SFR = Salite Forza Resistenza. Italian for climbing strength resistance, or at least in my poor Italian that’s how I translate. SFRs are a bread and butter workout that we use with our athletes year round, in different variations and timing of prescription. I don’t believe for a moment that we’re novel in incorporating SFRs, coaches have been prescribing them at least since the 1980s, and people have been riding up steep hills at low cadence for long before that! Other names for SFR efforts that we see are muscle tension, slow frequency repetitions, big gear repeats, et cetera. What I love about SFRs though is that you can put a lot of twists on them to add a bit of specificity to the period you’re in. And regardless of the period you’re in, this is a workout that I feel adds benefit year round in a lot of ways.

Happy Thanksgiving! A lot of our athletes are all about “earning the bird” on Thanksgiving. Getting a big day on the bike, and then relaxing with friends and family over an excellent meal. It’s a great feeling! Well, if you are in Colorado today you are probably stuck “earning the bird” on the trainer. Just in case you need a little bit of inspiration of what to do, here’s a great workout that’ll probably be a mix up from the typical base training and make plenty of space for a great Thanksgiving meal!

Today I wanted to look into a workout that I often don’t really think about, but for the simple reason that we use it so much. A lot of times the workouts that I think of as super important, and put a ton of thought into, we might do them less than 10 times all season and never more than once a week. However, there are a whole bunch of bread and butter workouts that we use all the time, because they just work. Today’s workout I like to call, “tempo - speed - tempo”. When you see the workout you’ll see it’s actually fairly self explanatory. I give the workout that name because it outlines what we’re doing, but then the specifics might vary at different times of the year, or with different athletes. The outline is warm up, do a block of tempo, do a block of more speed based intensity, do another block of tempo. The specifics of the tempo and speed work might vary, but the outline works. Here’s the workout:

Jim and I always have fun arguments about the use of LT work in training prescription (by the way, Nate writing here). I laugh about it, because at the end of the day we both have a good handle on when, how, why, and how much LT work to implement into an athlete’s training. However, everyone always has their own philosophies within certain principles. I always think of Jim as a big LT guy, and Jim always thinks of me as a light LT guy. Truthfully I think a lot of this is molded more by what worked for us personally as athletes, in our banter with each other, rather than how we prescribe LT work to athletes we coach now. When it comes to training prescriptions we’re pretty much on the same wavelength!

It’s February! Super bowl is done. For a lot of our road racers it is starting to feel like racing season is just around the corner. As far as training goes, that means that maybe the base is starting to get pretty robust, athletes are getting strong, but now it’s the time we have been waiting for - time to start getting into a bit of that higher intensity and really add some FAST to that strong. Now, one could go on for quite awhile as to debating the ideologies behind how much intensity should be incorporated, what form the intensity should take, how it should change for different races, and on and on. I am certainly a proponent of doing intensity that is specific to certain races, but before doing workouts that are nitty gritty in the specifics of a course I believe athletes need to start building up their “racing tool box” by getting some of the general higher intensity preparation workouts under their belt.

What kind of cyclists do I think should do sprint work in the winter? Trick question, I think all cyclists should sprint work in the winter. Yeah, pretty good joke one could say. On to the meat of the matter, I think sometimes we get hung up on nomenclature and let that dictate training more than it should. The word sprint may conjure up the image of a mad dash to the finish line of a race, totally maximal, road bikes, speed, etc, etc. Immediately a bunch of cyclists are saying, “that’s not something I do, so I shouldn’t do sprint work, that’s not for me”. On a simple level when I think of a “sprint”, all I think of is a short, hard, burst – it doesn’t have anything to do with charging for a finish line, it doesn’t need to be specific – except for perhaps in duration. So to add one more parameter, let’s call it less than 20 seconds. Definitely there’s some folks out there that don’t like 20 seconds and want to say a sprint is below 12 seconds – as the basic physiology lessons are that we start to cross over into a different energy system after 12 seconds of maximal effort at the latest – and it may be shorter depending on the CP stores on hand in the specific context. Whew, good run on sentence. For the specific workout I want to talk about today, I like doing twenty second efforts, and I think (anecdotally if nothing else) there is benefit in doing these 20 second efforts, as they make it that bit longer than most people really feel good sprinting – probably largely in part due to that switch over of energy systems in the back half.