The BEST Science Backed Short Intensity Cycling Workout (to maintain cycling fitness)

Is this cycling podcast about training and improving your performance, including FTP, V02 Max, endurance and sprint repeatability, we discuss This study published in 2020 looking at what performance outcomes changed - over a 3 week transition period - for elite cyclists when they reduced their training load by ~60%.The control group only performed low intensity training. The other group (sprint group) performed low intensity training as well as one session per week of 3 × 30 second maximal sprints, interspersed by 4-min of active recovery (100 W), with 15 minutes at zone 2 between sets. The sprint group had a 8% larger improvement in their 30 second sprint and maintained their 20min all out FTP effort over that 3 week period. Whereas the control group lost 3% of performance on their 20min all out effort. These results are quite surprising given they were only doing one sprint session per week. This is solid evidence to suggest that doing all-out efforts should maintain your fitness when volume is reduced significantly for short periods (1-3 weeks).

 

Full transcript:

Cameron Nicholls (00:00):

Welcome back to the RCA podcast where today I'm joined again by the RCAs data nerd Ben Treble, and today we're going to talk about a little bit of science that we've recently leveraged in some RCA content that I have personally taken on board myself, and I've been using it anecdotally over the past, I'd say six to eight weeks with great success. And I wanted to get Ben's perspective, so before Ben gives us his perspective, give you the context first, Ben. So we recently had an RCA member. He posed a question in our community forum and the question was, I've been training for this audax event and for those of you who aren't familiar with Audax rides, they're big juicy, hairy rides normally over five days, one week, two weeks. I think this one was over 10 days and it was like two or 300 kilometers a day and he'd been doing a lot of endurance training and all of a sudden he's got a 10 day cruise.

(01:05)
He's on a cruise and this is about two weeks before his actual event. So the timing wise, it didn't work out so well. So it's like how do I maintain my fitness while I'm on this cruise ship for 10 days and I only have access to a gym bike? So some coaches got involved in this paper, which we're going to talk about today, was presented and really it's about doing maximal efforts with decent recovery and you don't need to do long sessions because obviously being on a cruise ship and having access to a gym bike, I actually think this member, I'm pretty sure he took a photo of the gym bike when he was on the cruise. It wasn't an attractive looking bike, so you don't want to really spend a lot of time on these things, like 30 to 40 minutes max. And he was doing this session and I was thinking to myself, oh, we sent this out in a newsletter as well and we got a lot of responses back from our community, a wider community on this particular paper.

(02:06)
And I was thinking to myself, well actually this is it relevant to me now as well because I'm not doing a lot of training. Life's gotten in the way. I've gone from doing 10 to 12 hours a week to maybe six hours a week and I get on the trainer in the morning, I'm getting up a little bit later, it's winter, I've got to get the kids ready for school. I probably only got 30, 40 minutes. So I started to implement this session. So what is this session? Do a warmup for 10 minutes and then I'm doing, and there's variations of it, right? It doesn't specifically have to be this, whatever works for you, but you basically want to do an all out effort for 30 seconds. So I'm a lazy at the moment with my training and everything, so I'm just doing it in er mode, Ben, and I know this is a no-no, but I'm just going from warming up, do a few little ramps, and then at the 15 minute mark, I start my first 30 seconds at 520 watts and I literally just tap it up in ER mode from 200 watts to 520 and I write at 520 watts for 30 seconds.

(03:11)
And that's a struggle. I'm just getting there with form, maintaining my form, and then I come back for the next four and a half minutes to 200 watts and then recover and then I'll do it again back up to five 20 watts for 30 seconds, recover for four and a half minutes. And depending on how much time I have in the morning, this is over the last six to eight weeks, I've been doing that four times, maybe five times. I got up to six times the other , and what's been really interesting for me, because around that I've also been doing bit of zone two training, a little bit of sweet spot stuff, but not much. Haven't even been doing the bun ride. Went out and did the bun ride the other day, rolling turns, feeling good, feeling strong. That's not normal. When I've been doing six hours a week, we've been talking about this VO two Mac session recently, the 30 fifteens, I thought I'd try it.

