Weekend Cyclist? Here’s How to Get Fit In Spite of a Time Crunch

Of course, while this is great news for the overall health of busy people, it does not translate to fitness improvements. “Non-athletes focused on health will be better off with a weekend warrior approach over being sedentary, but health is not the same thing as performance,” Trevor Connor, exercise physiologist, coach, and CEO of Fast Talk Labs in Boulder, Colorado, tells Bicycling.

In other words, you will have to do some strategizing to turn your weekend warrior rides into cycling workouts that build fitness.

How to be a Healthy (and Fit) Weekend Warrior

To turn weekend workouts that support better health and longevity into workouts that will improve performance and fitness, you need to consistently challenge yourself, Connor says. No matter your regular workout routine, to make fitness gains requires putting a muscular or cardio stress on the body frequently enough to force an adaptation. Furthermore, you have to consistently challenge yourself to make progress.

“We habituate our bodies to that new level, and that generally takes about four to six weeks; once habituated, we apply a greater stress to produce yet another adaptation,” Connor explains.

Therefore, you need to transform your weekend ride into workouts and support those workouts with weekday movement snacks—both cardio and strength. These short routines will make all the difference in your weekend athleticism.

Turn Your Weekend Warrior Rides Into Workouts

It’s always a good day to take a leisurely ride. But if you regularly take the same Sunday morning spins, then it’s likely you are healthy but your fitness progress may have stalled. You can tell this has happened when your rides feel easier and, therefore, less challenging.

“The best way to build strength in cycling is to do sprints or intense hills,” Greg Justice, an exercise physiologist and owner of AYC Health & Fitness in Kansas City, Kansas, tells Bicycling.

To tackle sprints on your road bike, you’ll need to work on a few skills, such as building upper body strength to remain strong while you cycle out of the saddle. Then, you can structure your short during-the-week workouts to support this goal.

Building up your strength to tackle hills with more power is another great way to turn your ride into an athletic endeavor. Hill-specific rides (even without hills in your neighborhood) can boost both your cardio and your strength, because your heart and your legs have to make it up an incline.

Finally, you can work on building up to longer rides by working on your endurance. “If the goal is specific to gaining endurance, you can try polarized training, or 80/20 training.” During these rides, you will alternating between 80 percent low intensity and 20 percent high intensity. Vary the length and heart-rate zones of the high-intensity intervals for a further challenge.

Remember, you can mix up these workouts to consistently surprise your routine for results. You might want to follow up this weekend’s hill ride with next week’s long ride, for example.

Here are other ways the experts say you can transform your rides from healthy to athletic.

Do Some Drills

“Both off-bike and on-bike warmups will be beneficial before getting into higher intensities during a ride,” Ellen Foster, D.P.T., a physical therapist and cycling specialist at Beyond Exercise in Cincinnati tells Bicycling, who notes that dynamic stretches and mobility drills raise your heart rate and take your joints through their full range of motion.

Justice also recommends mobility drills. “A warmup is to prepare your body for the specific activity that lies ahead, so I always recommend breaking down the muscles you’re about to use in the workout,” he says. Cyclists should focus on quads, glutes, and hamstrings, plus your core muscles for balance and stability before a ride.

Here are three mobility drills to try:

Leg Swing

Why it works: Leg swings loosen the hip joints making it easier to move your legs through the entire pedal stroke.

How to do it:

1. Place right hand on wall.
2. Keeping right foot grounded on floor and hips facing forward, swing left leg forward and back for reps.
3. Do 15 to 20 reps, then switch sides and repeat.
4. Next, place both hands against a wall and swing right leg from right to left, crossing the midline of the body.
5. Do 15 to 20 reps, then switch sides and repeat.

Walking Lunge

Why it works: Because you transfer your weight as you lunge, your core has to stabilize. This move also strengthens your tendons, which will help prevent overuse injuries.

How to do it:

1. Stand with feet shoulder-width apart.
2. Step forward with right leg and bend both knees 90 degrees.
3. Without pausing, push through right foot and drive left leg forward into a lunge, repeating the motion on that side.
4. Alternate legs while walking forward.
5. Take 8 to 12 steps on each leg

Quadruped T-Spine Rotation

Why it works: Your upper back and core work hard when you ride and holding one position for an extended period can lead to poor posture, both on and off the bike. This move increases thoracic spine (upper back) mobility.

