How Many Hours Should Cyclists Ride for Fitness and Performance?
The cheeky answer to, “How many hours should I ride my bike?” is, of course, “As many as possible.” But that really isn’t true. More hours on the bike doesn’t automatically lead to improved fitness, greater weight loss, improved cardiovascular health, reduced chronic disease risk, improved mental health, or any of the other potential benefits of cycling. “Just ride more” can be a recipe for disaster if the activity isn’t supportable by your baseline fitness or your lifestyle habits. There is no perfect number of hours that will be best for all cyclists, but here are some good ways to find the right number of weekly training hours for you.
To start this conversation with a blank sheet of paper, let’s consider a situation where there are no constraints on the time you have available for cycling. Obviously, that’s an absurd scenario because you have other responsibilities in life, but I still start there because it will help you see that past a certain point, unlimited training time wouldn’t make you any faster or stronger anyway.
What are you trying to accomplish?
The best number of weekly training hours depends on your goals.
Health and cardiovascular fitness
For generalized cardiovascular fitness, the exercise recommendations from the World Health Organization are pretty reasonable: 150-300 minutes a week of moderate intensity exercise or 75-150 minutes per week if you incorporate higher intensity efforts. So, since cycling is typically a mixed-intensity activity, 3-5 hours a week is a good starting point for recreational cyclists looking to achieve the basic cardiovascular and metabolic benefits of aerobic exercise.
Improved Performance
Once you decide to use cycling to improve athletic performance, particularly your ability to ride a bicycle longer and at higher speeds, the number of weekly hours you spend on the bike will need to increase, and you will need to start structuring your rides to address the physiological demands required to achieve your goal. With the appropriate training architecture, 6-10 hours of cycling per week are sufficient to prepare for the vast majority of amateur cycling events. This includes short, high intensity events like criteriums, cyclocross, short-track MTB, and your weekly Tuesday Night World Championship group ride. It also includes 2- to 3-hour events like most amateur and masters road races, cross-country MTB races, and medium-length gran fondos. And, yes, 6-10 hours a week is sufficient to train for longer events like centuries, long gran fondos, gravel events of 100-150 miles, and marathon MTB races.
Winning Competitions
Training more than 10 hours a week becomes advantageous when your goals are to be at the pointy end of a competitive peloton. Can you win a criterium or the city limit sprint on 6 hours a week? Absolutely. That’s the whole premise of the Time-Crunched Cyclist books and programs, and they work very well. If you want to win the criterium at Masters National Championships, you’re looking more at that 10-hour minimum. Same with a sub-9 hour Leadville 100 MTB finish or finishing near the top of your age group in a 150- to 200-mile gravel event.
Who needs to ride 10 hours or more per week?
If we’re talking ‘need’ instead of ‘want’, then there aren’t that many amateur cyclists who ‘need’ to ride more than 10 hours per week, at least not for the majority of the weeks of the year. Even for high-level amateur competitors and athletes preparing for ultra-distance cycling events, there will only be a limited number of weeks during the year when you need to ride more than 10 hours.
Minimum Maximum Concept
Our coaches sometimes refer to this as the “minimum maximum” concept, or the minimum amount of time you need to devote to riding during your period of highest training volume. Put another way, an athlete needs to be able to commit to a minimum of X hours per week for Y number of weeks during a specific period of training before a goal event. Applying this concept to, let’s say at sub 9-hour Leadville 100 MTB finish, and a cyclist who can normally train 8-9 hours per week throughout the year may need to ride 11-13 hours per week for a 4- to 6-week period about 2-3 months out from the event (note, this is just a potential example).
None of the aforementioned recommendations are hard and fast rules. There are exceptions and a lot of individual variability. Cyclists win criteriums training 3 hours per week or get dropped despite training 12 hours per week. You might pull off a sub 9-hour LT100 on six hours of training per week, more commonly it’s people who can train 10-12 hours/week. The group of cyclists that benefits most from consistently training more than 12 hours per week on the bike are elite racers and cyclists who plan on performing at a high level (relative to their maximum potential) for a prolonged portion of the year.
