This is one of my most favorite profiles and one of the most effective training sessions you will have in your quiver of profiles. In this profile, I give you several options for mixing it up.
This profile was originally inspired by a Chris Carmichael workout from his book The Time Crunched Cyclist. It’s pretty advanced, so I’ve given you some modifications to introduce this to your less fit students. Over time, you can gradually prepare them for the full 3X9 minutes around threshold because the objective is to increase the amount of time you can sustain at this intensity. It is a powerful workout!
To help your riders understand what you are asking, you can draw the profile on a dry-erase board as in the example above.
My own personal preference is to use 9-minute (or longer) songs for each interval, but they can be hard to find, especially when you want to ride at a faster rpm/bpm. I’ve given you a variety of music suggestions, but if you find other songs that work well, please share them here with other ICA members.
Enjoy!
Taught this routine yesterday. Got some good feedback. We haven’t done a field test so I cued by drawing our intervals on the whiteboard and then the under was “hard”, Over was “hardest” and I had a line in the middle representing “harder”. Just started teaching using the music as a tool and not just background noise. Good results! This music selection was a bit out of my comfort zone but no one complained 🙂
Thank you so much for your clear, easy to follow instructions for teaching this class–I look forward to sharing this with all of my students and especially with my students using heart rate monitors (we do not have bikes with power). I will let you know how they respond. As an aside, I am using the Cycling Fusion ClassBuilder App with a projector, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive–this will be a great profile to show, as the graphic helps make sense of the efforts.