Sprint workouts

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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.

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!

Adam Hodges Myerson is a cycling coach, race promoter, team manager, and USCF category 1 racer. His company is called Cycle-Smart, and he can be reached at amyerson@aol.com. He lives in Northampton, Mass. with his wife, Allison, and their two cats Birdie and Marie.