Standing starts, Sprints

MIHECH said:

Hello,

please could you tell me if there are different adaptations from these two workouts and what is the difference?Which one would you recommend for this time of year (2,5 months till the first competition)?And how should I do them (OK sprints are logical, but standing starts?)

Thank you🙂

What are you competing at?

Road races, approximately 80-150km long with a few hills inbetween.

MIHECH said:

Road races, approximately 80-150km long with a few hills inbetween.

Sorry, I only do track. I do lots of both starts and sprints though.

Thanks anyway, maybe someone else (Dave🙂 or Alex) will respond.

MIHECH said:

Road races, approximately 80-150km long with a few hills inbetween.

Are you frequently in sprints at the end of these?
Also, the word "sprint", when it comes to training, means different things to different people. What do you call a sprint in a training context?

MIHECH said:

...please could you tell me if there are different adaptations from these two workouts and what is the difference?...

I tend to group neuromuscular work in to three general categories:

• NM Strength- Peak strength building which implies low speed, high force. IOW, standing starts. Not a lot of direct application to general road racing unless you're seriously strength limited which is pretty unusual for a healthy rider. But if you're riding kilos or pursuits or very short prologue type time trials(but more so in a fixed gear) these are pretty important.
  
• NM Speed- IOW, classic sprint workouts. Typically done from a moderate to high starting speed and focused on top speed and aceleration to the line. Good stuff for a roadie or crit racer and something most of us should work on since an awful lot of mass start events end in a sprint. There are lots of variations on these(uphill, flat, with a lead out, etc.) but they should emphasize quick aceleration and top speed over strength.
  
• NM, snap or neuro acelerations, microintervals and other workouts intended to develop your ability to quickly recruit muscle groups on demand for quick repetitive submaximal acelerations. IOW, getting used to jumping out of crit corners and responding to or launching repeated attacks. It's still NM work, but with more emphasis on the neuro side of things and less on the pure muscular.
  

Anyway, I used to do standing start work but now live 1000 miles from the nearest velodrome and it isn't a regular part of my training. Sprints and microintervals are still key especially as racing season approaches. When and how much is subject to a lot of debate and depends in part on your racing schedule, goals and progress in other areas. No general advice there except a lot of folks believe you should do at least a bit of sprinting every week all year long to keep that tuned up. I don't since sprinting sucks on my indoor trainer where I'm stuck all winter but I'll start a weekly sprint session as soon as I get back outside.

-Dave

daveryanwyoming said:

I tend to group neuromuscular work in to three general categories:

• NM Strength- Peak strength building which implies low speed, high force. IOW, standing starts. Not a lot of direct application to general road racing unless you're seriously strength limited which is pretty unusual for a healthy rider. But if you're riding kilos or pursuits or very short prologue type time trials(but more so in a fixed gear) these are pretty important.
  
• NM Speed- IOW, classic sprint workouts. Typically done from a moderate to high starting speed and focused on top speed and aceleration to the line. Good stuff for a roadie or crit racer and something most of us should work on since an awful lot of mass start events end in a sprint. There are lots of variations on these(uphill, flat, with a lead out, etc.) but they should emphasize quick aceleration and top speed over strength.
  
• NM, snap or neuro acelerations, microintervals and other workouts intended to develop your ability to quickly recruit muscle groups on demand for quick repetitive submaximal acelerations. IOW, getting used to jumping out of crit corners and responding to or launching repeated attacks. It's still NM work, but with more emphasis on the neuro side of things and less on the pure muscular.
  

Anyway, I used to do standing start work but now live 1000 miles from the nearest velodrome and it isn't a regular part of my training. Sprints and microintervals are still key especially as racing season approaches. When and how much is subject to a lot of debate and depends in part on your racing schedule, goals and progress in other areas. No general advice there except a lot of folks believe you should do at least a bit of sprinting every week all year long to keep that tuned up. I don't since sprinting sucks on my indoor trainer where I'm stuck all winter but I'll start a weekly sprint session as soon as I get back outside.

-Dave

Thanks Dave, you are always a help🙂🙂and of course all the others

Here's an associated question. I usually do my 2x20 interval in a park loop and there's a very wide and straight section without any side roads. Of recent, I've incorporated a short sprint in my 2x20 each time I get to that section, leading to 3 of these sprints for each 20min interval. I have seen improvements in my top sprint speed but wondered if this is a good idea. Should I just focus on 2x20 and leave these short sprints for another day? Are they adversely affecting the training focus of the 2x20s?

sogood said:

Here's an associated question. I usually do my 2x20 interval in a park loop and there's a very wide and straight section without any side roads. Of recent, I've incorporated a short sprint in my 2x20 each time I get to that section, leading to 3 of these sprints for each 20min interval. I have seen improvements in my top sprint speed but wondered if this is a good idea. Should I just focus on 2x20 and leave these short sprints for another day? Are they adversely affecting the training focus of the 2x20s?

