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Interval Training

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If you have been training for some time and know you are strong, but your training doesn’t seem to make you any faster then there are a couple of things you can do. Interval training is you best way forward and there is a few different methods of this very hard and effective training and so, here we will try to explain the why and how of “bike interval training”.

Power Training

Power training is what it says on the label, power training gives you more power, which will help you attack harder, climb faster and give you more all-round strength which in turn gives you more speed.

How it’s Done

First pick a hill, it is better to not be steep, a good hard climb that you can pedal on, not struggle or too easy that you will be spinning the pedals. This bicycle interval training can be used for different methods of training, firstly you can use as big a gear as you can manage and ride as hard as you can for a set distance, if you take this to its ultimate and ride hard enough you will be doing VO2 MAX intervals and performing interval aerobic training as you will be pushing yourself to your maximum or as close as your body and mind will allow.

Start with five intervals and using your heart rate monitor you can judge how hard you are trying. If you are reaching over 80% of your max heart rate then you are training properly, but your legs and lungs will be telling you this anyway!

If you want to find your heart rate max this is the method needed, but you need to warm up then do your hill interval as hard as you can without standing up on the pedals. You need to ride yourself to a standstill, 100%. If you are planning on doing this it’s much safer to take someone with you in case you have any problems with making this kind of effort, this is threshold interval.

If you are finding that five intervals are getting too easy then do more, be careful not to over do it. Power training can help in all forms of cycling, form the track to mountain biking and triathlon, not just road racing, without power you have nothing; power training can be the most productive form of cycle interval training.

Sprint Training

Sprint training intervals can be done in a few different ways; one of the best ways can be a little difficult for most of us. To do this you need a friend with a scooter or motorbike to help you get the speed and to emulate sprinting past another rider. You will need a flat road that doesn’t have much or any traffic. Your friend needs to take the speed up to just below your max speed, so that you can sprint past him at designated points, when you have finished your sprint the moto shouldn’t slow too much and then you have to make another effort to regain the back wheel of the motorbike again.

Without the help of a motorbike you can also train with a friend taking turns being the “lead-out man” and the other sprinting past. The disadvantage with this method is that as you both get tired the speed drops, this shouldn’t be a problem with a scooter or motorbike so the speed stays as high as you can keep it up.

Sprint training from a group is also great, but does add other problems of organization and safety, a group needs more room on the road, if you can find a closed circuit with a safe sprint straight, this would be ideal to have a fast training session with a sprint at the end of every lap, being careful not to get too enthusiastic and switching each other all over the road. An industrial center after everyone has gone home is perfect as long as there is not a security operative on duty.

Speed Training

All of the above methods of interval training on the bike will help to make you faster and give you more speed. If you are intending to ride time trials or triathlons where you could be riding on your own, then there is a very good system to improve your solo riding speed.

Find a length of road that is flat and a little more than a mile in length, mark out a quarter of a mile, a half of a mile and a mile distances, then follow this routine, if you find you are tired or you pulse is getting too high, then stop and go home and have a rest.

• 4 times quarter mile intervals

• 2 times half mile intervals

• 1 times mile intervals

• 2 times half mile intervals

• 4 times quarter mile intervals

This can be made harder by upping the intervals so that eventually you could (if possible) be doing 4 of each interval. If you can manage all this then you need to look at your speed and heart rate, are they high enough? Maybe you are not training hard enough and need to put more into it, after a session of these intervals you should not be feeling fresh!

This is a very hard training session and not to be taken lightly, if you feel you are not up to it, or you are not riding any faster than you would be normally then stop. This regime will help to raise your speed for any distance of time trial. If you want to race at 25 mph or faster, then you have to train at that speed or faster. There is no point training at 20 mph and then expect to be able to race 5 mph faster. Train at race speed (or better faster) over short distances then your body will be able to race at a higher speed over longer distances when it is required.

Training behind a scooter or motorbike is one of the best ways to raise your speed, as we have discussed before with this form of training you have to be very careful where you do this, a quiet road, preferably without and steep climbs or sharp corners. Riding behind a motorbike improves your speed, your bike handling technique and you’re drafting abilities.

Endurance Training

Endurance interval training is easier to organize either in a group or solo. First when training on your own, any route that you would normally use, no matter the distance, long or short, look ahead for lamp posts, post boxes, houses etc. this is easier in the countryside where there are less of these obvious points. Ride as hard as you can between, say a post box and the next street light and then rest between the next piece of pavement furniture and then ride as fast as you can between the next. This is great training for road racing as you don’t know how long you will get to rest between intervals or how long the interval will be, much like a road race scenario. To make this work you have to ride as hard as you can, not holding anything back because you know how far you will be riding, you need to be giving everything you have. If it gets too much just finish the ride at a steady pace.

With a group you have a choice of how you do interval training on the bike, the standard method of following the rider in front of you to the front of the group then moving over to return to the back and then start again moving forward again. This is easy when you are behind another rider and the hard work is done when you are on the front of the group.

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The harder method is to do a similar thing with a group, four riders is probably the best amount for this form of training. Ride in a line and instead of riding in a circle, the rider at the back has ride up to the front to take his turn at the front. This forces him to ride faster than the others to get to the front and when he gets there has to keep the pace high to make the next rider coming up from the back have to suffer and try his hardest. This is one of the hardest training methods and the more riders there are the harder it is as you have further to go to get to the front.

Our Conclusions

Interval training conditions the body to ride faster, if you want to race faster over a certain distance then take that distance and split it up into sections and ride as fast as you can over those sections and have some rest sections. Use your HRM to tell if you are training efficiently and ride hard and fast and you will improve.

Copyright 2010 CyclingMind