Using my commute as training

It's 4pm on Friday - leave early and take the long, hilly way home!

ma123 wrote:

Why not try 2 days a week upping your cadence by approx 10% - 15% this will help with the weight loss.

Hi there.

Can you explain how this works?

Cheers, Andy

ma123 wrote:

Why not try 2 days a week upping your cadence by approx 10% - 15% this will help with the weight loss.

I have to admit that's a new one on me. Weight loss via cadence training. Interesting. :?

now that's a big red herring

Infamous wrote:

If upping your cadence is more efficient (as generally suggested) then you would actually use less calories, assuming speed and distance was the same.

So grinding a big gear is more likely to make you lose weight in that case.

A higher cadence is not necessarily more efficient - it's supposedly less strain/strain on the legs but takes more cardiovascular fitness to maintain the higher cadence.

Jamey wrote:

Thanks Mettan.

I just want to put in a half-decent time (for a fat bloke) and I guess that this is about more than simply training for this one event, if I'm honest.

I want to have a solid training plan for the future to help weight loss and just make me an all-round better cyclist. And since my commutes account for 95% of my cycling at the moment, it seems logical to try to vary them in a structured way, either by changing distance or intensity on certain days.

But I don't have a great deal of knowledge about how best to create the structure/plan.

Jamey

Does this plan include sticking to a diet of some sort? I used to eat large, lardy sandwiches at lunchtime, but changed to soup. That, as well as the daily commute, also around 14 miles, helped with the weight loss, meaning I became fitter and faster a bit quicker.

I don't make decisions in advance about how fast I'll go. It depends on things like the traffic, the weather and how I'm feeling. And also whether my wife says I have to be home to put the kids to bed in which case I have no option but to leg it all the way!

Don't forget that if you're training specifically for the London-to-Brighton run, there's a nasty sustained climb at the end, which your normal commute may not give you much practice for (mine didn't )

I'm no training expert, but having been in a similar position I found half the battle was to keep the commute interesting. The best way is to mix the route up as much as you can, but that's not always possible.

The obvious thing to do is to get obsessed by the speedo. I got to the point of plotting tables and graphs in spreadsheets that also took into account the met office recorded weather conditions. The trouble with this is that it means going balls-out everytime which a) probably isn't good training (although nobody on this thread has said as much yet) and b) isn't something you can keep doing every day.

Once I was obsessed with the speedo I started devising other games.
Like pick-a-speed-and-stick-to-it: that means same speed and same gear all the way home - not that easy when your route undulates and your're turning in and out of the wind. It also means you've got to get away from the lights and up to, say, 14.3mph quick as you can in a high gear.

I don't know anything about interval training, but another good way of breaking things up is the blast-and-hang-on ride, where you go as fast as you can on ceratin set sections of the ride and just ride normally in between. Like I say, I don't know if it strengthens your cardiovasculars or whatever, but it certainly helps you ability to 'suffer' when you know another sprint bit is coming up ahead.