Fitness vs Stamina

johngroves

Newbie here!

I've been cycling for around a year now and started off with a cheap mountain bike. Modified the mountain bike by adding slicks and a bigger front cassette. The reason was to give me a better chance of keeping up with friends who have racers. After 6 months of dragging a heavy dual suspension mtb around 40+ mile road routes, I got a Peugeot Performance Road Bike. Going out now I can pedal to my hearts content but my lungs always seem to want to give up.

Is anyone else in a similar boat to me? Does anyone know of any good cardio-vascular exercises to help improve performance? I couldn't think of any other way other than cycling as much as I am.

Cheers,

John

daveryanwyoming

Surf these forums for SST, FTP, Base Training and other terms like those. If you want to get fitter and faster on a bike you've got to ride frequently(like 4 to 5 days a week), consistently(e.g. steady schedule for months on end), and hard enough(i.e. hard enough to get yourself breathing deeply and steadily for 20 to 30 minutes at a stretch but not so hard you have to back off or shut down after a few minutes). You've also got to go hard enough and often enough but still get good rest and recovery in a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual sense. There's a ton of information about those topics and SST based training is a good way to get there for folks with limited training time. Search the training forum and you'll find plenty of relevant threads with lots of opinions on how to best achieve the goals above.

Good luck,
-Dave