Tips for increasing endurance on a bicycle

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am a big guy. Not necessarily fat (although I would be fine with losing 15-20 pounds), but just big! I am 6’ 5" and weigh about 260 pounds. This means that going uphill on a bicycle can be brutal.

When I first started riding about 6 years ago, I had to stop and rest three times just to make it up the first hill. I live in a valley and the only way out of the neighborhood is uphill. I kept at it though, and after about 6 months settled into a routine where I ride 30 miles per day, alternating between taking a northerly route which is very hilly, and a southerly route which (after getting out of the neighborhood) is flat as a pancake.

6 months ago, I decided to add 20 miles to my northerly ride by looping around a lake. Unfortunately, I just can’t seem to do it. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I can do it, but I’m completely worthless afterwards. The last 10 miles are torture! My legs feel like jello, and I have absolutely no strength left. It feels like I have a low tire or my brakes are dragging, but when I stop to check everything is fine.

I replaced the rear cassette with one that provides a lower gear, thinking that I could save my strength going uphill. That helped a tiny little bit. I’ve tried the “brute force” method, which is just keep doing it even though it feels like I’m going to die. After 3 months of this there was little to no improvement. So for the past 3 months I’ve tried gradually adding 2 miles at a time.

I’m still hitting a barrier at 40 miles. I’m starting to think it is impossible to power my 260 pound ass more than 40 miles through hilly terrain without extreme suffering and I’m just going to have to accept defeat.

Any suggestions?

2

Are you eating and drinking during your ride?

3

Most modern training on the bike for us regular Joes is based on quality not quantity, which normally means intervals. This would usually be based around a goal of getting faster, which is not necessarily what you’re aiming for, but it sounds like something you should try as it could help.
Google ‘hill interval training bike’ or similar and you’ll get some plans. Gird the loins for some pain, and hit dem hills bro. You’ll be polishing off that half-century in short order, nae bother

4

Yes and Yes. I follow a rule of “drink before I’m thirsty and eat before I’m hungry.” I carry light snacks and water and take a short break every half-hour or so.

5

Good and good. Next: what are you eating? Often solid food can be slow to be absorbed due to most of the blood flow is to the working muscles. Gels, power bar type foods or liquid carbohydrate drinks are a better choice.

You might also be needing some electrolytes in your water. Dilute a sports drink to half strength(full is too high a sugar concentration).

Try not taking breaks, your muscles may be protesting the resumption of activity.

6

I’m about your size. I don’t ride anymore, but when I was younger I picked a daily route that was a slight incline for about 15 miles and then it was a big nasty curvy steep road to some TV and radio antennas on top of a mountain for another 7 miles. I took it easy to the foot of the mountain and then I rode all out balls to the wall until I couldn’t go any further. I knew I could be dead tired and seriously hurting and still have an easy downhill trip home to cool off. After a few weeks it was a piece of cake.

7

Do you do any kind of strength training? There might be some payoff attached to getting stronger so that the work you’re doing in the ride is further towards the lower end of your capacity.

8

Do you have a cadence monitor? The first thing is to get your cadence up. Higher cadence means your are pushing on the pedals with less force, which means your muscles don’t have to work as hard each time around.

Second, changing the cassette in the back is a good first step, but more importantly it sounds like you need to change the front to what’s known as compact cranks.

There is an expression in cycling called “burning matches.” Your body has two energy systems, one for short powerful work, the other for long slow endurance work. Each time you use your short powerful stuff you are burning a match, eventually you run out of matches, and can’t climb any more hills.

There is no reason you couldn’t go out and bike 100 miles, you already have plenty of endurance, but you need to learn how to pace it out. You are burning all your matches at the start, so that you have nothing left at the end.

When you get to a hill, speed up leading into it, then start gearing down and getting your cadence up. The goal is constant power output, not constant speed. You will eventually be in your easiest gear, going maybe 7mph. But you will get up and over the hill.

On the other side, you need keep your power out put up by gearing down and pushing as equally hard until you run out of gears.

The other answer to your question is to find a long hill near your house and do hill repeats.
10min warm-up getting there
then 4x5min repeats up the hill. Easiest gear, high cadence.
if you have time 30min biking at a hard effort
10min cool down

get that 4x5min up to 3x10 and eventually 2x20.

Lastly, you need to focus on your pedal mechanics. Kick over the top (10-2) then push hard followed by “scraping poop off your shoe” from 5-7.

9

Don’t bother, instead spend time biking. Sport specific training gets you better at the sport you want to train at. Doing lots of squats gets you good at doing lots of squats.

10

I think I should say that in the flatlands to the South, I can and have rode 100 miles and finished up way less tired than 50 miles in the hills.

It looks like I’m already doing the majority of what those plans are suggesting. One thing I did notice that I’m not doing is continuing to pedal while descending. I’ll try that on my ride this evening.

I carry granola bars and/or trailmix bars. What would you suggest I get that can be found in a grocery store. I live way out in the sticks, so the closest health food or fitness store is probably over 100 miles. I’ll try diluting a sports drink for my ride this evening also.

I wish I could find a ride where it was uphill all the way out and downhill all the way back. Where I live, it’s mostly a rolling hills type of terrain.

No strength training at all. The only gym around here requires that they do an automatic withdrawal from your checking account every month. I absolutely refuse to do that just on general principles. But that’s a rant for another thread.

