Beginner training question, risk of doing too much?

Running has many more "guidelines" about increasing mileage because it's much easier to injure yourself running. Somebody who has never run more than 40 miles in a week jumping to a 100 mile week is more likely to get injured. No matter how easy you run those miles, the wear on your body (joints, bones, and other injury prone areas) is significantly more than you're used to. Additionally, extremely long distance runs (3+ hours or 30+ miles) take serious attention and care for your body to attempt even once.

For biking, this is not the case. If you have a good fitting bike, your mileage can jump around as much as you want. At any point in time you should be able to attempt a century ride or however far you can ride in 8 hours without expecting to get injured. Your legs will be extremely exhausted. Core, back, and stabilizing muscles might be sore from the extra work as well. The ride will probably be very slow. But, you wouldn't expect to be injured like you might expect if you attempted a 40 mile run after never running more than 8 miles at once.

I would certainly still recommend building up to longer rides. Get some good 10-20 mile rides in and make sure the bike fit feels good, then work your way through 40, 50, 60, etc mile rides getting a feel for your speed on the bike and practicing eating and drinking while riding.

The most basic plans (talking old school here) have a 10% increase in either time or mileage per week. They usually have a rest week every 4-6 weeks. After 8-12 weeks, you'll probably change your focus to intensity or maintenance since you won't have the time to continue to increase the time or mileage.

As for a starting point, maybe choose 3 days a week to start (but feel free to do more or less).

It's not the mileage that does you in, it's the fit. Relatively small miscalibrations in seat position, Q-factor, pedal float, stack height, control positions, and the like can lead to joint pain.

If you feel fine, ride as far as you want. Just keep tabs on what starts to bother you and if you're adopting bad habits to compensate for it.

In my experience, most injuries will be due to poor bike fit. It's a whole lot harder to hurt yourself riding too much compared to running too much.

I've never met someone who actually follows or suggests any sort of 10% guideline for riding. If nothing else, a 10% increase is generally going to be incredibly trivial. It makes sense for running, and I'm definitely very conservative when increasing my running mileage, but for riding that's really tiny percentage.

Definitely, with any new sport your body is working in ways it's not used too so I would reccomend slowly scaling up the duration and intensity of your rides. The last thing you want to do is go too fast too soon and pick up a niggle which might last weeks or longer.

Your body will let you know when you are doing too much, the difficulty is knowing how to treat it.

If you've got a good fitness level from running, you'll probably be able to do more miles than somebody who is starting from square one. Your butt will probably tire before your legs do!

I'd suggest taking a long day to see what your baseline distance/pace is. Take a few hours to ride around, bring some snacks for your breaks, and ride at varied speeds until your legs get a bit sore. Then you can use the "add 10%" by time or distance from that starting point.

There are 3 aspects you can increase or decrease with running or cycling

Frequency - how often you ride,
Volume - how long your rides are and
Intensity - how much effort you put in

Clearly no one can "keep riding as much as I want" in that context.

Albeit if you ride every day at a slow pace then you may well be fine and not get fatigued.

It's really down to what your current level of fitness is, and what your goals are. It's the hard work + recovery that makes you fitter, so if you don't feel like the rides are hard they are probably not making you that much fitter - although not all training has to be "maximum attack" and perhaps 80% in some training methodologies can be easy cycling. The other 20% is usually very hard though, intervals and so on.

But, try pedalling harder or riding further, I'm sure you'll find a pace where it starts to hurt or a distance where you are whacked.

Not just a question of injury, do you not need rest days to help build muscle? I try to avoid more than 3-4 days in a row without a break and always rest before a century.

you're probably younger than me, so this will affect you less, but it's a question of degree, rather than being immune...

you can certainly overtrain. the result is (generalising) constantly aching legs, an elevated rest pulse, and "the bleaghs". to avoid this, keep a track of your pulse when you wake on a morning - it should be pretty constant (and even decreasing as you train). if it's consistently higher than normal (say, 10%) then try taking a day or two off and seeing if it comes back down (of cousre, there are other reasons for an elevated pulse - you may be slightly ill, for example).

i assume that continue to push yourself when you are overtraining could have bad consequences. you certainly feel bad and don't improve much.

I think in this case it's important to distinguish between "riding" and "training". If you're just out riding, then you can ride as much as you want, as long as you aren't riding poorly (described in many other posts).

The key difference here is that "training" involves deliberately putting stress on your cardiovascular system and/or energy systems. If done correctly, then putting ENOUGH stress on your body to improve your performance will REQUIRE that you take days off to recover. So, if you go out and do FTP or VO2max intervals, or over-geared workouts, or sprint intervals, if you do them correctly, you should absolutely take time to recover.

This is where something like TrainingPeaks is super useful. You can keep track of your fatigue levels and correlate them to what you've been doing, so you can plan recovery days. If you aren't doing it already, you need to seriously consider using software to track your training.

If your bike fits you well, and you're not getting totally aggro while you ride, you could ride every day for as long as you want and you'd probably be just fine. Cycling is not a particularly intense weight bearing exercise – that's what makes it so special.

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