I know the key to get fast in cycling is ride ride ride, but what about weight training the legs? Is there any room to get into the gym and build those quads up? or will it hurt your cycling?
I have yet to see much research on this topic.
Surely this is from weights:
but what about the Tour de France and those hill climbers? They seem to have tiny legs?
I am curious about this too. How much weight training is involved?
There is plenty. Keep looking. Start here maybe: http://bit.ly/P2vL6l
And where did those giant legs finish at the Olympics? Sure they got bronze in the TEAM sprint, but individual sprint? Look smaller…
My uneducated guess is that it depends on the cycling.
If you look at TDF riders, there is, I think, a noticable difference between the legs of the climbers vs.the sprinters. I belive the climbers are much smaller, and the spriters much bigger. The legs on these track cyclists are huge, but I suspect it is becuase hey have a completely different application of the bike. The are about pure, raw speed over very short distances. It seems that they are all about generating and maintaining momentum over a very short distance, anerobic efforts, and flat ride profiles. They don’t have to lug those legs over mountains, or across 100 miles of road before sprinting.
I think there is definitely a place for strength training for cycling (just like any other sport), but it needs to fit with the application of that strength. A decatalete needs to build strengh for the shot put, but not to the extent that it detracts from his ability to sprint or pole vault or run hurdles.
Track cyclists do quite a bit of weight training. Sprinters do more, pursuit cyclists less but still important because of starts. Road cyclists might do some weight training in the off-season, most don’t, but not during racing season.
My legs are pretty huge but I think much of that is genetics. I do train with weights in the winter but again, I thank my dad for my legs.
My background is lifting and I picked up cycling after retiring from competitive lifting. If I were going to compete in endurance sport I would stop lifting.
There may be some people that have a very unique genetics that have muscular size and yet have slow twitch capability, but the common picture is the ectomorph type of frame and genetics typically fares better in endurance sports. I am excluding short track sprints from endurance.
The main problem with lifting is the shared recovery time. In my example I train legs on Monday. It makes training on the bike and hitting those higher levels for intervals very difficult and some weeks almost impossible. If you train pretty hard in endurance you probably will not lift progressively either. I have been trying to juggle the two since 2004. (I have been lifting for 30 years) Every week I struggle to hit L4 because my legs remain sore for several days due to lifting.
There are always exceptions and being on cycling forums I have seen this debated a whole lot with quite of few disagreeing with me. I am pretty sure I would progress on the bike at a better rate if I were to give up lifting. Since I do not plan on competing I hope to go into my older years with a mix of strength and endurance fully realizing I am not going to beat the thinner/lighter folk up the mountain. Just my general advice to most people that training specificty seems to be key. When I competed in lifting, cardio was absolutely taboo until it was time for me to start working on making my weight class and even then I hated it because I would lose a little bit of strength from the weight loss. Works boths ways. Most competitive lifters think of endurance sport as a strength killer.
Wow, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a flood of replies on this thread.
Weight training for cycling is typically a really contentious topic, the folks that believe in it tend to really believe in it and the folks that don’t tend to really rail against it. An awful lot of fiery debates have raged on the topic on many cycling sites, I wonder if the Slowtwitch folks are burned out on those debates.
FWIW, most folks agree some form of strength training applies to pure track sprinting events but in recent years even some of the more competitive track squads have moved away from the gym and are doing more of that strength work on the bike with things like standing starts and big gear accelerations. (e.g. Australia, NZ) The argument against standard weights is that the squat rack or leg press machines don’t train the specific muscle recruitment patterns and joint angles of cycling and strength built in non specific ways has to be transferred to the specific needs of the sport. But traditionally most short duration track racers have spent a lot of time in the weight room and many if not most track coaches still swear by it.
For events over about a minute or so in length (about anything longer than the kilo on the track) there’s a lot less support for trying to build muscle and less support for pure strength training. But still lot’s of folks either hold onto a belief that bigger muscles will make them faster or they point to other things like core strength as reasons to get into the gym. That’s the place where the debates rage. Plenty of road coaches rely heavily on weight training, mostly in the off season and their reasons are varied but it often revolves around sprinting and peak power. Others go with strength work on the bike again citing specificity and some think the weight work might be o.k. but at what cost to overall training time and time that could be spent on more valuable on the bike work or even dedicated to recovery for better on bike workouts.
There are studies and these get debated a lot as well. Some point to no advantage to weight training, others like one a few years ago claim that weight training improved time trial times but that’s been attacked on the basis of things like the weight group adding their weight training on top of the control group’s program so the two groups weren’t doing the same weekly training hours or workload but yeah there are studies that could be interpreted as supporting both sides of the issue.
Anyway, you’re not likely to get a clear answer as athletes and coaches alike tend to be dug in on one side of this debate or the other.
