Dec 03, Chris Opie

Hi Lee,

This is a great question and I would like to start off by reassuring you that your commute is already a great way to maintain and assist in building your endurance.

Adding one slightly longer ride each week is an obvious choice for wanting to further increase your endurance. That said, regularly and consistently completing rides of 3 hours and above, indoors, can become a little uncomfortable and will require a good amount of dedication and commitment.

With your weekday commutes already helping maintain your endurance, a great way to further boost this is to adjust three or four of those sessions.

Choose two morning commutes that can be fasted, this will help to accelerate the production of the mitochondrial cells in your muscles, which are essential for endurance.

And on two evening rides include stricter intervals at FTP or Vo2 intensity. Something like 2*12 minutes of FTP or 4*5 minutes of Vo2 workouts. This will assist your body to adapt to working when fatigued. Including sprints is also a great way to help with your aerobic progression. 6 * 20 seconds maximum sprints each week can be far more beneficial than just improving your sprint.

On the Saturday session you can look to build up from 90-120 minutes before increasing the duration further. We recommend including some Tempo efforts in this session to further increase the benefits of fatigue resistance. 3 blocks of 15 minutes at tempo with 10 minutes at an endurance pace in between, is a good place to start.

Increase the duration of your longest ride each week by around 20-30 minutes.

This is a considerable amount of riding in one week, the benefits of training are only realised when we recover. Ensure you have at least one rest day per week and that at least one day is a strict Zone one session to consolidate the training.

Good luck, we hope this helps.