11

You have way more endurance than you need. What you describe says that you are blowing up on the hills. Like I said, you only have about 5 matches, and you are burning them all. All you need to do is learn how to manage your output on the hills. If you had a power meter it would all make a lot more sense.

It’s not just pedaling down hill, it’s about having constant power output. So how ever you feel when you are going up hill needs to be the same as on the flats. That means you should be going 7mph up the hill, but then 28 down hill, and 22 on the flats. When you learn to manage your power output the hills become meaningless.

You only need about 200 calories per hour, gatorade type drinks provide more than enough. Granola bars help as well to help stave off hunger. Some caffeine can also help. You don’t need anything fancy.

Like I said, you need to learn how to manage your power output up the hills. You are pushing too hard and burning out your legs. Nothing at all to do with endurance, and frankly not something you can “train for.” Getting stronger will obviously help you go up hills faster. But you’re obviously taking them way too fast.

12

For me, for running, my endurance went up gradually. Week 10 I could go longer than week 9 when I could go longer than week 8 and so on.

Cycling came in bursts. I was stuck at 12 miles for a while, then I got stuck at 20 miles for a while, then at 40 for a very long time, and so on until I could do over a century. And while I was building, I spent a lot of time feeling like I wasn’t gaining any progress.

You might want to try some different rides than just your two current routes - something shorter, but much faster. A long ride (40-50) where you deliberately take a break about halfway through. You should be able to get through the barrier - it just might take some time.

13

I’ve never bought any and don’t know the differences between various products, but there are energy bars and gels at my local grocery store–some with the health foods, some with the Gatorade, some probably over in Pharmacy with the Ensure and the SlimFast.

Now, different grocery stores are organized differently, so none of those places may be the right place to look (and my store is large, and so may carry more of some of those things than your store does), but my instinct is to suggest that you do some more investigating of what your store has to offer-- you might be surprised.

14

To be honest, 40 miles is so short in cycling terms that eating granola bars is not going to make any real difference, you probably will not start utilising the energy from them until after you have got home.

I would be thinking about getting your position right on the bike, there’s lots of guidance on this all over the net.

You should try keep a regular cadence of around 60-80, that’s quite a wide range, every time you hit lower you need to switch down on or two gears.

It does sound like you are trying too hard, especially early on with too large gearing.

As for your progress in general, it is excellent, much better than you realise. To go from a non-rider to where you are in what appears to be around one year) is really very good indeed, I hope I don’t sound patronising here. I had been off the bike for 10 years and got back on, it took me a full year to be able to ride the 14 miles to work and back three times a week - and I could only get around 30-40 miles on a longer ride.
The following year I managed to get myself to around 70 miles on a longer run, but I was utterly wasted, and its taken me most of this year to get 80 miles and remain reasonably functional - and my average is so low I’m not going to embarrass myself by posting it here. My 10 mile speed is just shy of 20mph so I have a huge amount of work to get my previous averages even on the horizon, I think I will need another 18 months to get there - so it will have taken the better part of 4 years to regain race speed - and I know what I need to do to achieve it, for someone who is not experienced this may seem very disappointing, but I am betting that you are substantially younger than me so you can probably cut that time dramatically.

Heck I could to 20mph all day and all night at one time and could clock close to 300 miles in a day even when taking into account rest, sleep and eating.

I think you are expecting too much too soon, really.

15

In lieu of a power meter how would you feel about the old school “talk test” or even a heart rate monitor? Your idea is to keep the exertion level relatively consistent and in the moderate range. If he cannot say a full sentence without stopping to catch his breath going up a hill he should drop down gears more. By heart rate that means keeping yourself around 60 to 70% of estimated maximum heart rate as your target both up (and within safety considerations) down hills.

Getting good at going long requires going long once a week but mixing it up in between those long rides with various sorts of interval training should allow you to get up those hills in the right aerobic zone faster. Hill repeats on the steepest hill of your route at all out to prepare you for handling it better in a more constrained fashion during a long ride, for example.

And yes it takes many months for the activity specific muscles to adapt. 6 months is just too soon to be expecting to do a hilly half century without feeling wiped.

16

Biking with heart rate is fine over the course of a whole workout, but fails miserably on hills. The problem is that heart rate lags as an indicator, so by the time his heart rate maxes out he’s already half way up the hill and totally burnt out. His heart rate will continue to stay high all the way down the other side even though he’s stopped pedaling.

Blowing up on the hills if a very common problem with cyclists and takes a lot of discipline to avoid, even with a power meter. I have a power meter so I know I can bike 112 miles at 75% then get off an run a marathon. Anything over that and my run suffers. If i cross 100% the ride is over.

What that means is that I can easily bike 22mph on the flats but I have to drop down to 10mph on the hills (while everyone else continues to push 22mph up the hill). I then catch up and pass them on the flats because they’ve burned out. Our body doesn’t know if it’s a hill or a flat, power output is all the same.

No, our bodies adapt very quickly to endurance (aerobic) activity. The problem here is that Frosty Camel isn’t staying aerobic.

17

I get your point about the limits of heart rate monitoring and by extension rating of perceived exertion. The muscles bit I am not so convinced about. Cardiorespiratory fitness adaption, sure. But the specific muscle strength changes … no, not “very quickly.”

18

I have not found HR monitoring to be inaccurate or slow to respond. I will see the change in HR before I feel the change in exertion.

19

EPO and blood doping are reputed to be very effective. :slight_smile:

20

My HR lags in both running and cycling. It might be different for everyone.