Planning a route with varying terrain is perfect for all around conditioning, giving you a taste of the hills and flat whilst providing more than one area to focus on during the ride.

Loops of this nature often make up the majority of your training and can, in some respect, offer the best return on your time in the saddle as you’ll be using a whole host of riding positions, techniques and muscle groups throughout the workout.

Depending on what you’re specifically training for, the trick to getting the most out of a ride like this is to know where to push and where to recover so that you can do the bits you want to do hard and still go the distance.

The good thing here is that even if you are limited on your selection of roads, you’re able to get a number of different training sessions done from one circuit.

For example you may focus on speed and the flatter sections of the route on one day and hills on the next. Ride the circuit in the opposite direction and it’ll feel completely different again.

Sometimes it’s just about being a little creative to help keep your ride fresh.