After how many miles a day do we get diminished returns with our fitness?
 

What's your opinion? Is it 40? 50? 70? 100? I have done 60 miles recently and 70, but I don't feel like there are many other benefits once you get past 40 or 50. I could be wrong. Maybe it's different for everybody? With cycling, you can't really customize the intensity of your whole ride as easily due to stop signs, different road conditions, hills, downhills, etc... The benefit of cycling is that it's more fun so you do it more. But minute per minute, hour per hour, there are more challenging workouts. Now going up a big hill is really a tough workout, but not all routes are going to be the same.

Who is this "we" you speak of?

Eleventy seven.

The longer the ride, the more fat I burn, so there's that. I notice a big difference between 75 and 100 miles in that regard.

Really? Maybe so. But I eat more the longer I ride. I'm just saying, is there not a diminished return?

It's not capitalized, so definitely not the royal We.

It depends what you are training for. If you are training for 100 mile rides, then you need to be regularly doing 50+ mile rides to get conditioned for it, especially if you are riding at tempo. If you are just cycling to keep fit, then there's no need to put in that kind of mileage. You get the best bang for your buck riding hard for say an hour.

I'm sure there is, but it probably varies per person even if you kept all other factors the same.

I don't necessarily lose weight on the longer rides (especially late in the season when I've pretty much lost all I care to), it's often more replacing fat with muscle.

You're likely to burn fat on a long ride even if you're eating because your digestion can't keep up with the calorie needs of the ride. I assume that varies a lot with how much effort people are putting out per hour or mile, however.

If you are training for 100 miles, would you say it's better to do 50 + miles consistently than to just do one very long ride close to 100 miles, but less often?

I'm not sure what "training" for a ride means. I understand what training for a race means, but I would think the best way to prepare for a ride of 100 miles is to ride 100 miles. I find the more long rides I do, the easier they get, but I'm not sure that if I wasn't largely limited to 25 mile rides during the work week, that I'd be as able to recover from my Saturday century as well as I do.

There's definitely a point of distance and frequency where the damage you're doing to the muscles day to day by the overuse overwhelms your body's ability to repair the damage--in other words, overtraining is a real thing.

Every time I go a little farther than I have in the past I get a mental kick out of it and know I have to step it up to exceed that new best mileage. The rest is all just a perk. I also like being pretty fit for my age and cycling is the one thing that helps the most. I know if I am on a multi hour ride I am burning some serious calories.

I live in New England, so I can occasionally get the kick of riding in 3 states in one day, completely under my own power (no cheating by putting the bike on/in the car).

DreamRider85 !!! :love:

Clever...

Longer rides build endurance. Short fast rides or HIT can help burn calories quicker. You may need to do other exorcises to achieve overall body fitness.

Depends on the kind of fitness you're trying to develop.

Kinda confusing GOAL with APPROACH, I think. ;)

The OP has a frog in his pocket.

Like most fitness questions', the "how many miles?" answer is one of diminishing returns. So you'll get the biggest benefit from the first mile. Mile 2, not so much.

That's not to say that you only need to ride one mile a day to prepare for a 100 mile ride. 60-75 miles in a day would be a better answer, because you'll want to accumulate the benefits or more miles to enable you to ride that long distance without (as many) endurance and fatigue problems. But perhaps you have to ride two miles, #74 and #75, towards the end of your long training ride to accrue the same benefit as your first mile.

What about VO2 slow kinetics?

I've never seen a mileage based fitness plan. It's time and effort (however you measure that, could be power, HR, or RPE).

I'd tend to think if you eat more because of that longer ride, then you probably are having to put out too much effort currently to do those longer rides.

Rides I do at very high to max efforts, I tend to eat back all the Calories I expended on the ride. When I ride at low to moderate efforts then I don't gorge myself on food for the next few days after the ride. This seems to be rides of any length for me. Though I've always felt that long rides of any sort let me lose weight. Maybe I just pace myself better on longer rides of 50 to 100 miles.

As for we in your title..... Do you think we all ride for the same reasons? I doubt many of us have the same reasons and desires for what and why we do it. So your bell curve you are trying to figure out might be really skewed.

Don't use we in your next title please. After all we are individuals with our own wants and needs. Being part of a controlled collective is not my desire.

None of the above...Numbers have nothing to do with fitness....Diminishing returns happen after your body adepts to the exercise or activity which you are doing and that particular exercise no longer provides enough stimulus for your body to improve. This happens to everybody and there are no exceptions. The only way to continually make progress is to change how you exercise and train. Changing things around is what provides new stimulus for the body and that's how fitness improves.

It’s his newest schtick. He will keep it up as long as people keep responding.

I can't see that how hungry you are is a good measure of the training effect of a ride.

All other things equal: the longer the effort, the higher the training stress, the greater the fitness adaptation.

A measure of "too much effort" would be symptoms of overtraining: fatigue, lethargy, insomnia, weight fluctuations, high resting heart rate, etc.

That's actually my point-- "training for a ride" seems to confuse an approach to one kind of goal (competitive racing) with a different kind (non-competitive distance riding).
You don't train to take a long walk or jog 10 miles.

It just seems obvious to me that the way you get ready to do a 100 mile ride isn't by "training" per se, but rather by increasing the distance you ride. So doing a bunch of 50 mile rides to "train" for a100 seems dubious on its face. On the other hand, incrementally working up to 100 miles over a series of rides would make sense to me, but each one of those shorter than 100 mile rides is also a ride, so I think it's kind of silly to call them training sessions.

How do you get the idea I'm talking about training effect from that? I'm not taking training effect into consideration at all.

I was just giving the OP a possible reason why they feel they eat more on long rides. On my long rides, I've never felt overly hungry afterwards. It is my short very hard rides that I tend to eat large amounts of food for a time afterward.