warm up

SBERRY:

Warm up by progressively raising pedal cadence and shifting into harder gears. At the end of 15 minutes or so, you should be cruising at around 80%-85% of max heart rate or higher. I like to warm up at least 30 minutes or more before a hard workout, but sometimes, time prohibits that.

After a few minutes of recovery, you can begin a structured workout of sprints, intervals, TT efforts, etc.

Cooling down is easy, just ride easy, don't worry about heart rate or cadence. The easier the better. It's almost impossible to cool down too slow or too easy. Shoot for at least 15 minutes here as well if time permits.

Good luck!!!

Same as J-MAT on the warm up, but take your HR upto the intensity at which you want to ride at be it 60% or 85%.

As a cool down you could do the warm up in reverse. Try not to get too cool/cold.

Just to clarify, you don't need any warm up at all if you are going to ride at 60% or even 70% of max hr. Low intensity aerobic rides are just that, low intensity rides. Just get on your bike and ride.

When riding that easy, the entire ride is a low-end "warmup."

Warmups are really only necessary when you will be engaged in high-intensity training like sprints, time trial efforts, intervals, etc.

Proper warmups ensure the muscles are up to proper temperature and that the precapillary spincters in the legs are fully open, allowing for maximum blood/oxygen delivery which will increase performance.

Precapillary spincters do not fully open unless they have been subjected to intense efforts prior to actual structured "work." Sometimes, the first interval is needed to fully open them.

For 60-70% or even higher, warmups are unecessary.