PERFORMANCE CYCLING CONDITIONING A NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO IMPROVING CYCLISTS www.performancecondition.com/cycling Periodization of Sprint Cycling with Considerations for Endurance Cyclists Clay Worthington, USA Cycling Assistant Coach Sprint Track, Colorado Springs, CO Clay spent two years as a scholarship coaching intern, an additional 6 months as assistant coach of sprint track for USAC, and is in his first season as Head Coach of Sprint Track. His responsibilities include implementation of training plans for sprint track at training sessions and perform necessary testing as required. He has also coached at multiple camps/trips (e.g., track en- durance, track sprint, road endurance, Southern and Palo Saeco Games-Trinidad). He is a USAC Level 1 Coach and a Cat 3 road and track licensed cyclist. He has a Masters of Science degree in kinesiology at Midwestern State University. BGN INT n cycling, the age-old question is quality versus quantity (i.e. intensity v. volume). If you look at the power numbers XTP there’s a wide degree for variance in power output. With women, the greatest power output for world-class athletes is be- MSR I tween 1300 and 1500 watts. With men, they are able to produce in the neighborhood of 2300 to 2500 watts (Figure 1). MTB Sprint athletes will try to produce these numbers on a regular basis—they try to practice at this maximum intensity. They do this from starts or as part of accelerations. With endurance athletes, if you put them on a bike at the end of a race the best any of them could produce would be anywhere from 1600 to 1700 watts. They will ride a time trail in the range of three to five hundred watts. The endurance cyclists who aren’t great sprinters will reach 1200 to 1300 watts at the sprint portion of a race. Under normal riding conditions they will be at 300-500 watts, which is 25 to 33 percent of their peak ability. A more meaningful way to look at these numbers is in relative terms (i.e. watts/kilogram of body weight). Reasonable estimates of power output capabilities of elite male track sprinters is 23-26 W/kg; elite female sprinters will produce slightly less at 20-22 W/kg. For more information on power output of sprint track cyclists see Martin et al. “Modeling sprint cycling using field-derived parameters and forward integration.” Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2006 Mar; 38(3) 592-7. For more information on power output of endurance cyclists see “Training and Racing with a Powermeter” by Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan. As a result of the above numbers we see that strength/power athletes are always trying to push to the limit attempting to make themselves better. It becomes a matter of seeing how hard they can ride for a given distance. Applying Strength/Power to an Endurance Event The first consideration when applying these concepts is to provide a reality check. Sprinters are born, not made—this is all part of genetics. Any application to endurance athletes will have this limitation. Certainly everyone can improve in many different areas of performance, but some people just aren’t sprinters. This relates back to physiological factors like fiber type. You can’t take a mature adult from 1200 to 1700 watts, it just isn’t possible. Further, body type is not as big a factor as it would seem, which means that the listed absolute wattages are best viewed as relative to an individual’s body size. There are many elite sprint cyclists who are not excessively large individuals (e.g. Michael Bourgain, 4th 2006 World Championships) and therefore don’t produce giant absolute watts; it is their relative wattage production that is important In contrast to this idea that sprinters are limited primarily by their ge- netics, endurance athletes are made with time and quality of work (Mujika presented information on this at the 2006 USAC Summit). The goal in endurance training is to provide the sustained effort to get over a hill and avoid getting dropped. Talented sprinters who can do this will tend to win more races than either those without this type of sprint talent or who can’t get over the hills at the speed of the peoloton. The tactics of power endurance athletes is to create space on the hills or into the wind where the less powerful athletes will struggle. If a coach has an athlete who he thinks needs to improve sprinting abilities, that athlete can benefit from sprint type training. This type of training can be performed in the gym or on the bike each has their particular advantages and disadvantages. This is the best way to develop some speed and pop. A goal of any endurance cyclist with good sprint abilities is can s/he get through the hard parts of a race and be in position at the finish to win. S/he can rely upon sprint training and abilities to win a race so long as they can produce sufficient sustained effort to remain in the peoloton at the critical points of a race. Figure 1 Strength/Power vs Endurance • Strength/Power – Always pushing limits – Quality, not quantity (typically 500m or less in training) – Strength is a major determinant • Gym work – Power is important • Explosive, quick, ballistic movements (1300-2600W) • Endurance: – Always within ability – Accumulation of quality (i.e., quantity) • Typically multiple minutes or more training – Strength is not a major determinant – Power is important • Sustainability (300-500W) Sequencing Power Development Sequencing of training refers to the continuum of development of physical characteristics based on the concept that physi- ological skills, abilities, and characteristics will affect other physiologic skills, abilities, and characteristics with an end result that performance is affected; e.g., increased strength = increased power. When looking at sequencing, it should be noted that these char- acteristic evolve in the environment of a weight room. Traditionally, strength/power athletes will start in the weight room with high volume training (10 reps), which is base building for future power development. This is done by increasing loads and bringing reps down to the two to five range. Once this is accomplished, jump and explosive power activities are added. On the bike, sequencing is a little different. The accepted sequence (continuum) is STRENGTH-ENDURANCE à STRENGTH à POWER à SPEED à SPEED-ENDURANCE. The last two characteristics can be switched depending on the event for which the athlete is being prepared or the particular strengths and weaknesses of each athlete. But the concept behind the listed sequence is that you can’t really work speed-endurance until you have brought on the speed. As one might infer from the name, speed-endurance is the ability to draw out the top end speed of an athlete. Strength Endurance for a track cyclist would be road riding at 80 to 100 rpm range, which will be a strength/endurance type of training even though the wattage is very low. Moving along the continuum is strength work. This is done by doing standing starts in a big gear, which brings down the rpm to 120-125 on the track. Effort will be in the range of 500-1000 meters depending on the event. Next, the athletes do accelerations in a bigger gear for a start trying to overcome a big resistance. As they move into power, this becomes much more race-specific using a smaller gear. In this case, they pop it training to work on the rate of force development. For speed, the important concept is over-speed training (100-200m efforts). This is done behind a motorbike or in pairs taking ad- vantage of the draft working in smaller gears to get the riders to generate more speed and pedaling efficiency with the power they have. Thus, this is neurological training. Finally, speed-endurance is longer efforts of motorpacing or longer efforts of speed (300- 600m). Again, the reason this can come at the end despite the increase in volume associated with the longer efforts is that at this time the athletes have fine-tuned the neurological ability to spin their legs quickly. Speed and power are independent of one another in track cycling terms. Power is acceleration while speed on a fixed gear is the ability to turn the necessary cadence. If one can’t keep the cadence, this results in losing the power one has. For endurance road cyclists it’s different because they are not limited by cadence; therefore, power is speed. If strength is so important, how does it relate? Strength/Power Transference Model This sequencing can be seen in the strength/power illustrated in Figure 2. This illustration shows the continuum from general strength to general power and the interrelationship of weight room work to on-bike training. For track cyclists, this is the essence of periodization. For sprint track cyclists, because they are working at the end of their range, as far as power is concerned, strength is very important and very much a limiter. To clarify, for someone to be naturally fast on a track bike, s/he doesn’t necessarily have to be strong but will need to be powerful. For example, take a junior male who doesn’t have a lot of strength (1RM squat of approximately 250 pounds; max power of 20-21 W/kg; best 200m 10.8) at a particular point in his/her career but has good speed. For that rider to move into the senior ranks and start getting higher speed levels with accelerations that are going to be competitive, s/he will have to increase strength.