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Gym cycling advice
dfulton
Posts: 12
in General Chat
I am a novice training for an ironman but due to working away from home for long periods I have to make do with standard gym bikes. I've just started trying to build good bike sessions into my regular routine but I'm finding that I'm not getting as far as I would expect. For example, I recently cycled for 2 hours at what I felt was a good pace (HR around 140) and only managed 35km.
Can anyone shed any light on to this? Is it that gym bikes are not very accurate in terms of matching exertion level to supposed distance covered, or is it that I am just cycling at too low a resistance? I consider myself to be relatively fit but I'm inexperienced in this type of training...
Any advice here would be very much appreciated.
Cheers,
Davedfulton
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Sep 05, 2009 6:31 pm
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Can anyone shed any light on to this? Is it that gym bikes are not very accurate in terms of matching exertion level to supposed distance covered, or is it that I am just cycling at too low a resistance? I consider myself to be relatively fit but I'm inexperienced in this type of training...
Any advice here would be very much appreciated.
Cheers,
Davedfulton
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Sep 05, 2009 6:31 pm
Private message
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90 mins on a turbo feels like 3 hr on the road if you ask me
It was great actually....of course I found the spinning bike much better than one of those normal gym bikes...
I don't like the turbo that much, find it hard to keep focused at home alone. In the gym it wasn't boring at all....
Has your gym got those Spinning bikes?
Oh and forget about that 35km in two hours.....nonsense!
Comparing the distance you do on a static machine with a real bike is never going to be very scientific unless you're riding a bike on a big treadmill (...)
If you ride on the road mostly & know your IM pace is X hours for the bike then you have a parameter you can work from.
The most often asked question from spinning newbies is 'how far did we go?' the answer clearly being no distance..its a stationary bike...
The only way to increase your distance but in the same time would be to increase RPM, but at the cost of increasing HR - most static bikes don't have gears, they just provide resistance to make it seem harder. Mechanical resistance has no affect on the overall distance, that's how it works on the bikes at my gym anyway.