(04:06)
I did three sets of nine reps at 420 , and I was doing it for a bit of content on our YouTube channel. I thought, I'm not going to get through this. Got through it all. Oh, that's surprising as well. And I just feeling surprisingly quite fit considering I'm only doing six hours of training per week, so I'm like, oh, hang on a sec. This session here, doing a maximal effort essentially for 30 seconds and then recovering and doing it again without spending a lot of time on volume. , it's in the ; it's, Obviously,and I've now had a great anecdotal experience with it , and I'm doing it once a week. I should probably preface I'm not doing it multiple times a week, just once a week for the last six to eight weeks. So what do you make of all that ramble?

Ben Trebel (04:57):

I'm a big fan. I would classify this as sprint interval training. As you said, there's a lot of variance of it. We have repeated sprint interval training where you would do short sprints with very short recovery between, and you do sets of them with longer recovery. And then you have just what you've done, which I would call this long sprint interval training. And there's different versions of that. I'm a big fan of it. I like to couple it within actually your zone two rides. One because it keeps them interesting, and two, I think it gives you a lot of extra stimulus without impacting the aerobic component of the session too much. There are an amazing maintenance session. There's a lot of emerging research on it. I think it's pretty underrated. I don't see too many people on Strava doing sprint interval training because I think they assume it's only if you want to be a sprinter, but the sprinting itself, particularly if it's like 30 seconds, it's working a lot of the energy systems to get there.

(06:04)
You're using the aerobic system a lot even though it's short, you're using the anaerobic system, it's kicking in because the sprint is long enough and of course you're jumping through the phosphate system to start with to get there, and your neuromuscular system is getting a lot of stimulus from those sprints. So it's like a very good bang for buck session that engages a lot of systems in a very short period of time. We do it a number of times in the session. I think it's very good at activating a lot of the metabolic pathways, a lot of the enzyme reactions that we need to maintain our capacities.

Cameron Nicholls (06:46):

Interesting. And it's not that, the thing I like about it as well from a practical standpoint is during, I would call this an off season for me, I'm just maintaining my fitness. I'm getting on the bike just for fitness, something to do. And normally when I'm doing this, I would do mainly zone two because it's easy and I might do a bit of your sweet spot threshold stuff and I kind of tend to stay away from the upper end stuff because I can't be bothered. It's like, oh, do I want to do a Tabata or a 30 fifteens or I'm just like, no, it's not interested. I don't want to do a swiff race. I might go do the local group ride and sit in a bit more, but I can't really get the mental capacity to go do these VO two style sessions. Whereas this, even though the 30 seconds is quite challenging, once you 15, 20 seconds in, once you're 15, 20 seconds in, you've only got 10 seconds to go and then you've got a four and a half minute recovery.

(07:55)
So I find mentally they're kind of easy to do, which I think makes it really practical. Practical in an off season phase where people are looking to, and it doesn't have to be an off season phase. It could be a period in your training where you've got with this member, they're on a cruise for 10 days and they want to maintain their fitness. I think it's probably needs to be prefaced though. And I think you alluded to this, that if you hadn't done much training, cycling training before or you don't have much of a base, then this type of training, you're probably not going to yield the greatest benefits. But if the base foundation is there, it's a really good way to activate those systems that you described and maintain some top end fitness without really having to do anything too extreme.

Ben Trebel (08:45):

Yeah, there was a paper, I can't remember what year it was from. It was fairly recent that it looked at sprint interval training impact on VO2 max and they managed to get better outcomes improvements on VO2 max than a classic sort of four, five minute steady state intervals at mean maximal power. So I think that was a very interesting study that just some sprint training improved VO2 max better than say a classic four - five minute, is a single study. So I don't want to take it too far out of context, but just anecdotally, you start to see this and you go, ah, there's some very interesting benefits to sprint interval training. There was a cool study from, I've got to get the name right, he's a French researcher in...

Cameron Nicholls (09:37):

That's all right. We can link it in the description.

