Can’t improve my average speed
 

I’ve been cycling for about eight years. I can not get my average speed passed 11miles. How can I improve?

That average speed is meaningless without context.

What do you ride (beach cruiser, time trial bike, single speed, mtb, unicycle)?
Where are you riding (up Alpe d'Huez, on a flat trail, downhill, indoors on a trainer)?
How long and often are your rides (10 min, an hour, 3 weeks straight; daily, weekly, once a year)?
What kind of health are you in (20s without any health issues, centenarian after 8 quintuple bypasses)?
How do you ride (all out til exhaustion, soft pedaling/coasting 90% of the time)?

Are you constantly being passed by other cyclists, and if so do you notice what's different between them and you other than speed (their riding position, cadence, clothing, the amount of noise coming from their bikes' drivetrain and brakes compared to yours, the amount of stuff they're carrying on the bike compared to you)?

There are two physical things which increase average speed: riding more miles/week and riding hills as hard as you can, which is a much higher level of effort than most people realize they are capable of. And then spending a few years doing these two things at every greater mileages and levels of effort. The downside is that yes, it hurts, but we do it to get the result. Besides, it's actually a lot of fun.

There are bicycles which will also increase your average speed. These are road bikes with dropped bars, sized and fit so the rider can get low on the bike and still pedal hard.

There are also a great number of details involving the above, but which are mostly irrelevant compared to those two simple things.

As carbonfiberboy says, the two main aspects of training are volume and intensity. The volume helps develop your cardio-vascular system (new capillaries develop etc.), Intensity layered on top of a solid base will drive more noticeable improvements. A good reference are the books by Joe Friel. I fall into the over 50 crowd, so I have his Fast After 50 book that lays that out. The intensity can be hill repeats, or it can be surges on flat ground. There is more risk of injury with intensity, and recovery is needed between intense efforts. Start off with only a couple of intense sessions per week, and keep the remainder of your volume easy. Best of luck. Lots of effort can go into planning how long the hard bits are vice the recovery periods (30 sec/ 30 sec or 5 minutes / 3 minutes), but the basic idea is to work hard to force physical adaptations, and then recover so your body rebuilds. Start with what works for you, works with your terrain, etc.

Good advice above, here's something to try to get started: if you have a ride you do often that you average 11mph on, let's say it is an 11 mile ride you do in 1 hour. For the first 15 minutes, ride your normal pace to warm up. For the next 15 minutes, ride harder - same gear and pedal faster or higher gear and same pedaling rate. This is often called the "comfortably uncomfortable" pace.

Then 15 minutes back at your normal pace, then the last 15 minutes (or less, since you should finish in shorter time) at a harder pace.

A variant if your riding is on routes where you have to keep stopping, do the "ride harder" on the longer segments between stops.

Keep doing that, soon you will be stuck at a new average speed, but it will be higher than what you started at!

This is what kayakers do, too. Turns out an uphill lake is called a river.

First post, one post, hasn't returned.

I still love websites that moderate this to require 10 posts before being allowed to start new topics, with one of those posts as an introduction in the stickied introduction topic.

I don't mind helping people at all, but I think that approach makes the conversations a lot clearer and more productive once they do hit 10 posts and have given an intro.

One hopes we will hear from the OP again in a few months, giving kudos to all. They wanted to know a particular thing, knowledge imparted. temporary end of topic. Sometimes the next thing we hear is like, "Is it better to do one long SS interval or several shorter ones?" :) Or OTOH, maybe they said, "Hell with that, I just want to ride my bike around the neighborhood."

I think your post asks the question, "Do we want to be more of a community, or just an open resource, an encyclopedia of cycling?" Is that fair? For my part, don't want to first have to pass a test before I google a topic.

Has anyone suggested using a second magnet for the speed sensor? Guaranteed to have a very large impact on average speed.

this one rang my troll alarm.

Always eat the right kid of food and keep yourselves energetic

How many kids a week do you recommend?

:)

Barry

Now that you mention it... yeah.

Like, if it was a troll, 11mph was a good speed to pick. But riding for 8 years should be a potential giveaway. If they said, 6mph, it would be too obvious.

What helped me improve my speed was listening to the Peter Attia podcast episode with Iñigo San Millán. He talks about how he trains pro-level cyclists with heart rate zones, and how it relates to mitochondrial function -- and what heart rate zones to train at to maximize the mitochondrial efficiency, so you do not switch to glucose prematurely.

The regimen he recommends is 80% of maximum heart rate (around 160 for me) for a few hours a week. This is actually a pretty relaxed pace where you can still talk but are breathing somewhat heavily. Looking at the training schedule of elite level cyclists, apparently they do this most of the year and do little high-intensity to prep for a race (in terms of percentage training time).

