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Gym cycling

dfultondfulton 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,

Dave

Comments

  • HarryDHarryD Posts: 425
    Dave

    Standard gym bikes are not road bikes. The geometry, resistance & set up do not replicate road bikes.

    In a gym they are there to provide warm up (e.g. before weights), cool down & cardiovascular exercise. Accuracy in terms of what they display or what the resistance is meant to represent is probably just a guess.

    Use your heart rate & perceived effort as a guage to measure the training effort. Try & compare with HR & effort on a road ride on you normal bike.

    Any chance you could take your road bike & a turbo with you on your trips? Many do
  • shortsshorts Posts: 1
    cycling for two hours on a gym bike is quite hard core. you should try and keep at 90 rpm cadence and see if this helps if you do one hour it will be fine then you can set different tasks try www.turbotraining.co.uk
  • hitman786hitman786 Posts: 37
    Yes Gym bikes are no match of road ride, in cycling you don't only pedal your bike there are lot more factors which ad power to your body and also resist you during cycling.
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