Indoor cycling training plan: smash your summer riding goals with this eight-week indoor training plan

Indoor cycling has become a popular training method in recent months, what with COVID-19 and global lockdown protocols, as it enables cyclists to ride in a safe training environment. While riders use indoor training for a variety of reasons, should your indoor training program differ from an outdoor training plan?

Naturally, there are a number of differences between training indoors vs outdoors, but the aim, like with any training plan, is to provide a training stimulus, which is applied to the body causing a reduction in performance to a point (caused by the stress created on your body’s homeostasis from training) followed by a short period of rest/recovery allowing physiological adaptation to occur which results in improved performance.

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How does indoor training differ from outdoor training?

Training volume

While volume is important to making performance improvements, when riding indoors you can reduce the total amount of training time by 10-15 per cent while achieving the same stimulus. 

The main reasoning behind this is because you are constantly applying a force to the pedals indoors, where outdoors you would have the ability (at times necessity) to back off and coast for a portion of your rides.

Fighting heat and boredom

When riding indoors we are not moving through air, which leads to a rapid increase in core temperature and often large amounts of sweat covering the body. This combined with the mental challenge of sticking to your structured training sessions can quickly deteriorate motivation.

Luckily boredom can be overcome with the use of online training apps such as Zwift, The Sufferfest or Rouvy. You can combat heat by using a good fan and a training environment with good ventilation. This will allow you to increase your evaporative and convective heat loss, therefore picking the correct room to set up your training station becomes important.

You control the variables

When riding outdoors you're often at the mercy of the elements, terrain, traffic and other cyclists. Indoor cycling lets you control the variables. This greatly improves the specificity of your training.

The heightened level of control is valuable in improving the precision and quality of each session that you are able to produce.

What to remember when adopting an indoor cycling training plan?

Structure your training

When training indoors, it’s vitally important to make sure that you keep your easy rides very easy and your hard rides very hard. The goal should be to keep 80% of your sessions at a low intensity, with the remaining 20% as high-intensity interval training sessions. 

A common mistake to avoid is that each session does not have to be a hard session. When training indoors it’s easy to be drawn into riding hard too often. As we’ve discussed previously, there is a large benefit to including your slow/steady sessions and polarising your training so that you can go really hard when the time is right.

Don’t neglect your skills

Spending large amounts of time training indoors makes it easy to neglect your skills such as bike handling or bunch riding. Remember to include an extra session or two to focus on your skills when the majority of your riding is done indoors. This will allow you to ride efficiently in a real-world scenario, so you don't waste the watts you've spent time gaining. 

Eight-week indoor cycling training plan

More cycling training advice

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• How to get fit fast: Time-crunched cycling training tips
• Cycling strength training: Your ultimate guide
• Polarised training in cycling: How riding slower can make you race faster
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• Cycling indoors: How to use indoor training for your outdoor cycling goals