Hi whenever i ride with a group or just going solo, I find it hard to get my legs warmed up. During the first few kms of the ride my legs feel heavy and feels muscle pain even though I had a rest the previous day. So at the start I feel slugish, for me to be able to catch up and stay in the group im doing >150% of my FTP and after a few kms more I’ll get drop already because I’m burned already. But after that my legs are ok, but of course I’m not gonna catch those guys because if i do that im just like burning my candle. Hope you could give me some advise. Thanks.
You’re not the only one, warmups are well practiced for a reason.
Some suggested warmups:
1 Like
Do a warmup on the way to the group ride. You’ll need to find out what works for you as a warmup, but typically a gradual increase in power, and some short bursts are good. Get some rest/easy pedalling after, before you start the real ride.
Same with riding solo, if you feel it’s a problem, start your ride with a warm-up phase.
However, if your problem is that you really need to do 150% FTP to stay with the group, then they are just stronger than you, and no amount of warmup will help…
10 Likes
Same here. I had 3 different group rides that I regularly did with each starting at different spots, two 12 miles from my home and one 8 miles from my home. Riding to the starts of those worked well for me. It seemed like a decent warmup for me was a minimum of 5 miles of road riding or 15-20 minutes. More was better.
5 Likes
It’s a bit hard to pin down exactly what’s going on with this group ride.
- How long are you finding you’re having to average 150% for?
- What’s the expected duration of the bunch ride?
- Is it a lunchtime, early morning, evening, or weekend ride?
As splash says they may just be much, much faster. I’ll never forget when I got my 
handed to me on my first group ride in a new city. As I found out later it was the local drop ride. 
When I snooped strava later I saw that it took some of them less than half the time to climb the hill that I took. They were properly fast.
It’s reasonable to expect the legs to take 15 minutes or more to become properly engaged. I’m in my 40s & generally I find the first few minutes of the first interval in a sweetspot workout to feel quite a bit harder than the rest of that interval.
1 Like
I read it as OP getting dropped early before getting warmed up and then needs to hammer it to catch back up with the group.
I’m 50s and on my longer weekend rides it often takes me 30 minutes to have my legs feel really into it
2 Likes
Yeah, i guess im way way below their FTP. Usually before i join these rides, I check some of the participants data in Strava, so i have a basis whether I’ll be able to stick to these guys, but sometimes just by looking at the strava data is not that really realiable. For example on the same route im only looking at 2 data sets, ave speed and avg power. So if I see that I can do the avg, my thinking is that I’ll be able to hold on. Guess my approach isn’t efficient.
Do the ride leaders not make it clear what the expected ride pace range is for ride?