First time back doing hard starts in a while today. Firstly, they never get any easier . I was pleased with how the session went though (5x4 minutes). Totalled nearly 16 mins at 180bpm+ which is good stimulus for me.
A fair bit off my power PB for the duration but I noticed that my best powers for shorter efforts like this are at lower cadences (presumably I can recruit more motor units/muscle fibers by increasing the torque demands).
Hard start was a fair bit easier than my last attempt at these: Vo2 Max training - did I do it right? but found riding on a turbo helped this. Powers dropped during the efforts (although rpe wasn’t short of a 9 throughout), but always managed to keep it above FTP