New year, new aspirations and all that, I’m planning on doing a couple of early-morning half-hour sessions a week on the rollers.

They’re just basic, non-resistance, rollers, and in the past I’ve done patterns of increasing cadence and gearing. Anything else more structured that I can be doing?

I have speed, cadence and (somewhere, I think) a HRM.

10-15 minutes warm-up and then 6-8 x 20 seconds flat-out sprints at maximal efforts with recovery using Tabata/HIIT protocol has shown to give the biggest improvements. Given that you’ve got little chance to adjust resistance / gearing then this will be high cadence efforts – you could also try to develop out of saddle sprinting on rollers?

you could also try to develop out of saddle sprinting on rollers?

Make sure there is nothing breakable in front of you and that rollers are set up correctly ie front axle behind the centre of the front roller.

Ta, could you explain the recovery bit a bit more?

you could also try to develop out of saddle sprinting on rollers?

Will you come and see me in A&E? 🙂

If you Google Tabata protocol you’ll see lots of advice – recoveries are typically 10-20 seconds. Really short, horrible and intensive session – do them properly hard and you might struggle to do 6 reps at the beginning. Out of saddle on rollers is possible, but really difficult – you really find out how lumpy your pedal stroke is. Fortunately with rollers, your kinetic energy is a lot less than a moving bike as only your legs are moving so ‘crashes’ aren’t quite as dramatic

Smashing, thanks.

so ‘crashes’ aren’t quite as dramatic

You haven’t seen how much there is to crash into in my garage 🙂

Completely non scientific, pedal getting faster as the song was on the radio, rest when the DJ prattled on. I would not have wanted to sprint out of the saddle. However I found all this soooo boring I sold the rollers and now mountain bike…………

I’ve been doing round the clock intervals on the rollers recently, bit more to think about so I’ve found them marginally less dull to do.

It depends on gearing but I find going as hard as possible in big ring/bottom of the block for the ‘on’ sessions then clicking up a couple of gears but trying to maintain the cadence works for me in the ‘off’ sessions. Then just spin for the recovery/cool down.

I originally set up the timer below to keep track but once used to them just use a stop watch and spend as long as necessary before/after to warm up/cool down.

http://www.intervaltimer.com/timers/7037985-round-the-clock-4-sets

I like (well, you know, ‘like’) the look of the round the clock stuff, I’ll give that a go.

Now to work out a ‘pedal you lazy b@$t@rd’ Spotify playlist

So, thread update, succumbed to the lurgy last week so first session was this morning, I tried the round the clock intervals. Planned sets were:

Warm up – 5 or so minutes in comfortable gear at 80/90rpm

Set 1 – ‘On’ in high gear, ‘off’ in comfortable gear, all at 90rpm
Set 2 – ‘On’ at 100 rpm, ‘off’ at 90rpm, all in comfortable gear
Set 3 – ‘On’ at 100 rpm in high gear, ‘off’ at 90 in comfortable gear.

Warm down

I got to the 50sec ‘on’ interval in Set 2 😳