The aboc Sprint Squad is a small group, there's about 6 or 7 of us I think at the moment.  It's the end of the season for all but a very small number who are racing at the Aussie Masters this weekend, and then it's all over 'til next summer.

So, what do we do in the mean time?

We'll cycle through this high-level plan, this is emphasis, not exclusive, so before you tell me "but you'll lose all your leg speed if all you do is strength", yes, we keep a leg speed component in our strength block and so on, we change the emphasis, not do just one thing. And we even get out and do some longish (~1hr or so) easy road/mtb rides, I just don't write much about them because they're not terribly interesting.  So please don't feel the need to send me messages that I need to get my squad doing road miles, we do them, we just don't write much about them because they're generally taken as read and pretty dull compared to the sharp stuff we do in the gym, on the track and on our ergos.  Everyone does road miles in some form, they're just not all that interesting when what you care about is sprinting.  We don't do E3 work with our sprinters, except maybe the kilo riders, but they're a bit special.  Anyone that actually wants to do the kilo is pretty demented, they have to do E3 work as well as sprint training and that's tricky to balance.  The kilo .. urgh .. anyway .. I have the utmost admiration for anyone willing to hurt themselves that much, but they're nucking futs!

Preamble done, here's the plan, bear in mind that these blocks overlap so the total time doesn't add up :

Six weeks to two months of strength - heavy weights in the gym concentrating on squats and deadlifts and lots of gate starts and low speed accelerations. K1's and so on.  Towards the end of this block we do more power work, accelerating from 30km/h to 70km/h or more chasing the motorbike etc.  We may do some weighted gate starts too for giggles.  This is where you slap a weight vest on a rider and get them to do starts. I'm not sure about them, but some coaches I respect a lot use them a bit and so it might be worth experimenting with a little.

One month of leg speed, lots of chasing the motorbike at DISC as fast as we can go in reasonably small gears doing lots of revouts.

One month to 6 weeks of speed-endurance - longer sprints, ramp ups etc - these are the vomit-inducing interval sessions that Dino had to do last night at Spin while the rest of us did short strength efforts.  Nothing longer than about a minute or so in total duration, but with shorter recovery times between efforts (5 to 10 minutes) so we get used to having to sprint again shortly after a sprint.  This simulates championship sprints, and hurts like hell.  It's burnout inducing so we don't do too much of it.

That takes us through to roughly August and we can have a little rest for a week or so, go ski-ing or some sort of a holiday etc.  Some of the junior sprinters may go away over their school holidays etc. 

Then we reassess and see where everyone is and look at the events scheduled for next summer, by July/August we might have some semblance of a calendar to look at and an idea of what each rider needs to focus on for their specific events.  Most of us will be concentrating on match sprints and flying 200's, a few on the time trials (500m & kilo), so we do slightly different things for each rider, but that's a rough overview of the plan for us through 'til mid winter.