In many power training circles you hear about the "Hour of Power" which originated with cyclist Bill Black. Basically, on a trainer go at 90% of your threshold power for 60 minutes and in every minute do 15 seconds or so of increased power. Do this for an hour and you end up with basically the same numbers as an hour of threshold without the mind-numbness. You can do it outside too but the terrain has to be pretty flat to get the full effect.
I want to tackle this at some point and with minimal time to ride today, I set up the trainer in my classroom and worked out inbetween classes. However, I only had 40 minutes so I did "20 minutes of power" to experiment. After a 10 minute warm-up, I held 260w for 20 minutes and then at 45 seconds I surged up to 300w to the minute mark. I was surprised how hard this was and I will have to ease into doing 60 minutes at once. My tsb is pretty negative right now (-11) so that might contribute.
It us a really neat idea and breaks up the monotony as well as providing a nice intense workout if you have little time. If you want to see a better account and a graph, head over to Alex Simmons's blog and check out what he did for the full hour.
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2 comments:
We did the hour of power a lot in college; one shot of beer a minute for sixty minutes. When you get that accomplished go for the century club, that's really tough!
A British friend of mine used to go and play soccer until 6pm and then the team would go over and do 9x9 which was 9 pints each before 9pm (when the pub closed). Nine pints in 3 hours....that is pro material.
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