Runners- indoor bike advice?

Options
2»

Replies

  • MegaMooseEsq
    MegaMooseEsq Posts: 3,118 Member
    Options
    jlklem wrote: »
    If you really want the bike to benefit running it's pretty simple. Build up to riding as long and hard as you can. A day or two between bike rides to recover. I have trained a ton of athletes and biking is a good adjunct to running but the fitness will only partially transfer. Obviously start small...15-20 minutes. Warm up, main set and then cool down, ride hard during the main part. Start with 15 minutes (5 warm up, 5 hard, 5 easy...done) a few times a week and build from there.

    Bike trainers have nothing to do with the road or real speed. So 16 mph on your bike might be 25 on another. There is no reliability across machines. Use effort to guide you. You know what hard feels like. Ride hard. Slow increase to where you accumulate 40 total minutes of hard riding a week (all hard minutes per week combined). Maybe for the first few weeks shoot for 15 minutes of hard over three rides. Increase 2-3 minutes a week up 40. Do not worry about cadence (RPM) as the best exercise physiologists in the world do not agree on best cadences so....there are some general guidelines but that is for people who are pretty specialized. You want to be a better runner. If you follow this plan, and run easy between bikes days I would bet you would get to 11-12 minute miles on all runs. Intensity builds fitness but it needs to be used carefully. The cool thing about biking is you body can handle way more of it than running.

    I am being very conservative with my suggestions as I do not know anything about you but I do know what makes people more fit. And it's not easy pedaling (at any RPM) unless you are completely untrained and you do not sound even close to that.

    John

    This is a well-timed post for me - thanks OP! I have a stationary bike at home and have been wondering what to do with it now that it's looking like running might be done for the season. (I know there are a lot of winter runners here and I've read some great tips and encouragement, but I've only been running on the sidewalks around my house, which are currently ice-minefields and likely to remain that way for some time - I just don't want it enough to drive somewhere in order to run, so I don't think it'll be happening this season.) I've been mostly just putzing on the bike for 20 minutes while I watch cartoons, but haven't felt like I'm doing much other than getting sweaty and making my thighs sore. That slow/hard/slow progression sounds completely do-able, though, and I like having something to work toward.
  • MeanderingMammal
    MeanderingMammal Posts: 7,866 Member
    Options
    DX2JX2 wrote: »
    Lizzypb88 wrote: »
    We have had our first snowfall today and it is rough outside, ended up having to do the treadmill which I absolutely hated! I cannot do it mentally... with this crazy week of winter snow and the roads are so icy and we are expecting snow every day this week, I don't want to torture myself on the treadmill because if I'm not at least enjoying it a little bit then I have no motivation... during the winter on days I cannot get outside to run, I was thinking I wanted to do the bike... I do not like the elliptical much, I feel I would rather do the bike instead... so to keep my running up during these bad winter days, what on earth should my speed on the bike be? Hard days running I do 11:50/mi, easy slow runs are more like 14min/mi, I do not understand RPM or anything like that, I just want some advice on how long, and what RPM to do when I do the bike, I'm actually a bit intimidated by it as I have never used one since high school

    Depends on your goals. If you just want to maintain fitness while indoors, use HR/effort as your guide rather than specific RPM metrics or other factors. Pedal at an effort and for a length of time that feels comparable to the type of run that you would have planned for the day.

    Although it's worth commenting that easy paced running HR and easy paced cycling HRs are quite different things.
  • thebiggreenmachine
    thebiggreenmachine Posts: 66 Member
    Options
    jlklem wrote: »
    Actually most world class athletes remarkedly fall into around ~90 foot strikes per minute (each foot). Read about Jack Daniels observations during the Olympics. But you are spot on, most of the 90 per minute is from world class while racing...foot strikes actually seem to vary depending on pace. Just did a search and found a few nice analysis of foot strikes and it is pace specific. Go figure, just like cycling cadence....so many factors no one really knows. Most people I know are around 90 but who really counts on all their runs. Very few.

    J

    Here's what Jack Daniels wrote about that study on a LetsRun message board back in '07:

    Maybe I can clear a few thing up in this stride-rate and stride length discussion. First I need to emphasize the fact that what I have written relative to stride rate among elite runners (we tested 49 men and 30 women at the 84 Olympics) is that they almost all used a 180 OR GREATER stride rate. It was not meant to mean that 180 is THE proper rate. For women the rate was about 5% faster than for men, with women’s AVERAGES ranging from about 195 to 202 and for the men, from about 186 to 194. There were certainly individual differences, with men and women going over 200 in the 800 and some in the 1500 also. Over the range of running speeds observed (800 for men and women, to 10k for men and marathon for women), stride rate varied for both men and women by about 3-4% and stride length varied by 26% for men and 38% for women (having marathon pace involved for women and not men, skews these data some, but women did not race 5k or 10k in 1984, and we didn’t get men’s marathon). Still, no question that speed is changed much more as a result of changes in stride length than in stride rate.
  • jlklem
    jlklem Posts: 259 Member
    Options
    Perfect, thanks for finding that

Categories