Winter and Pre-Season Turbo Training Sessions

!±8± Winter and Pre-Season Turbo Training Sessions

Like most turbo training sessions, the workouts listed below should be started and ended with a warm up and cool down.

Your warm up should be 15-20 minutes of easy spinning in a low gear, with a couple of hard efforts and sprints thrown in, to get your muscles buffering the lactic acid. This leads me onto my first type of training:

Lactate threshold training will improve your overall fitness, and you will be able to work at a higher intensity for longer.

Lactate threshold turbo training sessions normally involve working at or just above your lactate threshold for a certain period of time, with a short rest period in between intervals.

Most cyclists will do 2 intervals of 20 minutes, with a 5 minute rest between intervals, the rest period can be shortened as you become fitter (or more tolerant to the pain).

In order to find your lactate threshold heart rate for these turbo training sessions, you must measure your average heart rate over the last 20 minutes of a 30 minute time trial. You may have to repeat the test a few times in order to get the most accurate result.

Interval turbo training sessions will allow you to work at a high intensity for a longer period of time, such as when you are in a breakaway group, or attacking on a climb.

A basic workout structure you can follow goes like this:

5 minutes at 90% MHR, 2 minutes rest.

As you become fitter, you can either lengthen the interval, increase the intensity(MHR), or decrease the rest period, or do more intervals during your turbo training sessions.

Sprinting turbo training sessions focus on increasing your explosive power. A simple structure you can follow for this workout is: 1 minute sprint, 5 minutes rest.

As you become stronger, you can either lengthen the sprint, or shorten the rest period. If you have a power meter, you could shorten the sprint period, and focus on outputting a higher power.

The last type of turbo training sessions I will discuss in this article is known as 'Fartlek' training. This type of training closely mimics the random nature of racing. There is no structure in a Fartlek workout, you simply increase or lower the intensity randomly throughout the workout.

So how do you actually convert this fitness over to a real bike?