This plan aims to encourage people who do little or no cycling to ride regularly. The aim is to get you up to four hours of cycling a week, and give you a basic level of fitness to build on.
Starting with three short rides a week, it gradually builds up the duration and adds in a fourth day during the second half of the plan. It’s based on a seven-week training block followed by an easier week to ensure adequate recovery and avoid over-training. After this (active) rest week, you should then feel ready for another seven-week block!
The final week includes a test to enable you to judge your progress. This could simply be riding your favourite route to see how quickly you can do it, or something more specific, aimed at identifying measurable fitness values to work out training zones.
How hard do you ride?
Since the aim of this first plan is simply to get you riding regularly, just go out and ride at a steady pace. You shouldn’t be totally exhausted at the end. As a guide, if you’re riding with someone else you should be able to talk to them, but find you need to pause frequently for breath.
How to judge your effort
In later plans there will be more variety of pacing across the week and throughout a session, so you need to know how to judge your effort. Sometimes you will need to ride easily, often you will ride steadily; there will be times when you will work hard, and others when you will go very hard or flat-out.
Descriptions like that are based on personal perceptions. Even with all the scientific methods available today, some experienced cyclists still prefer to train on feel, and are very adept at judging their effort surprisingly accurately.
Going back to the analogy of holding a conversation, riding easily should allow you to chat freely. If you’re working hard, you should still be able to speak, but you’ll need to take several gulps of air during sentences, and once it gets to the very hard stage you’ll be down to noises rather than words! In these plans, the levels from easy to flat-out are divided into five zones: blue, green, yellow, amber and red (see key, below).
Key to the rides in Nicole’s three regimes
Blue rides
These rides should be done at a pace where you’re hardly aware of the exercise factor. They are for social rides, recovery rides, or warming-up/warming-down from other sessions.
Heart rate: less than 60% of your maximum and 69-83% of your functional threshold
Green rides
Much of your training will be done at a pace where you start noticing the effort and you need to take breaths between sentences. It is aimed at improving your endurance base.
Heart rate: 60-75% of your maximum and 84-94% of your functional threshold.
Yellow rides
These rides require you to put in much harder work for shorter periods of time, normally during your medium-length rides. Conversation will be severely restricted.
Heart rate: 75-89% of maximum and 95-105% of your functional threshold.
Amber rides
These are short, high-intensity efforts measured in minutes. They will form part of your longer weekend rides and you’ll find it hard to say more than the odd breathless word.
Heart rate: 89-94% of maximum and greater than 106% of your functional threshold.
Red rides
Talking is out of the question for these very hard, short, intense interval bursts. They will usually last only a matter of seconds, or, at most, just a few minutes within longer sessions.
Heart rate: +90% of maximum and greater than 106% of your functional threshold heart rate.
• Extracted from Cycle For Life, by Nicole Cooke (Kyle Cathie)
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