What team sport coaches can learn from sprint cycling about power development

Most, if not all, strength and conditioning coaches are in pursuit of power development that transfers to the track, field or court. Sprint cyclists are some of the most powerful athletes on the planet but when we look at athletes to reference when talking about power, they are are not often referenced. So what can other sports learn from sprint cyclists? We spoke to Toby Edwards who works with the Australian sprint cycling team to see what they do and how it can be transferred to other sports.

Sprint cyclists are some of the most powerful athletes around. Since joining the Australian cycling team, how has your view on power development changed?

Coming from field based running sports to now working mostly with the track sprint and BMX race disciplines, I’ve made myself completely revisit the biological contributions to maximal power production: force-velocity and torque-cadence relationships; morphological factors such as muscle fibre type and muscle architecture; and neural factors such as motor unit recruitment, firing frequency, and inter-muscular coordination. This has changed my approach and the way I think about developing power for sprint cyclists and BMX athletes versus field based running sport athletes.

For example, with running and jumping sport athletes, I would develop power through contrast and complex sets. In the gym, we’d pair a heavy back squat with a box jump, or trap bar deadlifts with depth jumps. On the field, it would be resisted and unresisted sprint accelerations.

With sprint cyclists and BMX athletes, the focus in the gym is purely to increase maximum strength. We use the bike to develop power through different track or BMX efforts. That way, we can manipulate the inertia an athlete has to overcome through different gear ratios and entry speeds, allowing the athlete to train anywhere on the power-cadence curve depending on the type of adaptation we seek.

With power development being such an important physical characteristic of the athletes that you work with, we need to ask: how much of an emphasis do the Olympic lifts and their derivatives have in your programme?

Following on from the previous question, the expression of power is context specific. Ultimately, we are concerned with an athlete’s expression of power on the bike and not the expression of power in the Olympic lifts, their derivatives or any other gym lift for that matter. There is no exercise in the weight room that can replicate the speed of muscle contraction / shortening velocity that athletes experience on the bike.

However, that is not to say we don’t use the Olympic lifts or their derivatives in our program. They certainly feature throughout our off-season, general preparation and specific preparation phases.

During the off-season and early general preparation phases, we perform a variety of Olympic lifting complexes to improve technical components and work on some level of work capacity. In the general preparation phase, we’ll use a derivative of the clean or snatch at the beginning of a training session to prime the athlete for the primary lifts of the session. In the specific preparation and peaking phase, we will remove the catch and transition into some clean / snatch pulls from either the floor or from blocks.

Coming back to your original question, yes, power development is a critical physical characteristic to develop for sprint cycling and BMX race athletes. However, we do not necessarily place a large emphasis on the Olympic lifts to develop this capacity.

Given the research that is out there, what role do isometrics have in your programming for sprint cycling? If you use them, how?

Despite the excellent research into isometric training for improvements in sports performance, the research in this area for improvements in sprint cycling performance and peak power output is currently lacking.

Based on the literature, we know that isometric training can elicit improvements in maximum strength with the adaptations being relatively specific to the joint angle and range of motion. We can then theorize that cycling specific isometric training might offer some benefit to cycling performance and peak power output through improving torque production at low cadence ranges.

During my brief time with the Australian Cycling Team, I have used isometrics during specific preparation and peaking phases to allow maximal force expression at various crank angles. However, it is difficult to determine whether they were beneficial to performance without controlling for various other factors. The only study I have found is by Kordi and colleagues, who concluded that peak power output improved in elite sprint cyclists by 3-4% through improvement in maximal torque after only six weeks of cycling specific isometric training.

The need for ankle stiffness is something that crosses many different sporting disciplines. How do you go about training ankle stiffness in sprint cyclists, and is there any crossover to running based sports when it comes to methodology?

Ankle stiffness is important in cycling to transfer torque to the pedal, similar to transferring force into the ground when sprinting.

The key differences and takeaways for me involved the interaction between elastic and contractile elements, and the storage and utilization of elastic energy. For example, field based running sports involve stretch shortening cycle movements where the muscle tendon unit shortens due to the shortening of tendinous elements, while contractile elements mostly contract isometrically. Whereas in concentric only movements such as cycling, the muscle tendon unit shortens due to muscle fascicle shortening with minimal tendon displacement.

That said, I have used a very similar methodology to train tendon stiffness in cyclists as I have in running and jumping sport athletes. This includes regular use of intensive and extensive plyometrics during warmups, heavy seated and standing calf raises and isometrics, and heavy strength training.

If you were to go back into team sport, what would be the biggest physical training lesson you would take with you from cycling?

Do less, but do less better. Working in a pure strength and power sport such as sprint cycling, I have come to realize that it is equally, if not more, important to understand what to not do as it is what to do.

It’s very easy to get carried away trying to address everything all at once. Then you end up not addressing anything at all.

What do you think are the most common mistakes young practitioners make and what would you recommend they do to overcome them?

Input does not always equal output. The biopsychosocial model has become a topical area of interest in the strength & conditioning world, and rightly so. The athletes we are so lucky to work with are humans first and athletes second. We have to account for not only the training stress we impose on them but also the psychological and social stress that might also be occurring in their lives if we are to optimize physical training adaptations.

Create ownership and build autonomy. I first learned a version of this from Josh Bonhotal at Purdue University in 2016-17, when he introduced me to relationship-based coaching. Five years on, I have finally understood what he was trying to teach me… Coaching is a partnership between you and your athletes, and at the end of the day we are there to support them and their ambitions. I really like a saying I heard from Dr. Lynne Munro, one of our sprint cycling coaches, when we talk about how are we creating ownership within our training environment: “My advice, your decision.”

Last, consistency is king. You do not need to keep changing exercises every four weeks or every training cycle just because the textbook in university said to do so. Exercises are just vehicles to deliver a stimulus. Keep them the same and get good at them. There are other variables you can modify to progress an exercise if you need to.