Getting Faster on Your Bike

Get Faster on Your Bike

Whether you are looking for some late-season bike fitness or planning how to get faster in 2012, below are 10 tips to riding faster:

1. Do a bike fitness assessment to determine where you are. If you don’t have that baseline assessment, it is difficult to know what you are capable of.
2. Use a Heart Rate Monitor or Power Meter and find what your zones are so you can train in those zones. Also, don’t forget that zones change over time. The most accurate way to determine your zones is to be tested every 6-8 weeks as your fitness changes.
3. Get a bike fit and become more efficient at riding on your racing bike. Focus on your pedal stroke. If you are not transferring power through the entire stroke, you will not get to maximum speed.
4. Do interval training. Your body needs to know what 100% feels like, and get used to it. Intervals are nowhere near fun, so make sure you rest well and recover.
5. Take recovery seriously if you are training at a high intensity. Most of the benefit from a hard workout comes from the recovery.
6. Mix up your weekly training with speed and recovery workouts. Spending too much time riding moderately hard while preparing for an event is only going to allow you to ride moderately hard in the event. Train fast and recover.
7. Go on group rides with people who are slightly faster than you. It's either keep up, or get dropped. Pretty soon you will be keeping up.
8. While drafting is illegal in many triathlons, practice riding in pace lines. It gets you conditioned to riding fast, since by default the pace line progressively increases the pace.
9. Depending on where you are in your season, follow a popular progressive training approach.
• Start with efficiency (learning proper technique), since establishing that provides the foundation for everything else.
• Build technical endurance.
• From there, add in really low cadence strength work. You almost can't go too low. Whether on hills or flats, do increasingly longer intervals where you get your turnover down to the 50 to 60 rpm range.
• Once you force your legs to handle that higher load, then you can work on power and turning that higher wattage/effort over faster/at higher RPMs.
10. If you have been in the sport for a while and want to take a non-traditional approach, build speed before endurance. Use your summer/fall base fitness and focus on lactate threshold workouts in the winter so you are fit and faster come spring. Then start your longer aerobic base riding in the spring.