Tricks for staying perky for sprints from rest?

Training With Power
1

Hi,

The other day I had to workout where the intervals prescribed 200% of ftp, then z5, then all out.

I found that for the second and third opening sprints, my heart had trouble going from a recovery mode to the demands of the sprint efforts. This is just a thing that my body does (observed by a cardiologist), I can’t fix it. I’m 31 now and I started to notice it when I started structured training 3 years ago.

But as far as cycling goes, it means when I suddenly go hard, I have to lay off, wait for the heart, and then make the best of the remaining Z5 time. The all-out 30 seconds at the end goes fine, tho my power is below the suggested target watts. It’s just that from-rest to sprint stuff is sometimes very hard for me to achieve. It’s gotta be a perfect day to snap from a recovery interval.

Any thoughts on this?

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Hey @likhi.ondov - I am by no means a cardiologist and do not know your medical history, but one thing I would say to do is to ensure you get a proper warmup. Everyone is different but a solid 30-45 minute warm up before these types of efforts is extremely helpful for “opening up” your blood vessels so that your body can respond to the demands of training. It also takes time for you to adapt to these shorter more intense efforts (especially if you are not a sprinter by nature). It doesnt happen overnight. So if this is the first time you’ve done zone 5/6 workouts in a while… give your body some time to adjust. You may not nail the intervals perfectly, but I have a very strong feeling that you will see improvements :slight_smile:

The warm up training tip if you want to read a bit more:

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