Lifestyle Choices to Maximize Your Cycling Workouts

To get the absolute most out of your cycling workouts, you need to maintain a healthy lifestyle away from the bike. Here are three powerful ways to create a well-balanced, healthy life.

Eat Well to Be Well

While there are too many variables to make any sweeping claims about the best way for each and every individual to eat, there are a number of core guidelines proven to achieve excellent health results.

For starters, it’s crucial to pay attention to your calorie intake. And to do that, you need to determine exactly how many calories your body requires each day. The National Institutes of Health have created an easy-to-use online calorie calculator that takes into account sex, age, height, weight, and physical activity level to calculate your recommended daily caloric intake. 

From there, the simple rule is that to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you consume, to maintain weight you need to consume roughly the same amount of calories you burn, and to gain weight you need to consume more calories than you burn.

But remember, not all calories are created equal. The type of food you eat matters as much as—if not more than—how much you eat. Eating nutritious food is always important to maintain good health, and it’s especially important when you’re exercising, since the food you eat becomes the fuel your body uses to recover and repair itself following a workout.

To keep things simple, we’re going to focus on two factors that should be at the foundation of any healthy approach to eating.

The first is to avoid processed foods. As cycling and fitness expert Selene Yeager puts it: “You can’t properly fuel, mend, and build your hard-working muscles with lots of processed food.” Similarly, sports scientist Allen Lim, PhD, said: “The best [cycling] pros learn to cook with whole-food ingredients. When a rider takes the time and makes the effort to cook for themselves, they perform better because it improves their diet and eating habits.”

Along with avoiding processed foods, make plant-based foods the foundation of your diet. A study published in The Journal of Nutrition compared a number of health and mortality metrics against various dietary patterns. Researchers concluded that “a diet rich in plant foods (whole grains, a variety of fruit and vegetables, nuts, and legumes)” were consistently “associated with lower risk of death from [cardiovascular disease], cancer, or any cause.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to become vegan, but the data clearly shows that diets heavy in plant-based foods tend to produce better overall health.

The “Eat Well Plate,” designed by health officials in Canada, provides a very simple way to create a plant-based diet. This plan recommends dividing each meal into three categories: roughly half of your meal should be vegetables and fruits, a quarter of your meal should be whole grain foods, and the other quarter should be some sort of protein-rich food, ideally ones that come from plants more often than animal products.

As an added bonus, a plant-based diet is more ecologically sustainable than anything else, as animal agriculture is now one of the world’s biggest polluters and a key driver of climate change.

Sleep is Crucial

To see the biggest gains from your cycling workouts you need plenty of sleep. That works out well because it turns out that cycling has proven to be a powerful sleep aid.

Sleep is important because it’s when your body does most of its post-workout recovery and muscle repair. According to orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine expert Dr. David Geier, MD, healthy adults need 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night. Athletes in training may require even more sleep. 

Fortunately, getting all that sleep won’t be that hard, as cycling encourages healthy sleep patterns. Researchers at the University of Georgia found that as people’s fitness levels decreased they had more difficulty sleeping. But when people exercised more—including activities like cycling—they started getting full, uninterrupted nights of restful sleep.

Sleep has implications much larger than helping you perform well as a cyclist. Poor sleep contributes to a number of negative health conditions, while good sleep patterns contribute to better overall health.

Exercise Your Entire Body

To maximize the health benefits of cycling, complement the time you spend in the saddle with upper body and core workouts. Here are a few workout plans to get you started:

1. UPPER BODY WORKOUT WITHOUT WEIGHTS

This workout is great because it requires no equipment whatsoever. To complete this workout, do the following cycle 4 times, giving yourself a 3-minute break between each cycle.

Based on a workout developed by Bar Brothers Groningen: “no-equipment-8-beginner-routine.” Bar Brothers Groningen.

2. UPPER BODY WORKOUT WITHOUT WEIGHTS

This routine is a 4-week plan designed for beginner to intermediate weightlifters:  

WEEK 1

Adapted from: Pena, Jimmy and Joe Wuebben.“The Complete 4-Week Beginner’s Workout Program.” Muscle & Fitness. 

WEEK 2