Just joined the community and excited to kick off my indoor training journey! I’ve heard a lot of great things about Wahoo X and I’m here to build consistency, boost my fitness, and make the most of every ride.
Still getting familiar with the app and all its features, so I’d really appreciate any tips from seasoned users — especially around structured workouts, syncing ride data, or setting up a solid training plan that actually sticks.
If there’s a go-to beginner workout or series that helped you get started, I’d love to hear about it!
Thanks in advance for the guidance — pumped to be part of the community and looking forward to learning from you all.
Firstly, if you want your plan to work well, you need to do a fitness test. Ideally you have a good go at Full Frontal. It’s harder than your average ramp test, but much more accurate and reliable. There are a couple of good fitness test preparation plans (Go to plans → cycling → Fitness Assessment Prep). One includes Full Monty which is a standard ramp test which can help you aim for the right numbers when you do Full Frontal.
Then, there are a few one week plans that can be good for looking around either in the Explore Systm section or “A week with”.
But ultimately if you want to get stronger, you need the longer 12 week plans. I usually just use the General Fitness ones unless I am aiming for a specific event in the future. I will sometimes muck around with the MTB plans or Gravel plans. There’s a lot there!
My advice is to include yoga and strength training. The yoga sessions are short, but feel good. If you are a road cyclist and don’t do strength training, you aren’t helping your bone density, so strength is not just about making your muscles strong, but also your bones!
One of the options is to either do 2 weeks hard, 1 week easy or 3 weeks hard, 1 week easy. There was a podcast a while back about this suggesting that older riders (50+) will get better improvements with 2:1, while younger riders are better with 3:1. So, that’s something to keep in mind.
If you haven’t done structured training before, you will probably see a significant improvement pretty quickly which is also good. I think my FTP went up by 10% after my first 12 weeks.
Yeah, I’d second that—get Full Frontal done early, it sets everything up way better than guessing numbers. And don’t skip the yoga/strength stuff, honestly it makes a difference for recovery and just feeling less beat up. I usually stick with the 2:1 blocks (I’m in the “over 50” club now, ha) and it feels sustainable. You know what? Even the little one-week tasters are worth a spin if you’re still figuring things out. But yeah—get that first 12-week plan in, you’ll notice the jump.
Re: this, I found it’s about the habits AROUND the plan that make it stick. I am most consistent when I make checking my SYSTM plan part of my evening routine (while my training is in the morning). When I’m at my best, at night I look at what’s planned for the next 1-2 days and mentally prepare myself for it. This makes it a lot more likely that I will actually do it on time, rather than letting my morning get away from me and then oops no time, guess I’ll do it tomorrow.
Also lately I had to re-learn to be realistic with my plans. Just because i used to do 8-10 hours a week of indoor cycling and then add strength and yoga on top, doesn’t mean that fits my life right now. Fewer workouts completed more consistently is better than a full schedule that I’m only doing half the time (even if technically I do the same hours, it FEELS worse to skip rides than to schedule and complete fewer).
