What lenght intervals are best? I do 1 and 4 minute intervals on hills. Is any longer needed? BTW i'm not santiago botero sorry.

They all have different purposes. Anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes, depending on what you're working on.

There are different categories of interval. Some of them are: neuromuscular (15-30 seconds), anaerobic capacity (1-2 minutes), VO2Max (4-8 minutes?), and threshold (longer).

All these systems need development, depending on your goals.

5 minute intervals are the best (just for me, just right now).

Ok, my goals are to start racing cat5 in May...which ones do I start with? I have only been riding for about 3 months. took about 10 years off the bike...I just turned 21 lol. I have just been logging miles, but I need to increase my speed for racing obviously.

Arnie Baker says that for most people, the most effective interval length is 5-7 minutes.

That's a short enough time that you can work pretty darn hard, but not so short that it's an anerobic locker of pain.

I'd suggest alternating each week between six 200 meter sprints and six 1m intervals. Both should get 4-5 minutes of recovery (barely pushing the pedals and/or coasting). These should be explosive. Start out of the saddle for the first 10s. They should hurt. Try to rip the cleats off your shoes and break your chain. Bend your handle bars. Every single pedal stroke should have as much power as you can generate. Do not pace these efforts at all -- just insane power. If you think you are fading, go harder until you know you're fading, and fight the fade until you ride yourself into a pile crap.

Yeah, so alternate sprints one week, 1m intervals the next.

Each week do VO2Max intervals. 5x5 minute Hill repeats are great if you have access to ~1 mile hills. 5 minutes of recover it plenty for these. Pace each one to hurt. Some weeks you hit the first one for record time, then suffer through the rest. Other weeks, try to nail the same time all 5 runs, but go fast enough that you can barely finish the 5th one on time.

For the other rides, you can do 3x10 minute intervals or 2x20 minute intervals. I'd probably just choose one and do no more than one of these workouts each week. You can skip them some weeks too if you replace it with fast tempo work.

For the fast tempo, a.k.a. SST (sweet spot training), you want to ride hard enough that you can do it for 45-90 minutes, and still have a good ride the next day. This is not a race effort, but too hard to carry a conversation. You should be going hard enough that you occasionally catch yourself backing off and have to redouble your concentration.

SST is your bread and butter. I just started doing these rides in December, and my threshold power has gone up a full 10% in those ~11 weeks. It takes a week or two to get used to riding at this level, because it's kind of hard. Once you adjust to this low-level constant suffering, you'll really start to get stronger. It's pretty amazing.

A 200m sprint workout can be done in less than 30 minutes, so if you have time, you can do an endurance ride at a fairly easy pace afterwards.

Every couple weeks, if you're not racing it's a good idea to go on a group ride with racers (including elite and pro if possible). Do what you can to hang on and learn from it. Take some risks (attacking and such) if you feel strong enough. Count these as SST rides even though the intensity is so much more variable.

Another side of SST I haven't experimented too much with is low-intensity intervals. A fast, small paceline would work great for this. Riding solo, you could go for a minute at your TT pace, then try to recover while keeping some pressure on for a minute or two, then repeat.

You da man Waterrockets! Thanks a lot!!

If you really want to understand intervals, buy this book for $13. It is very useful even if you don't have a powermeter.

https://www.amazon.com/Training-Racin...2907547&sr=1-1

But what if you enjoy the locker of pain??


I tend to do 45-60 second intervals with 60 second recovery between...

Then another night I do longer intervals of 20* minutes with 5 minute recovery between...

WR- you forgot to add the bleeding eyes picture.

INTERVALS! BRAINS! INTERVALS!

Good post.

What he said. Follow this advice, eat and sleep well, and you will do ok.

I was actually just going to post a similar question. Thanks for the training input, Waterrockets.

I was just going to say.. listen to Waterrockets. I saw him riding once, thought he was in a red jersey... when he passed me, he turned blue.

I'm trying to work on redshifting when going away from people, but I've still got that pretzeled space/time continuum from my last 20-minute test. Seriously. This was posted last week and just now showed up.

Thank you Waterrockets.

Another Interval question:

Friel states in his training bible on an M2 Day, do 3 to 5 work intervals for 6 to 12 minutes each up to zone 4 and 5a. Recover for 2 to 3 min between. My question is should most of the interval period be in Zone 4 and 5? Or does he mean by "work up to 4 and 5" that the intensity should/can be that high? Or at the end of the interval period you should be in 4 and 5? Hope that makes some sense.

I'd pick this one.

It might be best to equate your zones with the Borg rate of perceived exertion. Check out the table here.

RPE seems to respond faster than HR Then you can double check the HR at the end.

I've been working on using preceived Ex. more and more and hope to get used to it soon. I've just used HR for so long it's going to be hard to let go. LOL