Here's a training with power article for you to salivate over. On the whole I think the article is terrible and misses so many finer points of training I hardly know where to begin. But Coggan is a noted authority on power training and of course you can always learn something by reading. You just have to know where to look. I think the idea of doing drag race starts and hard seated accelerations is spot on and should be incorporated into bike race training. The key is accelerating the cranks under load. Not just doing long efforts at one cadence. Taking the crank from 45 rpm up to 110 rpm while under high load, and doing it as quickly as you can is what you want to do.
Coggan went wrong in his evaluation of "traditional" SE training via 5-20 minute efforts in a big gear. Trying to do these indoors at a fixed cadence defeats the purpose. At 30 kph, even a 5-minute effort would cover 2500 meters. A 20-minute effort would cover 10k. Maybe it's different where you live, but around here it's rare to find stretches of road of such length without any grade changes. Most coaches advocate doing these kinds of efforts on rolling terrain anyway, and the reason is (hopefully) obvious: pushing the gear through a range of cadences, accelerating the cranks under high load, is where the benefits come from. Not to mention this simulates racing. The drag race starts and "power stomps" are simply extreme applications of this principle. If you envy lab rats and thrive on suffering through structure, go ahead and do sets of them. But if you just like to ride and accomplish the same sort of thing, push the big gears over rolling terrain and keep the cadence changing. Accelerate over the rises like you mean it. And enjoy the ride. Thanks for reading.
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