Drop-set intervals for cyclists

Drop-set intervals

What are they:
‘Drop-set intervals’ or ‘descending intervals’ are hard sessions in which the rider starts the effort at maximal intensity then drops the intensity by 10% while doubling the duration for the second effort. Unlike a standard interval session there is no recovery between the two efforts.

What are the benefits:
These sessions are multi-functional, being ideal for lactate tolerance, improving anaerobic power and extending the duration that you can maintain a hard effort for in race situations such as attacking, bridging or even extended sprints for the line.

How do I do them:
After a good warm up, establish how long your absolute maximal sprint time is, then rest for a good 15 minutes before the session begins. Lets assume you achieved 100% all-out effort for 30 seconds, in which case your typical drop-set session might look like this.

1) Ride for 30 seconds @ 100% effort
2) Without any recovery, go straight into riding for one minute @ 90% effort

Recover for 3 minutes and repeat. Aim for two to three intervals to start, with 3 minutes rest between each drop-set. Aim to increase to six. When you can manage six, progress the session to double drop-sets, which look like this:

1) Ride for 30 seconds @ 100% effort
2) Without any recovery, ride for 1 minute @ 90% effort
3) Without any recovery, ride for 2 minutes @ 90% effort of the previous effort

Recover for 7 minutes then repeat. By now you can see a pattern developing. Each effort is twice the length but 10% less intensity than the previous one and the recovery period between intervals is twice the length of the combined interval time. With increasing fitness you’ll be able to do triple and even quadruple drop-sets before failure. I’ve based the intensities on perceived effort here and after a few sessions you’ll quickly get used to what a 10% drop in intensity feels like, but better still would be to use a HRM or a powertap for more accurate results. As you will quickly see, these sessions are extremely tough and shouldn’t be incorporated into your training programme more than twice a month.

Now for the really fun part. Why stop at sprint interval drop-sets? You can progress these sessions to any length of time to benefit all areas of your riding. So if for example your peak power for a 10mile TT was 300 watts and you wanted to improve your power over much greater distances, the drop-set session you might be aiming to build up to would look like this:

1) Ride for 20 mins @ 300w
2) Ride for 40 mins @ 270w
3) Ride for 80 mins @ 240w

You almost certainly wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near completing these durations the first time you tried the sessions, but building up to them session by session would provide an extremely high quality progressive overload programme. Just record how far into the session you can get on each attempt and use that point as a ‘carrot’ each time you do the session.

*Printed in Cycling Weekly Magazine (UK) 23/7/2009

	Author:	huw_williams (huw_williams's profile, huw_williams's blog)
	Posted On:	Friday, 17th July '09, 10:46pm
	Tags:	Cycling
	Comments:	1 comment, go to comments