In terms of the two photos posted, one presumably of a track racer and the other of a roadie. That part is pretty clear, bigger hypertrophied muscles aren’t the best thing for endurance racing. Google ‘mitochondrial dilution’ or consider power to weight ratio for the reasons but they can be pretty useful for peak torque and peak neuromuscular power assuming that strength can be applied in a sports specific way which means either building it on the bike or doing a good job of transferring it to the bike. Not really any different than track and field sprinters vs endurance runners, not too many huge quads on marathon winners either.
One thing that’s really clear from science and simple power/torque analysis is that endurance cycling is NOT a strength limited sport. Anyone with a power meter and files that record crank torque can see this, it takes less than 50 pounds of average force on the pedals at 90 rpm to sustain 350 watts. If a reasonably sized adult athlete can walk up a flight of stairs and lift their body weight they can easily apply 50 pounds of force to the pedals. Or looked at another way, how many 50 pound single leg reps could most folks do on the leg press machine if they could do them at any pace of their choosing. Most folks could probably knock out those reps all day long if they weren’t in a hurry. The issue with sustaining that 350 watts isn’t leg strength and improving your one rep max leg press from say 250 to 350 pounds isn’t really going to change anything since the forces required in pedaling are already such a small fraction of most folk’s one rep limit. The key is doing those reps quickly and supplying the oxygen and fuel to sustain those muscle contractions, not the peak force required for each one and that’s why high capillary and mitochondrial densities are much more important to endurance cycling than muscle fibers with large cross sections (which leads to mitochondrial dilution as bigger cross sectional muscle fibers have more peak strength but at the expense of proportionally fewer mitochondria).
Personally I was coached to include a lot of lower body weights in my winter program for many years. It did not make me faster. I’ve gone away from that and put that time into things like 2x20 Threshold intervals and have gotten a lot faster with that kind of work year round. I still do some core work as cyclocross season approaches because I don’t want to throw my back out running around throwing a bike on my shoulder and some core work does seem to help my position on the bike, especially the TT bike but doesn’t seem to directly impact speed as much as comfort and general life health and posture. But plenty of folks swear by weight programs and if it works for them, great.
-Dave
well in the time it took to write this it looks like folks have jumped in. I’d think about what Felt says, that’s pretty much that heart of it IMO, pure strength and pure endurance fitness pull you in different directions and it’s hard to do both as well as you might do one or the other.
Wow, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a flood of replies on this thread.
it’s been discussed so many times it’s barely even worthy of any reply but this: http://forum.slowtwitch.com/gforum.cgi?do=search;
I thought The_Aesthete’s response was way cooler…
One thing that’s really clear from science and simple power/torque analysis is that endurance cycling is NOT a strength limited sport. Anyone with a power meter and files that record crank torque can see this, it takes less than 50 pounds of average force on the pedals at 90 rpm to sustain 350 watts. If a reasonably sized adult athlete can walk up a flight of stairs and lift their body weight they can easily apply 50 pounds of force to the pedals. Or looked at another way, how many 50 pound single leg reps could most folks do on the leg press machine if they could do them at any pace of their choosing. Most folks could probably knock out those reps all day long if they weren’t in a hurry. The issue with sustaining that 350 watts isn’t leg strength and improving your one rep max leg press from say 250 to 350 pounds isn’t really going to change anything since the forces required in pedaling are already such a small fraction of most folk’s one rep limit. The key is doing those reps quickly and supplying the oxygen and fuel to sustain those muscle contractions, not the peak force required for each one and that’s why high capillary and mitochondrial densities are much more important to endurance cycling than muscle fibers with large cross sections (which leads to mitochondrial dilution as bigger cross sectional muscle fibers have more peak strength but at the expense of proportionally fewer mitochondria).
To summarize, cycling is a cardiovascular sport. There’s a specific piece of equipment that’s excellent at training cardiovascular fitness. It’s called a bike.
Wow, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a flood of replies on this thread.
it’s been discussed so many times it’s barely even worthy of any reply but this: http://forum.slowtwitch.com/gforum.cgi?do=search;]
x2 ^^^
Just look at running…100m sprinters vs. 1 mile and up runners…Can’t just look at strength training by itself otherwise you are oversimplifying things…Also need to look at engery systems involved for particular event and not too mention the individual athlete’s limiters…
Go back and seach the millions of old posts…determine what your purpose for strength training would be and then apply accordingly…As a propenent of some form of strength training for endurance sports (read the details elsewhere), I think the answer as to whether or not it will make you faster for anything over a sprint is NO…I think there is a reason that there are not many studies on it because I think it is pretty obvious to those with lots of experience…
Yeah but when you are talking events of about aminute or less, like the OP the story changes. I suppose that virtually every top Sprinter and kilometer rider for the past 30 years could be wrong an ST right, but I doubt it.
