Hiya, I’m a middle-aged dad looking to regain some fitness — mostly endurance for positional comfort and spirited pace on 50 mile+ road and gravel rides. I live in flatland (i.e., Chicago, IL, USA) and ride year-round. I have a regular weight-lifting routine at a good gym to maintain some semblance of core strength and coordination — but they’re not cycling coaches.
Presumably, many people reading this have fallen into (or are in) this situation. Did anyone try a subscription service like Teainingpeaks? Open-source advice on basic training plans? Just don’t think about it too hard and ride more, gradually increasing distance? What worked for you?
In my experience, whatever gets you on the bike challenging yourself consistently will help you get fitter. For some people they can just head out and ride more and it comes to them, others benefit from some structure or a defined goal.
What’s worked ok for me has been setting myself and ‘event’ of some sort (either an organised thing or an adventure I want to do) and then getting TrainerRoad to do its machine learning magic to make me a training plan to follow. It helps that I actually enjoy doing intervals - I do most of the workouts outside if I can - but there’s also someting nice about the fact that I don’t have to choose what to do or fiddle around making adjustments.
I find if I ask for a Masters plan I get 2 intense rides a week, then when time/family/etc allows I add in rides that are longer, more sociable or whatever I fancy . I haven’t managed to reach the glory of my youth through this approach, but it’s given me enough fitness to have some cool adventures and hold my own on club rides.
But again, that’s just my experience. My advice would be to ask yourself what approach will kepp you riding consistently and figure it out from there.
A vote for SteveC’s approach. Having some sort of goal race/event, especially with friends, really helps me push through the over/unders or long threshold intervals. I use a mix of 2, 45min structured TrainerRoad sessions (mostly inside) and 1 or 2 outside unstructured sessions a week. The indoor TR structured workouts are just so time efficient! If I can keep that up consistently without too much work travel, then it does wonders for my fitness and fun on the bike.
I’ve been an Xert user since 2022 and enjoy it because it gives me a plan for each ride, plus a little motivation to follow that plan rather than just ride when I feel like it
There are 3 levers you can pull to gain fitness….Consistency, Volume and Intensity.
The core of any training regimen is consistency. Train / ride regularly from week to week. After that, you can add either volume or intensity. Don’t have time to train more? Go harder. Have time to train more? Add hours, but you’ll need to dial back intensity (at least at first).
if a pre-packaged trading plan gets y9u riding consistently, go for it. If riding with your buddies does it, then do that.
If you want to add some structure to your training, I would seriously have a look at this simple but effective training program from friend of the Discord @Jem_Arnold
I think an important consideration is what will drive you to be consistent in a way that includes more volume and more intensity.
I recently signed up to an app with a view to including more structured training in my routine but I’ve found find it hard to find the motivation to do more than one structured training session by myself a week as generally I find it a bit boring. I get much more energy and enjoyment from riding with others which drives consistency. A couple of the group rides I join include some form of organized efforts and, while these probably wouldn’t find there way into a perfect structured plan, they are fun, motivating, and have improved my riding.
I’m 52 and still clinging onto my youth with road racing. As others said and I strongly agree, enjoyment is your key here. That will deliver consistency, which will unlock fitness. How fit are you looking to get? When I start building for a target race, I will start paying more attention to structured training and the numbers that training diaries like Training Peaks provide.
If you are only looking for a moderate level of fitness - ask yourself if you are really going to enjoy and be motivated to engage in structured training? I will do it for target events, as the process is kind of fun. Like many people, the process is wrapped around a target. It doesn’t tend to work if it’s just for general fitness. And you probably don’t need it. If you like intervals of course, go for your life.
A great tip from a Leonard Zinn coaching article I read was…. If your on-bike time is less than 8hrs per week, just ride more.
Specific sessions or general riding. Just do whatever riding you can to enjoy and add miles and variety and consistency. Bunch ride, Commuting, riding to the in-laws barbecue on the weekend, quick indoor sessions etc. Just get the hrs over 8h/wk first.
Thank you all for sharing your perspectives. After contemplating, I suspect the best path for me is halfway between “open-source advice” and “just ride more”. Principles that resonated with me:
If under X hours training, just ride more “Zinn rule” (I am under any reasonable value of X at present)
Keep easy days easy and hard days hard — and, implicitly, make intentional choices about which days will be easy versus hard — is probably sufficient to deconflict weight and on-bike training at my load
Do what brings energy (in my case, I actually enjoy an on-bike interval now and again — and had maybe overthought avoiding them entirely as overkill)
Thanks again. It’s so nice to have a place to ask this kind of question and get a non-judgmental response with genuinely useful thought-starters in it.
