First things first: This isn’t a “get fit quick” plan. While it’s possible to expedite fitness gains with targeted protocols, significant improvements in fitness take time, especially for those who are already seasoned riders.
That said, “it is possible to achieve measurable gains in performance over a four-week period,” says Cassandra Padula Burke, RDN, CPT, triathlon and running coach and registered dietitian nutritionist at Catalyst Performance Lab. “However, your starting fitness plays a role in how much improvement you may see in that time frame.”
Ultimately, consistency and sticking to your training plan is key to producing measurable gains in performance over time, Burke says. But if you’re looking for a motivation boost or a quick-start plan to get you going, a four-week plan can help.
So we’ve created three plans to kickstart your goals for three performance metrics: speed, endurance, and threshold power.
Structuring a 4-Week Indoor Cycling Workout Plan
The ideal structure for a four-week plan will vary substantially from athlete to athlete, says Pav Bryan, certified cycling coach with Humango. That said, it’s possible for self-coached athletes to start with a template.
For reaching a specific goal within a the span of a month, Bryan recommends following a weekly structure like the following:
- Monday: Rest/recovery day
- Tuesday: Intervals specific to your goal (lactate threshold/VO2 max/FTP/endurance)
- Wednesday: Sweet spot (top end of zone 3, right below threshold) workout
- Thursday: Rest/recovery day
- Friday: Intervals specific to your goal
- Saturday: Sweet spot workout
- Sunday: Endurance workout/ride
Depending on your goal and/or availability, you could add a third rest day or swap a second endurance workout for an interval workout.
To see improvements in fitness, progress at least one variable per week. If your goal is to improve your FTP, for example, you might increase the power on your interval workouts by four to eight watts each week. If your goal is to improve your endurance, you might add 15 minutes onto your zone 2 ride each week.
4-Week Speed Cycling Plan
The two key components to improving sprint/peak power are torque (pushing a gear big enough to produce power) and leg speed (the ability to turn the pedals quickly enough), according to Bryan.
He recommends mixing some heavy geared efforts (short sprints of five to 20 seconds in a large gear from a standstill or very close, remaining seated throughout these efforts) with bursts of light geared efforts focused on developing leg speed and efficiency.
Those efforts don’t have to take place in the same workout, and it’s recommended that the under-geared, high-cadence workouts take place on an easier day, Bryan says.
With that said, here’s how a weekly plan for improving speed could look:
4-Week Endurance Cycling Plan
“Building endurance is all about time in the saddle,” says Burke—think rides lasting 60 minutes or longer at low intensities. If your goal is to improve endurance in just four weeks, know that your gains might not be super obvious. Aerobic fitness tends to build slowly, especially in individuals who already have a high level of fitness. Still, a smart workout plan can nudge you forward.
Because it’s not feasible for most people to spend far more than an hour on the bike on work days, Burke recommends tempo rides. This type of workout lasts 60 to 90 minutes and focuses on “comfortably hard efforts,” Burke says. You’ll target a specific pace or wattage and try to maintain a steady effort for the entire ride. Your effort level should be around a level six to nine on a one-to-10 scale, she says—lower for longer efforts and higher for shorter efforts.
Here’s how you could implement this into a four-week plan:
4-Week Threshold Power Cycling Plan
To improve functional threshold power in a four-week period, Bryan recommends focusing on sweet spot workouts. The “sweet spot” is defined as 88 to 93 percent of your functional threshold pace. “Training at this intensity gives a good amount of measurable gains towards improving the threshold without creating a lot of fatigue, which is common when training at about 100 percent threshold,” Bryan says.
As for specific workouts, Bryan recommends starting with eight to 10 minutes in the sweet spot zone with equal recovery periods. As you move through the plan, you can increase the duration of the sweet spot interval or reduce the duration of the recovery interval.
Using the four-week plan template, training for FTP over four weeks could look like:
Can You Really Build Fitness in a Month?
“Dramatic improvements [in fitness] will likely only occur for beginners,” says Bryan. “Anyone who has had any kind of experience with consistent training for longer than a few months will see substantially fewer improvements.”
Those “newbie gains,” as they’re so often called, are largely attributable to neurological adaptation versus musculoskeletal and/or cardiovascular adaptation. That is, your nervous system responds to the new stimulus in these early stages.
The nervous system adapts quicker than the musculoskeletal system and cardiovascular systems: When beginning any new exercise plan, initial gains in fitness are largely neural in nature and occur as the brain makes connections to motor units firing in new ways. That’s why it’s so common to experience drastic increases in fitness—often multiple types of fitness at once—and why those dramatic increases start to taper off after a few months, and fitness becomes harder to gain.
According to Burke, a beginner cyclist may see significant gains across all performance metrics—endurance, speed, and power—no matter what goal they’re actually focusing on, but an experienced cyclist may see only slight improvements in one metric.
Additionally, it’s important to note that different components of fitness progress at different rates. Bryan says that quantifiable improvements at a higher intensity, such as sprint power and VO2 max, are easier to achieve in four weeks than improvements at a lower intensity, like endurance.
This is largely because the adaptation process tends to be shorter at higher intensity, and the reversibility process also happens more quickly, Bryan says. “For someone who has spent more than a couple of years consistently riding their bike, four weeks is likely not enough time to see quantifiable results while training at a low intensity.”
A structured plan to improve higher intensity efforts—such as anaerobic threshold, VO2 max, or neuromuscular power—is the most effective use of the training time, he says.
Maintaining Fitness After the Plan
While it is possible to see some improvements in fitness with a four-week training plan, it’s important to manage frequency and intensity and have a plan for continuing to progress.
“We want to ensure that the workouts and training aren’t so intrusive into the athlete’s life that it becomes a chore or distraction to their normal life,” says Bryan. “Training like this tends to be very short-lived and not sustainable over a long period of time. When athletes over-commit to training in the short term, they drop the training once the goal is achieved.”
Make your training synergistic with regular life, he says, to make a lifestyle change that outlives any specific training plan.
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Amanda is a content writer and journalist with extensive experience in the health, fitness, lifestyle, and nutrition niches. She is a certified personal trainer and sports nutrition coach, as well as a triathlete and lover of strength training. Amanda's work has appeared in several notable publications, including Health Magazine, Shape Magazine, Lonely Planet, Personal Trainer Pioneer, Garage Gym Reviews, Reader’s Digest, CNET, LIVESTRONG, Health Journal, CleanPlates, Verywell Fit, Verywell Mind, and more.