Yeah but when you are talking events of about aminute or less, like the OP the story changes. I suppose that virtually every top Sprinter and kilometer rider for the past 30 years could be wrong an ST right, but I doubt it.
I absolutely believe that. Track sprinting is certainly more of a fast-twitch, muscular sport than any sort of road cycling or triathlon style cycling is.
Yeah but when you are talking events of about aminute or less, like the OP the story changes. I suppose that virtually every top Sprinter and kilometer rider for the past 30 years could be wrong an ST right, but I doubt it.
I know you were probably just joking around, but I don’t think that any of the experienced (good) coaches and/or former athletes would argue the value (necessity) of strength training for pure sprinting…It would be the same arguement…look at the guys doing it…again I think it is fairly obvious…
I think a lot of the bad vibes from the strength training posts came from someone taking things out of context and then getting blasted by really rude replies…usually goes like this…a relatively new athlete to endurance sports or maybe some of the triathlon related events…does some strength training and then swears by it…again with no real context and very limited information about a whole host of other factors…Gets eveyone fired up about strength training making you faster when it actually probably addressed some paticular limiter with respect to range of motion, joint mobility, or muscular inbalance (all which is important by the way…just won’t directly make you faster endurance athlete)…
I really am a strong propenent of strength training for endurance athleles (you can read a pretty comprehensive plan of the things I do in another post)…However, at a certain point (which isn’t very much) strength training becomes pretty much a non factor when compared to sport specific training (swim, bike, run) in terms of getting faster…
I usually don’t take hard-line stances on stuff, but I think the role of weight training in triathlon is minimal enough to take a pretty hard-line stance of “has no effect on race performance.”
All the world-class triathletes, be it Brownlee, Macca, Craig Alexander, Rappstar, have rail-thin physiques, carrying minimal extra weight or muscle. That is the kind of physique you need to win anything from ITU distance races to ironman. This still applies at the AG level - endurance >>>> strength for triathlon racing.
I have genetically strong quads, and can leg press ridiculous amounts of weight even with no training, and it doesn’t seem to help me on the bike at all compared to the hours and hours doing endurance training.
And yes, I have a big pet peeve against all the beginners who swear that weight training is making them more comfortable and faster on the bike or run. I seriously doubt both. You don’t get comfortable in the aero position by doing lots of deadlifts or squats, and you certainly don’t get faster in a triathlon distance bike by doing lots of squats.
I’d change my tune if the racing distances were <2-4 minutes per leg , which would likely require serious specialized strength training to get big anaerobic power, but as it stands, I’m in the camp that you can completely ignore weight training.
And while it sounds very logical and eminently reasonable to say “yes, there’s a role for strength training in triathlon”, unless you can specify exactly what tri-specific benefits you’re getting in terms of speed or comfort, I don’t buy it. (I strongly support weight training for quality of life and acts of daily living as well as participating in other sports, but that’s totally different and separate from triathlon, for which I see strength training as a negative in most cases, with costed training time from SBR as well as extra weight that you don’t need. And yes, despite these negatives, I STILL lift hard 2x/week for vanity reasons only.)
Rappstar - care to share how much you can benchpress? Just curious.
It depends on the goal.
Related question.
Last year I had a pretty bad crash and have had to curtail many aspects of my training. Pre accident, one thing that I would do several times per week is 100m sprints on a grass soccer field (running, not biking), simply because it is fun. Well for the longest time I did not even have proper coordination to run. I still kind of battle myself, and have not progressed to the point where I can “sprint” consistently. Bottom line, I don’t do the sprints/accelerations 3x per week.
Now, over to the bike. My bike FTP and power levels across all the typical aerobic ranges are back to pre accident. However, on group rides, when there are sudden accelerations, (like 10 second surges when I have to put out 8-10W per kilo to close the gap), I just don’t have it. Before these were easy. It’s not like I ever trained for these surges, but I have lost the 100m sprints out of my run training. Thoughts on how this “transfers” to my ability to “jump” on the bike.
As a side note, most of the top XC skier in the world have a lot of sprint (running) training in their dryland season, because it seems to transfer over well to the intensity variation in mass start skiing (and also sprint finishes)…and of course, XC skiers cannot rely on specificity all year long, so they have to find suitable replacements. As triathletes, we can pretty well get specificity all year no matter where we live…trainers and indoor pools take care of that.
Dev
For tri there isnt really a reason to weight lify, but for general amateur bike racing here is a very good reason for weight lifting - sprinting. Unless all your races involve vast amongs of climbing where the pack gets shredded to bits sprinting can be a valuable tool. One thing i have learned in road racing is this - your FTP will keep you in the race, but it the short anaerobic efforts that put you on the podium.
There is no point to having a 400w ftp if you cannot break awayfrom the pack. This is where lifting can be helpful - it can allow you to make the necessary gap that you need or sprint to the win.