Hi everyone, I recently listened with fascination to episode 62 featuring Chris Blomfield-Brown about time trial warm up, or activation as I’ve learned is the preferred them, and how the right protocol can really boost your performance.
From what I gathered, he described the protocol to be something along those lines:
- Start by riding very easy at a high (ish) cadence for about 10-15 minutes
- After that you can do between two and three efforts where you slowly ramp up the power over to course of maybe one minute to threshold power and then hold it for about two minutes after that. Once this effort is done, stop completely. The idea being that in this moment the body has more Oxygen than it can consume and so it stores the excess in the muscles. Repeat up to 3 times for optimal muscle oxygenation.
- Once this has been completed you stay in the activated state for around 10 minutes so the activation should actually happen fairly close to the start of the event.
He was then asked by Ronan if this can be applied to other sports as well, namely running and rowing, to which he said yes.
At this point my interest as a former high school track (mostly 3k steeplechase and 5k) and cross country (around 3-7k in length) runner was really piqued. Now I’m questioning if I activated in a sub optimal way all my youth of competing.
My activation, we called it warm-up of course, was something as follows:
- Maybe an hour or so before a race, we’d start by jogging really easy for about 20 minutes. We usually did this in full track suits including jackets, even in summer. Seeing to TDF riders activate with cooling vests on and hearing Chris say that you want to keep your core as cool as possible, I’d file that as the first mistake.
- After that we’d do some stretching and some drills
- Finally some strides. Those would normally be some acceleration runs
We’d be finished typically with around 15 to 20 minutes to the race start.
My thinking after hearing the episode is that we should not have worn the full track suits, finished the activation much closer to the start and maybe even start with the drills as to not have a lot of time in between the easy running and the strides.
Does anyone have with running or cycling activation protocols? I’d be also curious to hear any past experiences.