Rainy Day Workout Ideas – My Morning With the Cycling Trainer and Vanderkitten Kit
Happy New Year! We set a 2019 goal for a century ride in September 2019. That’s 100 miles! And 80 miles back the next day! Motivation time! I’ve declared it time to “Triple Down on My Weaknesses,” and I’ve already been dialing up my workouts starting this week.
How to Get a Good Workout on a Bad Weather Day
When the weather goes “South” – too cold, wet, rainy, or windy, and you still want to get in a good workout on a bad weather day, and you can’t get outside to run or ride; simply take it inside!
Cycling Indoors
If you’re needing to get in some cycling, and if you have a trainer; you’ve got it made. Set up your bike the night before; that way, you will be sure to take advantage of all the effort you already put into prep work. Ours is made by CycleOps, and it works great!
Get out your kit. That’s your cycling kit! You will be less likely to skip the workout if you have all your gear waiting on you, and it’s attractive. Think of your kit as your friend and assistant; just waiting to work out with you and do it’s job –getting you moving. I can tell you from experience; I’ve had plenty of mornings when I wasn’t “feeling it,” but took one look at my workout gear waiting on me, and I just couldn’t skip the opportunity.
Go ahead and cue up a high intensity interval training video; some of them are pretty cheesy, however, you can get a fairly good workout if you keep up the pace. You might surprise yourself – we had a couple weeks of horrible weather recently. I took two days a week, did those High Intensity Interval Training – HIIT training videos, logged half my usual mileage, and came out stronger on the hills than before. I suppose I was working a different level, and it paid off on the tarmac.
Currently, my favorite HIIT is from Global Cycling Network. It has seven million views currently, probably because I’ve rode to it a hundred times! It’s short enough – 20 minutes – to get in a good sweat, and if I luck out and get a commercial or two, it turns into a 30-minute workout. On YouTube, if you type in “GCN Workouts,” there are dozens and dozens. I can ride this video as “hard” or “easy” as I need for that day.
Protect Your Floors!
If you have wood floors and are using a trainer; grab a couple of your doormats to protect the soft wood in case you step off the bike. We use one workout room foam mat for each wheel, and one inside door mat, since it’s always clean and dry, for the wider rear wheel equipment setup.
We’ve used these workout room foam mats in garages, and even dragged them to a rental house and set up a temporary workout room in a spare bedroom when we were displaced by hurricane damage. Right now, we are using them in our own living room three times a week to protect our floors from our weights until our permanent workout room is repaired/finished. They are easy to toss down, and far better than marring your expensive floors.
The white material under my bike is unprinted newsprint – it’s made to absorb ink and not let it bleed through, so it’s the most perfect way to keep chain lube splatter controlled.
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If anyone has a quick explanation of the zwift thingy, please do tell! Should I get it? Do it? Is it fun? Do you like it? Any tips or tricks to it?
