Speed - High cadence training on rollers

[WillemJM]

To keep my cadence up, I do two sessions a week 30 minutes on rollers with intervals spinning between 110 and 120.

Aprreciate opinions, what would benefit me the most?

1.) 2 minutes rest, 2 minutes 110-120 at 35 kilometers per hour with repeats until my 30 minutes are done.

2.) 1 minute rest 1 minute 110-120 at higher intensity 40 kilometers per hour, with repeats until my 30 minutes are done.

I find the second work-out easier than the first.

 

[cycledogg1]

Willem,
I suggest you extend your workout time to one hour. You may find the first 30 minutes basically a warm up session. Try spinning 90 to 100 and putting in a 3-5 minute rest after the first 15 minutes and again after the first 30 minutes. Then use your structured no.1 routine for the second 30 minutes. Hope this helps.

 

[daveryanwyoming]

Originally Posted by WillemJM .
....Aprreciate opinions, what would benefit me the most?...

The listed workouts are going to primarily focus on muscle coordination and depending on the resistance in your rollers perhaps some anaerobic tolerance. Those intervals are much too short and on most rollers without a resistance unit, too easy to do much for sustained power or overall cycling fitness. They may still be a good thing to include in your schedule if you struggle with higher cadences in situations like fast group riding and have trouble relying on leg speed to accelerate and close gaps. But they're primarily a skills building drill so it doesn't really matter too much how you approach them in terms of blocking out the length of the spin ups.

If you want to get a bigger sustained power and overall cycling fitness benefit out of these then try them as micro-intervals. Find a gear and a base pace on your rollers that gets you up to deep but comfortable breathing (Tempo pacing), then burst quickly with leg speed and whip your legs up to speed every two minutes for about ten seconds before settling right back to your base pacing. Do that for 20+ minutes or up to an hour at a stretch working hard not to drop below your Tempo base pacing and focusing on rapid leg speed accelerations every two minutes. That limited recovery at Tempo base pace makes all the difference in terms of keeping you in a solid aerobic work zone but still providing a leg speed focus and muscle coordination work during the bursts. These are not easy, but they are a very effective way of targeting: dynamic riding, leg speed, and sustained power.

Good luck,
-Dave

 

[WillemJM]

Thx guys, good information.

Just to add, I do around 10 - 12 hours of training every week on pavement, the roller sessions are just thrown in on recovery day mornings (still ride in the evening) to try and keep my cadence up, as I am naturally a big gear grinder. So, my objective is to help with handling high cadence at load.

 

[daveryanwyoming]

In that case, keep the efforts easy and the gears relatively low and spin your brains out for a few minutes at a time as skills and muscle coordination work. But there's no real reason to block them into formal intervals or tire yourself out if the goal is a recovery ride with some skills benefit, just pick a low enough gear and spin it up as high as you can hold without bouncing excessively and work on smoothing out your pedal stroke at high leg speeds.

Don't try to sneak in extra high end work as in hard short efforts on a recovery day if you're already training on a structured program on other days. Use recovery days to recover but if you keep the intensity low there's nothing wrong with getting some low intensity leg speed work in at the same time. Realistically used that way I wouldn't block out any kind of intervals, I'd just keep the gearing low and roll half an hour to forty minutes a bit above my current cadence comfort zone and work on smoothness and suppleness but not intensity, hard breathing or high end efforts of any sort.

-Dave

 

[WillemJM]

Thx Dave, appreciate the advice.

 

[cycledogg1]

Yeah, what Dave said. Did not know you were putting in the hours on the road.
Cheers,
Rick in Tennessee