Twice a week I do about 10 20-second sprints top speed, on a flat street. I consistently reach 28-29 without wind, and today touched 30 briefly. I'd like to add a couple of MPH on my sprints. Just for my own satisfaction. I don't race.

About me: I'm 55 years old, 5'10", about 205 lbs (Got a bit of gut, although it's been getting smaller). On a good day I can average 20mph over 30 miles (Chicago flat). I do longer intervals (about 4 minutes on, followed by a couple minutes off) a couple times a week as well, and overall ride about 5 days out of 7. Oh, my bike is a Cervelo RS, and I have about 2" of drop from my saddle to the top of my bars.

Wondering what's best: lose a few pounds, do some leg presses at the gym (I go about 2-3 times a week), or what? I don't want a real cycling coach–too expensive–but I've wondered if I could hire an expert to ride with me a couple of times.

Suggestions?

I would try these training techniques to get better at sprinting:

1) Find a downhill that flattens out, where you can start your sprint at ~30 mph. It will help your leg speed.

2) Find a downhill and get in your 39x19 (or so) and spin like mad. Again, leg speed.

3) Find a slight uphill (<5%) you can sprint up, e.g. hit the bottom at speed and sprint as hard as you can for 10-20secs. It will help your strength.

Any idea what your cadence maxes out at in these sprints? Generally you want to start the sprint at 100 rpm and go from there.

This^

First make it last, then make it fast.

i would think that you may be able to drop forty pounds. if so, that would be the most help.

Weight loss really helps.

Having said that your sprint doesn't change that much regardless of weight, not in a coarse fashion. If you're a 40 mph sprinter lean you'll be a 37 or 38 mph sprinter heavy. Etc.

https://sprinterdellacasa.blogspot.co...sprinting.html

There's other stuff but that's a start.

I've been able to improve my speed by treating the stop signs on my route as opportunities - there are usually six or seven, and you start from a standstill, hit stop speed and then hold that for at least 10-15 seconds. Not perfect, but a way to treat an annoyance as an opportunity.

Another way is to pick a point and just go flat out as hard as you can until you reach it. Light poles or large trees are good as you can see them far enough a way. Again, focus is on integrating into your regular ride. I learned this from a cross-country coach in high school, as we didn't have a track. It helps incorporate terrain figures like hills or turns that you may want to work on.

Im a noob at cycling, but just doing this over the last two months has improved my speed by a good 10%.

Plus it helps me to HTFU, and I need a lot of that!

Get on strava. Find some 0.1-0.5mi long 'segments' that are on your normal routes or create your own (keep 'em private). Work on sprinting those segments, maybe doing 1 to 3 of them each ride. Keep the rides marked as private if you don't care about competing against others.

After a while, strava will show you your whole history of progress on those segments and you'll clearly see your improvements over time. This will serve as motivation, which feeds back into the loop, and you get faster.

Basically what JCNeumann said above, but using some tech to motivate and measure.

Shoot video of you sprinting. Post it. Let us rip you apart and put you back together up as a sprinting machine.

Sounds like I'm kidding, but we need to see what you're doing.

All very good suggestions above. I'll recommend these additional exercises:

1. spin-ups cresting a hill. When you go over a hill, do not upshift. Stay in the lower gear and spin up your legs as fast as you can. Get to the point where you just start to bounce and back off a bit and keep spinning like mad. Eventually your leg-speed will improve along with your neuro-muscular connections & timing. Aim for +200rpms.

2. one-legged riding for 15-20 seconds at a time. Find a flat spot and shift into lower gear. Unclip one foot and hold it out or rest on the chainstay to clear the free pedal. Ride with one leg for 15-20 seconds and find the dead spots. These are the areas where that leg is robbing power from the other side by having it be pushed up by the other leg. You want each leg to be able to move itself around the circle so that ALL of your power goes into spinning the pedals, not pushing up a dead leg on the other side. This trains the brain to activate the right muscles to get the leg out of the way of the other one. Really helps your spin be smooth at high-RPMs

3. use lower-gears in sprints. I usually hit 38-42mph in a finishing sprint with a 50x15t or 50x14t gear max. You'll want to be crossing the finishing-line spinning at 130-140rpms. The thing that moves air out of the way quickly is power, not force. power = (force * distance)/time. Or simplified in cycling terms power = pedal-force * RPMs. If you're already pushing on the pedals as hard as you can at 100rpms, that's all the power you can generate with those muscle-contractions. However, if you apply more muscle-contractions in the same amount of time, you can generate more power. That is, spinning at 130rpms with the same amount of force on the pedals will give you 30% more power. And you'll go 9% faster! So without any increase in strength or fitness at all, just using two gears lower and spinning 30% faster will let you go from 30mph to 32.74mph!