I think at this point that is complicating things for you. Based on your comment above re: “X hours” and what would be “reasonable”, it sounds like you need 1) consistency and then 2) volume.
Once you have those two things, then worry about intensity. So my advice is to ride more frequently and ride longer when you do. The if you want to ride “hard” a couple of times / week, do it, but I don’t think you need “structure” at this point. Ride “hard” if you feel like it (hit the hills hard, maybe try for a Strava segment PR, etc) but don’t worry too much about it for now.
I think the occasional long easy ride - at least 2x your “normal” ride – has real value. Make it fun by choosing an interesting destination, like a bakery or coffee shop in another town. You’ll be amazed how far you can go if you don’t go hard. To make long rides more family-friendly, you can choose a family-friendly destination and ride there while the others drive.
In the “do what brings energy” department I like hitting small rollers hard – standing and attacking to maintain momentum instead of shifting down and slowing down. If it’s totally flat you can play with getting a strong drive out of corners or whatever else makes you grin.
Unless you have experience with self-coaching, I would advise against that. These plans are fixed and do not adapt. I have tried the plans by British Cycling without any understanding of how structured training works and the result was not great.
Instead, I suggest you try TrainerRoad. It is with good reason that they are the market leader when it comes to structured self-coaching. They support several ways to train, including custom-generated training plans and their TrainNow feature allows for impromptu training sessions. They have a very good forum, too, in case you have any questions. They have a reputation being indoor-only, but that’s false, any workout can be done outdoors, although you will need to plan your routes accordingly.
For context: just turned 49, married, 4 kids, work full time.
I can’t recommend TrainerRoad highly enough. Following a TR training plan, my FTP rose from 286 in July 2024 to 340 in June 2025. 4 rides per week (intervals on Tues, Thursday, Sat, endurance on Sun). None of the scheduled rides lasted longer than 75 minutes.
I don’t mind the indoor intervals because they just flat out work, at least for me. TR building the plan, scheduling it, giving me workouts that work, all of that makes it really easy for me to do it.
Another vote for Trainer Road. Starting last December I was coming back from 2.5-ish years of injury and mystery pain. With only two TR rides a week my FTP went from 175 to 205 in a few months. Between those two rides I was only on the trainer for 2.25 hours a week, which leaves plenty of time for riding outside. In the winter you could bump it up to three rides a week if you don’t want to ride in the cold.
For context, I’m about to turn 44; I’ve never been a racer; my big goal is finishing Unbound in less than 18 hours next year. I also used to hate riding inside—it felt like it broke my brain. I got a Kickr Move as a last ditch attempt to make riding inside work, and that little bit of movement made it something I could enjoy. I watch TV or movies while I’m riding inside.
If you don’t have a trainer, you can buy one from REI to try it out. As long as you’re a member there you have 90 days to return it if you don’t like it. Although I don’t generally advocate for doing that, it’s a big purchase and you should be sure it’s something that will work for you.
Structured training hasn’t appealed to me, as it’s difficult to commit to plans when the week can go sideways. Just another source of anxiety for me. I also am not racing anymore so I don’t have like an event to structure back from.
What works for me is having a consistent workout that I can use to challenge myself and track progress. For example, a long bridge on my daily ride allows me to shoot for a consistent power output. Or, I can ride laps around Central Park and shoot for 1, 2, or 3 lap PRs. On weekends, I have been doing endurance rides, for example trying to keep over 20mph average pace for 60-70 miles.
It works for me. At almost 45 I’m still beating my times from 15 years ago, when i was racing. I’m sure structured training would be better but this is working.
So, not quite “ride more” but not quite the commitment and stress of a structured plan.
+1 for TrainerRoad. A word of caution though, if you mix one of their higher volume plans in addition to extra riding outside with too much intensity it can be easy to overcook yourself.
Yup. Some high intensity is good, more is not better. Ideally one comes into an interval workout fresh enough to do high-quality work. I’d be cautious about doing over-threshold intervals more than 2x/week.
I like hitting small rollers hard – standing and attacking to maintain momentum instead of shifting down and slowing down. If it’s totally flat you can play with getting a strong drive out of corners or whatever else makes you grin.