02 - Capacity and Intensity

Broadly speaking, there's two things a sprinter needs - intensity - being high power outputs, to accelerate and go fast and capacity - the ability to go fast for long enough and to recover to repeat efforts.

Both of these need to be trained and as with most things in life, there's more than one way to do it.  Most sprint coaches will identify as one or the other, a capacity or an intensity coach, which is generally reflected in the way they structure their programs.  If they start with long efforts (500m or so) and taper down to shorter, faster efforts through a training program, they're working on capacity, if they do the opposite, it's intensity (sometimes called "reverse periodisation).

It is the opinion of the author that intensity is often better trained before capacity, but this is by no means the "right" answer and many will disagree.  As such, we're presenting here a couple of models for you to choose from.  If you're already an endurance cyclist (road, criteriums, track pursuit/points race, MTB) you will probably benefit most from an intensity approach, if you're a BMX'er you're already primed with intensity and will probably benefit from a capacity approach.  If you're coming at track sprint cycling from a non cycling background you're going to need to learn to pedal, which means you will probably benefit from a hybrid approach with more road riding to learn the basics of pedalling efficiently.  Again, there's no "right" answer as such and you are free to choose whichever approach you think will work best for you.

One thing we do hope you keep in mind is that sprint programs should never remove the intensity component - we think Charlie Francis is right - if you cut out intensity (speed/power in our context) you lose precious time. Your program changes emphasis around, but never removes completely, any of the things you are trying to train to get faster.