MTB Workouts: 7 Proven Training Sessions
Making sure you’re using the best MTB workouts in your training program is one of the fundamentals to get right if you’re looking to improve your fitness and race performance ability.
But how do you know which sessions are likely to be effective?
Well, to try and help you avoid wasting time through trial and error, we’ve put together 7 essential sessions you can use to build an effective training program to improve your MTB fitness.
We’ve seen these training sessions work time and again to win national and international competitions in athletes we’ve directly coached, but as a bonus, we’ve also included real-world examples of the world’s fastest pro MTB athletes performing the workouts too.
So with that, let’s get into the first session…
1: Long Endurance Ride
As is the case with many cycling disciplines, long duration, steady-intensity “endurance” rides are a cornerstone session for mountain bike riders and racers. These rides can be 2-5 hours+ in duration and can be performed on or off-road.
The goal is to spend a sustained amount of time working the Type I (slow twitch) muscles fibres, increasing their oxidative capacity and fatigue resistance.
Doing so will aid in making you more efficient (for instance, able to stay burning your abundant fat stores for longer/at higher intensities rather than drawing significantly on limited glycogen stores) and also able to mentally handle long duration rides, which again can impact fatigue resistance by reducing impairments in motor unit drive.
A great example of a pro MTBer performing such a session can been seen in Mathieu Van Der Poel’s 5H ride in the Italian mountains here:
📝 Note that the intensity need not (and should not) be high - Van Der Poel rode at an average power just 204W, which in relative intensity terms is very low for a rider of his level (less than 50% of his threshold power, or what he could sustain for 40-60 minutes, give or take).
The key takeaway is to prioritise duration in these types of rides over intensity.
By completing these endurance rides regularly, you’ll be able to build the aerobic foundation needed to support the more MTB-specific, high intensity training you’ll also need to include in your plan.
2: Start Sprint Drills
If you’re a competitive athlete, then you’re likely aware that one of the most critical points in a MTB race is the start.
This is key: whilst a good start won’t ensure you win the race, a bad start can easily extinguish any chance of a victory!
There are a couple of elements to a race start that should be trained so that you can be sure you have the best chance of getting off the line cleanly:
The first is clipping into the pedal fast from a standing position.
Next, is the immediate sprint to rapidly get up to speed.
Then comes the sustained high intensity effort (often with intermittent surges/sprints within this effort) as you battle for a good position before the first lap starts.
All three of these elements can be worked on at once by including dedicated start efforts into a ride.
📝 To perform these, pull up on a gravel road or trail and unclip, standing as if would at the beginning of a race. Have a friend count you down (or count yourself down if your buddy-less) and aim to clip in and sprint hard for 5-10 seconds. The sprint doesn’t need to be totally all-out, but should be close.
After the sprint, settle into a hard effort at or just above your threshold power/HR, and ride for a further 2-3 minutes, surging up any steeper gradients you might encounter, but equally feeling free to coast around tight corners, over rocks etc.
These specific blocks nicely blend a technique-based training session with a productive workout from a physiological standpoint, since the sprint and subsequent sustained effort will help to develop your neuromuscular power (i.e. the ability for your brain to recruit a lot of muscle fibres quickly) and your VO2max and anaerobic capacity.
There’s a perfect demonstration of this workout in action by 2022 MTB XCO World Champion Evie Richards on her Instagram account here.
3: “Over-Under” Intervals
One of the key parameters that separate the top performers in MTB XCO, marathon etc is their threshold power output. The higher their FTP (Functional Threshold Power), Critical Power and lactate threshold is, the greater chance they have of coming out on top.
This means that boosting your threshold power should be a major priority for an MTB rider or racer looking to get faster.
Threshold power can be improved by a number of different types of training, including the long endurance ride mentioned above (in fact, this is one of the best means of improving threshold power!).
From the standpoint of increasing the lactate threshold, “over-under” style interval blocks can be extremely effective. This is where you ride slightly over your threshold for a period of time (e.g. 1 minute) and then drop slightly below your threshold (e.g. for 2 minutes). This is repeated numerous times within a single block (e.g. 3-4 cycles of this over-under pattern making up a block of 9-12 minutes) with workouts typically featuring 2-3 of these blocks separated by recovery intervals.
The idea, from a lactate perspective, is to force an accumulation of lactate in the blood when riding over threshold, and then training the body to move this lactate to other working muscles that can use it as a fuel. This then has the dual purpose of decreasing fatigue (since lactate accumulation is associated with fatigue) and providing a great fuel source to other muscle tissue that have the capacity to use it.
In our experience, the workout design develops the threshold power better than simply riding right at threshold power, though doing so can help with “tolerance” and familiarity with this hard yet sustainable effort level.
For MTB riders and racers in particular, these over-under style intervals offer high specificity to the demands of hard MTB riding, since you’re often performing long sustained efforts that see you going above threshold for short periods (e.g surging up steeper gradients) and then trying to maintain speed whilst seeking partial recover (on flatter portions of a course or route, for example).
A good example of this can be seen towards the start of World Cup podium regular Ondrej Cink’s “criss-cross” session here.
4: Technical Repeats
MTB trails and race courses continue to get more and more technically demanding as bike technology becomes ever-more capable. This means that how adept you are at riding corners, rock gardens, jumps and drops has an even bigger impact on your ability to cover ground as fast as possible.
To improve your technical ability specifically, more time on the MTB and riding technical trails is a good place to start. Technical sections can easily be integrated into other training sessions like the long duration endurance rides mentioned previously.
However, to really hone your skills in this area, performing dedicated repeats of technical features can ramp up your rate of improvement dramatically. To do so, try to find a challenging section of trail, and create a loop where you can hit it over and over again (e.g. a brief downhill section with a short climb back up).
