Tour de France - Who is watching it?

[Physiobase]

Hi guys, as a keen cycling enthusiast (nowadays more mountain biking than road cycling) I am glued to the daily Tour de France and am finding myself doing about 4 rides a week as a result. Next weekend it will even be a ride in France.

Anyway I have been spinning 2-3 x a week to get my baseline fitness up and build on my anaerobic capacity. I feel this has been helping me with the anaerobic situations I get myself in on not so short steep climbs on the MTB. I am finally finding that on the longer weekend rides and I am getting up most of the hills that I used to have to walk up. Some tell me road riding will really help my mountain biking even further, others that MTB will help with road riding hills. If you had a choice what would be a useful concept for cross-training to improve my hills?

What are your experiences, tips and ideas? I am keen to be able to do 150k on the road with out a problem but the focus would be on mastering those off road hills he in the UK while it is dry. Afterall it becomes a huge challenge as soon as the rain begins to fall and the whole of England becomes one large bog.

Any and all tips welcome 8o

Hard hill riding and or low rep/high intensity strength training in gym
You need power and you won't develop power with spinning. Marj

[Physiobase]

Thanks Marj. I have actually been uping the resistance load consistently in spinning as we do a lot of hill grinding in my class, not just fast cadence work. I agree that the high cadence thing doesn't help with pure power and so like to think of the class often as churning butter rather than whipping cream.