Indoor training is brilliant. No traffic, no punctures, and no weather excuses. But for all it’s perks, it is also the easiest place to let small errors stack up until your legs feel cooked and your motivation drifts.
To keep you on the straight and narrow, here are the common slip-ups I see in pain caves everywhere, many of which all of us here in the Cyclingnews team have fallen foul of, plus the simple fixes that keep your numbers rising and your bike from dissolving in a puddle of sweat.
Mistake 1: Doing high-intensity intervals on every ride
Discover the dark magic of 30 x 30s, and it can be very tempting to chase that productive suffering every time you hop on the indoor trainer. Stack high-intensity rides day after day, though, and your fatigue will rocket before you realise, leading to a big old fitness plateau.
For most people, keeping the fireworks to two quality sessions each week (maybe three if you can handle a higher load) is plenty. Fill the rest with genuine Zone 2, or steady endurance, where you step off feeling better than when you started.
It’s worth remembering too that rest weeks are where you make the gains. Every three or four weeks, bring in a lighter week so the adaptations have room to land.
Mistake 2: Overheating and dehydrating
When riding indoors, you lose the real-world wind chill that keeps core temperature under control, and once your body starts to cook, your heart rate drifts up, power drifts down, and everything feels harder than it should.
Yes, this is painfully obvious, but it is so easy to end up feeling fatigued and groggy through not staying cool.
A good quality fan is absolutely essential unless you are training specifically for heat tolerance (something that should be done under close expert supervision).
If you like smart gadgets, the Wahoo Headwind plays nicely with all of the best smart trainers. Crack a window, wear a light wicking base layer, and throw a towel over the bars and top tube so the worst of the salt never reaches the bike.
Heat and fluid loss travel together, so treat fuelling and drinking as part of the same fix. Indoors, you sweat more and burn through glycogen faster, so for rides of 60 to 90 minutes, aim for 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrate each hour. For longer or harder work, move to 60 to 90 grams per hour. Most riders land around 500 to 750 millilitres…
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