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If you’re aiming to achieve a big goal in a one-day or even one-week event each year, you don’t generally need to maintain high training volumes year-round. Maintaining a high weekly workload is more necessary for prolonged periods of high performance because it means the fluctuations from baseline or sustainable workload to periods of heightened workload are smaller and more manageable.
How much stress is necessary to improve performance?
Underlying the recommendations above are the ideas that a certain amount of training stress is necessary to improve performance, and the workload required to induce that stress increases as fitness improves. Workload is the product of time and intensity, so weekly training hours are only part of the equation. Manipulating intensity and duration is the essence of creating workouts and organizing them into a training plan.
There is always a “minimum effective dose” of training necessary to stimulate your next positive adaptation. If your training stress – directed at a particular aspect of your fitness – is below this minimum effective dose, then it’s insufficient to cause the adaptation you’re looking for. However, at the other end of the spectrum there’s a point at which adding more training stress isn’t going to yield greater adaptations. Riding 15 hours a week is not 1.5x as effective as riding 10 hours a week, and riding 20 hours a week might be too much stress for your current physiology to support.
This is why we, as coaches, spend so much time monitoring your response to training. You may be able to fit more riding into your schedule. You may even be capable of coping with a higher workload. But for maximizing performance, what we want is to apply the minimum amount of training stress necessary to bring about the biggest adaptation we can get. More than that is a waste of energy and takes away from your ability to recover. That doesn’t mean we’ll always stop you from riding more, if that’s what you want to do and it fulfills other needs in your life, but from a purely performance-oriented perspective you want to do just as much as you have to do to get what you want, and no more.
How many hours do you have?
The number of hours you have available each week for training could be a limiting factor, but more and more, with people working from home or staying very active in retirement, available training time may be plentiful. That’s when additional metrics can become useful, like tracking total weekly Training Stress Score in TrainingPeaks, the total weekly work you’re accumulating in kilojoules, and trends in subjective information like perceived exertion, mood, and how you feel on the bike (and off of it). You should be tracking all of those things anyway, but in the case of athletes who have more available time than they know what to do with, these pieces of information can be very helpful for telling you when you’re doing too much.
By Chris Carmichael,
CTS Founder and Chief Endurance Officer
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Comments 36
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Ten hours per week seems to be the threshold for increased risk for A-fib. It seems this is a glaring omission.
Having to deal with paroxysmal atrial fib myself, I’m curious if there are any studies or data associating duration and intensity of exercise with atrial fib. Is atrial fib more common in endurance athletes?
I too have paroxysmal AF and got ablation therapy. There is mixed evidence in the literature to say if it’s a true causal effect. Most of the epidemiological studies are retrospective and cannot control for all the risk factors due to that. I reviewed some of the studies with my electrophysiologist and he’s also of the same opinion that it’s possible but not proven. Doubt if the well controlled study will ever be done.
if you dont do polarised training you had hearth problemes
There is zero evidence or published research to indicated this.
Sorry for my opinion but is not enough to say “more” or “less” hours a week. We need to adjust the weekly training according some scientific parameters. So it should be the point of discussion. What do I need to measure? Given a weekly pack of weekly hours of training we can test our lactate level each 3 weeks and adjust the weekly load and time. We can test our oxygen capacity too. It has worked fine for me. What I trying to say is the magic weekly number is consecuente of something.
“Hill” asked this above as well: what kind of training load would you suggest for a 300- or 500-mile, 24- or 48-hour event? Understandably, the advice given usually tops out at rides around a century…it’d be great to hear more about ultraendurance events. Thanks!
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Is your articles Always geared for young to mid age Men?!
I’m a woman of 64 still riding with all guys, most younger than myself! Obviously been riding/racing for more than half this years.
But I still would like direction. It gets confusing as you age! How much! How little! Please write for Woman too!
Love CC training suggestions!
Recovery time is important, I was practicing day on, day off for recovery advancing to evenings too as a day rider, I have cycled 532 miles in 12 hours and 798 in 24 with an hour distance of around 52 miles. I believe that MTB training might suit touring as it develops calf’s and this will help with the torque of an extra load, though on my 798 mile ride, I recall the feelings of loss of strength after 550 miles and a feeling of heavenly assistance to aid the rest of my journey, since then I always believed any distance over that a day is too much. I agree with Robert not to overdo things and be realistic.
