A Cadence Pyramid workout is a brief session that produces big neuromuscular gains in just 10 minutes.
Video Transcript
Unknown Speaker 0:11
Today I’m gonna take you through a workout that I absolutely love. This is one where you can see noticeable gains without ever having to put out any power law. The top cyclists that I know do this regularly. I even had one friend every morning he’d get out of bed hop in the rollers. do this without even getting out of his PJs. All you need for this workout is a bike and a set of rollers.
Unknown Speaker 0:36
So this is a pure neuromuscular workout. What do I mean by neuromuscular, it’s training the muscle firing patterns in your leg, believe it or not every pedal stroke, there are dozens of muscles in each leg that are involved in that stroke, and they need to fire in perfect sequence. If they don’t, they can start fighting one another which has an effect called co contraction. So there’s a bit of a simplification, but imagine if your quads and your hamstrings were firing at the same time, you’re doing work, but a lot of that power is not going into the bike and you’re actually doing some damage to those muscle fibers. So a neuromuscular workout trains that firing pattern so that you can actually get more power. With less work and you’re doing less damage. This workout is one of the best ways I know to train those muscle firing patterns.
Unknown Speaker 1:26
katolaz workout is control. Just pedaling really fast on the rollers gives you a little bit of benefit. But often you’re just bouncing all over the rollers and just training bad neuromuscular patterns. It’s important to hold the exact cadences for a minute each will try not to rock on the bike. That’s how you teach your body the neuromuscular control. You can do this workout on a trainer but rollers are best. If you have a lack of neuromuscular controls I’m unfortunate about the demonstrate it really shows up on the rollers. When I used to do this workout almost daily, I could hit 141 50 RPM without bouncing it all on the rollers. Fortunately, I’ve been enrollers in years and now I doubt I could even hit 130 without bouncing all over the place. And I can tell you, I’ve seen the difference in my racing. Alright, here’s the protocol. First is important you keep the power low. This is not meant to be a hard workout. So you’re going to start at 100 RPM for a minute, then increase to 110 RPM for a minute. It’s really important you hit those exact cadences. So keep going until you do a minute at 130 rpm and then come back down through 121 10 and 100. What you’re going to find is as you come back down suddenly 100 It’s going to feel pretty easy. I think it’d be really smooth on the buck. For some of you that might be too much to start and you might be better off starting at 90 RPM going up to 120. To build that neuromuscular control, you can increase that go up to 130. For those of you who are more experienced you might be able to go as high as 140 and 150. For everybody as you build that neuromuscular control, try to bring up that top end of the pyramid. Track riders will do this workout increasing and five RPM increments and some of them will go as high as 160 and 170.
Unknown Speaker 3:14
What’s great about this workout is it only takes 10 minutes this is something you can do at the end of your regular workout or is a wake me up in the morning. I recommend doing this workout three to four times per week. Trust me you will not regret it. For more workouts and tips. Check out our workouts of the month.
