Sprint, VO₂ Max, Threshold, Durability: Build Your Winter Properly

Anthony Walsh (0:00)

If I had eight hours a week to train this winter, I wouldn't spend the next four months just riding steady miles, the old school winter mile, just hoping I got fitter. I'd split the winter into four blocks, a sprint block, a VO2 block, a threshold block, and a durability block. Stay with me for the next 10 or so minutes, and I'm gonna break down exactly how to structure your perfect winter. I'm Anthony Walsh, I'm the host of The Roadman Cycling Podcast. I'm a former lawyer, and now I interview the world's greatest minds, and I try and deconstruct commonalities of how the best performers perform, and bring that to you in a format where you can apply it into your own training. So that's exactly what we're gonna do today around winter training. So those blocks I mentioned, each one of the four blocks, each one would have a job, and at the end of each block, I check whether that block actually achieved its job. Because training isn't just about stacking stimulus on, stimulus on, stimulus on. We're looking for adaptation, we're looking to get better as a result of that stimulus. And this stops us making the same mistakes winter after winter. So winter two is informed by the decisions and the outcomes from winter one. This is what I mean by reverse periodization for this winter. Instead of starting with months of those long steady riding and leaving all the harder work until the brighter days, the spring, I'd actually flip it on its head and I'd reverse periodize it. You might have heard of this, it's the opposite of standard periodization. For me, the benefits, they're simple. It's supported in the data as much as standard periodization or random allocated intensity. But also importantly for me, most of us, we're in a climate where we're getting shorter evenings in the winter. And that means it's quite laborious to sit on the trainer for two, three hour rides in the evenings. When we reverse periodize it, we're doing our intense work earlier in the winter, and we're leaving the longer stuff like the durability block for when the evenings start to stretch a little bit. So, what I do is, I'd work from shorter, more explosive efforts towards longer, more sustained efforts as the winter progresses. First sprint, then VO2 max block, then a threshold block, and finally a durability block. Durability, if you don't know, that's like the ability to produce useful power when you've already been riding for a long time. We'll dive into this in a little bit, but it's like, after you've completed 2,000 kilojoules, what power can you then hold for a five-minute effort, as opposed to a five-minute effort, totally fresh. Each of these four blocks, it's going to last four weeks, three weeks where we build a work, and one week where we decompress, test, and get ready for the next block. And here's the important bit, the test isn't there, so you can just post this number to your friends in WhatsApp or a Strava brak, and feel good about yourself for the afternoon. The test tells you whether the training you did during that block actually achieved the goal. We're in a sprint block, we're testing to see do we get a sprint adaptation. It's maybe one of my pet peeves with cycling at the moment. Everyone thinks that 20-minute test defines fitness. A 20-minute test isn't a good indicator of fitness if we're in a sprint block. The stimulus we're giving you is a sprint stimulus. The adaptation we're looking for is an adaptation to that sprint stimulus. We're looking to improve key sprint markers, 5-second power, 10-second power, 15-second power. 20-minute power, it's not relevant to us in this block. So let's say you spend three weeks working on your sprint. You test it at the very beginning of the block, and you test it again at the end of the block. And maybe the number hasn't moved, but that doesn't automatically mean that the block was a failure. Maybe you were exhausted when you re-tested. Maybe you were sick. Maybe you changed bikes. Maybe you actually haven't had enough practice sprinting before, and your technique is just unreliable because it's not repeatable. This does all give us a question to investigate. Did the training work? And if the training didn't work, why not? And what would you change the next time that you run a sprint block? Now you're not just collecting workouts. Now you're not just on TrainingPeaks making workouts go green. You're learning how you respond to training stimulus. Before we get into the four blocks, let me show you how an eight hour week might look. On Monday, I do 45 minutes of strength work. Tuesday, 75 minutes on the bike. This is the main session for whatever block you're in. Wednesday, easier riding, maybe some cadence drills. Thursday, 45 minutes easy on the bike, and another 45 minutes of strength work. Friday, take it as a total rest day. Saturday, it's a two and a half hour steady endurance ride, and Sunday, it's another hour easy. That gives us six and a half hours on the bike and a near and a half of strength work. The warm ups, the cool down, and the gym work are all included in that eight hours. Now, this is a template for somebody who's already used to training regularly. It's probably for somebody up as far as cat tree, borderline, cat two. After that, you're gonna need to extend the hours because eight hours is not gonna get you probably winning cat two races. It's definitely not gonna get you winning cat one races. But if you're currently riding three hours a week, don't jump straight into eight hours a week. Start where you are and build towards that workload that you can handle week on week. The fourth week of each block, I'd reduce the overall workload. You might ride five or six hours instead of the eight hours. You'd keep the gym lighter and you do a retest after a few easier days. The test replaces the hard workout that week. It's not something you stack on top of it. If that kind of general philosophy is clear, let's jump in and talk about exactly how I would structure that first block. Because for most of us, that's probably coming up around now. The first thing I would suggest you jump into is a four week sprint block. The question you're asking is simple. Can I produce more power over short explosive effort? At the start of the block, after a good warm up, I do three short sprints, each about 10 seconds, several minutes of easy riding in between them. The goal is to be fresh enough that each sprint you can actually produce your best power. I like to sprint for something, sprinting for an imaginary line, sprinting for a signpost, sprinting for a tree, something where it's like an actual definite endpoint. Record your best five second power. It goes without saying, do this somewhere safe or do it on an indoor trainer. Try to use the same bike and the same power meter when you retest later on and make the setup as similar as you can. Over the next three weeks, that Tuesday session, that becomes a sprint session. Start with a handful of high intensity, high quality efforts. You're looking at something like five by 10 seconds, four by 15 seconds sprints. Give yourself plenty of recovery in between them. You're training explosiveness here. What I like to do is visualize. The visualization helps because a lot of people think that sprint training is just going through the motions. I have five by 10 seconds sprints today. I'll just execute on them. That's not it. Sprints are about violence. Sprints are about absolute violence. You need to visualize ripping the cranks off your bike, pulling the handlebars off your bike. How I like to do this is in the few seconds before the sprint, I like to visualize a stick of dynamite with the fuse just ticking down. When you hit the bottom, when it's time to go, it's boom. You're exploding through the pedals with absolutely everything you have. That's how you execute a proper sprint, not a token. It's time for an interval. Beep, done. Violence, maximum violence. Onto the gym session. In the gym, I'd focus on getting stronger with good technique. One lesson in with a personal trainer can help you if you haven't got good technique, but the sort of stuff I'd prioritize in this phase, it's squats, it's hip hinges, perhaps a split squat or a step up. If you're new to lifting, start light and build this up gradually. If Monday's gym session leaves your legs too sore for the Tuesday sprint session, you might think about moving it around in the week. Because novelty factor really matters, especially if you're not used to being in the gym. By that I mean how custom you are to gym work. If you haven't been in the gym for months, you need to prepare for it to be a complete struggle when you lift yourself off the toilet for those early few sessions.