HOW CYCLING WORKS

39 secrets to help you train harder, fuel smarter, know your bike better - and maybe even impress your friends

WHY DO INTERVALS WORK? WATTSVILLE The lung-busting periods of work in an interval session are short, and rest periods allow you to recover between efforts, so you can spend more time riding hard than if you just tried to gun it for 60 minutes. And those hard efforts have benefits for almost every type of riding. If you’re looking to get faster over short distances like a town-line sprint, intervals work by targeting the muscle fibres you need for speed, says Michael Ross, director of the Rothman Institute performance lab in Philadelphia, and author of Maximum Performance for Cyclists. You have two types of muscle fibres: slow twitch and fast twitch. When you’re pedalling easy, you use your slow-twitch ones, which have plenty of endurance but generate less power and…

You're reading a preview of

Bike Australia (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue #22

DiscountMags is a licensed distributor (not a publisher) of the above content and Publication through Zinio LLC. Accordingly, we have no editorial control over the Publications. Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers or other information or content expressed or made available by third parties, including those made in Publications offered on our website, are those of the respective author(s) or publisher(s) and not of DiscountMags. DiscountMags does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, truthfulness, or usefulness of all or any portion of any publication or any services or offers made by third parties, nor will we be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on information contained in any Publication, or your use of services offered, or your acceptance of any offers made through the Service or the Publications. For content removal requests, please contact Zinio.