Try to learn from each repeat and analyse where you can take a better line, stay off the brakes and change your body position to improve your speed and flow.
Once you get the hang of the common types of features you’ll encounter on a ride or in a race, you can practice hitting them with a bit of fatigue already present, e.g. by sprinting up the hill in your loop. This can help to train your ability to focus intently on the trail even when you’re in the heat of a race or at the end of a longer ride.
One top tip here is to constantly be trying to look further down the trail and spot any obstacles or changes in the trail as early as possible, whilst at the same time training your peripheral vision to register obstacles in the more immediate vicinity.
5: VO2max Intervals
Alongside the need for a high threshold power, the other key performance determinant in MTB XCO racing in particular is having a high relative VO2max, or in other words having a huge capacity to deliver oxygen to the working muscles during high intensity riding in relation to body weight.
VO2max-focused intervals then should be a staple part of a MTB training program, and will benefit enduro racers, longer distance “marathon” athletes and general trail riders too.
There are multiple variations of workouts that can be used to train the VO2max, and some are more complicated than others. A fairly straightforward but effective means of driving up the VO2 and achieving the high heart rates you should try to elicit during such workouts are interval repeats of 3-4 minutes.
These are performed at a level that’s above your threshold power and result in about an 8/10 rating on the RPE or “Rating of Perceived Exertion” scale. The intervals are best performed on climbs with a medium-steep gradient, where these can be performed on the road for a more consistent surface, or off-road for greater MTB specificity.
📝 Aim to complete 3-6x 3-4 minute intervals, being careful not to over-pace the first few. In fact, it’s good practice to ensure you warm up well for such intensive sessions and ease your way into the first effort so as not to immediately draw down the highly limited intramuscular energy sources like phosphocreatine.
Multiple World Champion, Olympic Champion and World Cup overall winner Nino Schurter uses these exact intervals as part of his MTB training program and talks about them in this video:
6: Maximal “Capacity” Efforts
In the later stages of the preparation towards a key event on your calendar (be it a race, a trip away etc), working on your “top end” fitness will help put the proverbial cherry on top of the cake that your endurance rides, sustained intervals and technical training has created.
Just as with many of the other suggested workouts here, training sessions which work on your anaerobic capacity (or W’ in critical power terms) can be highly structured and feature a set of repeats of a precise duration and a specified number of repeats.
However, straightforward “maximal” efforts (such as those you might perform if you were chasing a KOM/QOM on Strava) where you ride as hard as you can over a particular section of road or trail (or for a specific duration) can be extremely effective, even when the total volume of high intensity you’ll accrue is relatively low.
To perform these kinds of efforts, choose a hill that is long enough for the effort length you want to perform, where you’ll want a medium-steep gradient so that you don’t pick up too much speed and spin out, and have something to push against.
Then, build up quickly to a hard effort that you can sustain throughout the length of the effort, but only just. You don’t necessarily want to start these efforts with the hardest sprint you can possibly do, since 45-60 seconds into an effort, you may well be struggling to pedal. Instead, you want to get up to the highest power output you can consistently hold for the duration, e.g. ~2 minutes.
Such a session can be seen used by 2016 Olympic MTB XC Champion from the Rio de Janeiro games Jenny Rissveds, where she performs 5x high power efforts that reach upwards of 600W!
7: Easy Recovery Spins
Finally then, another vital training session that should be part of any MTB training program is the easy recovery spin.
It’s easy to forget that challenging sessions that impose a stress on the body actually reduce performance and increase fatigue in the short term, and it is the body’s super-compensation response to this stress that results in an elevated level of fitness. However, this only happens when the body is given a break from stress and can recover sufficiently.
Whilst passive rest (think lounging on the sofa all day) is very effective, active recovery has its own set of benefits that in most cases can help accelerate the speed of recovery and allow you to train hard again sooner. This is important, as some of the fundamentals of reaching a high performance level are consistency and frequency.
Far from being simply advantageous in the physical domain, low-stress recovery spins are also very useful mentally too, helping you to emotionally relax and simply enjoy riding the mountain bike without pressure to achieve set power or heart rate numbers.
📝 For a good recovery ride, keep the intensity low and the duration relatively short, where 45-mins to 90-mins is a good ride length for most. Try to avoid routes that feature a great deal of steep climbing terrain, since this will inevitably force you to ride harder than is ideal on this type of ride.
If you’re lucky enough to own one, an e-bike can be the perfect bike for this part of your training! They’ll allow you to get up steep terrain whilst keeping the intensity low, and can open up the possibility of performing repeated downhill runs, where the bike can virtually “shuttle” you back up the hill! This can really ramp up the productivity of a recovery ride, by allowing you to work on technical skills at the same time as resting. A number of pro athletes are already using this hack!
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The workouts included above are admittedly exclusively on-the-bike sessions since this is the scope of this post, but a key training modality that’s imperative for overall power and stability on the bike is strength training.
Here are some resources to help you learn more about strength training specifically for MTB athletes:
Scientific Literature:
Strength Training for Endurance Athletes: Theory to Practice
The Effect of Strength Training on Performance in Endurance Athletes
Optimizing strength training for running and cycling endurance performance: A review
Websites:
Summary
Fingers crossed this post was helpful for you and gives you a selection of proven workouts to try out in your own training. Understand that there are many variations possible with each session here, and there is no need to outright copy the exact session design explained here. Feel free to get creative and adapt sessions to suit your personal likes and limiters.
For a whole host of structured workouts in both power and HR formats, we recommend checking out our Complete Workout Library.
If you’re at all interested in looking under the hood a bit more and getting to grips specifically with the physiology of cycling, we have our Cycling Physiology Guide for that too.
Finally, we have ready-to-ride MTB training plans available, so be sure to take a look if you’re in search of a program.
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