3 tips to improve your cycling

You’ve purchased your bike and all your accessories and are ready to get serious about riding. But before you start training, here are some tips to help you avoid rookie mistakes – and hopefully help you on your road to a long love affair with this wonderful form of fitness.

1. Track your heart rate to pace yourself

When venturing out on your first few rides, you want to create a fitness foundation to build upon. From there you can work on increasing your fitness levels to avoid getting tired too quickly on your rides. That’s why it’s important to begin with longer, less intense rides. You can increase the intensity of your rides as you progress. A Magellan Cyclo GPS can help you track your heart rate zone so you keep track of how your fitness is progressing – just find out what your maximum heart rate is and set that in your device. As a beginner, focus on staying in zones one to four.

2. Fuel up with the right nutrition

Whether youare cycling forleisure or competing, eating well on and off the bike will benefit your endurance and recovery time between rides. If you intend to ride for longer than two hours, some great snacks on the go include bananas, raw nuts, died fruit, peanut butter sandwiches and protein bars.

3. Measure your cadence to build cardio strength

Try mixing up your heart rate based training with some cadence drills for cardio strengthening. Cadence refers to the speed at which you are peddling. This can be measured by revolutions per minute (RPM). One cadence exercise involves starting at 90 rpm for one minute. Then proceed to step it up by 10 rpm every minute until you hit 120 rpm. Return to 90 rpm for a rest period of two minutes and then repeat the cycle again.

You can customise your Magellan Cyclo GPS main screen to show your cadence more prominently, making it easy to follow when riding.

Find out more about Magellan Cyclo GPS at magellangps.com.au