Trainer Tuesdays Workout #5

Welcome to week 5 of Trainer Tuesdays! Feeling a little guilty about all those cookies and eggnog? Time to dust off the ‘ol trainer and join us for a sweat fest! This week we’re continuing the oh-so-beneficial one leg and scrape drills, but adding in a new drill to help you with your transitions. We’ll practice getting in and out of our shoes while pedaling–helpful to those of you who want to work on leaving your shoes clipped in your bike during transition. We’ll top things off with some high cadence intervals to help you work on your speed skills. Join in at 5:30pm Eastern on 12/18 for a live tweetcast including tips and motivation (#trainertuesdays)!

Trainer Tuesdays Workout #5

• 5:00 at an easy pace
• 6:00 drills done as 3x (1:00 right leg, 1:00 left leg)
• 5:00 of :30 scrapes (see in notes below), :30 easy spin
• While continuing to pedal as much as possible, remove your feet from your shoes then pedal with your feet on top of your shoes till 2:00 have elapsed. At the 2:00 mark, transition to feet inside your shoes (again, while pedaling as much as possible) and ride till the 2:00 mark.
• Repeat above 4 more times (total of 20 minutes of shoe transitions)
• 3:00 of hard (Zone 4), fast (100 rpm) pedaling, 1:00 of easy pedaling at 80 rpm.
• Repeat above 4 more times (total of 20 minutes of these intervals)
• Cooldown: pedal easy for 4:00.

Total time: 60 minutes

Notes: On the one-legged drills, focus on pedaling smoothly and maintaining your form. Your leg is going to want to “skip” on the hard part of the stroke (the upstroke) but that’s what you want to avoid. Try to pedal at your normal cadence. You will feel it in your core and hip flexors!

For the scrapes, you want to exaggerate your pedal upstroke. Imagine you have mud on the bottom of your heel that you’re trying to scrape off. Focus all your energy on “scraping” the upstroke and ignore the rest of your stroke during this drill.