If you settle right back into your 2x20 pace and don't follow each sprint with a few minutes of easy pedaling then I don't see any problem. If you can hold your target AP for your long efforts but spice it with some short sprints then it's another variation on the HOP stuff Bill's been talking about lately. The SST and L4 work needs to be fairly continuous with no long rests(nothing over 30 seconds or so during the 20 minutes) but you can definitely spice it up with some jumps.

You won't be targeting and probably won't see much improvement in your peak sprint power. That's not the point of microinterval work. It's more in line with that 3rd bullet above, working on snap or the neuro side of NM. If you try for peak 5 second power numbers you'll almost certainly have to back off on your SST/L4 efforts in which case you'd be moving to a "neither here nor there" workout which I wouldn't recommend. But adding some short submaximal jumps to a longer sustained SST/L4 effort is a creative workout that can be real useful for mass start racing.

-Dave

Just quickly for now.

You can readily incorporate spint work all year round without doing much damage to overall aerobic training. The trick is to keep the efforts fairly short, 6-8 seconds. These can in fact be done on a recovery ride day or a low level endurance day. As race season approaches, then you begin to lengthen the efforts, until they become sprint and anaerobic workouts together (and form a key workout in the schedule).

Do all types as Dave mentioned. Standing starts are great - they have a tremendous benefits, especially helping to manage pack surges. Personally though - I only like doing standing starts on the track bike, which are built for the maximal stresses - I find road bikes are not strong enough to cope with the loads (bars/stem flex wildly, bottom bracket stresses, drive train worries me at times).

Doing sprint work is still worthwhile for a roadie, even if they're not a sprinter - you may still need to outsprint the three other guys in your breakaway or surge to the line at the top of the hill (as opposed to beating a bunch finish) and of course to respond to attacks and make sure you get into the break in the first place. The faster you can accelerate, the less time it will take to chase down/join a break.

Invaluable for crit riders.

daveryanwyoming said:

If you settle right back into your 2x20 pace and don't follow each sprint with a few minutes of easy pedaling then I don't see any problem. If you can hold your target AP for your long efforts but spice it with some short sprints then it's another variation on the HOP stuff Bill's been talking about lately. The SST and L4 work needs to be fairly continuous with no long rests(nothing over 30 seconds or so during the 20 minutes) but you can definitely spice it up with some jumps... But adding some short submaximal jumps to a longer sustained SST/L4 effort is a creative workout that can be real useful for mass start racing.

Thanks Dave. Looks like my present variation matches this set of requirement. I'll keep going with it to keep the 2x20 more interesting, and a bit of a rest for my bottom.

Alex Simmons said:

Just quickly for now.

You can readily incorporate spint work all year round without doing much damage to overall aerobic training. The trick is to keep the efforts fairly short, 6-8 seconds. These can in fact be done on a recovery ride day or a low level endurance day. As race season approaches, then you begin to lengthen the efforts, until they become sprint and anaerobic workouts together (and form a key workout in the schedule).

Do all types as Dave mentioned. Standing starts are great - they have a tremendous benefits, especially helping to manage pack surges. Personally though - I only like doing standing starts on the track bike, which are built for the maximal stresses - I find road bikes are not strong enough to cope with the loads (bars/stem flex wildly, bottom bracket stresses, drive train worries me at times).

Doing sprint work is still worthwhile for a roadie, even if they're not a sprinter - you may still need to outsprint the three other guys in your breakaway or surge to the line at the top of the hill (as opposed to beating a bunch finish) and of course to respond to attacks and make sure you get into the break in the first place. The faster you can accelerate, the less time it will take to chase down/join a break.

Invaluable for crit riders.

Thanks Alex 🙂

Best regards from Slovenia

[quote="daveryanwyoming"]

• NM Strength- Peak strength building which implies low speed, high force. IOW, standing starts. Not a lot of direct application to general road racing unless you're seriously strength limited which is pretty unusual for a healthy rider. But if you're riding kilos or pursuits or very short prologue type time trials(but more so in a fixed gear) these are pretty important.
  
• NM Speed- IOW, classic sprint workouts. Typically done from a moderate to high starting speed and focused on top speed and aceleration to the line. Good stuff for a roadie or crit racer and something most of us should work on since an awful lot of mass start events end in a sprint. There are lots of variations on these(uphill, flat, with a lead out, etc.) but they should emphasize quick aceleration and top speed over strength.
  
