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Right there guys and girls , I need to get a training plan together , have a 29er ss for off road and a cyclocross for road riding , and want to get generally fitter and lose some weight to start with then moving onto improving my strength and stamina for a few races possibly . Apart from the obvious ( getting out more !! ) any tips on how often and how long to ride for etc .
Any advice much appreciated !!
Cheers
Read a good book (e.g. Friel) on training and understand what you're doing and why you're doing it.
What sort of racing are you planning to do and what aspirations do you have?
Worth having a few repeatable benchmarks you can measure progress against too.
Edit: and useful to decide up front how much time you can commit to training.
got a 12 hour event in october (d2d) which we do every year but would be nice to go into it knowing I could compete at a higher level , also got singlespeed event in September (ssuk) which again rather than just going for the crack it would be nice to be able to aim higher
Friel may be overload, there is a lot to it.
You're probably best to start off with a few base rides per week, not too fast, but steady (75% heart rate worked for me & I found a monitor really helpful), 2 hours or so. Keeping pedalling the WHOLE ride helps. After a few months you should be fitter and can do some intervals, & some long rides to help with the 24hr.
Riding with a club/group helps.
I agree with both mrblobby and cynic-al.
Its good to read a book to understand what you are doing, but friel can be a bit of an overload. I got Friel last year in prep for this year and tackled it bit by bit, often reading and re-reading to get all to sink in. Now I'm in a position where I have scoped out a training plan for the year. You need goals, objectives and a plan to reach them. Sometimes its had to define these if you have not had a training structure in place the year before. Base miles are extremely important, make sure you get these low intensity miles in. Its quite tough on the road as you always want to go faster, if you day dream you find your hear rate starts to elevate.
Maybe get Friel and see what you think, he also does a blog somewhere.
Cheers and good luck
Ah! in terms of how long to ride for. Ramp it up slowly, max 15% time increase per week. Base period think about time in the saddle rather than distance. High volume, low intensity. It will depend on how many hours you have free to do this also.
Some people hate them, but I use a turbo trainer with Trainer road software. Having the software takes the boredome out of just sitting inthe garage peddling.
Frequency, intensity, duration. Once you have a min duration of 20 mins uninterrupted at consistent decent heart rate (eg as posted above) then frequency is the most important, min 3 times a week. For most of us it's this which is the killer but it's much more productive to 3 or 4 times than one or two "big rides". It's quite informative to have a look at training plans for marathons which are easy to find on the web, shows how the works built up and rest days etc