Indoor Cycling Workout Programs

Want to get serious with your indoor cycling workouts? Design a customized plan to get on track and see results. Include a mixture of workout types--tempo, interval and hill--to meet your fitness and cycling goals. You'll be on your way to improved cardiovascular fitness and strength by using a thoughtfully planned indoor cycling workout program.

  1. Your Workout Goals

    • Your personal indoor cycling workout program will depend on your goals. If you're just interested in developing overall fitness, indoor cycling is a great way to do that, and you don't have to worry about mimicking the actual challenges of cycling on the road. Cyclists who eventually want to take the workout outside, though, and hit the road with new skills will want to design a program to meet their riding goals. Always include a warm-up and cooldown in your daily workout.

    Designing Your Program

    • Design your workout program to include a variety of workout types to diversify your strengths and increase your fitness. The workouts described below--tempo, interval and hill--are best used in rotation to maximize your fitness. If you just want to exercise, vary these workouts more or less as you please, as long as you're getting variety. Cyclists planning to do endurance rides, such as centuries, should gradually increase their tempo rides to nearly or equal the length of the planned ride. Hill workouts and interval workouts should be included to build leg strength for hilly rides and sprinting ability and speed.

    Tempo Workouts

    • Tempo workouts are rides at an even pace you can maintain while in a comfortably aerobic heart rate zone; you should be able to talk, though the pace should be somewhat challenging. You can maintain this even pace for a time that suits your current fitness level. For beginners, this may be 30 minutes or less; advanced riders may do an indoor cycling tempo workout of 90 minutes or longer, depending on their endurance and goals.

    Interval and Hill Workouts

    • Interval and hill workouts in indoor cycling are similar in that the intensity is increased periodically for a short time, then reduced to a manageable difficulty for recovery; this cycle is repeated throughout the workout. The difference? Interval workouts typically increase the cycling speed, while hill workouts simulate hills by increasing resistance. Interval workouts build your ability to sprint and accelerate rapidly, as you might when passing a competitor in a race or pushing hard to the finish line. Hill workouts increase your leg strength to make actual hills easier in the long run.