Awesome video, guys. I will give you my results of employing these techniques across three workouts.
Workout 1: I did a mostly Z2 ride with a few 600W or so “sprints” just to focus on getting the form down and how it feels. I immediately noticed a few differences between Pete’s technique and my own. First, I was leaning a bit too far forward. I corrected this using Pete’s advice of feeling the nose of the saddle against the hamstrings. Second, I was not really locking out my upper body at all. Pete’s deadlift analogy helps with this, as well as the “circle of power” method. I was more or less pulling the handlebars correctly, and my left/right sway of the bike feels smooth, but I’ll have to get video footage to tell for sure.
Workout 2: Did 5x5s all-out sprints, with about 7 minutes rest between. The first one I kind of miffed, but the second one felt good. I look down at my head unit and for the first time ever see four digits in 3 second power average! Ok, maybe a fluke, but then the next 3 sprints are even slightly higher. It actually works…
Workout 3: Similar to the previous workout, but in the 10-15 second range and experimenting a bit with cadence. Still setting power PRs all over the place.
My best power improvement was 6s average, which went from 982 → 1062 for an 80W (or 8.15%) simply from watching this video and applying the techniques within. No doubt these number can increase slightly after more practice. Here’s the resulting power curve improvements for this experiment:
I just feel silly for racing 6 years and never properly working on my sprint technique. Especially since I lost this year’s state RR by about a foot and had two other very close 2nd places in the past two months!