Fantastic One Hour Turbo Trainer Indoor Cycling Workouts

Winter nights are never encouraging for riding a bike. That's where workouts on your turbo trainer can come in to helping improve your cycling performance.

Whether you workout on a turbo trainer or set of cycling rollers- It's often difficult to remain fully focused on your training throughout the winter when really you should be using the training time as a spring for your next road racing, time trial or triathlon season.

When it comes to doing workouts at home on the indoor trainer we all have differing levels of concentration. Some cyclists find an hour as close to the limit in terms of time they can spend on their turbo trainer workouts and therefore detailed below are a selection of fantastic one hour long indoor cycling workouts to help improve your cycling performance.

Leg speed is a key attribute to any cyclist- particularly those who race. Maintaining a fluid high cadence pedal stroke will help to produce performance gains through improved cycling efficiency.

The ability to spin up to a high cadence will also be worked in this workout and is a particularly useful ability for cyclocross and road race cyclists who have the regular need to quickly sprint up to speed.

Speed work sessions are relatively low load so are ideal throughout the training year as do not place excessive needs on the cardiovascular system as heart rate is not really a determinant for speed workouts.

Through a combination of single leg spinning and spin-ups you can target both speed and technque over the course of an hour long workout.

Use Spin- up exercises to help you develop leg speed and cadence control while you pedal.

Spin ups start from a moderately low cadence (lets say start around 80 rpm) and you should allow your cadence to increase gradually over about 50 seconds up to the maximum you can handle without bouncing. Try to keep your lower legs relaxed as tension will cause you to bounce.

Combine spin-ups with single leg cadence drills. 20 seconds of single leg spinning is fine initially to help you develop a better pedal stroke and can either be taking the opposite leg along for a ride or having your opposite leg unclipped.

You can easily target both leg speed and pedalling technique in an hour long indoor cycling workout as shown below.

The key element for many to achieving a better time trial performance is muscular endurance. The ability to keep turning a huge gear at a relatively high cadence has to be developed over time. Therefore you can target your muscular endurance on the turbo trainer with your indoor cycling workouts.

The aim of muscular endurance intervals when indoor cycling is to train the muscles to perform at high workloads. Therefore the workout below places high demands on the body without taking yourself into the anaerobic threshold area or above. Therefore you can perform the workout on a regular basis to emphasize development for when you're riding against the clock.

While there is no one single workout that can get you ready for road race or cyclo-cross racing events. You can train for those changes in pace which populates bunch racing and cross country events.

You can never tell exactly how long you're going to spend 'in the gutter' in a road race so it's a good idea to train accordingly in your turbo trainer workouts.

The below workout includes a number of intervals specific to the demands of racing

Tabata style reaction intervals

5 seconds hard, followed by 5 seconds easy sounds straightforward- however when you try it for more than a few minutes at a time- It Hurts. These intervals will help you become adjusted to the changes of pace required in race situations.

30 second lung opening intervals

When the pace goes down in a race it rarely goes 'mental' for more than 30 seconds. Train your body to go for multiple 30 second intervals in different gearing's (therefore at different cadences) to be able to react accordingly and potentially do some damage yourself after someone goes hard for the first 30 seconds and everyone else wants a recovery period.

5 minute muscular endurance intervals

The key attribute to many racing cyclists is the ability to maintain the ability of pushing a high gear at a relatively high cadence. This is emphasised in this workout as well as the ability to push a high gear while already fatigued. This will help your racing towards the end of a race.

Please let us know how you get on in the comments tab below

Many thanks

CyclingFitness