What if I told you that riding slow is actually the secret sauce to riding fast? I know that sounds crazy, and in a world obsessed with speed and suffering, the idea that your coffee shop spin could make you a better rider sounds completely counterintuitive. But stick with me, and I promise you're going to see why the idea of going slow to go fast isn't just a catchy motto. It's backed by science and it's trusted by the world's top coaches. Here's a jaw-dropping statistic. Most professional cyclists spend 80 to 90% of their training time at low intensity. The world's best riders, the best guys on the planet, devote the bulk of their time in the saddle to what many amateurs would dismiss as junk miles. Estana head coach Vasilus Anastopoulos. He was on the podcast with me recently and he talked about zone one, like the easiest of the easy riding and he told me how that's become a cornerstone of pro training at the moment. So, in today's episode, we're unpacking how slow rides actually make you faster. We'll dive into the surprising physiology of low inensity training, how it supercharges your aerobic engine, boosts your fat burning capabilities, and builds your endurance. We'll share lessons that I've learned from legends in endurance physiology. Professor Steven Sailor, Dan Lurang, Olaf Buu, Vasilla Sanostopolis, Dr. Dr. Christian Schrot. We'll bust the myth that more intensity equals more progress and show you how doing less can actually give you more. And of course, I'll give you practical tips on how you can apply these methods into your own training. Whether you're just getting started or you're a seasoned, maybe even full-time bike rider. By the end of this video, you'll understand why sometimes the best way to get faster in the bike is to take your foot off the gas. This video is going to be an eye openener. So, make sure you hit that like button right now before you forget. and let's jump in. All right, let's start with the big question. How on earth can slow miles make you faster? To answer that, we need to look under the hood at what happens in your body during those long easy rides. We're talking about zone one, zone 2 training, the low intensity conversational paced efforts. You might have heard this called base training. And it's called base training for good reason. It forms the base of your fitness pyramid. And without a solid base, the peak of your fitness, that's your speed, your power, those race effort performances, they can't stand tall. When you ride at a slow, steady pace, something fascinating actually happens in your muscles. Instead of relying on those explosive, short-term fibers, the ones you use in sprints or highintensity efforts, your body taps into type one muscle fibers, also known as slow twitch muscle fibers. These fibers are like your body's built-in endurance engines. They're incredibly efficient and they can fire for hours without fatiguing easily. Why exactly does working these slow twitch muscle fibers at low intensity make you faster in the long run? That's where it gets interesting. So, let's dive in. The first thing low inensity training does is to give your mitochondria, the famous powerhouses of your cells, a huge upgrade. Think of your mitochondria as mini power plants inside your muscles, producing energy from the oxygen you breathe and the fuel you eat. When you spend more time riding slowly, your body not only creates more mitochondria, it also makes them far more efficient. This is like upgrading your engine from a small four cylinder engine to a powerful V8 engine. With more mitochondria in action, your muscles generate more energy far more efficiently, allowing you to ride longer and faster before fatigue sets in. But there's even more happening beneath the surface on those easy rides. Your body also starts building an extensive network of tiny blood vessels known as capillaries. Imagine these capillaries as highways that deliver oxygenrich blood straight to your muscles. The more highways you have, the better the oxygen and nutrients reach your muscles, fueling your endurance and speeding your recovery. Recent research published in the sports medicine. It highlighted this very point showing that steady lowintensity endurance rides significantly increased the number of capillaries far more effectively than highintensity training alone. In essence, those relaxed rides, the easy rides, they're quietly laying a vital infrastructure to help you ride stronger for longer. Now, another powerful adaptation that occurs in easy rides, the zone one, zone two, is the transformation of your metabolism. Changing the rate at which you use fat as a fuel source.
During slow rides, you train your body to maximize the use of fat as a primary fuel source, a concept known as fat oxidation. As you regularly spend time riding in this zone, your body learns to burn fat more efficiently. The benefit that means you can conserve your precious carbohydrate stores that glycogen for those crucial highintensity moments like a sprint finish or a race deciding effort. Another fascinating process that happens when you slow down. It relates to improved lactate clearance. This is connected to a key metric called lactate threshold one. You might hear people saying hear people saying LT1 or your aerobic threshold. Essentially, LT1 is the intensity at which lactate, often misunderstood as merely waste, begins to rise slightly above resting levels. Spending plenty of time riding just below or around this threshold, gradually shifts it upwards. In practical terms, this means you'll be able to ride at higher speeds or power outputs without accumulating fatigue. This adaptation occurs because those highly efficient slow twitch fibers and newly created mitochondria become extremely efficient at consuming lactate as fuel. In other words, your muscles actually recycle lactate, preventing that familiar burning sensation from kicking in prematurely. As your LT1 shifts and it moves closer to your lactate threshold too, your LT2, you're effectively raising the baseline of your fitness, enabling faster riding, staying more comfortable aerobically for longer. Perhaps one of the greatest yet underrated benefits of slow, steady rides is their gentle impact on your body. Unlike going out and smashing yourself, long and easy rides, they produce significantly less neuromuscular stress and hormonal fatigue. like a two-hour easy spin. It doesn't leave you on the couch scrolling Instagram shattered for the rest of the day in the same way that a two two-hour interval training or a group ride might. While that might seem obvious, the implications for your training consistency are profound. The Estonic coach Vacillus Anastopoulos told me the aim of endurance rides should be to finish tired but not completely exhausted. Why? Because it allows you to repeat it again tomorrow and the day after that. That consistent sustainable workload is precisely what leads to long-term fitness gains. Professor Steven Syler, who pioneered the 8020 training principle, he explained it perfectly when he said, "Your floor matters more than your ceiling." In other words, real progress doesn't come from a single epic training session. It comes from being consistent, stringing together sessions over weeks, months, and even years. Slow, steady rides keep you in the game. They prevent burnout. They prevent overtraining and you don't get injured or sick as much. So to put this simply, slow, easy rides trigger a powerful chain reaction of positive physiological adaptations. You're building more efficient mitochondria and extensive networks of capillaries. You're teaching your body to burn fat more effectively and you're raising your lactate threshold. You're also enhancing your body's capacity to handle consistent training. Think of these slow rides as constructing the foundation of a skyscraper. Sure, this isn't flashy work doing the foundation, and it might not feel as exciting as highintensity intervals, but without this strong foundation, you simply won't reach those heights that you're capable of as an athlete. That was heavy. So, let me share a quick personal story with you here because I haven't always been a disciple in this church of easy zone one, zone two rides. In my early cycling days, I did what a lot of amateurs do. Every ride was a hammerfest, group ride on Tuesday, out the door, full gas. Maybe I was meant to do an easy ride on Wednesday, but it somehow turns into a mini race because a buddy showed up and we half wheel each other. Weekend meant to be a chill ride, but it ends up being a town science sprint to see who pays for the scones going into every single town. I was constantly riding what the coaches call that gray zone, that moderately hard intensity that isn't easy enough to recover, but isn't hard enough to really push the envelope on getting adaptations. And guess what? Sure, I got better initially because I was riding a lot, but I hit a plateau. I was exhausted and my numbers plateaued. They weren't improving at all. Does this sound familiar? Be honest. Looking back now, I can see why this was all wrong. Why I took a bad wrong turn on this podcast. I now have the privilege of chatting with some worldclass coaches. I interviewed Dr. Dr. Christian Schrot recently. He's the performance coach for Jacua and he explained that many amateurs fall into this trap of wanting every single session to feel intense, thinking that intensity equals progress.