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Sprinting For Success
In my last article, I described the outline of the base training period.
One aspect that I intentionally left out was sprinting. Sprint workouts
are a feature that can and should be part of your training year-round,
and they merit an article of their own. It's an aspect that many riders
neglect, or often do incorrectly if they do try to include them. Making
a well-designed sprint workout part of your weekly routine is crucial
for any cyclist who not only wants to increase their speed, but their
strength and power as well.
A sprint, like most efforts, consists of two important aspects: cardiovascular
and muscular. It's important to consider each aspect separately, and then
see how to combine them for maximum effectiveness. From the cardiovascular
standpoint, any interval that begins with a maximal effort will require
energy quickly. Your body gets that by using adenosine triphosphate (ATP)
as a fuel source. To accomplish this, a phosphate bond is broken, releasing
immediate energy. This ATP source is replenished by creatine phosphate
(CP) stored in the muscle. With this process, no lactic acid is produced,
and is said to be anaerobic and alactic. While this system provides energy
quickly, the source is limited. Your body can only do this for 8-15 seconds
before the creatine phosphate is depleted, and the effort becomes anaerobic
and lactic. Once the CP stores are gone for that effort, your body turns
to sugar for energy (known as glycolosis), and that's when the lactate
build up begins. When the effort is over, your body can replenish its
CP stores very quickly on its own, within minutes. You can see how important
it is to make sure that a proper sprint effort stays in the 8-15 second
range. Any longer than that and you're training a different energy system.
From the purely muscular standpoint, sprint workouts are the place to
build leg speed, pure strength, and the power that results when you combine
these two aspects. Many cyclists have made weight training part of their
preparation regimen; sprints are where you can do your weight lifting
on the bike, and in a sport specific way. Just as you would follow a lifting
program that consisted of adaptive, strength, and power periods, so too
can you take that approach on the road. The sprint workout not only helps
you with your basic sprinting skills, but can also aid your overall fitness
and ability to punch it out of corners, up hills, and when making attacks.
Over the course of a 50-lap, 4-corner criterium, you might make 200 small
sprints. It's not just about the dash to the finish line. Everyone needs
to be a sprinter, just to get to the end of the race.
To begin with, your sprint workout should come as the first day in a string
of 2 or 3 training days, and always after a rest day. Because it's your
maximal intensity day, it should happen when you're most rested, and before
you attempt any workouts of a lower intensity. You need to be fresh enough
to put 100% into each sprint, just as if you were doing a day of squats
and lunges in the gym. Typically, that means your sprint days will fall
on Tuesday and either Friday or Saturday. Tuesday will be your most important
day, with the Friday and Saturday sprint day being equally important if
there's no race, or secondarily, as a way to open up the day before an
event.
There are a number of different ways you can implement a sprint workout.
What you do will depend on what phase you're in, and what aspect of your
form you're trying to focus on. I'll detail each type of sprint I employ,
and when you would take that approach:
1. Speed:
Some of my clients call these "Sit and Spins." Early in the
season, when you're in your first 6-12 weeks of training, you want to
emphasize technique. You're training for neuromuscular adaptation, strengthening
of the tendons, and an increase in your body's ability to store, use and
replenish it's CP. To do this, begin your effort from a walking pace,
in the saddle, and in a gear that will take you 8-15 seconds to do 20-30
pedal strokes. Typically this will be the small chain ring, perhaps a
39 x 21-15, depending on your ability level. Burst into the effort (staying
seated the entire time), focusing on pulling up and exploding down onto
the pedals, and staying very square and rigid in the saddle with no rocking.
These should be done on a flat road. It should take you about 5 seconds
to get the gear up to speed, and the remainder of the time to spin it
out, staying on top of the gear. If you're weight training as part of
your program, these sprints should coincide with your adaptive or hypertrophy
phase.
2. Strength:
Once you've got enough training to move into the more extensive part of
your base period, you can begin to emphasize strength in your sprints.
The technique is the same as the previous example: in the saddle, starting
from a walking pace, for an 8-15 second sprint. The major difference is
that now you only want to complete 8-10 pedal strokes over the course
of that same time frame. You'll likely find yourself in the big ring;
anywhere from the 17-11, again depending on your level. This is very stressful
to your knees and back, and should be undertaken with extreme caution.
What's crucial here is that your form is impeccably strict to get maximum
benefit with minimal injury. The force you sprint with here must generate
from your core since that's what will hold you still in the saddle and
provide the resistance. If you find that you can't push a big enough gear
to get 8 pedal strokes in without failure, the weak link might be your
abs and back as much as your legs.
Another difference with these sprints is that you can do them on a slight
incline to keep the cadence and resistance consistent throughout the sprint.
It's not crucial, and you'll still get plenty of benefit from them if,
like me, you can't bear the boredom of doing sprint repeats in the same
spot. Again, if you're weight training, these sprints should coincide
with your strength phase.
3. Power:
Once you finish your base period and are moving into your real racing
season, you want to be able to combine what you've built in speed and
strength for a truly powerful sprint. In this period, you want to go back
and emphasize the acceleration aspect of the speed sprints, while combining
them with the high resistance of the strength sprints. These sprints can
be done out of the saddle now as part of the process of putting things
together for race day. Again, the time frame is 8-15 seconds, starting
from a walking pace, with a goal of 12-15 pedal strokes. Your gearing
will be similar to what you used in the strength phase, but now you should
accelerate all the way through the effort. These sprints coincide with
the power phase of a lifting program.
There are many ways to vary these types of sprints. If it's in-season,
and you feel like you need to go back and reemphasize a bit of strength
in your sprint, then you might find that shifting down as you do an out-of-the-saddle
sprint is helpful, and simulates a race situation well. You might want
to work on your ability to attack on a climb, so you could introduce some
occasional sprints into a longer tempo effort done while climbing. Perhaps
it's your acceleration or speed that turns out to be a weakness; in that
case adding some sit and spins to your routine will help. And if you're
doing your sprint workout on a Friday or Saturday before a race day, simply
to open up, you should almost always emphasize the speed. Keep the resistance
low unless the race is being used for training.
In all cases, the sprint itself lasts 8-15 seconds. Over the 45 seconds
that follow the sprint, you'll see your heart rate rise and fall as your
body tries to pay back its oxygen debt and recover. You should consider
that whole minute part of the interval, and be sure that there's 1-5 minutes
of rest between each interval. With that approach, the tightest your sprint
workout would ever be is 1 sprint every second minute. You can also group
your sprints into sets of 3 or 5 with a longer recovery period between
sets. Additionally, don't be overly concerned about how high your heart
rate gets. This is not an aerobic effort, and the heart rate increase
is a delayed reaction. You will never hit your max heart rate doing sprints
from rest in this manner, but that's not the intent. Instead, use the
number you see as a gauge to track your own consistency and freshness.
If you feel lousy and your heart rate is not going up to it's normal point
at 15 seconds after the sprint, then it might be time to call it a day.
How many sprints you do in a workout should be dependent on the quality
of the sprints. When you sense that you're no longer able to put out the
same wattage or hit the same speeds as the workout goes on, then again,
that might signal the end of the workout. I would expect most riders to
finish at least 5 sprints at the beginning of their program. Building
up to 30 or more in a workout is not as difficult as it sounds. Remember
the 200 sprints in a 50-lap race!
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