Cycling Workout: Descending Intervals | Strava

Having just recently acquired my first turbo trainer, I’ve been looking for some training workouts to make my turbo time effective.

This one, from the Strava Blog, looks very interesting. Structured, hard, but with plenty of rests in between the efforts.

I’ve taken the interval pattern in the article and created a custom Garmin Workout for you.

[Download Now]

When you’re doing a Descending Interval you’re doing a series of maximal efforts that get shorter as the interval goes on.

You start with a 60-second effort at the maximum power you can sustain for the full minute. Then you spin easy for 60 seconds.

After that you power up for another max effort, this time 45 seconds in length. Take 45 seconds easy spinning, then proceed with a 30-second maximal effort. Take 30 seconds easy and then finish up with a 15-second hard acceleration (some people sprint like the end of a race, others rev the pedals to accelerate seated for this final effort).

A Descending Interval workout would consist of 4-5 of these progressions, separated by 5 minutes of easy spinning.

Strava premium users get a load of additional features over freebie users, and as you’d expect, they use their excellent blog to promote them.
I’ve taken the post a step further by providing you with a free Garmin Workout version of this exercise. Give it a go on the turbo.

Download this Strava training as a Garmin “Workout”

I’ve created the descending interval pattern outlined in the Strava article, as a Workout for Garmin Edge devices.
This means you can load up the Workout and the Garmin will prompt you when to start each section. It will even tell you if you’re not working hard enough during the “max effort” phases!

Click to download this free Workout for your Garmin

Please note that to create the workout, I equate “max effort” with heart rate zone 5.
For this to work for you, your profile on the Garmin should have been set up with your personal HR zones.

Click Here to Download this FREE Garmin Workout