What better way to start a new monthly idea, than to start with a hugely fun/vomit inducing session :-). High Octane Escalation is a maximal 30-seconds set of intervals that are designed to build your fitness across a variety of exercise intensity domains.

These intense, thigh bursting efforts will have a positive effect on your moderate (long endurance), heavy intensity domain (around FTP) and severe exercise intensity domain (VO2max/MAP and FRC/W’). They’re an ideal session to do over the off-season when combined with other intense and moderate sessions to either stop your power from declining while taking things easier, or to build power depending on what phase of training you’re in.

How to complete them
You’ll need a good warm up, so I’d suggest around 30-minutes building to zone 3, with perhaps a couple of short, brief efforts around the power you think you may be able to average for each 30-second effort. Then ride easy for a minute or two. Then rapidly accelerate to a very high power, and smash out a maximal 30-second effort. This effort can be done in one of two ways — either starting at a very high power and fading over the 30-seconds with fatigue, or aiming for a more moderate but still high power and attempting to hold it at that power for 30-seconds (a small drop off is fine). The main thing is that whichever way you do it, it has to be very hard. Then ride easy for 5-minutes at very low power so that you can recover and get ready for further efforts. You should be able to complete a minimum of 3 efforts and a maximum of 9. As your training progresses you can increase the number of efforts up to 9. Once the High Octane Escalation are complete you can either cool down for another 10-minutes or so, or take it easy for 5 to 10-minutes and then continue with endurance training.

These efforts have a positive effect on your stamina, FTP, MAP, and FRC and have been shown to help you have a better season next year.