Yes, that pace is technically described as below AeT or VT1, below the aerobic threshold. It's best definable by breathing rather than HR. This HR recommendation is close, but flawed because MHR is hard to know and an individual's AeT is not necessarily right at that percentage anyway. Crossing AeT, one's breathing rate will show a definite increase. My AeT is at about 78% of FTP.

The 20-25 hour a week training schedule? And then the 25-35 hour a week racing schedule? Not particularly useful.

If the OP could ride that many hours, they'd probably be pretty fast, too. For all of us that don't, intensity helps make up for the training load which is instrumental in forcing adaptations (i.e., making you faster).

Riding 5-10 hours a week without much intensity isn't going to make you much faster once you've established some baseline fitness.

^^ Quite. The less time one has for training, the more time needs to be spent riding with intensity. It's not an across-the-board percentage thing, though we sure see a lot of that 80% kind of thing bandied about. The longer the fast rides one contemplates, the more total training time is required, the smaller the percentage of intensity becomes, and conversely. Google "time crunched cyclist workouts."

HRM are popular
? are there Respiratory Rate Monitors? I have only been able to locate hospital monitors and baby sleep apnea oriented ones , best worn for sleep.
Using HR variability, as some propose , is only good for resting RRate
I would like to quantitate my subjective RR / exertional rate
though a block timer app would probably do the job more simply

They were in the 1990s and 2000s.

Now the most effective training is done with power. Some people try to use hr in conjunction with that, but it's not necessary.

HRM are still popular because they can be inexpensive and work for everything: bike, run, swim, hike, walk, gym, etc., etc. Thus triathletes all use HRMs. They also have a big price variation, from inexpensive up to 1/2 the price of a power meter.

HRV can be used actively, not only resting. I use an Android phone, Elite HRV with a bluetooth strap and transmitter. I haven't done, but I suppose one could put the phone on a mount or in a jersey pocket and go riding with the app running. I take both resting and standing HRV every morning.

RRM vs HRM
 

gotcha on that.
I have a Wahoo Tickr that pairs better with my Hammerhead Karoo on ANT+, and decently, though less stably with my iPhone6,
used to pair with the Karoo occ to cross check the GPS on the Karoo.
Interestingly the Karoo is ~2-5% less on routes, though GPS algorithms easily vary that much and it is also that much less than a drawn course on MapMyRide.

As I was talking myself out of a powermeter, I looked into the various metrics, laboratory quality thru subjective, and feel for me, the subjective RPE exertional rating, speed duration and distance were all I needed, and playing around with the calculated proxy VO2max and "FTP" on various sites were fine for me at this stage.

What I was looking for was a Respiratory Rate Meter that might log that data, as I log the other training mishagas.
It has been fun looking at the correlations between the "gilt standards" of VO2max , watts, and METS , seeing what are reasonable proxies with stable values for use and comparing mine.
I dodged Cardiac rehab, and wanted to see where its (rather fanciful) metrics fit in, as well.
Plus I am ( like many older folks) on beta blockers that further screw up using heart rate as a metric.

RRM are to be had . There is a good paper reviewing their use in monitoring pediatric pneumonia
https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.201711-2233CI that lists what they do.
I haven't found anything that costs less than a good powermeter , designed for hospital use, as of yet.
I think they may be as good if not better than HRM.
and it would be an interesting comparison to match it with "5 min of huffing" to see if it out performed simple timed intervals with subjective endpoints.

Like the OP , there a a lot of folks who make use of a game of stats to help motivate themselves, and it is always fun to calibrate that with a bit of science.

You don't need a respiratory meter. All you need to know is what the breakpoints at AeT/VT1 and AnT/Vt2 feel like so you know about where you are in the effort continuum. That'll sub for the HRM, which I agree won't do you much good. The breakpoints are sharp enough to be quite detectable with a little practice. For the game of stats, in your case there's no substitute for a PM. Might as well get one. There are $300-$400 wheels with Powertap SL+ hubs on ebay. I scored one of those hubs out of a wrecked bike and built a wheel on it. Works great with my Garmin 800.

Garmin's newer watches record respiration rate during activity and in the background too. I don't know how accurate they are, I suspect they work better with a chest strap.

Really? How do they do that? What's the sensor and how does it transmit data? HR varies if one breathes deeply, which is very noticeable when taking an HRV reading, so perhaps that's what's being recorded. If that's the case, I suspect it would work well up to some HR/effort, then completely fail.

Carbonfiberboy

https://www.firstbeatanalytics.com/e...piration-rate/

🙂