A six-second cycling test has been shown to reliably and efficiently measure peak power in endurance athletes, offering an appealing alternative to the standard 30-second test.
The 30-second test, known as the Wingate Anaerobic Test, provides important information for optimizing athlete training and performance. Researchers evaluated a shorter variation, which addressed some shortcomings of the longer Wingate test, and saw promising results.
"Not only do you get more reliable results with a shorter test, you also reduce the amount of strain you put on an athlete's body," says Joao Henrique Falk Neto, first author of the study and PhD candidate in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation.
He explains that the increase in reliability is because some studies suggest the longer Wingate test may slightly underestimate peak power since athletes know they'll need to sustain their most intense effort for a full 30 seconds.
When you think of an endurance sporting event, you likely envision something like a marathon where you're putting forth a steady effort, clocking in kilometre after kilometre at your standard pace. However, according to Falk Neto, many modern endurance athletes like cyclists or cross-country skiers intersperse sprints of high-intensity effort with recovery periods.
"You basically keep repeating that pattern of surging and recovering throughout your event."
For endurance events like these, peak power is a crucial factor in determining how an athlete will perform, which is why tests like the Wingate are used. For example, an athlete's peak power could be a major factor in determining where they finish on the podium.
"A lot of races are decided in the last sprint to the finish line," says Falk Neto. "The higher your maximal peak power, the faster or more intense you can get in those last few seconds, where you might actually win the race."
In addition to affecting performance in the critical final moments of an event, peak power also influences how sustainable an athlete's effort is over a longer time.
"There's something called the anaerobic power reserve, which is just the range of intensities you have. The higher your maximal peak power, the higher the range of intensities you have," says Falk Neto.
Athletes with higher peak power could find intense sprints less physically taxing than competitors with lower peak levels because they won't be pushing to the very top of their capacity for every sprint.
"This should lead to less fatigue, and less accumulation of different metabolites and physiological responses that we know are going to lead to fatigue over a prolonged period."
For the study, run out of the Athlete Health Lab, Falk Neto and his collaborators assessed 27 trained endurance athletes. Participants visited the lab four times, doing three six-second Wingate tests during their first visit and two tests per visit on the following three testing days.
Researchers, including undergraduate trainees assisting with the assessment as an experiential learning opportunity, gathered measurements such as muscle oxygenation, blood lactate, oxygen consumption and respiratory exchange ratio to determine peak power for each athlete. Falk Neto plans to use these measurements in a followup study exploring the physiological demands of performing the six-second Wingate.
They also found that athletes produced consistent peak power numbers across the multiple lab visits and tests. There was a negligible difference between the first and second tests on visits two through four, further lowering the physical burden placed on athletes. Researchers also confirmed that despite the repeated tests, there was no "learning effect" — a phenomenon in which test subjects' performance improves through repetition of a task.
"This is significant because it shows that a single six-second, all-out test is sufficient to provide consistent monitoring of an athlete's maximal peak power across a season of training."
While the researchers focused on endurance athletes in their study, the shorter test could help all types of athletes optimize their performance by better understanding and identifying their training zones, says Falk Neto.