How to do it:

1. Start on all fours, shoulders over wrists and knees under hips.
2. Lower forearms to the ground. Gently rest right hand on the back of head. Right elbow should be pointing toward floor; left forearm on the ground. This is the starting position.
3. Inhale, then as you exhale, drive left forearm into the ground while rotating right elbow up to the ceiling. Hold at the top for 5 seconds.
4. Then return to the starting position.
5. Repeat. Do 10 reps.
6. Switch sides.

Ease Into the Ride

You don’t want to jump right into a tough, high-intensity ride. Instead, give yourself permission to go slow at first. “Spin easy and get it to where the legs feel like they’re loosened up and ready to go,” Connor says, adding that your warmup doesn’t need to be longer than 20 minutes.

Then, Do the Hard Stuff Early

After you’re adequately warmed up, it’s generally a good idea to get the difficult sections of your ride—say, intervals—out of the way before you’re too tired, says Connor: “Do them while you’re fresh, while you have good posture, while you have good form,” he advises. Then keep your effort fairly easy for the rest of your outing.

However, if you’re prepping for a race with just weekend workouts, you’ll want to follow the routine of some pros and challenge yourself with the hard stuff at the end. To do this safely, you’ll need to first get a bike fit and then, make sure you strength train. Here’s why: “Pros are resilient because they put a lot of time into being positioned on their bike and they do lot of off-the-bike strengthening,” Connor explains.

If weekend warriors combine an improperly-fitted bike with a lack of strength, they are at a greater risk of injury. Connor says, if you’ve done two hours on the bike and then try to do intervals, you’ll start feeling neuromuscular fatigue, which can lead to poor posture, and then, it’s more likely you will get hurt.

This is why your weekend workouts should include some strength training. Even 10 to 20 minutes of lifting can reap benefits.

Tailor Your Strength Training with Movement Snacks

Don’t let the dream of long rides and cross-training sessions stop you from incorporating small “movement snacks” into your weekdays. A walk, calisthenics routine, strength training, and yoga can all be done in shorts bursts, and these workouts can take pressure off your weekend routine and improve your fitness, says Connor.

That’s because “the most important thing in training isn’t the intervals you do or how you periodize, but consistency. Consistent training is number one, and the weekend warrior approach is, by its very nature, not consistent,” Connor says. Look at those ten-minute workouts as part of your regular fitness, not just as breaks in your day.

“Getting in some strength exercises during the week will help you feel stronger on the bike and help you avoid injury, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time or equipment,” says Connor. In fact, throughout the week, he squeezes in 10-minute sessions with moves that target his body’s weaknesses.

Rotating through a variety of routines will challenge your muscles and lead to more gains. Just be sure to work most of the major muscle groups Monday through Friday. For example, you could do upper body on Monday, lower body on Tuesday, core on Wednesday, and then two full-body routines Thursday and Friday.

Squeeze in a Little Cross-Training

Justice recommends Pilates and yoga for their mix of strength, mobility, and flexibility benefits. Even just a few moves focused on the muscles that tend to get tight for cyclists can improve your athletic ability. These moves can also be done during the week as part of your movement snacks.

Bridge

Why it works: Bridge is essentially the reverse of bending over a bike, opening the muscles to counteract the shortening effect of cycling on the back body.

How to do it:

1. Lie face up with knees bent and feet on the floor. Extend arms along sides.
2. Press feet and arms firmly into the floor. Exhale to lift hips up toward the ceiling.
3. Roll shoulders back and down. Press weight evenly into all four corners of both feet. Hold for one breath.
4. Exhale as you slowly roll spine back down to the mat, vertebra by vertebra.
5. Repeat

Spinal Twist



Why it works: This move helps relieve tightness in the lower back and hips, and also opens the chest and arms, which can improve posture and relieve tension in those areas.

How to do it:

1. Lay faceup, knees bent and feet on the floor. Bring arms out to a T-shape, with palms up.
2. Let legs fall over to the left, as far as they can go before right shoulder comes off the ground.
3. Hold for 5 breaths.
4. Repeat on the other side.

Cat Cow



Why it works: This move also releases the back, as well as the neck and hips, and you can even do a very modified version of this movement while on your bike. Be sure to keep your shoulders dropped away from your ears to help relax your neck.

How to do it:

1. Start in tabletop position, on hands and knees, shoulders over wrists and hips over knees.
2. Inhale to lift gaze and arch spine.
3. On exhale, round back, tuck tailbone and move chin to chest.
4. Move through these two postures, articulating the spine, for 10 full breaths.


Laurel Leicht is a writer and editor in Brooklyn. She’s covered health, fitness, and travel for outlets including Well+Good, Glamour, and O, The Oprah Magazine.