Whether you’re going after a Strava segment or just sprinting to be first in line at the café stop. Looking to make a breakaway in a road race, or riding for the win at your next crit. There are plenty of scenarios in cycling where having a strong sprint can come in handy.
But if you’re a bit of an endurance diesel engine, knowing where to start to improve your top end cycling speed can feel a bit overwhelming. To help you build those sprint legs, we’re bringing you our pick of the best workouts on ROUVY that’ll have you surging away from the bunch and attacking like a champ in no time.
Neuromuscular | Increase your FTP with Lidl-Trek
Ever felt like by the time your legs have even registered that you want them to start sprinting, everyone else is already up the road? If you’re mainly used to steady state riding, or longer stints of intensity (for example in a 10 mile TT). The first thing you want to work on to become a better sprinter is your neuromuscular recruitment. For the most part, we’re using our slow twitch, endurance-based muscle fibres when we’re cycling. Whereas sprinting is far more explosive in nature, requiring fast twitch fibres to be ready and firing up quickly when you need them. This requires a different type of training stimulus that develops these fast twitch fibres and gets them better at ‘switching on’ faster.
The Neuromuscular workout on ROUVY, part of their ‘Increase your FTP with Lidl-Trek’ series, is an ideal start point. You’ll tick off a warm up before completing several super short, super sharp blasts of sprint intervals comprised of mini pyramids quickly ramping through your power zones, between 5-10s each, up to a max of 150% of your FTP. Focus on trying to hit the target powers as quickly as possible – don’t be disheartened if you can’t do it the first time. The more you practice, the easier it will get.
Quick fix | Master’s plan
Ideal if you’ve not got much time to burn, this 35 minute workout combines endurance with quick sprints. After the warm up, the main set will have you swiftly alternating between easy zone 1 riding and sharp 6 second blasts at 130% of your FTP. We like this workout because not only will it make your time on the turbo trainer fly by, it’s also really useful for building your ability to respond quickly to an unexpected attack in a race situation.
40/20 | Lidl-Trek
Break away, and stay away! 40/20 workouts (comprised of 40s hard, 20s easy) are a great way to get your body better at clearing lactate and keeping the heat on after an effort. Because it’s no good burning a match to get away from the bunch if you’re just going to get swallowed up again a few seconds later. Once you’ve made an attack, you need to be able to keep pushing to maximise your gains. The 40/20 format means you don’t get a full recovery between each interval, helping to improve your capacity to push power under fatigue.
Quick explosivity improving
A lot of the workouts so far have featured ultra-short blasts of sprinting. And while this workout ‘only’ has intervals with 1 minute reps, those 60s are going to feel mighty long when you’re holding 150% of your FTP! This is a great session to start incorporating once you’ve ticked off some of that neuromuscular recruitment work, because it will help you to start working on sustaining your top end power for longer. Ideal for longer sprints or attacking on the hills.
Never Give Up | Push Harder
Speed meets endurance. The bulk of this 1hr 6 minute ride is spent in Zone 2, so it’ll help to keep your base of endurance nice and solid. But what we like is that the session throws in several 30s sprints at 180% of FTP to keep you sharp and able to react quickly to changing race dynamics (or spontaneous ‘last one to the end of the street buys the coffees’ battles on the Sunday club ride).
