PLANNING FOR 20-40’s
You can do these on the flats, but I think they are most effective when done on a climb. A climb of 30 or more minutes is ideal as you can do two or sometimes three sets of 20-40s. Toward the end of my career, I was doing these on the road bike occasionally, but back in the day, it was pure mountain biking. Here’s the skinny (or the fat!). Be sure you are wearing a watch, or better yet, that you have a stopwatch with an easy-to-read screen mounted to your handlebar. You need to know the road or trail where you are going to do your 20-40s. You’ll need a safe place without downhills or sharp turns, because when you sprint on a flat trail as hard as you can for twenty seconds, you get going fast! Same goes for doing 20-40s on a climb. You want to find a really consistent climb without any downhill sections. Why? Inevitably, one of your sprints will match up perfectly with that short little break in the climb and you won’t get the training
benefit since you’ll be on your brakes. Ideally, I like a steady, middle-chainring climb. Find out how long it takes you to climb the entire hill at a good, steady pace. If it’s about four minutes, you’ll need to start your first sprint at the bottom. On climbs between four and twenty
minutes in length, have the 20-40 fall right in the middle. If you have a climb of 30 or more minutes, you’re in 20-40 heaven! Multiple sets on the same climb!
GEAR AND TERRAIN SELECTION
Twenty-40s on the flats are great, but the real beauty of doing them on a climb is that you are forcing your body to recover from a wicked hard effort while you’re still climbing! And then, you only get 40 seconds to try to get a tiny grip before the watch is at zero again and you’re back on the gas! You’ll want to stay in whichever chainring is appropriate for your chosen climb (usually middle, but sometimes granny or big). Front chainring shifts during 20-40s can get tricky and detract from purely putting the power down. I like them to be
a middle-ring workout myself.
IT’S SPRINT TIME
Don’t start your ride with a 20-40. Do at least a 15 to 20 - minute warm-up to get your muscles warm and your lungs opened up. During this warm-up, use your stopwatch and include two or three hard efforts of ten to 15 seconds. Put a minute of easy spinning between each of these efforts. Now you’re ready for the real effort. Start your stopwatch at zero and sprint as hard as you can for 20 seconds. Rest for 40 seconds, and when your watch reaches one minute, do another 20-second, all-out effort. I typically do four repetitions
and call it a set. So if you do four sprints, your last sprint will end at 03:20 on your watch. Pretty short workout! Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Don’t believe it. The third sprint will be excruciating and only the toughest riders will finish their forth sprint on top of their gear.
I try to recover for at least ten minutes between sets if I’m going to do more than one. Ninety five percent of the time, I do two sets of four sprints. Back in the day, every once in a while I’d do three sets of four sprints or two sets of five sprints, but never more. This workout is all about quality, not quantity.
REAL-WORLD WORKOUT
I’ll take you along with me now as I do 20-40s up the Crested Butte ski area road. You’ll get the idea and be able to make adjustments for your local trails. After the warm up, I begin the climb. It’s a solid medium effort in my middle ring, big cog. I climb steadily for about five
minutes, then start my stopwatch and sprint my guts out for 20 seconds. Here is where you’ll appreciate that big readout on your watch! Twenty seconds isn’t so long. During the effort, I began in my biggest cog, but I went through the gears and got four or five cogs down by the time 20 clicked over on my watch. Bam! Right back into the big cog. Okay, that wasn’t so bad. Uh oh. 55, 56, 57…here we go again!
Number two, number three, finally number four, and your watch is at three minutes and 20 seconds. We’re done. That’s one set. Keep climbing steadily in your middle ring, then call it a workout. Cool down and go home. I would do these once a week, usually on Tuesday or
Wednesday, and the entire workout lasted between 60 and 90 minutes. Just do one set for two or three weeks and then bump
up to two sets. If you’re doing them good and hard, you’ll rarely need to do more than two sets of four sprints. The beauty of 20-40s is that 20 plus 40 equals 60, and there are 60 seconds in a minute. This makes it easier to keep track of your start and stop points, even when suffering from oxygen debt.
FEEL THE IMPROVEMENT
How often should you use 20-40s? That depends how much you ride. Weekend warriors will feel improvements if they do 20-40s on one ride a week. Riders who log rides four to six times a week should try to start with 20-40s on two days (don’t do them on back-to back days) and increase it to three days a week as they become conditioned to the efforts. Twenty-40s will be tough when you first try them, but feeling the improvement to your riding ability is enough motivation for most people to continue with 20-40s and maybe even look forward to doing them.
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