Increase Your Cardio Fitness And Stamina With This Indoor Cycling Workout

indoor-cycling-workout-wattbike
(Image credit: unknown)

As winter approaches, many keen cyclists are planning on moving their workouts indoors – and some of those who would normally go to the gym are looking for alternatives in the form of exercise bikes and turbo trainers. With a drawn-out winter ahead it’s worth gathering as many effective workouts as possible to fill the months of indoor training to come, and you can add this hour-long workout from the team at Wattbike to your hoard.

The session involves five long intervals performed at a high intensity and, though you do get long rest periods to recover, it’s going to be a tough hour so it’s best saved for when you feel well rested and ready to challenge yourself. The benefits are worth it, though – you’ll see your overall fitness and in particular your endurance increase.

The workout uses the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) scale as a guide to the intensity of each part of the workout. This is more straightforward than a measure you need a tech for such as power output or heart rate, and also means that if you do attempt this workout when feeling a bit run-down, the effort you have to put in adjusts to how you’re feeling on the day.

The RPE scale runs from one to 10: broadly speaking one requires almost no effort, at five you’ll be breaking a sweat but able to hold a conversation, and 10 is all-out maximum effort and only possible to sustain for short stints.

If you have a Wattbike you can find more workouts like this as well as training plans on the Wattbike Hub app.

Indoor Cycling Workout

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Header Cell - Column 0 TimeEffort
Warm-up10minBuild gradually to RPE 8
Recovery2minRPE 5
Interval 14minRPE 9
Recovery4minRPE 5
Interval 24minRPE 9
Recovery4minRPE 5
Interval 34minRPE 9
Recovery4minRPE 5
Interval 44minRPE 9
Recovery4minRPE 5
Interval 53minRPE 9
Recovery4minRPE 5
Warm-down12minRPE 3
Nick Harris-Fry
Senior writer

Nick Harris-Fry is a journalist who has been covering health and fitness since 2015. Nick is an avid runner, covering 70-110km a week, which gives him ample opportunity to test a wide range of running shoes and running gear. He is also the chief tester for fitness trackers and running watches, treadmills and exercise bikes, and workout headphones.