How to Use Your Bike Commute for Training

Do you ride to work? Turn your commuter miles into beneficial training with these helpful tips.

Always obey traffic rules and think safety first when cycling in urban areas.

If you commute by bike, you’re likely well aware of the benefits of your daily rides: for one, you reduce the amount of time you spend sitting in traffic—which brings your stress levels down. Next, you feel good about using a human-powered machine to get from here to there and not burn fossil fuels in the process.

And then there’s the exercise component, which has a host of health benefits. But can it be useful as a training tool? Absolutely, assuming you follow some simple recommendations - and the rules of the road. The trick is knowing how best to integrate it into your overall training. (Remember, planning is key)

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Commuting by bike can be your secret weapon for gaining a new level of fitness, if used appropriately. On the flip side, it can be a season-killer if you don’t take time to properly incorporate it into the overall plan.

The most important thing to keep in mind when using a commute for training is recovery. If you ride twice a day, an hour each way, that is going to add up to a lot of miles, and many of them could be “junk miles” filled with stops and starts from traffic lights or stop signs, depending on your route. Those can wear you out more than you’d think.

It’s possible to effectively include intervals in your commute, for example. However, the key is making sure to get the recovery you need on the easy days so you get an adaptation from the work you’re doing on the hard days.

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The second critical element to consider if you train by commuting is endurance work. A 20-minute commute may help the weekly volume total, but if you’re looking for true endurance work, a commute doesn’t count. To take that a step further, two 90-minute rides in a day are not equivalent to one 3-hour ride.

That’s because there are physiological adaptations that only occur during longer sustained training. One is a slow depletion of your muscle glycogen reserves over time, which causes you to recruit muscle fibers that aren’t normally recruited because of fatigue or fuel sources. For any accomplished cyclist, that adaptation doesn’t happen during a 90-minute ride.

Also, it’s important to remember that our aerobic energy systems are very slow to get up and working. It can take up to 15 minutes before the pathway is fully activated. Thus, during a 20-minute commute, you may only get five minutes of “training.”

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While a commute may not be conducive to endurance training, it can be used very effectively when you are focusing on threshold or VO2 work. Here are a few top tips to maximize the training benefits of your commute:

• Don’t treat your training plan and commute as two separate things. Rather, look at your week and ask yourself what workouts are necessary. Then plan your commute accordingly. That 45-minute trip between work and home could be a great opportunity to get in your threshold intervals.

• Don’t consistently do the same amount of riding at the same intensity on both ends of your day. For example, make the morning commute as easy as possible. Then, add time to the trip home to make it two or even three hours.

• Creating a true endurance ride is the hard part of commuting. One way is to add time to one end of the commute. But perhaps even better is to take advantage of the commute to do your shorter interval work so you can free up your weekend for the long ride.

• Commuting is ideal for recovery days, as long as you aren’t rushing, sprinting out of every stop sign or traffic light, and it isn’t overly taxing in other ways.

• But sometimes you’ve just got to skip the commute to get the recovery you need. If you have no choice, simply ride as slowly as possible.

• If your commute is short—under 15 minutes—and you don’t add time to it, then keep it very easy and do not count it in your overall training.

And don't forget: always obey traffic rules and think safety first when cycling in urban areas.