Roller Pyramid of Power

Yesterday I suffered through what I find to be one of the most painful, yet beneficial workouts: the Roller Pyramid. This exercise increases leg speed and improves the smoothness of your pedal stroke. This exercise will not only improve your sprinting, but will also help make you a more efficient racer in general. Roller pyramids are one of two workouts that I feel almost immediately inject a bit of power into my legs and have a direct impact on my racing. The other exercise is motor-pacing, but I’ll leave my analysis of that workout to a future blog post.

The roller pyramid is a form of interval training, involving riding the rollers at progressively higher 1-minute or 30-second cadence intervals. You build up to your max cadence, then work your way back down to recovery. I find the best workouts last about an hour and work through the pyramid two times. If you are new to riding rollers, you may find it difficult to ramp up your cadence without bouncing in the saddle. This is an indication of an inefficient pedal stroke, the more you work on the rollers, the smoother and less “bouncy” you will get. When I first started with this workout, I could barely get above 110rpm without feeling like I would fly out of the saddle. Now, after many roller workouts, I can safely max my pyramid out at just over 200rpm.

Here is an introductory, sample workout for those new to the rollers. Once you’ve mastered this workout, you can add “steps” to the pyramid to further increase your target cadence. As you add more steps to the pyramid, you can shorten the length of the highest cadence intervals to avoid burn-out.

10min Warm-up

3min Burn-out to Z5

2min Rest

1min 110rpm

1min Recovery

1min 120rpm

1min Recovery

1min 130rpm

1min Recovery

1min 120rpm

1min Recovery

1min 110rpm

5min Rest (drink)

1min 110rpm

1min Recovery

1min 120rpm

1min Recovery

1min 130rpm

1min Recovery

1min 120rpm

1min Recovery

1min 110rpm

10min Cool-Down

If you have any questions about this workout, or roller pyramids in general, feel free to ask them in the comments section! 

Cadence graph you are shooting for