Unleashing Your Cycling Potential: How to Improve Endurance

What is Endurance?

In the context of cycling, endurance can mean different things to different people. For some, managing to ride for an hour brings satisfaction, while for others, endurance might be an audax, which could be 200km or longer. Scientifically speaking, endurance in cycling is a physiological state in which the body works aerobically by using oxygen.

In the six-zone Coggan training zones model, the first five zones fall under endurance, and we only hit our Anaerobic Capacity when sprinting flat-out in the highest zone. Endurance cycling is easier to define as an ability, and it is a component of fitness that determines how long you can ride a bike.

Who Needs Endurance?

Anyone who wants to ride further than before needs cycling endurance. For example, if the longest ride you have done is two hours, and you have entered a Gran Fondo that will take you seven hours, working on cycling endurance helps bridge the gap in duration. Endurance is not all that important for events shorter than an hour, such as time trials or criterium races.

How to Improve Your Endurance as a Cyclist

Improving your cycling endurance requires a high-volume training regime, but by training and fuelling more effectively, it is possible to increase your stamina on the bike without riding hundreds of kilometres a week. In this section, we will provide you with tips for improving your endurance as a cyclist.

Increase Your Training Volume

The key to better endurance is to increase your training volume, which is the number of hours you ride a week. There is no secret sauce or magic interval set, but the most crucial metric you should look at is time in the saddle each week. If you can increase that slowly without overdoing it, you will improve your endurance.

Lower the Intensity

To get maximal benefit from your long, endurance rides, you need to spend as much time in zone 2 as possible. Zone 2 riding promotes physiological adaptations that underpin cycling endurance, increasing the number of mitochondria in your slow-twitch muscle fibres. Mitochondria use oxygen to create ATP, the body's rocket fuel, so for endurance athletes, the more mitochondria, the merrier.

Time in zone 2 also leads to increased capillarization (the density of capillaries) in slow-twitch muscle fibres. This brings more oxygen-rich blood to the muscles, a critical factor in improving VO2 Max, and improves your ability to remove metabolic byproducts from the muscles, some of which cause fatigue. Additional benefits of zone 2 include increased stroke volume and higher FatMax.

Tailor Your Training

The threshold training method, which prescribes lots of sweet spot riding, works well if your time is limited. You won't get much adaptation from five to eight hours of riding in zone 1 and 2, but you will see more by spending some but not all the time at 88 to 93 per cent of FTP.

This approach can cause excessive fatigue in some athletes, and coaches might suggest they do less zone 3 training and try fasted training in zone 1 or 2, which some coaches believe maximises training stimulus.

Riders with a medium amount of time, such as 8 to 12 hours a week, can adopt a similar approach but add one longer ride per week. This creates a pyramidal training intensity distribution, where the blocks of the pyramid represent time spent training at different intensities. The wide base is low intensity, the narrower middle is a threshold, and the peak is higher intensity.

When athletes have 12 to 15 hours or more, a polarised approach is best, according to some experts. Polarised training (also known as 80/20) cuts out almost all zone 3 and 4 riding. Approximately 80 per cent of sessions are dedicated to zone 1 and 2 ridings, with 20 per cent at VO2 Max-level intensity and above. Studies have linked polarised training to more significant increases in VO2 max.

Eat More Carbs

Consuming more carbohydrates on long training rides and during events improves endurance and recovery. Regarding athletic performance, carbohydrate and energy availability are the keys. Considering this advice, we need to take on energy, ideally in readily digestible forms such as glucose, on rides longer than one-and-a-half to two hours.

Amateurs rarely require the vast amounts of carbohydrates pros ingest during hard Grand Tour stages. But we should aim for 60 to 90g per hour on four- or five-hour rides and potentially up to 120g if going longer, particularly on consecutive days.

Prepare Your Gut

The gut needs to be trained in the final stages of your cycling training plan - something many un-coached athletes fail to do. It can take 12 weeks for the gut to adapt to digesting food for hours on end. In the final three months of training, trialling your event-day nutrition on long rides is recommended, even if the intensity is lower than your target pace.

What you enjoy eating, can digest, and fuel you well on the bike is highly personal, and athletes have different preferences. Some athletes will do 12 hours or longer on liquids, like gels or liquids like Ensure. It's all you need: a great density of carbohydrates and a mix of protein and fat.

Mind Your Mind

When you overlook the mental side of training, you're starting down a slippery slope where you risk burnout. Staying thankful for what you do have can stop a poor training session from becoming the end of the world. Certain athletes are as psychologically tough as they come, but when it comes to everyday riders improving their mental fitness is critical.

Looking for ways to keep topping up motivation through goal setting and gratitude practice is recommended. Staying thankful for what you do have can stop a poor training session from becoming the end of the world. It's also great for your physical performance, not to give yourself a hard time and be too 'all or nothing'.

Conclusion

Improving cycling endurance is critical to achieving your goals, whether you aim to compete in a gravel race, mountain bike racing, or ride 100 miles or further. Increasing your training volume, lowering the intensity, tailoring your training, eating more carbs, preparing your gut, and minding your mind can improve your cycling endurance and enhance your cycling performance. Remember that what works for one person might not work for another, so it's essential to experiment and find the best approach for you.