Training: Ride hard after work

At last the evenings are getting longer and with the clocks going forward it’s a great opportunity for some quality training after work. Early spring is when you should get more specific with your sessions. You will be getting a little stale with long steady miles and the turbo trainer, so now is the time to speed up your riding.

Introducing some faster pace work into your training now will make the transition to racing later on a whole lot easier. The lighter and hopefully warmer evenings are perfect for short, snappy training sessions that will boost your fitness levels and won’t leave you too fatigued. Most of us don’t have much free time after work, maybe an hour at most, but that’s still plenty.

British Cycling’s lead coach, Chris Furber, thinks an hour is a perfect window of time. “The human body is designed to walk and run, so is neurologically and physiologically set up for those movement patterns,” he says. “You can condition your body to follow a cycling movement pattern just by getting out on your bike regularly. If you stop cycling for too many days your body will quickly return to its normal walking state.”

Bearing this in mind, here are three one-hour sessions to do in your working week between Monday and Friday: