Speed?

mattman51790 said:

How do I increase my speed? I got a good bike I ride a minimum of 14 miles a day and my crusing speed for 3 years has been 15mph. I dont know how to increase it. Do I spin more or put it in a higher gear to strengthen my legs or what?

Thanks,
Matt

Have you tried riding harder for as long as you can handle it every so often?

mattman51790 said:

... Do I ... put it in a higher gear to strengthen my legs or what?...

If you can walk up a flight of stairs, you have more than enough leg strength for fast cycling. Yeah, that's not intuitive when your legs start hurting at speed, but it's true. If you can regularly press on the pedals with 40 to 50 pounds per pedal stroke you have the pure "strength" to ride with the top racers. What you lack is the ability to continue doing that 90 to 100 times per minute for hours on end. What we lack as cyclists isn't strength(in the sense of peak force) but the abilility to continue supplying our muscles with fuel at a fast enough rate. IOW, what we lack is metabolic fitness or the ability to rapidly convert fats, sugars and oxygen to the ATP and ADP necessary to fuel our efforts and to produce power.

You'll develop that metabolic efficiency and sustainable power as Steve says, by doing some longer sustained efforts that get you breathing deeply and steadily and stress your comfort zone without totally wiping you out. The key is getting up to an intensity that requires concentration and forces deep steady breathing(exchanging a lot of O2 is a good sign that you're stressing your muscle's ability to process fuels) but is sustainable for 10, 20, 30 minutes or more in continuous unbroken stretches. Do that a few times a week and continue doing it for a couple of months and you'll see improvement and increased sustainable speeds on your rides. You don't have to go into this kind of training mode on each and every ride, but add some rides with focused training goals if you want to see progress.

Good luck,
-Dave

A different way of saying the same thing is that if you keep doing the same stuff all the time (i.e., keep riding the same way, the same speed) then nothing will change.

If you had been inactive for years and started really taking to the bike, you would find that you will make very rapid progress and get a lot faster in a short amount of time. Eventually though, you reach an equilibrium and you get comfortable and not much changes. Maybe you are pushing yourself by going longer and farther (which has value) but really not any faster. Guess what? You have to ride faster to ride faster. That implies pushing yourself a bit from time to time.

Good luck.

Thanks, I will try pushing myself harder

Matt

Search these forums for training ideas on how to build your engine. There's tons of stuff here if you can filter the wheat from the chaff.

Try to find a group of people to ride with that go faster than you.

And as an earlier poster said, if you want to go fast, you have to go fast.

Join a club with training rides, tagging along with those faster guys will make you ride faster.