The all important warm up is a fine art that brings many benefits when you get it right. In today’s guest blog, written by Dean Downing, we explore the art of warm up, plus Dean shares his Crit race warm up:
When it comes to warming up, failing to prepare means preparing to fail. Whether you're planning a session on the Wattbike, a road race, time trial or Criterium, warming up should always feature on your list of pre-session preparation.
If you don’t warm up, something is going to fail. Skipping a warm up means you may injure yourself and as a result you won't go into the training session or race in good condition and you won’t complete it to the best of your ability.
Most Wattbike sessions are hard work, whether it be a solid zone 2 or zone 3 workout or a harder zone 4 or zone 5 session. There are different ways of warming up for a Wattbike session, but the idea is that you warm your legs and lungs up progressively.
A 20-30 minute warm up is ideal for the harder sessions and perfect for a time trial or a criterium effort where you need to be straight on the power and riding hard from the gun.
You need to think about the type of effort you are going to be doing in your session or race, but ultimately you need to get your engine ready to race.
When racing in the City Centre Tour Series events, I used the following warm up. This type of warm up is also used by some of the best track riders on the Great Britain team:
5 minutes easy pedalling at 90rpm 2 minutes at 95rpm
1m 30 at 100rpm
1 minute at 110rpm
30 seconds at 120rpm
2 minutes back at 90rpm
3x 6 second max sprint efforts to warm up the muscles with a 2 minute easy 90rpm spin in-between
To finish off you can ride up to 5 or 10 minutes at 90rpm.
I’m going to be honest, there were a few occasions that I mis-timed my warm up at some of the Tour Series events, mainly due to my own bad timing! I ran out of time and ended up doing a 10 minute warm with no structure at all. As a result I was unprepared for the fast start and I suffered badly for the first half of the race, missing the breakaway’s for example, I had to then make bigger efforts to get to the front. All because my legs and lungs were not warmed up properly.
Once you have practiced your own warm up for your sessions at home on your wattbike, you can take this to the races and be prepared in the best way for that all important Time Trail, Road Race or City Centre Criterium.