Ben Trebel (09:39):

Just so you don't stuff it up. I'll link a study on hypoxic training with just endurance, say like your zone two only sort of training versus sprint interval training. And they ended up with the same sort of VO2 max improvements or management. A lot of these metrics stayed the same. There was no scientific difference up or down, but the difference they found was in the fatigue resistance in their ability to repeat sprints. So the tests that they did comparing the two groups was you do a sprint and then you had to try and repeat it as many times as you could within the same power quality and how many repeats could you do? And the group that had done the sprint interval training could get through 30% more sprints than the other group. Interesting. And this was in a short

Cameron Nicholls (10:34):

Timeframe that aligns to my experience at the bunch where in previous years when I've been in this off season phase and I've just been doing my own tour and a bit of sweet spot stuff, I could get involved in the terms, but I would fatigue out pretty quickly. It wasn't so much my cardio system, it was my muscular system would start fatiguing, so I would do less turns. Whereas on this particular bunch ride the other day, I stayed in the turns pretty much the whole time. Sorry, that was my dog there in the background if you heard that interesting animal sound. And I was like, even though I've only been doing four or five of these 32nd efforts on the trainer once a week, I was able to do, I don't know how many turns, I did like 30, somewhere between 15 to 30 at high power output, not at the five 20 watt mark, which is what I'm doing my 32nd efforts for this particular session, but they're like 4, 4 50 watt turns and able to do 15 to 30 of these when I've been doing very little training. It was very telling. Which kind of aligns to the research that you mentioned there. I think one thing that people probably need to keep in mind if they're going to implement this is the recovery is pretty important is that it's not that you just go out there and, you do repeated sprint efforts on top of each other. Why do you need a decent recovery?

Ben Trebel (12:11):

Well, as I said, there's repeated sprint interval training, which is where you specifically have short recovery, which you're aiming for a different outcome to what we're kind of talking about, which would just be sprint interval training. And the recovery time varies greatly between rider, like how well trained you are. I think five minutes is definitely on the shorter side, like the sessions I typically would prescribe for sprint interval training. Mind you, this is a longer session with a higher power, slightly shorter sprint. So 22nd sprint, I would be looking at 10 to 20 minute rest intervals, but on a two or three hour ride. So you're doing a lot more sprints and the intensity is essentially the first one you do is maximal do a 20 minute max sprint and then try repeat it every time.

Cameron Nicholls (12:58):

20 minute max sprint.

Ben Trebel (13:00):

Sorry, 20 seconds.

Cameron Nicholls (13:02):

I was going to say 22nd max sprint. I'll be impressed. Yeah, I would

Ben Trebel (13:09):

Be too.

Cameron Nicholls (13:11):

Yeah. So I think that's the key there. Obviously there's variations in this type of training, but yeah, for me, what's practical right now is if you've got 40 minutes, if I was to do a 10 minute recovery, which probably has some merits, I'll probably be more effective. I might be able to do five 50 watts instead of five 20 or something like that for the 30 seconds. But you're still hitting that anaerobic state and tapping through those different systems, as you said in that 30 seconds. So you're activating what's required.

Ben Trebel (13:46):

Yeah, you're getting that. It's a neuromuscular activation, and something you don't get from some of the old classic interval types is the intensity is not hard enough to recruit all the muscle fibers and motor units. And when we do these, when we say neuromuscular, it's your body's forced to push and activate the neural pathways to then go and activate the motor units, which then twitch the fibers. So if we just do very low zone one and two work, very likely you're only engaging your type one muscle fibers. Your type twos are just getting lazy, and if we don't use them, we kind of lose them. So doing your 40 minutes at sort of a low zone two with some big sprints thrown in, it kind just engages the full body system, which is why I think it's so good at maintenance work and it's pretty easy and sort of less demanding to handle.

Cameron Nicholls (14:42):

Absolutely. And it's in the research, as you've mentioned, some papers and this specific paper that we were using internally at the RCA. We'll link that in the description as well for everyone to have a look. So yeah, if you're out there and you've got limited training time for a period within your block or whether you're in an off season phase, but you want to maintain some decent fitness, this is definitely something to consider. It's in the research and I put my hand up and I vouch for it now myself. So thanks for your time, Ben, and if anyone's out there listening and you want some support with your training, don't forget the RCA offers coaching services where you can also work with Coach Ben who I'm speaking to right now, or one of our other coaches. Just go to www.roadcyclingacademy.com and check out our one-to-one coaching page. We'll catch you in the next podcast.

 

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