(up-tempo music)
- Okay, today I'm going to be helping you
to find more power on the bike,
and who doesn't want more power?
Power is basically the holy grail in the cycling world.
The more power you have, the faster you can ride.
Now it's hard for me to say exactly
how much more power you might gain
from following these tips,
but they are all tried and tested,
and for some it can be in the region
of around 20 watts on their current FTP,
which sounds pretty good.
So here are a handful of my tips
to help you find that extra power.
Now most methods for increasing your power on the bike
include some level of hard work, so spoiler alert:
there is plenty of that to come in this video.
But I thought I'd start with one
which requires very little of that.
In fact I'd go as far as saying it's almost free power.
Now there are a number of debates out there
as to the ideal cadence for riding your bike,
but I'm going to throw that out of the window.
There is no ideal cadence, however there is a trend towards
the higher cadences having a higher
power output and better efficiency,
so I'd really recommend you going out,
trying out different cadences throughout your ride
and seeing which one you prefer.
I'd actually try this during sessions,
hit different cadences for different reps,
and see whether any of them were easier or more comfortable.
(relaxed music)
Now that's enough of the easy power gains,
now onto some hard work.
So to increase our power on the bike,
we essentially need to unleash it.
Think of it as if we're just teaching our body
what it's capable of.
See, a lot of people don't really realize
what they have the ability to do,
so it's just a case of unlocking that
and then teaching our bodies
and training our bodies how to use that.
Now a great workout for this,
which we see a lot of pros using
is something called micro-bursts.
This is short intervals of maximum effort,
so on this we're aiming to put down
as much power as we possibly can for each interval
and this is a great way of training
our neuromuscular system and increasing our strength.
So a good example session is 20 minutes steady riding
within Zone 2 with a 10-second
maximal sprint every five minutes,
then take 10 minutes of Zone 2 recovery
and then repeat the 20 minute block again,
but now with 30 second maximal sprints every five minutes.
An alternative session with less recovery
is what we call a To Battle workout.
This is a 10 second maximal sprint
followed by 20 seconds within
Zone 1 or Zone 2 recovery spin.
Repeat this eight time through to make
a continuous four minute block of effort.
Take a six minute Zone 2 recovery and then
repeat that session through as many times as you like.
Well on the flip side of this,
you may want to team these power burst intervals
with some over-geared strength work.
Now this is another subject for debate,
but there is a good reason why so many pros
still choose to do these.
They build strength, they will recruit more muscle,
they improve neuromuscular function,
they can also improve pedal efficiency.
You may even, over time, see an improvement
or increase in muscle mass too.
Now the basic idea with these over-geared workouts
is to ride in a higher gear or a bigger gear
than you're used to, it's as simple as that.
When you're starting out, you may just want to go
one gear bigger and then over time
progress to two, three or more.
So a good session to start out with is
five times four minutes over-geared at Zone 3,
which is between 76 to 90 per-cent of your FTP,
with six minutes Zone 2 between and after each rep.
This is 50 minutes in total and over time
you can increase the length of the over-geared intervals
whilst reducing the recoveries.
Now obviously this over-geared work is a tool
and we're using a rather over-emphasized
low cadence to do that, so just make sure that
you don't end up falling into the trap of riding
at this over-geared, low cadence during your normal riding,
and to do that just make sure that
you're mixing up your cadences during your normal rides.
Now the next method is to bump
our Functional Threshold Power,
or Functional Threshold Heart-rate up.
Now this is essentially the maximum power or heart-rate
that we can sustain for 60 minutes,
and to bump this up will actually mean
that we can produce more power for
a sustained period of time before falling apart,
and to do this we want to work at or just below this level
and that will therefore mean that we can actually
rack up quite a lot of time at a very high intensity,
and that's going to build not only strength
and build our fitness,
but it's also going to bump that threshold up,
and this area or this zone is what we call our sweet-spot.
It is defined as being between 88 and 94 per-cent
of our Functional Threshold Power,
and between 75 and 85 per-cent of our maximum heart-rate.
So one of my go-to sweet-spot workouts is
four lots of eight minutes at sweet-spot,
matching it with an 8 minute Zone 2 recovery.
Over time you can start increasing the intervals
to 10 minutes, 15 minutes or even 20 minutes
and once you've done that then
you can even play around with reducing the recoveries.
And finally, we need to think about
where you're trying to increase your power.
You see, naturally we will put out more power on climbs but
obviously that isn't very specific to riding on the flat.
Whilst it is the same muscle groups, the way in which we
recruit them and the way in which they work
is very different, so if you are trying to
increase your power on the flat then do more training
and do these sessions on the flat or on an indoor trainer.
Alternatively, if you are trying to increase your power
and improve on the climbs then do more training
and do these sessions on hills,
or you can even pop your resistance up
a little bit more on an indoor trainer.
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If you'd like to see four gym exercises
to improve your power and your strength on the bike,
you can see that by clicking just down here,
and if you'd like to find out a little bit more
about that sweet-spot that we've just been talking about,
you can see what is sweet-spot by clicking just down here.