Now that's an honest way to move things forward .... so to speak.

At 55 and 200 pounder you are better just not forcing the situation too much until you get a few pounds off you. 50 km/h is not a bad sprint either you know.

Handle that weight.

Good luck.

There is also the wind sprints, where you alternate riding at your max sustainable effort, sprint until you're totally out of breath, then only slowing down to your max sustainable effort while gasping for breath and feeling like dying. After regaining your wind while going at your max sustainable speed/cadence, rinse and repeat 3 or 4 times. If you're feeling like dying would be better than this during the winded phase, then you're doing it right!

If you have heart problems, this might not be a good idea, though.

Question.

I have been told to use a harder gear when doing my 1 minute intervals. this goes opposite of what you are saying. maybe its because for me its used as training so max sprinting speed is not the goal its strength gains? being new to all this I am a bit confused.

You kind of picked up on it. For improvement aka training, practice pushing a slightly higher gear ratio at max exertion at lower RPM. For racing your friends, push as hard as you can spinning at 130 RPM or high cadence. Same pedal force at higher RPM = greater power. Btw...high RPM pedal stroke is also a skill to be practiced. Your position on the bike has to be good to achieve higher RPM in the drops.
Good Luck.
PS: if you want to be a better cyclist...do what I do and copy and paste Danno's posts. He should have his own dedicated sticky section as he really knows what he is talking about.

How long do you recover between each sprint? It's important to rest between each sprint so that you can exert maximal power. This is according to what I have read in Friel's training bible. If you don't recover sufficiently between each sprint, the workout more closely mimics anaerobic endurance training.

Here is a link to one of his blog entries:

https://www.joefrielsblog.com/2011/08...ls-part-5.html

(Scroll down to Sprint Power.)

I'm begging you: shoot video.

We can offer up a million drills and interval workouts, but we have no idea how you sprint. And let me tell you, there are plenty of sprinting styles.

What are you doing with your arms?
How are you holding the bars?
Where's your butt?
Where's your chin?

Think of it as a golf swing. We need a frame of reference.

All of this, by the way, will be covered in my upcoming book on tactics, strategies, and techniques. Start saving your pennies.

+1 to a video

One more thing: try to rip the bars off. Seriously, this gained me about 200 watts when I really started trying.

Pull up with the rear leg.

Since you live in flat land lake-bottom country, try this: do sprint intervals into the wind, and then turn and fast spin with tail wind to recover, then repeat.

thanks for clarifying , sometimes too much info can get a newbie all turned around.

Small ring sprints. Lots of them. No gear changes. Spin until your can't spin faster and then hold that as long as you can. Repeat. Then use big ring with no gear changes. Spin it out. Repeat. Then one gear change and spin it out.....

One thought is that if you're able to do 10 of them in a single workout, they are probably not really sprints. And 20 seconds is getting to the outer range of sprint duration. Kind of in between a pure sprint and a VO2 interval. I'm no Cavendish, but to me sprints are no more than 10 to 12 seconds of fury, and when done well you probably can't do more than 5 or 6 in a single session. And that's giving yourself 4 or 5 minutes to recover between reps.

That's not really a sprint-exercise; it's intervals for building muscle-strength. It does help build strength to use one higher gear for 1-min intervals. However, I find for the time-spent, it's much more efficient and quicker to just go to the gym and do squats, leg-lifts and calf-raises. There is only only so much strength you can build up before you gain too much weight that cancels out the increased strength. So you need to address both. One is to maximize muscle contraction-force through strength-building exercises. Then you also have to work on sprint technique to develop as much power as possible from the strength that you do have.

In my experience (10-years racing, 7 in 1-2-pro), most racers are darn close in strength and fitness. When you're neck & neck with someone at +40mph, what's going to get you that last 0.5mph to cinch the win is being able to get whatever strength you have down to the wheels as efficiently, smoothly and as quickly as possible. It's very rare that you're going to win a sprint using a bigger gear than something that spins at 130rpms.

The previous two posts are a good expansion of what I was trying to point out above about rest intervals between sprints. It's not just the work interval (WI) but also the rest interval (RI) that helps define the purpose and effect of a particular interval workout. In fact, intervals originally referred to rest intervals, even though most people refer to the work intervals.

Thank you Danno.
Even though I can squat some heavy weight (1 to 2 reps), it has not translated into cycling. From a dead stop the fastest I have gotten up to is 30.7 mph, oddly that test I was on the hoods for some reason or another. even when I do my 1 minute intervals I get to around 27mph on average at the top of the intervals before I fade.

Like you said there are many other variables like technique, body position, and so forth.