Hit It & Quit It
Hey you . . . yeah you. Want to go faster? We’ll, I’ve got something for you right here: Just hit it and quit it. I’m serious, it’ll take you to new heights. And I am not talking about the sweet Funkadelic jam from the classic “Maggot Brain”. I am talking about intervals and the right way to do them. Hopefully you’ve had plenty of LSD (see last month’s post) and it’s possible that the desire to go long is waning. I alluded to the fact that intensity has its place and now is a great time to tune up the engine and lengthen the season without spending monster hours on the bike with some short, hard work. All you’ve got to do is hit it and quit it. And it’ll make you faster.
One of the best ways to think of doing intervals is to imagine this type of work like weightlifting. If you are in the gym, you pick up a weight and do a set. When you are done, you put that weight down. The same goes for intervals: Pick a short hill (hit it) and then turn around and coast down/ride as easily as possible for a few minutes (quit it). The magic happens by taking it as easy as possible and giving the body a chance to reset. Repeat a reasonable amount of times and then go home. You can do a great set and be home in an hour. A short warm-up, five or six 1- to 2-minute all-out efforts with double that time spent recovering, and you’re done. Head home with the satisfaction of having done something that will make you faster but didn’t take too long.
What I just described has an acronym (of course it does): SHIT — Steep Hill Interval Training and it works great (though it doesn’t feel too good). But the beauty is that it’s quick and effective. These short bursts will help increase power but also help raise your threshold and they aren’t as tedious as the more controlled, and longer, tempo and FTP intervals most folks typically consider when doing their intervals.
They don’t have to be so short, four or five 5-minute intervals also work great, just pace it to make it. The goal is always to go as hard as you can when doing SHIT, but you also want to try to make the last one as good as the first. This takes a little practice, and maybe a few failures, but learning to pace yourself at a maximum effort for a given duration is more than half of what makes doing intervals effective in the first place — high performance is as much a learned thing as it is a physical adaptation.
One last note: More is not better. If you are doing this right, you shouldn’t be able to do more than a handful on the longer side or maybe eight 1-minute efforts. If you can do more, you are doing them wrong by not going hard enough.
SHIT intervals are a great midweek tune-up and can be very helpful by maximizing time while increasing ability during a time of year when, let's admit it, motivation is waning. I’ve been there, the weather is great, but I am tired of doing the same old thing (that thing being sit on a bike all day). Not to worry, all you’ve got to do is hit it and quit it and you’ll be feeling real good in no time.
—Jeff Louder