How Can I Improve My Climbing With Interval Training?
In this episode of our Explaining Training podcast, we answer this question from Marie:
“Hi! I would like to improve my performance on hills of around 7 - 10 mins. I usually do 2 interval sessions per week, 2 long aerobic rides and 1 or 2 short recovery rides. What types of intervals would you suggest I try?”
Now something that immediately jumps out here is that it sounds like Marie has a really good balance of low and high intensity riding, and also a good number of recovery days per week as well. Basically, her standard weekly structure sounds really good!
Physiological Determinants
So performance on climbs that last between 7-10 minutes is going to be determined by a couple key physiological factors.
The first and probably the main one will be VO2max, i.e the maximum rate at which you can take on and process oxygen to produce energy, and over the course of a 7-10 minute effort, you going to be riding at or very close to your VO2max, if you’re going all-out.
Another important factor is the ability to move lactate between muscle cells and into the mitochondria, which are often called the power house of the cell. A maximal effort in that 7-10 minute range will be fuelled almost entirely through carbohydrate break-down, which then produces lactate as a byproduct at a high rate. While lactate itself isn’t bad - that’s something really important to stress - it is associated with the production of other metabolites that contribute to fatigue, so we want the body to be able to clear this lactate as effectively as possible, to allow Marie to sustain a high power output for a entire hard effort.
A third factor is also Marie’s capacity to ride above her threshold.
Some cyclists who do a lot of low and middle intensity riding but spend fairly minimal time at higher intensities can be limited in their ability to ride above that threshold power.
These cyclists might find that their 5-minute maximal power isn’t a great deal different from their 20-minute maximal power for instance and this sort of comparison is one way you can get a bit of a gauge on this.
If that sounds similar to your experience, then what we’d probably recommend is spending some time working on improving your ability to recruit fast twitch muscle fibres, and the ability to produce energy more rapidly via what’s called “glycolysis”, which is the breakdown of glycogen, i.e. the body’s stored carbohydrate.
Recommended Workouts
What Marie might want to focus on in her interval sessions then depends to some extent on her individual strengths and limiters.
Given we don’t exactly know where Marie’s strengths and limiters lie, it’d make sense to hedge our bets and suggest she could focus on efforts that target VO2max, given this is the biggest determinant of performance in this case.
VO2max-focused intervals actually do help with other abilities as well, like improving lactate transport and boosting capacity to ride above threshold, so in that sense we’re kind of covering all bases with these kinds of efforts!
So if we were to recommend some workouts for Marie or listeners with similar goals to try, they might be the following:
Firstly, a session featuring 4-5 x 6-minute efforts done at an 8/10 effort level (which will typically be somewhere around 103 to 110% FTP) with perhaps 4 minutes of recovery between each effort. When you get better at these, you can also start to include a 30-second hard start surge at the beginning, to help elevate heart rate and oxygen consumption more rapidly.
Next is a microburst-style interval.This workout design will typically comprise of 2-3 blocks of 30-seconds ‘on’ and 15 second ‘off’. The ‘on’ intervals should initially feel something like a 7-8/10 but as the block of intervals wears on, you should find it increasingly hard to produce the same power output, and the effort will feel more like a 9/10. Typically the ‘on’ intervals will be at an intensity of 120-130% FTP, and you might start out performing 3x 9-minute blocks, and building up to 2x 12-minute blocks for example.
In addition to these interval sessions Marie may also benefit from some workouts targeting lactate transport, or shuttling. Over/under-type interval sessions can be good for this. These typically comprise of 8-15 minute blocks where you alternate between riding slightly above threshold power, and slightly below. You might start out, for example, alternating between 1-min at around 108% FTP, followed by 2-mins at 85% FTP and as you get better at these efforts, you can progress them by making the final block or all of the blocks longer in duration. As an example, you might start with 2x 9-min blocks, and progress to 2x 12 or 15-min blocks. You can also increase the power of the ‘overs’, or include a hard start at the beginning of the block.
Another session that Marie might want to try is what we might call an anaerobic stamina session. There’s some evidence that this may help to improve lactate transport or the ability to buffer fatiguing metabolites, and it could also help if Marie has limited capacity to ride above her threshold. A good anaerobic stamina session might include two blocks of 4-5x 1-min efforts, at a 9/10 on the RPE scale or rating of perceived exertion scale.Within each block, Marie could take around 2-2.5-mins recovery between each effort, and then a longer period of recovery between the two blocks. As her ability to clear lactate improves she could then shorten the recovery between 1-min efforts from around 2.5 minutes to something like 1.5 minutes.
In summary, Marie’s interval training might be improved through mainly targeting improvements in VO2max, but by also mixing in some over/under-type efforts, alongside some sessions targeting anaerobic stamina.
With this approach, she’ll likely see some good developments in the 7-10 minute climbing efforts she’s seeking to get stronger at.
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