- Go over and under our target race pace,
cadence and power.
What we then move into is what I think is the harder part.
(upbeat instrumental music)
Solid, tasty little brick workouts.
Trainiacs, good morning.
Still just, I'd say 85% over getting over this cold,
so 45 minutes on the bike, 15 minutes on the treadmill,
building up to race pace of just under a seven minute mile,
about a 4:30 per kilometer,
and then within that I did some hypoxic training where,
I breathe through my nose, even at race pace.
More on that in a future video.
So a workout that we're doing occasionally right now,
about three to four months out from race season,
is over unders,
and what we're looking to do is go over and under
our target race pace cadence and power,
and there's three reasons that you want to do this.
The first is that during the course of a race,
our cadence is inconsistent,
as we shift down, as we shift up,
as we climb hills, as we take corners,
our cadence is going up and down.
Same with power.
Hills, shifting, cornering, surging,
wind gusts here and there.
None of that's consistent, but for some reason,
most of us hop on the bike trainer
and we do our target power,
we do our target cadence, and we don't change,
so the third reason that we want to do these
is because we want to build ourselves
as an all around good cyclist.
We're not just looking to be a good cyclist
in that 90 to 95 cadence at a 205 watts kind of power.
We want to build fitness and the ability to surge,
to slow down, to spin hard, to spin fast,
to spin easy, and not have it take much out of our body
because the name of the game in triathlon
is to bike as quick as you can
while saving yourself for the run.
So the more we can do to make sure
that the bike isn't taking a ton of energy out of us,
the better we're going to be for the overall race.
So here's the over under workout
that we've been doing over the last six weeks or so.
You can do it with either a power meter
or just rate of perceived exertion,
and at the end of the video,
I'm going to link to two videos that I've done
that will help you figure out what your race pace is
and how to calculate power zones.
So this workout can be done anywhere from hour long,
if you're training for a sprint distance,
up to two and a half hours long
if you're training for a half IRONMAN.
You make the changes just by changing how long
the warm up is, how long the cool down is,
and how many repetitions of this cycle we go through,
so what you're going to do is you're going to warm up
anywhere from about five to 25 minutes
and then after that warm up,
we're going to get into this protocol,
and the protocol is to do three to four minutes
over your race pace,
so in my case, my target race pace is around 205 watts.
So I'm doing four minutes at about 240.
At the end of that four minutes,
I do one minute way over my race pace,
making sure that I don't dip under 300 watts.
Then, here's where it gets really tough,
is instead of cooling down after that one minute
at the over 300 watts,
I go and do another four minute chunk at 240
so I'm not even close to recovering
because I'm still well over race pace,
and then another one minute chunk at over 300.
So it's four at 240, one at 300 or more,
four at 240, one at 300 or more,
and then you can go under and cool down for five minutes.
So that's the over power.
We're getting into that zone where we're increasing
our top end and making ourselves stronger
because it's really, really difficult
and how you end up extending that
is by doing that cycle two times, three times, four times,
with that five minute rest in between.
It ends up being absolutely brutal.
But we're not done.
So that takes care of the over under on the power.
What we then move in to is what I think is the harder part,
messing around with the cadence.
After one of those five minute sections
where we've cooled down and regrouped,
we get into a series of six minute sections
where we're messing around with the cadence,
and what we're doing is we're taking our power up
to around 230 watts, so it's still over race pace.
We're still doing it over,
but where it gets really hard
is of the four six minute sections,
we do the first one with a cadence of around 60.
We do the second one at our target race cadence
of around 90 to 95, we do the third one
at a low cadence of around 60 again,
and then we do the fourth one,
which I think is the hardest,
at a target cadence of 110.
Really spinning up those revolutions per minute.
In between, we're taking three minute rests to regroup
so that we can finish that six minute section
and hopefully not email your coach and fire him, Pat.
So there you go, trainiacs.
That is over unders.
It's going to build an immense amount of fitness,
not just in that sweet spot that we like to get into
as triathletes, but at all different cadences,
all different powers, and it's going to make you
a better cyclist all around.
It's going to end up taking less out of you
during the race when you're on the bike
and you're going to be fresher for the run,
and that's where you gain a ton of time.
If you want to see those two videos
where I talk about figuring out your FTP
and how to apply it to certain zones,
check out the videos here and here.
If you aren't yet.
Hi Mel.
- Sorry.
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Now I have to fire Mel because she got in the shot.
- Whoops.