Workouts

One-Hour Workout: Nail Your 70.3 Intensity for a Bike PR

This workout will help you prepare for the demands of 70.3 racing—and all in under an hour.

July 28, 2021 Emma-Kate Lidbury

Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! Download the app.

This week’s One-Hour Workout comes from elite coach Jim Vance, creator of our 10 Weeks to Your Best 70.3 course, which helps guide you through everything you need to achieve your potential at middle distance racing.

Vance said: “This workout is designed to help you be efficient with your time, but prepare solidly for a 70.3. Most athletes do steady efforts at race intensity for a 70.3 in their training, but the truth is most races are not perfectly steady efforts. There are hills, surges to be made to pass athletes, or surges out of corners and U-turns. This workout helps you prepare for these surges, and is a very short and effective workout for 70.3 preparation.”

After an easy 10-minute warm-up (building the effort as you go), you’ll do four rounds of 10-minute intervals as: eight minutes at 70.3 intensity, one minute above 70.3 intensity, followed by one minute easy spin. You’ll then cool down for 10 minutes, pedaling easy, to take you to the hour.

This video from the 10 Weeks to Your Best 70.3 course shows Vance explaining how to define your 70.3 bike intensity, which can be done with power (in watts), with heart rate, or via RPE (rate of perceived exertion). Regardless of which you use, Vance highly recommends “dialing in” to this effort and intensity in training (with a workout like this one) to help you learn how it feels and recreate it on race day.

If you’re an Outside+ member, then you can simply follow this link and you’ll find this workout loaded into the workout library in the Outside+ Today’s Plan account. (Here’s how to set up your Today’s Plan account, which comes with your Outside+ membership.) This will allow you to connect and execute the workout on Zwift, Garmin, Wahoo, TrainerRoad, or whichever platform you use.

If you’re not an Outside+ member, sign up here for this and many more perks.