Tuesday Training Tips for Competitive Cyclists

Video Transcript

"SAL COLLURA: So, Tuesday I like to think of as a speed workout or sprint workout. So, if you can ride with other people, that's great. Sprint workouts by yourself are hard, but with other people it's easy 'cause there's always somebody out there who can beat you. So let's call that a 2-1/2- to 3-hour ride, and what I like to do is sprint and recover. So if you can find fairly flat course, a really popular thing among cyclists is to sprint for "stop ahead" signs. So before an intersection there's a "stop ahead" sign, you sprint for that. And what I'd like to see you do on that is five, six, maybe seven sprints with a recovery in between. So let's say you're sprinting for--we'll call it a quarter mile because there'll be a little bit of maybe a lead-out coming up to that, but you've got maybe 200 or 300 meters of really hard sprinting. Okay, then you're going to need a couple of miles to recover and then you're going to go hard again. And what that does is help build up your top-end speed, and if you're just going at that top-end speed constantly, you're not going to improve it. But if you keep coming up to it and then recovering and then coming up to it again, you're going to get those higher speeds, and it should be a pretty big gear when you're ready for it. I like to sprint in a 53/11 and that's a huge gear, but when you're going between 30 and 40 miles an hour, you need that kind of gear to get that kind of speed."