Training with Power on the Track

Posted in training on January 20, 2012

By Ric Stern, Founder, Performance Director and Senior Coach for RST Sport Solutions

Track racing is an exciting and physically demanding sport. Its popularity has significantly increased in the United Kingdom within the last 15 years, due, undoubtedly to the success of the Great Britain Squad. However, the sport is dominated not just by Great Britain, but Australia, Russia, New Zealand and the USA, with the USA women holding the world record for the Team Pursuit.

There are a variety of events that are held on the track including both sprint events and endurance events. The Olympic sprint events are the 200-m match sprint, the team sprint (500m for women, 750m for men) and the Keirin. The endurance events are the team pursuit (3km for women, 4km for men) and the omnium (which comprises of 6 events held over 2 days).

Track bikes have a single speed fixed gear, and no brakes! This means that being able to pedal across a wide variety of cadences is important. Track racing requires a lot of skill. It's imperative to be constantly aware of your surroundings and competitors on the track to ensure that you don't hit anyone.

The omnium consists of a flying 250m time trial, a points race, an elimination event, an individual pursuit, a scratch race, and a 1-km time trial. These events thus cover a wide physiological spectrum from maximal efforts over ~13-seconds to events that last over 30-minutes. It's a bit like a stage race on the track.

As well as having a high aerobic power output for the individual pursuit where elite males need to generate ~ 500 W for 4 and a quarter minutes, they also need to sustain a high average power around 400 W for the points race, and also need to sprint with high powers of ~1500 W when sprinting. They have to be excellent across a wide range of powers and unlike road racing there's no soft pedaling during the races.

Two sessions that I use to work some of the different aspects of the omnium are:

Sprint sessions:

From a rolling speed of about 20 mph, get out of the saddle and sprint hard to maximum effort for around 5-secs and drop down the banking (if you're on a track) and making sure others are aware what you are about to do, then get back in the saddle and continue sprinting as hard as you can for 10-secs. Keep cadence high and don't stop pedaling at the end of the effort! On a road bike, don't change gear, but make sure you've selected a suitable gear beforehand. Aim to complete 5 to 10 sprints with 5-mins between efforts

Pursuit power:

Here you're aiming to do intervals at about 90% of your best effort over a 3 or 4 km pursuit (so efforts would be 4-mins or so duration for women, and about 5-mins for men). From a rolling start build quickly to 'cruise' speed and maintain your power which will be about 10 to 20% higher than you'd sustain for a 16km time trial. It's imperative not to go off too fast in these short intervals (or an actual pursuit) and then find yourself blowing up. Keep the power and speed even and do these in pursuit position on the tri-bars. At the end of the effort keep pedaling gently and recover for 5 to 10 minutes before repeating the intervals 3 to 6 times.

If you're doing these efforts on the track make sure you've OK'd it with other riders and the coach running the session. While you're doing your efforts on the black line (the pursuit line), other riders should be circling the track above the blue line.

RST
Ric founded RST in 1998, and has been creating champions ever since. Following the completion of his degree in Sports Science, where he obtained a first class BSc (Hons) degree from the University of Brighton, Ric saw a need for science based coaching solutions. Richard is a certified Association of British Cycling Coaches Level 3 cycle coach. Richard has authored research work, had articles published in specialist cycling magazines, newspapers, and web articles.

He is currently working with Michael Freiberg from Australia, who is the reigning World Champion in the omnium event. He also coaches Michael for the team pursuit.