What makes a good cycling sprinter

Top end speed is exactly what it sounds like: how fast can you go in an all-out sprint. Top end sprinting is all about generating speed and is a combination of form, cadence, strength, and positioning aerodynamics. Clearly power plays a role here, but tracking sprint speed gives us insight into the ability to translate watts into speed through quality of form and aerodynamics. Fatigue resistance is often neglected in sprinting but is very important. Simply put, fatigue resistance is the ability to resist a decline in power over time when sprinting compared to your Pmax max power output for at least one revolution of the crank.

Look at the chart below. This type of power decline is a real limiter in longer sprints. High Acceleration and Low Fatigue Resistance These are the sprinter who can put three bike lengths on you before you know it but cannot sustain the long sprint.

This type of sprinter needs to be skilled at positioning in the finishing setup, finding the right lead out, and using it to wait to the last second possible to complete the final sprint. I often recommend that this sprinter be more of a freelancer and focus on racing the other racers, targeting key competitors and looking to pass them late in the sprint. Starting the sprint too early is death to this type of sprinter, as they open a gap, get chased, and end up passed by more fatigue-resistant riders.

The long sprinter wants things fast and hard over the last two kilometers to soften the peloton and prepare his move. For this type of sprinter, I often recommend having a marked sprint point not as much freelance on the course that triggers the sprint.

This will help the long sprinter focus on the pre-setup lead-in instead of waiting too long to start his move. For this type of sprinter, the strategy becomes very specific to the race and to the competitors. Now that we understand and see some measurements of the three components of speed and how they affect racing and performance, the final question to be answered is how do we improve our speed?

Like with any training, the answer is specificity! I see lots of sprint workouts with rest intervals too short for muscular recovery. Improving your form will make your top end speed higher by better utilizing the power you put out. As part of your form work, learn to sprint deep in your drops and low over your top tube. Good for attacking, standing starts or on a climb. If you are sprinting against other riders, then chances are you will already be moving fast. This session will really help to increase your leg speed, which allow you to accelerate from speed to get the gap you need.

These repeated bursts of maximum speed with little recovery between them will improve your sprint and also boost your endurance for longer distance events. One sprint is seldom enough in a race situation, so this session will help with repeated sprints out of corners or if you have to go again to make an attack stick. In , Cycling Weekly spent a week with sprinter Jess Varnish to see how she trains for explosive speed on the track.

On a 'strength week' like this one, Varnish rode outside only once, and see little other daylight, except while walking her dog, Hugo. The rest of the time she was holed up in the Manchester Velodrome, either on the track or in the gym. That's riding steady then accelerating like you would at the beginning of a match-sprint effort. You back off when you reach full speed, then roll around the track to recover.

It's not quite as simple as that, because it also involves something else we've discovered that helps but which we don't want to share. Basically this is work to increase leg speed. CW says: Sprinting is about increasing force on the pedals and increasing the speed with which that force can be applied, then increasing pedal rev speed. Apply lots of force over a short space of time and you have a fast-accelerating sprinter with high top-end speed. Varnish's strength training is designed to increase the force she applies to the pedals.

Accelerations and leg speed sessions increase the speed with which that force is applied. Our weight training goes through different phases depending how far out we are from a target.

I've just started this and I'm doing it because I had a back injury earlier in the year that cost me a lot of time out from training. I think sprinters are prone to back injuries because we put our backs under a lot of strain when doing standing starts. It's like plyometrics — running and standing jumps and stuff like that.

In the afternoon, I did standing starts. As a six-time Olympic gold medallist on the track, Hoy made his name by being awesome from a standing start. The track sprinting he excelled at leans heavily on explosive power, muscle strength and coordination. Even in the kilo the one-kilometre time trial in which Hoy won his first gold medal before the event was dropped from the Olympics, the key facets are a good start and an ability to maintain the effort without fatiguing excessively. Cavendish is well suited to road sprinting as he can compete for hours in the saddle, yet still generate a maximal effort at the end of a hard race or in the middle of a grueling three-week Grand Tour.

As a lightweight road racer, Cavendish needs to carefully consider his ability to ride for hour upon hour, day after day, and over high mountains. Power-to-weight ratio still matters for sprinters in a stage race. If you want to improve your sprinting, there are a number of things to work on. While power is clearly important, technique — underpinned by good coordination — is also vital.

Cavendish has a reputation for his race craft and is able to win sprints, regardless of whether he is delivered to the line by a perfect leadout or has to surf the wheels of other teams. Practice makes perfect here. If you want to excel in this area, practice, practice, practice. However, remember that good technique is best learned when feeling fresh, not when fatigued.

There are plenty of specific training sessions you can do to improve your acceleration and all-out sprint. From increasing your top-end speed to working on your technique, we have outlined some of the best ways to improve your sprint below. Exercises off the bike can also help improve your sprinting.