An on-the-bike warmup can be crucial to a good performance and is often the key to avoiding feeling like a sack of rocks during the first hard effort of a ride or a race. But knowing what kind or how much of a warm-up to do can quickly lead you down a bottomless sports science rabbit hole. Early on in my riding and racing life, warm-ups were something that I constantly struggled with until I started working with my first coach.
The simple answer to figuring out the perfect warm-up routine for any event is to start working with a coach and let them do the work for you. However, a coach might not be in the cards for every rider, so instead, let me give you the best advice I got from over ten years of racing, everything from 12-hour-long gravel events to 30-minute Zwift races.
Here's a simple way to think about planning a warmup, which works for me: the shorter and more intense the race is, the longer and harder your warm-up should be. In some rare cases, like a short sub-20-minute time trial, that might mean doing a longer warm-up than your actual race.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, getting ready for an all-day gravel event might require minimal warm-up. Instead, I might do some quick mobility exercises before rolling around on the bike near the start and simply spinning my legs easy for a few minutes. To take it one step further, consider how soon you will make a hard effort in your event. For shorter races like time trials, cyclocross, or a criterium, you often give maximum effort right off the line. So, a strenuous warm-up makes perfect sense ahead of such races. This is usually untrue for longer events like road or gravel races. The exception to that rule would be if the event starts at the bottom of a big hill or you plan to attack from the gun.
Over the years, I’ve tried many different kinds of warm-ups, some more complicated than others, and I’ve learned that keeping it simple is the best approach for me. To that end, all my warm-ups are variations on the intensity pyramid concept. This means I slowly ramp up my effort over a pre-determined time that I vary based on the event I’m warming up for.
I’ll start with roughly 10-20 minutes of easy spinning. This would be my endurance or zone 2 effort (think 2-4 level effort on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 being the maximum rate of perceived exertion or RPE). Then, I’ll bump my effort into my tempo or zone 3 (5-6 on a 1 to 10 RPE scale) for 5 to 10 minutes. If I’m getting ready for something that will take multiple hours, I would throw in a hard 30-second effort (8-9 on a 1 to 10 RPE scale) here and finish with 5-10 minutes of spinning very easy.
If I were instead prepping for a shorter, more intense event, I would add another block of between 3-5 minutes in my zone 4 or threshold zone (7-8 on a 1 to 10 RPE scale) before finishing off with a short hard effort and some easy spinning.
Ultimately, I’m using a very basic structure and adjusting my timing to suit the particular event I’m preparing for. Alternatively, I’m also adjusting the timing based on how much time I have before my start. A good way to start planning your warm-up is to work backward from your start time. If your race starts at 9 am, you want to be finished with your warm-up roughly 15-20 minutes before that to give yourself plenty of time to do any final checks and get to the start with time to spare. If the race is short and intense, plan for a longer warm-up of around 30 minutes, so in this instance, you should start warming up around 8:15 am.
Like everything else about racing and riding bikes, warming up gets easier with practice. You can practice warming up and experimenting with what works for you before a workout or a PR attempt on Strava. This will help take the guesswork out of it the next time you need to do a warm-up before a key event.
Test Editor Dan Chabanov got his start in cycling as a New York City bike messenger but quickly found his way into road and cyclocross racing, competing in professional cyclocross races from 2009 to 2019 and winning a Master’s National Championship title in 2018. Prior to joining Bicycling in 2021, Dan worked as part of the race organization for the Red Hook Crit, as a coach with EnduranceWERX, as well as a freelance writer and photographer.
