A 20 Minute Cycling Warm-Up

A cycling warm up is essential prior to any workout or competition. I have created a 20 minute, timed warm-up for you to use as part of your training plans.  You can ride this on an indoor trainer or on the road.

Stay tuned, as I plan on releasing a new workout each week. 

20 Minute Warm-up

4 minutes riding in Zone 1: cadence 90-100 rpm
4 minutes riding in Zone 2: cadence 90-100 rpm
4 minutes riding in Zone 3: cadence 90-100 rpm
1 minute riding easy (Zone 1): cadence 80-100 rpm
1 minute riding high cadence with little resistance (Very fast spinning greater than 120 rpm)
1 minute riding easy (Zone 1): cadence 80-100 rpm
1 minute riding high cadence with little resistance (Very fast spinning greater than 120 rpm)
4 minutes riding in Zone 1: cadence 80-100 rpm

For those of you well experienced with zones, the above warm-up should be easy enough to follow.

For those who need a bit more explanation, here we go!

Zone 1 is a level of effort where talking is easy. You should be able to keep up a zone 1 effort for 8 hours or more. It really is quite easy. A zone 1 workout should make you feel guilty that you did not seem to work hard enough. Your breathing should be quite easy and relaxed.  Guilt Zone = Zone 1 workout.
Zone 2 is a level of effort where you still can talk in full sentences but it is difficult because your breathing is more laboured. This type of effort could be maintained for a couple of hours.  Since full conversation is possible, we can this the Friend Zone = Zone 2 workout.
Zone 3 is a level of effort where breathing is much more laboured. Sentences are no longer spoken but only one or two word answers can be grunted out. For this zone we can call the Grunt Zone = Zone 3.

Now if your looking to turn this into a workout, you can ride 2, 3 or more blocks to create workouts of 20, 40, 60 minutes or more.

Thanks for reading.

Coach Michael