How to Improve in Cycling: Road or Mountain

Amid the hustle and bustle of daily life, obligations, noise, and routine, cycling stands out as the perfect escape. But it’s not just that—it’s a passion. And for many, something more. Thus, cyclists constantly strive to improve their times and beat their records. To meet these performance improvement goals, whether in road or mountain biking, we need to follow some basic and advanced tips.

Tips to Improve in Road Cycling

Here are some tips to improve your road cycling:

Improve Your Position

At a speed of about 30 kilometers per hour, two-thirds of the cyclist’s effort goes toward overcoming air resistance. This causes significant physical strain and is closely related to the position on the bike. Knowing this, it’s vital to maintain an effective position that allows you to perfectly transfer power to the bike while also being aerodynamic to minimize air resistance. Lowering your back toward your center of gravity and leaning forward is the best solution, along with properly adjusting the saddle and handlebars.

Work on Your Technique

Efficiency is vital to improving performance on two wheels, as it saves energy and allows you to cover more kilometers. Technique is involved in balance work, pedaling style, cadence, braking, and managing descents and climbs, for example.

Plan Your Training

Going out for a ride without a set goal is wonderful and brings a lot of fun, but it’s not the best way to improve performance. Planning your training is essential and as simple as setting a number of sets or intervals to complete. In this regard, the help of a coach or physical trainer is always recommended, but you can also train with other cyclists and use competition to your advantage.

Stretch After Training

As in all sports, stretching is important to reduce muscle recovery time and prevent injuries after intense physical activity. However, recent research suggests that stretching causes muscles to relax and reduces their power for over an hour, so it’s better to stretch after getting off the bike rather than before.

Don’t Just Ride on the Road—Try the Track Too

Leg muscles contain slow fibers, which develop with long rides, and fast fibers, which can only be trained with high-intensity interval workouts. It’s highly recommended to do this session on the track and take a break from the road for a day.

Exercise Your Muscles

Strength and hypertrophy training is another great ally for every cyclist. To reach our best version, it’s important to work the muscles of the whole body, prioritizing the legs, at the gym. This helps fight stagnation and strengthens the core.

Use Muscle Recovery Systems Like Pressotherapy

After an intense and demanding bike workout, your legs will suffer significant wear and muscle fibers will break, causing pain or the sensation of muscle soreness. If muscle pain doesn’t improve or persists significantly after stretching, massages, active recovery, or ice baths, there is still the option of pressotherapy, a therapeutic technique that applies controlled air pressure to reactivate both the lymphatic and circulatory systems, helping speed up muscle recovery.

Tips to Improve in Mountain Biking

Here are some tips to improve your mountain biking:

Train Progressively and Gradually

Just as we highlighted the importance of session planning, we also emphasize that the intensity and demands of training should be progressive and gradual. The human body is an almost perfect machine that adapts muscularly when subjected to constant physical activity. For this reason, if we gradually increase the difficulty of training, we allow our body to adapt and improve its performance.

Training on Flat Terrain Is More Effective

Mountain biking training is based on continuous and steady effort, so training on flat terrain is more effective because it ensures pedaling throughout all sections of the route. This doesn’t mean we should eliminate climbs and descents from our sessions, but we should give them their place and not overdo these sections.

Take Care of Your Nutrition

Increasing carbohydrate intake and having an early, hearty breakfast are two musts for any cyclist. Carbohydrates are long-term energy sources that help improve endurance. However, it’s recommended to consume them 3 hours before physical activity to avoid digesting while on the bike.

Gradually Increase Volume and Intensity

This advice goes hand in hand with training progressively and gradually. Just as we must plan sessions well to increase demands, we also need to be patient and listen to the signals our body sends us. Otherwise, we risk overloads and muscle tears that will hinder our progress.

Improve Your Breathing

Oxygen supply to the muscles helps delay and reduce fatigue. Breathing is affected by fatigue and directly influences heart rate, which should be kept low. Therefore, avoid abdominal contraction, keep your back straight, and achieve steady, harmonious breathing.

Practice These Tips to Improve Your Cycling Performance

After presenting all the previous tips, we can summarize that performance improvement in cycling largely depends on ourselves. Having useful information and applying the basic principles of good preparation will make us great cyclists. The three keys are proper training planning, improving technique on two wheels, and good nutrition.

Fourth is optimal rest. Resting after training is essential to avoid limiting our progress and to continue following the three keys mentioned. Here, pressotherapy is a great ally to shorten recovery times and improve rest quality. Before that, however, come active recovery, post-ride stretching, massages, and cold baths.