• NM, snap or neuro acelerations, microintervals and other workouts intended to develop your ability to quickly recruit muscle groups on demand for quick repetitive submaximal acelerations. IOW, getting used to jumping out of crit corners and responding to or launching repeated attacks. It's still NM work, but with more emphasis on the neuro side of things and less on the pure muscular.[/QUOTE]
  

Steve_B said:

[/list]Here is some info from Andy Coggan relating to "strength endurance" and, ultimately, the exercises he describes end up being hard standing starts and microintervals.

Late last summer, I was pretty much done with most of my training and just going to ride off my fitness. I still had some criteriums coming in the next 4-6 weeks and since I was bored with most of the other training I had been doing, I thought I would take this up.

Keep in mind that my sprint was only average and most of that is because I did not train it. In fact I had let it go to "fallow" over the previous two years. I was not getting into the breakaways that I needed to and so I figured that I shouldn't even bother with my sprint. In any case, late last summer I started doing hard standing starts and the 15/15 microintervals, two times each week. Within 4 weeks, I had brought my 5-second maximal power (from a standing start) back to my best ever recorded, an ~15% increase.

There are probably several reasons for this. One is surely that since I had not spent any time seriously training my sprint in about 2 years, any training would probably show good gains. Another is that I show peak power in my sprint very early on, during the high torque portion of the sprint. The hard standing starts made huge gains in that. In a crit, I'm rarely sprinting from a slow speed so I'm not sure how applicable that is. I also don't know if the microintervals did anything for me (other than make me very tired 🙂 ) In any case, it was an interesting experiment.

Steve how long did your whole training last that day, did you incorporate L2 that day or L3 or something else, or nothing else but the intervals?

MIHECH said:

Steve how long did your whole training last that day, did you incorporate L2 that day or L3 or something else, or nothing else but the intervals?

I don't have the number in front of me but probably 1.5 to 2 hours. I would do 10-20 minutes of L2/L3 to warm up. Then, I would do ~15-20 of the standing starts: some on flat ground, some on a short hill. I would use a 53x14 gear initially on flat ground then after a few sessions, 53x12. On a hill, I would use an easier gear. I would leave ~2 minutes between sprints.

Then after those, I would ride easily for a 10 minutes then start the microintervals: 15 sec on then 15 seconds off. I have a 7 km loop that I would use for these. These things are brutal, especially at the intensity I was shooting for. I could only do 10 minutes of them initally then I think later on I talked myself into 2 x 10 minutes. If I still felt like it, I would do some L2 or L3 at the end but not much since I was usually pretty trashed at that point.🙂 That loop is ~10 minutes from my home anyway.

I never combined these with anything else but I could imagine integrating the 15/15's (or just the "on" part) into an L2 ride at some point.

Steve_B said:

I don't have the number in front of me but probably 1.5 to 2 hours. I would do 10-20 minutes of L2/L3 to warm up. Then, I would do ~15-20 of the standing starts: some on flat ground, some on a short hill. I would use a 53x14 gear initially on flat ground then after a few sessions, 53x12. On a hill, I would use an easier gear. I would leave ~2 minutes between sprints.

Then after those, I would ride easily for a 10 minutes then start the microintervals: 15 sec on then 15 seconds off. I have a 7 km loop that I would use for these. These things are brutal, especially at the intensity I was shooting for. I could only do 10 minutes of them initally then I think later on I talked myself into 2 x 10 minutes. If I still felt like it, I would do some L2 or L3 at the end but not much since I was usually pretty trashed at that point.🙂 That loop is ~10 minutes from my home anyway.

I never combined these with anything else but I could imagine integrating the 15/15's (or just the "on" part) into an L2 ride at some point.

Thanks 😉

Best regards Miha

Hi everybody
Nowdays I have started to performance these sprints.I do 6-8 standing sprints in flat using 53/16 for 10 sec.with 3 minutes rest.In the begining of them I pull the handlebar backward.Is this pulling position right?

orbeaonyx said:

Hi everybody
Nowdays I have started to performance these sprints.I do 6-8 standing sprints in flat using 53/16 for 10 sec.with 3 minutes rest.In the begining of them I pull the handlebar backward.Is this pulling position right?

In order to start going from a standing start (zero velocity), it would be very hard to not pull on the handlebars. So, yes, I think it is OK and I think that you have to pull on the bars.

orbeaonyx said:

Hi everybody
Nowdays I have started to performance these sprints.I do 6-8 standing sprints in flat using 53/16 for 10 sec.with 3 minutes rest.In the begining of them I pull the handlebar backward.Is this pulling position right?

tear them off and break the chain