I hope everyone got outside for a few hours and had a fantastic weekend. I was extremely fortunate that the bad weather I was supposed to have all weekend ended early Saturday and allowed me to get a nice run in Saturday morning and a sweet bike ride in Sunday. I ran my personal best 10k time Saturday which is nice. It wasn't "fast" by any means, but it was the fastest I've ever done the distance. I've never raced a 10k and I'm sure my race time would be a lot better, but nonetheless it is cool to get a personal best on a rainy, overcast morning when you were not anticipating being able to leave the house at all. On Sunday I rode about 70 miles up to Grant and then out into the marshlands. Pretty standard weekend ride but the weather was gorgeous and I put up pretty good power numbers despite my legs clearly not being 100% after the hard run the day previous.
So with the worthless recap of my life out of the way, I want to discuss my favorite cycling training exercise, the 2x20. Pronounced (two by twenty).
I said before that you don't have to do structured exercises, and you definitely do not. If you are just starting the fitness journey just riding a bike for an hour at any intensity will be an adventure. This advice is oriented more for people who are "hooked" on the sport and want to make the moderate jump from casual cycling for health and fitness to someone who wants to push themselves to make major gains.
Before going deeper I want to make a statement: cycling is fun. Riding your bike on the trail with a friend or loved one on a day with great weather is one of the most simple pleasurable experiences in life. Racing bikes and, to an even greater extent, training to race bikes is agonizing. It is grueling, searingly painful, and as my missing teeth with attest, full of sacrifice. But... this is fun and pleasurable too. Certain people, and definitely not everyone, find a sublime level of consciousness when they are pushing themselves beyond their limits and they find beauty and happiness in the suffering that is competitive cycling. Again, this is not for everyone. Some people enjoy their casual riding so much that they try to take it to the next level and it doesn't go well. Some people will never understand how your legs burning from lactic acid can be anything other than misery.
That's fine.
You don't have to race or train like a demon to enjoy wonderful fitness and health benefits from cycling. You can get fit as fuck from just simply riding with no "goals" or "structured workouts." Why am I prefacing this so much? Mostly because I don't want to scare people off. When I talk about riding so hard you want to throw up, that is off-putting to people just starting out and if they get the idea that they HAVE to do that in order to make it worthwhile they may ask why they bought this stupid bike in the first place.
With all that said, let's discuss the best cycling workout ever, the 2x20!
The 2x20 is a high intensity interval training repetition. To be technical, the plan is to ride at Threshold Intensity for 20 minutes, Active Recovery for 5 minutes, and then ride at Threshold for another 20 minutes.
What's Threshold? Threshold is the maximum level of effort you can maintain for one hour. If you have a power meter or a heart rate monitor you can do an FTP test in order to determine what your Threshold Power or Heart Rate is. For example, let's say that you do an FTP test using heart rate and you determine that you can maintain a 170 beat per minute heart rate for one hour at your maximum effort before you run out of steam. In this exercise you would ride for 20 minutes at 170 BPM, slow pedal for 5 minutes to recover, and then ride another 20 minutes at 170 BPM.
You don't need a heart rate monitor or a power meter to do this exercise though. You can ride it by feeling. Are you gasping for air at the end of the 20 minute interval? Are you close to throwing up? Are you nearly drooling on yourself? Was it hard to see clearly towards the end? Was your subconscious mind trying to play tricks on you by creating bargains to get you to quit? If you answered yes to any of those you probably went hard enough. If you answer no to all of them you probably didn't. It should be very, very hard. The first time you do a 2x20 it may even be the most intense physical activity you've ever done in your life.
And it never gets easier... you just get faster.
What does this work out do? The most important measure of fitness in cycling is FTP. The higher your FTP the faster and harder you can ride. Raising your FTP is the best way to improve your speed as a cyclist and this is the best exercise to do just that. Again this is about speed and maximum efforts. It won't necessarily improve your long ride endurance. If you've never ridden more than an hour, going out for a 6 hour ride will be a true test for you even if you do 2x20s 3 times a week. That's why I would always suggest mixing long, steady rides with these short intensity workouts so you train both your systems.
Riding at slightly above and below threshold is the best way to raise your threshold and become a faster and fitter cyclist. That's why this exercise is the gold standard. In addition to working on your FTP, it pushes your recovery. You just pushed yourself to your absolute limit for 20 minutes and you only have 5 minutes to rest before you have to do it all over again. Your legs will have a bit of lactic acid in them and you will be thirsty. Use the 5 minute "rest" period to pedal easy (helps clear the lactic acid) and take deep drinks from your bottle.
For a long time you are not going to be recovered 100% for the next 20 minute interval. Your body will not have acclimated to recovering within 5 minutes from an effort like that. But keep it up and you will. After a while you will look down at your clock and see it's only been 3 minutes of rest and your body is already eager to go again. Improving recovery is key for a racer because racing on bikes is about big accelerations followed by steady efforts followed by big accelerations repeating over and over until the race is over. If you recover from a big 20 minute effort in 4 minutes and the other guys in the race can recover from it in 3 minutes, eventually you're going to be unable to keep the pace. This is why recovery is just as, if not more, important than flat out power. In racing every big acceleration is called "burning a match." You only have so many matches in your match book. Once you burn them all, you won't be able to accelerate the next time someone attacks. Recovery is the key to having more matches in your book than the next guy.
But you don't have to be a racer to enjoy the benefits of this. You will get noticeably faster on the bike in a very short time. If you are a raw, untrained cyclist and you begin doing this exercise twice a week you will gain about 10% speed in a month. A 10% performance gain in a month is insane. Within 6 months you'll gain another 10%. These a huge gains and you just won't make gains this big or this quickly any other way.
From a health perspective, your resting heart rate will be lowered. Your maximum heart rate will go up. Having a lower resting heart rate will lower your blood pressure, raise your oxygen carrying capacity, and facilitate better sleep. 75% of fighting heart disease is diet, this is the rest.
The final selling point of this exercise is speed. Counting a 5 minute warm up and 5 minute cool down you can knock one of these out in under an hour. From the perspective of benefit vs time, nothing beats it.
One last advice, find a route for this that is empty road with minimal stop signs or traffic lights. When you are really cooking and have a nice rhythm worked up, you do not want to stop and have to restart. Ideally you want a 10 mile stretch, so you can go out and turn around and go back home without running out of road.
Here is an activity file of mine when I did a nice and hard 2x20 so you can see what the effort looks like. If you follow the link to the garmin page you can see the heart rate data and so forth if you're curious. It's a short ride, only 17 miles and only 45 minutes of effort, but well worth being part of your routine.
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