One-Hour Workout: Bike Sprints

Although sprint workouts aren’t something triathletes typically reach for—especially at this time of year—there are a myriad of physical and mental benefits to including them in your program. Higher intensity efforts like the ones in this session can help boost your top-end power, strength, and speed—as well as really help break up the monotony of slow, steady endurance riding. This session, from Adam Daniel, master trainer at Wattbike, is best done indoors on the trainer, in part so you can really give each interval your best effort with zero distractions.

This one-hour workout starts with a 10-minute ramp warm-up, followed by four simulated sprint lead-outs of increasing intensity throughout. You’ll repeat these efforts for a total of four times before concluding with an easy cool-down. The workout is prescribed in both FTP (functional threshold power) as well as RPE (rate of perceived exertion). 

Daniel said: “As triathletes, we rarely think that sprints will be beneficial to our training regime given the endurance nature of the sport and the races that we participate in. But improving your sprint ability will help with short, sharp climbs, as well as getting you back up to speed after corners. It will also improve your ability to perform repeated sprint efforts when under fatigue, and boost your body’s ability to remove lactic acid.” 

One-Hour Workout: Sprint Workout

Warm-up

10 min. ramp, building in 1-min. blocks from 50% FTP (RPE 3 out of 10) through to 100% FTP (RPE 7-8/10) in the final minute. 

Recover: 2 min. @ 50% FTP (RPE 3/10)

Main Set

2 min. @ 75% FTP (RPE 5/10)

2 min. @ 100% FTP (RPE 7-8/10)

2 min. @ 115% FTP (RPE 8/10)

20 sec. @ 200% FTP (RPE 10/10) – full throttle effort!

Recover: 6 min. @ 30% FTP (RPE 1-2/10) 

Repeat 4 times through

Cool-down

Recover: 5 min. @ 30% FTP (RPE 1-2/10)