How to develop aerobic power and strength endurance on your indoor trainer

Developing Aerobic Power - Strength Endurance
Power is force multiplied by speed and is vitally important for bike racing. Power is your ability to ride the bike fast for a long period of time. This more than anything else, will decide how good your results are in bike races. This is because races are not won or lost when you are in the bunch ripping along at 40km/h. Races are won or lost at the decisive moments. To be in these moves you need to be strong and to be strong you need to be able to develop short burst of high power. These burst may be for two minutes to bridge a gap, a five minutes effort to solo it home in front of the bunch or those thirty second efforts to hold your position when an attack goes off to be the one making them. How do you do train for this? Read on...

VO2MAX efforts are the key. They help you to do this but more importantly they help build your ability ability to repeat and back these high intensity efforts up during the race. I call it repeatability. All of this is trained doing VO2MAX efforts and is the fundamental component in a well-structured training program.

There are three types of muscle fibres:

Endurance - Slow twitch - Type I
These are the endurance fibres that allow the endurance cyclists to ride all day. They are very good at burning energy aerobically (ATP) so they are red in colour. They don’t fatigue very quickly and can go all day. They sacrifice developing power for endurance so these fibres don’t make you ride fast, just long.

Intermediate - Fast twitch Type IIa
While a lot of people understand fast and slow twitch fibres these ones are the most interesting of the Fast twitch muscle fibre. Being a combination of Type I and Type II fibres they can burn energy both aerobically and anaerobically. These are the fibres that you can use to develop good speed for your recreational and CycloSportif endurance events. They are the most important fibre for road racing cyclists to ensure that they are able finish with the main group. But more on that later. These fibres develop better power than Type I and have good resistance to fatigue.

Sprint - Fast twitch Type IIb
Used primarily in sprinting. These are the fibres that produce huge amounts of power but only for a short period of time. They are white in colour because they primary burn energy anaerobically.

The percentage of the mix of these fibres denoted what sort of cyclist you are. Lots of Type I and you’ll be an endurance cyclist that’s good at longer events done at slower speeds while lots of Type II and you’ll be more suited to short explosive events like criteriums and track.

VO2MAX and E3 Indoor training sessions are designed to develop Type IIa which will increase your power on the bike so that you are able to maintain a higher speed for longer. It is also essential for time trialling or being in a working break in a road race.

We have a huge range of E3 and VO2MAX workouts to choose from that are available from this website.