12strings

#1. I've been doing 30all-out, 30sec recovery intervals (short recovery) once or twice a week for about a year, and seen great result...still definitely not maxed out on the benefits I can achieve through those.
-But I've also recently read about doing 20-30 second Max power intervals with long, full recovery (5 minutes or more) between each one, so each one achieves higher power.
-what are the major benefits of each, and is one better, or should I mix in both?

#2. I'm a natural spinner (100rpm feels about right, 90 feels slow). When I do all-out trainer intervals, I'm generally going into the mid 130's, unless I purposely go to a super hard gear to work on slow cadence power. Is there any reason to try to change this? Ie, try to select gears so my all-out intervals are closer to 100rpm?

12strings

I should add that the primary goal here is cyclocross racing.

-Thanks!

caloso

My totally non-scientific take:

#1: Both are good. The 30"/30" on-off are really about training short-term recovery. Obviously, you are not fully recovered from a hard 30" effort when it's time to go again and your power will drop significantly (at least mine does), but if you are racing (particularly crits or CX), you'll need to train your system for hard, repeated efforts when you're not fully recovered. I also think the psychological training is at least as important as the physical.

With the fully recovered sets, your focus is just on developing as much power as possible. Which is also good. But, if I could only choose one it would be the 30" on/off.

#2: It's probably tougher to turn a natural masher into a spinner than a natural spinner into a masher. But I'm not sure why you would want to. If it were me, I'd just keep spinning.

caloso

In that case, I would definitely go with the 30" on/off. When are you ever going to be fully recovered in a CX race?

Carbonfiberboy 

1) The 30-30 intervals are to stimulate the aerobic system and as has been said, to improve what used to be called lactate clearance. They are very good for that. The max power intervals are to increase max power, just like it says. They target the neuromuscular power zone, which does increase absolute max power, which the 30-30 intervals do not. They do different things. My practice is to do most of my work to improve aerobic fitness and target max power in the last few weeks before a major event, while of course still doing the aerobic work. Besides the max power intervals, there are also other types of sprint work, like form sprints and stomps which also develop high force and speed skills. I find that everything helps and having a well-rounded skill set helps most.

2) Doing "all-out trainer intervals", the idea is to develop maximum power during these intervals and to hold it steady for the whole length of the interval and to keep the power about the same for all the intervals in a set. If you're going by heart rate, you won't be developing maximum power. If you don't have a PM, go by speed on the trainer. You want the maximum speed you can hold for the duration. Ignore cadence other than to experiment with gearing to find the best gear to deliver the max speed which you can hold for the interval duration. This takes a fair bit of experimentation. For every various interval duration, the exact answer to this question may be different.