16th
Speed work.
I’ve neglected the speed skill stuff this week for various reasons. What I usually do is each night do slow single leg reps with max resistance in the 53/12. I’m talking as slow as you can do while staying in contact with the palls in your freewheel. This is very similar to the technique we used in Karate, your body learns the absolutely correct and best path to take to perform the action in the most efficient manner. Efficiency is your ultimate aim as a 5% improvement in efficiency is just as good as a 5% increase in power. After that, a few blasts up to a high rpm get the body used to doing the efficient movement quickly.The aim here is to allow you to accelerate quickly, like those mini sprints out of the corners in a crit, the initial jump when someone attacks and you have to respond etc. The whole workout only takes 20 minutes or so and leaves you time to do endurance work and stretching as well.
Well as I said I’ve neglected it this week but I wanted to see where I was and how this may have affected me, so I tried a few 30 second bursts at a comfortably high cadence (not near to the out of control bouncing phase). A section of the results are below, with each sprint looking the same over the entire workout. The range was around 143-150rpm you can see my heart rate got up quick to support the effort and peaked around 168bpm. Recovery took almost 3 minutes which sounds like a long time to me but I’ve nothing to compare it too.
I’ll try this again in 4 weeks and see what it looks like then. It’s definitely not something I want to do a lot of at this time of year, getting my HR up that high is not part of the plan.