You rode 44mph in 12 hours and 33mph in 24 hours? Even if you meant kilometers instead of miles those would be gargantuan records!
Exactly!
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Well written article! I try to stick to a 4 hour per week maintenance quota when I am not training for anything. It varies from a structured intervals during the week and a long weekend ride. Some weeks end up being a 3 hour Saturday ride and an hour Sunday ride when I am too busy. It’s not great, but it’s better that starting from zero when I do have the time to commit to an event…
On intensity days, is it better to end those rides shortly after the workout portion is finished, or continue on at endurance pace to add time at the endurance level? Thanks.
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When I was working, every minute needed to be accounted for. Now, even in retirement, I will do what I want! If it’s 7 days of 3 hour medium intensity, so be it. If it’s 2 short days of intervals, and plenty of hiking and kayaking, no worries. Living on the Central Coast, wind, temperature and tide do govern the choices. Above all, it must be fun. The results must be a reward from recreation, it can never be thought of as training. And I seem to do well! When that gun goes off, I’m in a happy place. When it’s over, I always marvel at how easy and effortless it was, at a pace I could not even approach for a fraction of the time in “training”. Living in San Diego,I guess racing 20 times a year was all the hard work I needed.
mm.. good advise
how would your train for a 500 miles 47 hr event? ty.
Well written. I agree . Thank you.
Number of hours depends on the variable what you are training for. Other variables are what is your base fitness/ and what level of cyclist are you (pro peloton or happy amateur ). A third variable that often gets overlooked is how old are you, I’m in my mid 60’s and find if I do more hours (or off bike training) the quality of what I do drops off
None of this works without a strategic diet. You cannot ride out of a bad diet. Five hours of intense training per week with nine to twelve hours of sleep per twenty-four hours. Forty-eight hours off the bike before the event. This is my minimum amateur level recipe. Hours on the bike are catabolic. Sleep is the best legal anabolic process for your legs, lungs and heart. Drop hours on the bike if you must and get more sleep. This will put you at the “priority end” of your event, and make you even stronger in future events.
I read your book Time Crunched Cyclist and was able to be highly competitive in the age group categories following your suggestions of 6-7 hrs a week. That is not the prescription for road racing but fit the bill nicely for criterium and track racing.
“ let’s consider a situation where there are no constraints on the time you have available for cycling. Obviously, that’s an absurd assumption because you have other responsibilities in life”
???????
I don’t understand……………..
Just read the WHOLE article!
Author
Michael,
Conversations about the optimal number of training hours typically start by asking, “How many hours do you have available?” because we all have other priorities, like a job and family, that require our time and attention. Without those constraints you would instead ask, “How many hours are needed to accomplish your goal?” Based on an athlete’s current fitness level and the physical demands of a goal event, 10 hours of training per week may be all that’s required or create the maximum amount of training stress the athlete can effectively handle right now. Riding 15 hours a week could do that rider more harm than good, at least at their current fitness level. So, we chose to look at the scenario (probably better word choice than assumption) where you an athlete has no constraints on available training time, so show that the answer to how many hours a week you should ride your bike is still not “as many as possible”. – Jim Rutberg, CTS Media Director
In a first look experiment at 59 years old, I discovered that:
14 hours a week causes adaptation. Most of that is basic endurance <120 BPM with 7 hours on the weekend split 4, 3 or sometimes 1, 6. That leaves 7 hours over 5 days during the week, with one being rest. So 7 hours over 4 days.
6 hours a week does not hold fitness at the 14 hour level. I have declared 5 hours a week as the diletante threshold.
For safety's sake the long rides are on dirt to minimize shared location (collisions) with cars.
The cheeky answer to, “How many hours should I ride my bike?” is, of course, “As many as possible.” But that really isn’t true. More hours on the bike don’t automatically lead to improved fitness, greater weight loss, improved
You should correct the typo: don’t = doesn’t
Author
Thank you for pointing that out. It’s been fixed. – Jim Rutberg, CTS Media Director
Sorry, Richard, but “many hours don’t…” and “one hour doesn’t…”
The Comp Lit major in me couldn’t resist.
Agree 100% Rob. Grammar in this country is becoming atrocious.
Absolutely correct.
Nice work- -love it!!