[Closed] Turbo interval session - no inspiration. Any ideas?

In my experience, you either have the mentality to do serious turbo work or you don't. I am the latter so I fix the problem by simply going out on the bike.

Tunes

Do an interval playlist ,works for me .

Swaying toward 50min tempo thingy with some 30s efforts in the middle

Do you have a goal that you want to achieve on the bike? A race or event? Much easier to motivate yourself to get fitter with a goal.

Think about what you want to achieve on the bike work out what you need to improve to achivee the goal then work back from that and put a training plan together.

For some visual stimulus try Trainerroad or the Sufferfest vids or the two together. Trainerroad has some good training plans

What are you turbo training for? I couldn't ride a trainer just for the sake of it, and what you're targeting forms the basis of your sessions.

By this time of year, I'm pretty sick of the trainer anyway so if I go on it it's probably just a fairly short steady just below threshold to not lose much fitness.

For a quickie I do.....

10-15 minute warm up
Pyramid of 10sec fast in hard gear, 50 sec easy spin
20 sec hard 40 sec easy
30/30
40/20
50/10
60 hard
10 easy/50 hard
20 easy/ 40 hard
And so on back to zero
Then 10 minutes cool down

Not that easy to do, but not too hard to think about

It's got to be hard enough that you don't have the chance to think about anything else 😉

Warm up, followed by two 1-2-3 interval pyramids, warm down. The whole thing is done in an hour

I do the twenty minute GCN High intensity one a couple of times a week-

4 minute warm up

30 seconds L5 effort

recovery

45s L5

1:30 recovery

60s L6

recovery

45s L5

recovery

30s L6

Recovery

10s L6
50s L5
10s L6

Warm down.

Throw in a stretching routine and then it is about 30-40 minutes. Not to burdensome and seems to maintain fitness. CBA to be on there for more than an half and hour. Good chance to listen to some new tunes as well

Well that ended up pretty hard work. Warmed up then 55mins keeping the effort as high as possible. 30mins in I put in 6x 30s efforts, with 60s reco each at the same tempo as the rest of the sesh, then the last 20 mins burn up. Finished nearly puking, which can only be a good thing. Thanks for the suggestions.

The aim of training, as a casual mtb-er, are to beat my mates and put in a fair effort at a couple of Enduro events this year 🙂

My favorite at the mo.

Follow links to lots more similar.

get the spin mentor app on your phone - loads of workouts, most are hard work intervals and you can listen to your tunes. Well worth the £1.99 it cost me a few years ago as I use it all the time.

I find lights a sensible alternative to the turbo.

I'm finding the GCN turbo vids quite good. Did the 30 min climbing one yesterday and was suitably ready to vom at the end.

On the turbo I need to do one of two things. Long tempo sessions with a box set to distract myself from the mind numbing drugery of it (with alarms set on the Garmin to stop me dropping out of my HR or cadence zones)

Shorter focused interval or phased type sessions where I focus on nothing but the effort. Here having a trainer type video such as the GCN vids really helps to push it.

I find lights a sensible alternative to the turbo.

Lights are great but I'd need a flame thrower to melt the ice in front of me at the moment. The whole place is like an ice rink and no fun at all on any 2 wheeled machine.

Big shout for some of the GCN vids, pop it on the Iphone / Ipad and sweat away.
Its too cold and dark to go out atm anyway.

I'm ignoring 'go and ride a bike instead', that's not the purpose. The purpose is to do focussed intense training, not put off by cars/roads/weather/hills etc. But I shouldn't REALLY have to explain that, right? I'm off during the week just now so again, dark nights aren't part of the equation.

I'll check out gcn etc. I do the sessions in the shed with my phone only and a stopwatch app. It would be handy to have a programme that uses alarms to section the efforts.

Dan, I have just discovered an app that does just that. It is called Impetus (Android).

I have been looking for something like this for ages, it has some pre-loaded workouts but also allows you to enter your own.

I have a couple of toughies I could email if you want.

I also have the BC 20 minute warm up as a 'set'