How to improve in cycling when you have little time

When winter arrives, the lack of light and work and family obligations come together to make it almost impossible for many to accumulate time on the bike, let alone maintain a training plan or achieve a minimally decent form. This is what you can do to perform on the bike when time is scarce.

Make the most of the available time for cycling

We all like to ride with a group or join a cycling event and have the fitness to be at the front on all climbs and enjoy that pleasant feeling when you decide the pace and not the route. However, the increasingly busy pace of modern life sometimes makes it very difficult for us to dedicate a minimum amount of time each week to cycling, which means that the vast majority of cyclists we see on the roads and trails are what the English call "weekend warriors," that is, cyclists who only ride on weekends.

Obviously, riding a bike only on weekends means that our physical fitness is very limited, and therefore, the type of routes we can tackle is also limited.

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However, despite cycling being a sport where training volume is very important, advancements in training systems and available tools allow us to achieve a very decent form, even good if your genetics allow you to better assimilate the training, with much less time than traditionally considered necessary for good performance.

As we usually recommend, the best alternative to make the most of your time is to have a personal trainer. Putting ourselves in the hands of a qualified professional allows us to have someone who will constantly adapt the training based on our availability and know our capabilities perfectly to schedule the sessions and intensities ideal for improving performance without causing stress in other aspects of our lives.

Whether we hire the services of a trainer or plan our own training, the first step is to be realistic about the available time. Many people set New Year's resolutions to train 15 or 20 hours a week, but who nowadays can dedicate that much time to training? Except for police officers and firefighters, the most common professions in master races, facing that training volume is almost impossible, at least sustainably.

It is better to be realistic and consider that we only have 1 hour 3 days a week and at least one long ride on the weekend, rather than setting goals that we cannot achieve.

With little time, the recipe for applying different training loads is very simple: exchange volume for intensity. It is not ideal if our goal is to tackle long-distance routes, but there have been multiple studies showing how high-intensity training also produces adaptations in cells that improve endurance.

With this in mind, we must understand that the indoor trainer will become our great ally. To optimize time, it is advisable to have our "pain room" always ready so that we can come home, dress as cyclists, turn on the computer, and start working. When using the indoor trainer, it is preferable to use the training plans (unless we have a personal trainer to guide us) included in virtual applications, which will push us harder than just riding on virtual roads to see what happens.

When time is limited, having a plan, whether generic or personalized, is vital. Any plan, whether good or bad, is always better than having no plan because it gives each training session a purpose and objective, rather than just pedaling.

In addition to using the indoor trainer, another good alternative to add training hours to our weekly schedule is to use our bike as a means of transportation to work daily. Obviously, this is not ideal for specific training, as we cannot do intervals while commuting in the city, or depending on shower availability or the type of work we do, we cannot arrive exhausted and sweaty.

However, especially if we work relatively far, the pedaling time we add, although not considered formal training, allows us to accumulate a good amount of volume to complement the specific work we do on the indoor trainer.

Lack of motivation to train is another limiting factor during winter. It's cold outside, it gets dark early, the wind is harsh, and especially when the weekend comes after a busy workweek, staying in bed seems more tempting than going out to ride.

To avoid this, nothing beats making plans to ride with someone. If we have already committed to going out, it is much harder to back out, although we all know someone who always calls at the last minute to say something came up and they can't make it. To prevent last-minute laziness, it's best to prepare everything the night before: the bike, the clothes, the water bottles, the energy bars, the route we will take, etc.

In any case, if the weather is really bad, the indoor trainer will once again be our friend. Virtual cycling applications have made indoor training less unbearable. If we can't go outside on a weekend day, why not join a virtual race, ride with one of the many groups organized in these applications, or take on one of the challenges they offer? Do you already have your 100 km or 100-mile Zwift jersey?

Thinking beyond cycling can also be a good option when we have little time to add stress-free training. Joining a gym or attending group classes like Spinning or Pilates is a good complementary workout, and ultimately, paying for an activity makes us more likely to attend.

In the end, as coaches often say, it is better to add a lot of a little than a little of a lot, meaning that having consistency to create a habit that we can maintain over time is better than just riding once a week and doing a 5-hour ride that leaves us completely exhausted until the next weekend.