I have heard about “grease the groove” in weight lifting is there a possibility to use this to increase my sprint power? What would the protocol be say my ftp is 280w and max sprint 1000w
Sprinkle in a handful of 5 to 10 second sprints on your longest endurance ride.
Or do a 5 second seated sprint and a 10 second out of the saddle sprint as part of your warmup on your interval days.
Just keep them short!
While I don’t think I fully understand the concept of it, it looks like this weight training method is rather similar to generic training in the bike - and in some way how Progression Levels are set up:
Do a reduced level of your target training for a while to improve your skills to eventually reach your target. If you want to have a great 30s sprint, start doing intervals with a few 15s sprints once or twice a week. Then go for 20s, etc.
In general, if you want to get better at sprinting: train sprints.
GtG is basicially “little and often to minimise fatigue while practicing movement patterns”.
My suggestion to sprinkle in short efforts is (hopefully!) very much in the spirit of that approach.
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I hadn’t heard of ‘grease the groove’ until you wrote this but from 30 seconds of reading I did I’d probably approach it from two sides. Cadence/technique and force.
For me, I hit my highest power at ~115-120 RPM. It took practice to get comfortable sprinting at that cadence though. So some spin ups, starting seated and progressing to standing, where I stepped up 5-10rpm at a time until I went just past comfortable and held that for like 5ish seconds. Overtime I went from bouncing all over the place at like 120rpm to being able to do ~150 relatively comfortably (but with no force).
The other side is the force production. Some of this is just raw strength so weight lifting can help. But for others it’s rate of force production. For strength maybe do a touch lower cadence, for ROFP maybe go slightly higher and just spring all out for 5-10s. As soon as the sprint starts to feel hard, stop, wait at least 10 min, then do it again.
Basically just keep it short and sweet. There’s a place to do 30+ second sprints but for raw sprint power 5-10s is where you need to be to actually hit max power without wasted fatigue.
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@mwglow15 how did you figure out your cadence for sprinting? I don’t have the space in my life for gym work as I have a very physical job. Definitely on the side if high cadence spin ups. In the endurance rides with these built in I typically peak at 120rpm and 600W
Hmm, a combination of just more sprinting and looking at power data after.
I definitely sprint at a higher cadence now than I did when I started racing 6 years ago. That’s in part due to practicing higher cadences so that I still feel coordinated and so I can actually push the pedals hard enough while spinning that fast. The other is looking at some data and realizing that even if I feel more ‘powerful’ at 100rpm because I’m able to push harder on the pedal that my max power usually comes above 110rpm.