If you want to keep up with your cycling practice over the winter but cannot ride outdoors, try some of these indoor cycling interval workouts. You will see significant improvements in your speed, endurance, and lactate threshold when you head back outdoors in the spring.

For cyclists, there is much more to pedal stroke than simply making the cranks go round. Yet it is very difficult to determine what professional cyclists are actually doing just by watching them, especially given both the speed of the pedal itself and the almost invisible changes in the force applied to it. However, by making a few subtle changes to the pedaling movement, you can realize a huge difference in power and efficiency over time.

Many people use bike trainer workouts as a chance to exercise while they are engaged in some other task such as watching TV or working on their laptops. This results in spending a long time on the indoor bike trainer performing moderate impact exercise which, as any athlete should know, does not serve as a good workout and can actually be detrimental to one's fitness.

For those of you who have been trying to figure out the distinction, indoor bike trainers are functionally comparable to stationary bikes; the main difference is that with an indoor bike trainer, you are simply attaching an external device to your regular bicycle rather than utilizing a totally separate piece of gym equipment. Indoor bike trainers are sometimes used by cyclists for warming up and cooling down before or after a race, but they are more often used by endurance athletes either out of preference or when weather conditions do not allow for outdoor riding.

The power meter was invented as long ago as 1988, but it is still treated as a new device by many athletes. Riding with a power meter not only increases your enjoyment of cycling, it also improves your understanding of fitness, provided you are utilizing the features correctly. One of the most useful purposes of a power meter is to determine your functional threshold power (FTP) and, consequently, the related training zones.

In the past, it was always very difficult to measure fatigue accumulation during training. Most methods were subjective and lacking in precision, especially in the long term. More recently, athletes have begun to measure excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, better known as the EPOC prediction method, to determine how well they have recovered after a single session, as well as over longer periods of time.

The heart responds immediately to an increase or decrease in stress levels. This phenomenon can be measured through beat-by-beat heart rate data (R-R intervals). An accurate measurement of the time interval between heart beats is called heart rate variability (HRV). Generally, larger HRV intervals mean less physiological and psychological stress. The results of HRV measurement can be used to limit the chance of over-training, under-recovery and injury; it also can be used to confirm recovery is of adequate duration, and training is at the right intensity, and vice versa. Moreover, measuring HRV reveals the effects of stressors induced by variable events such as jetlag and high altitude training.

The aging process in humans begins around the age of 40 when muscle mass and strength gradually begin to decline at a rate of just under 1% per year. The process is caused by a decreased capacity for oxidative phosphorylation in the muscles, explains Menshikova et al. This is most likely due to a reduction in mitochondrial function, content or a combination of the two. The question is whether aging is genetically predetermined or whether it can be reversed through adequate exercise.

The heart is an involuntary muscle, meaning it cannot be consciously controlled - a person cannot tell a heart to speed up or slow down any more than he or she can decide on the amount of blood pumped in every beat. Endurance training impacts both heart rate and stroke volume, but perhaps not in the way you would expect.

Determining the limiting factors in endurance training is essential for athletes looking to continue improving their endurance performance. In endurance training, most limitations are caused by fatigue. An understanding of what causes this fatigue on a physiological level can help athletes manipulate conditions in order to induce physiological adaptations that will improve endurance performance.