Russian Steps, a good session!!

My Current “Favorite” Training Session...

Russian Steps.

When you are a regular to training and exercising you tend to find particular sessions that you enjoy most. I find, as I am sure most of you also find, the harder the session the more I enjoy it. I tend to get more satisfaction from completing these tough sessions. After the Haute Route this year I promised myself I would try to improve my 1 minute to 5 minute power, as I tended to be dropped like a stone as soon as the top guys hit it on the early slopes of the climbs. With this in mind, I have tried to pop a few harder and sharper sessions this winter. Before I have spent winter doing long steady rides with some intervals, but these intervals are more like 20-30 mins and a steady threshold power.

The recent interval sessions I have been doing are mostly 2-5 minutes long. So VO2 max power for these, and some above VO2 max into Anaerobic. With a few sessions mixing between both. One of the guys who trains here at Athlete Service mentioned a session he has been doing this season, Russian Steps. I had heard of it but never looked into what it was all about. Cue google, and I found what the session was all about... general misery was the simple answer.... but it had the credentials to fill my desire to improve my power in the short efforts.

The session runs as follows:

A good warm up (for me 15-20 mins as I am old and achey).

Then you simply have “ONs” and “OFFs”.

15 seconds ON, 45 seconds OFF.

30 seconds ON, 30 seconds OFF.

45 seconds ON, 15 seconds OFF.

60 seconds ON, 60 seconds OFF.

45 seconds ON, 15 seconds OFF.

30 seconds ON, 30 seconds OFF.

15 seconds ON.

The above is classed as 1 set, try to do 3 sets in total and have between 5 and 10 minutes easy spinning between each. Really easy though, you will need to save your energy and clear the lactate in your legs.

So the “efforts” are written down as “sprints” on the program i found... This term sprint I tend to use rather loosely.... As you can imagine 15 second sprint is not too bad, but doing many of them and including a 60 second sprint is kind of impossible. So the efforts I try to hit power 100+ watts above my FTP. If you do not know your FTP then use 9/10 perceived effort. This is still a very very tough session even with slightly measured efforts. As the effort time goes up, the rest time goes down, I am not good at this session but I have found every time I do it I am improving the power I can hold in the efforts. When the improvements are measurable like this I find it great to keep you doing the sessions.

So thats my current favorite training session (only once a week though!). Give it a spin, but be warned, its not for the faint hearted..... ;)