Warmup - one hard effort or no

Here's what my coach recommends:

"A pre-race warm-up for Criteriums and Time Trials might look like this (on trainer)-
Total time: 46:00

• 20:00 EnduranceMiles (EM).
  
• 10:00 Tempo (T), with 80-90 cadence.
  
• 2:00 RecoveryMiles (RM), spin.
  
• 4:00 SteadyState (SS), 90-100 cadence.
  
• 2:00 RecoveryMiles (RM), spin.
  
• 2:00 PowerIntervals (PI), 110 cadence.
  
• 2:00 RecoveryMiles (RM), spin.
  
• 2:00 PowerIntervals (PI), 110 cadence.
  
• 2:00 RecoveryMiles (RM), spin.
  

For a road race warm-up, it might look like this-

• 15:00 EM spinning
  
• 5:00 interval starting with Tempo and ramping up to SS for the last minute
  
• 4:00 RM spinning
  
• 2:00 interval starting at SS and ramping up to PI for the last 30 seconds
  
• 2:00 RM spinning
  
• 2:00 interval starting at SS and ramping up to PI for the last 30 seconds
  
• 5:00 spinning until the start
  

And yeah, I have definitely found that if I put in a few hard efforts as a part of my warm up, I am more ready and will hurt less from the big efforts that follow. Hope this helps. 😉

Woofer said:

Does anyone find it necessary before doing a short hard effort like the flying 200 meter to do a really hard near maximal effort first in the warm up in order to get a good effort out of the timed event? The last two times I've done this, it seems like I did better efforts after the timed event with a thirty minute to forty five minute low gear warmup with perhaps a five second hard burst. The last time I only got in twenty minutes so that may skew the data. 🙂 Not sure if that's just the competitive fires or the warmup routine. I plan on changing my warmup next time to see what happens.

If your event is supra-threshold, you probably want to consider a supra-threshold warm up, see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Citation&list_uids=8847338
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Citation&list_uids=14652506

L.

Thanks for the responses. Typically for crits and time trials I have been doing longer more steady state stuff to get the blood flowing with a few sub maximal efforts so as to save most of the juice for the race.

Those studies match my limited experience of N=2 so that means I probably should be recording my track *warmup* stuff as well!