If you don’t have a ton of free time to dedicate to a long bike ride outdoors, don’t sweat it. You can build and maintain your fitness in other ways—including doing these quick 30-minute spin workouts.
Research suggests high-intensity exercise for a short period of time can improve your VO2 max just as well as training at a lower intensity for a longer period of time, according to a study published in the International Journal of Exercise Science.
So if you only have a half hour to spare, we’ve got you covered with these four quick 30-minute spin workouts to help you up your cycling game for better fitness. Plus, a few more ways you can benefit from a short indoor ride.
The Benefits of 30-Minute Spin Workouts
A half-hour is all you need for a quick yet effective workout to build and maintain fitness. In general, cycling every day can do wonders for your health. As we previously reported, cycling’s plethora of benefits include improving brain function, heart health, sleep quality, and mood. Plus, short bouts of exercise like hill repeats, HIIT workouts and other forms of interval training can help improve your performance, whether you’re chasing speed or endurance.
How to use these workouts: Each workout below details what to do, how long to do it for, and at what level. The level indicated is your RPE (rate of perceived exertion), so on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 is easier than a soft pedal while 10 is an all-out, eye-crossing effort. Perform one of these 30-minute spin workouts up to 3 or 4 times a week with an easy recovery day after.
1. Rock the Block
These sustained, tough efforts increase your calorie burn while building your tolerance to riding above your comfort level. Be sure to warm up and cool down.
2. Ramp Jump
Don’t worry, this isn’t about catching air; it’s about ramping up your effort to full throttle, keeping it in the red for just a little longer, bringing it back down to recover, and then doing it all over again. (Get a better understanding of zone training in this video.) These ramping intervals help you hang on in a pack when the pace gets peppery. Perform the set twice for a clean 30 minutes, or three times total for a 42-minute workout.
3. Flick the Switch
Lace up the gloves and get in the ring for this punchy workout. These repeated full-gas efforts suck up tons of energy and help raise your fitness ceiling so you can ride faster and longer, with less fatigue. Repeat the work effort for 15 rounds.
4. Old School HIIT
Tabatas are named after their originator Japanese scientist Dr. Izumi Tabata, who cooked up the interval scheme with his team of researchers at the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo in the 1990s. Tabatas involve doing 20 seconds of all-out effort, followed by 10 seconds of rest and repeating for eight rounds (or a total of four minutes). You’ll do that twice in this workout, with a five-minute recovery between. They’re designed to train both your aerobic and anaerobic systems in a very short amount of time.
5. Riding the Line
To improve your sustainable power, you need to ride that razor’s edge right below your threshold and then a hair over it to coax your body to be better and clearing lactate. These intervals will help. They’re easiest to do on a moderate climb, but you can also do in a big gear on flat roads or on the trainer. Go for six rounds of this workout.
