z3
- 5 minutes Z2
- 10 minutes higher Z3
- 10 minutes Z2 to Z1
Progression: Add these intervals to a longer outdoor walk.
Friday – Rest day
Nothing on the cards today. Head over for a drink after work. It is the off-season, after all!
Saturday and Sunday – Free Trips
Depending on your goal, you can choose how much you do on the weekend, but ideally you’ll enter the number of hours of your target event. If it’s a sports car that will take you about 6 hours, then a total of 6 hours on the weekend will suffice.
Saturday could be a 2 hour drive while Sunday could be out for about 4 hours on the club race.
As you get closer to your event, it’s a good idea to go through these hours in one go, to prepare for the event. That could mean just a quick spin on Saturday, before a big 6 hour drive on Sunday.
make it easier for you
Hopefully Matt’s training plan doesn’t sound too daunting, but now we’re about to make it even easier with some free must-use software from Garmin.
Garmin Connect is something you may already be using. It’s what you download when you want to connect your phone to your Edge head unit. But it’s often underutilized and has a variety of brilliant free stuff you can use to get faster. It’s like having Matt Rowe’s guide with you every day, for free!
Garmin Connect is a hub for all your data whether you’re traveling indoors or outdoors and even your weight, energy PB and sleep. You enter your activities and the Edge 1040 provides you with a suggested daily workout. This is where it helps you to be fitter than ever. You don’t have to have a set goal and you only need to build a week or more of data for the suggested daily workouts to start showing up. In fact, if you already have activities on Garmin Connect, you’ll be ready to go right out of the box.
It works by giving you a load focus, which is the impact your activity has on your body. This means the Edge 1040 can tell you what you need to focus on and then what training to do to get there. It even takes into account runs if you like to mix things up and even your sleep quality if you’re using one of Garmin’s compatible wearables.
This makes it slightly better than TSS alone as the sole metric for determining training, since you could be absolutely wrecked by a terrible night’s sleep. The Edge 1040 will see this and know not to push yourself too hard that day, prompting a recovery ride or even a full rest day.
You can select to do this trip on the road, but if you don’t like the weather, you can do the training in the Tacx Neo 2T. It’ll even activate ERG mode to keep you perfectly in the zone. All you have to do is pedal.
tacx neo 2t
The Neo 2T is a brilliant option for indoor training. With a power accuracy of +/- 1%, a maximum resistance of 2200 watts and the ability to replicate up to 25% incline, you can take on some really tough sessions with this device.
One of the downsides of indoor riding can be that you feel immobile, but the Neo 2 can be mounted on these motion plates to enhance it and provide true road feel with multi-directional movement.
And the 2T is also a super quiet trainer. In fact, it’s one of the quietest on the market because Tacx has designed it with no internal transmission and therefore no fast-moving parts. Which is good, because it doesn’t drown out your songs.
garmin edge 1040
Speaking of music, Garmin has just released a new control screen on the Edge 1040. Just swipe down and you can change the volume, pause, and skip tracks. However, Garmin suggests that this should only be used when riding indoors.
From here you can also monitor a workout, which is very useful when things get sweaty because the Edge 1040 was designed to work in the sweat zone.
Therefore, maximizing your fitness has become much easier. Using equipment like the Tacx Neo 2T and the Garmin Edge 1040 will allow you to train really efficiently both indoors and outdoors.
Then Garmin Connect ties it all together and lets you follow a training plan in minutes or just lets you get fit with suggested daily workouts without having to think about it.
The icing on the cake is that once you have your Edge 1040, the training plans and all the smart stuff is free and no subscription required.
