 That is a strange one. Today I'll be sharing with you my experiences in the gym with this guy right here, Aaron Turner. A cycling specific strength and conditioning coach who also has a PhD in load management. In fact, a lot of his PhD studies were focused on a continental cycling team but today he's focused on a regular bloke at the age of 41 that's just trying to get faster on the bike than ever before and in doing so. He'll be pointing out a lot of things that I'm doing wrong in the gym while also providing the simple changes that I can make that will make me more powerful, stronger and faster on the bike, including a banded deadlift exercise that if implemented at the correct RPE you can see an increase in quad muscle activity ranging from approximately 30 to 50%. So what am I looking to get out of the gym as a cyclist? Well, firstly, I just wanna improve my overall strength on the bike and also. Spent repeatability. Yep. There's two ways you can go about it. We can increase repeatability to the power you're at or we can increase your top end sprint power so you don't have to dip into it so often in a race. So if you can increase that when you're cycling up to just over 1,000 watts you're not so close to your top end power so that'll improve your repeatability as well. The sheer fact of getting stronger because I want you to lift heavier this is heavy for you, which is good. Yeah. The lunges are going a bit easier on yourself. So I want heavier single leg work for you. That'll increase total strength and then for every watt of power you're producing it's gonna cost less oxygen and less energy which will improve your repeatability as well. We're gonna get that benefit from the strength. I just want you to get stronger. More quadricep in this. You got a lot of glue but I wanna bring in some quad as well. Your lunges are good, they're just too light. Okay. Gotta get them heavier. Also keep the same technique. Well, we're gonna play a little with it. I'll show you different variations and we'll see what you like but we need the weight to go up, reps to come down. The other thing is your order of your exercises. We need to front load it more with the important cycling stuff and then the other qualities in the upper body. Let's put them towards the end. Okay, because they're still important for you but they're less important for the cycling stuff. Really good for bone mental density in the upper body and if you haven't forbid you crash and you have to put your arm out like we want you strong through here. We want those bones density less likely to have a major injury. But from performance, if we put them at the start of your gym workout it's gonna increase fatigue. It's gonna increase neural fatigue. So then when we get to important lower body stuff or important core stuff later in the session you don't have to give us enough out of that. Yeah, okay. And it's called the priority model. There's a lot of research on it and it is whatever you put at the start of your workout while your fatigue levels are low, that's where you're gonna get your highest strength and muscle growth outcomes. I don't care which order you put them in. There's pros and cons to each but they have to be close to the start. Upper body at the very back and then of your preferred core we'll put in the middle. Look, your lunge technique's pretty good. So, and the fact we're changing this to be a bit more quad dominant. You don't, you don't recommend going straight to bed. Well, we were gonna tweak your deadlift technique a little bit. So, even if you just do a couple of reps with a bit more knee flexion at the bottom of the movement and then once you're happy with that we're gonna add the band. You look good in the lower body. Okay, this looks good here. You're still a little cyclist. So this is just a little here. I need to be here, just a bit more, okay? So we're gonna accommodate that. I'm gonna get your look up a little higher and get your think chest here. Beautiful can, from there, give me three. Again, that's improvement. When you go back and look at the video you'll see that first rep and you're like, oh, that was the golden rep. So anyone who's well trained and is thinking of trying this next demonstration that I'm doing at home, provide it safe for you to do so. You would only bring the band in if you're lifting at least 80% of one repetition maximum in your lifts. If you're lifting less than that and you're well trained it's not gonna provide any additional benefit for strength development. But if you're untrained, probably just work on your technique. Don't worry about adding the band in my opinion. Cam, you're well trained. So we are gonna get you to eventually to a point where the weight that you can lift the heaviest for seven reps, that's ballpark 80%, you're gonna add the band to that weight but you're gonna drop back to four to five reps. Feet on to the band, get your stance fits that you're happy with. No dead spots. No dead spots. It's written all over his face. I can feel the dead spots dying. Oh, different lifts, isn't it? Yeah, wow. But I'd like some like deep knee band lunge patterns and you've got a pretty deep one at the moment but we can get deeper. So your new walking lunge technique we're gonna take you out of your kind of quad dominant style to a style that has a bit more of a harmonious balance with glutes, a little bit of hamstring and a lot of quad in there as well. So side on it's gonna look like this. Leaning forward. Yeah, so see this shim bone angle? Yeah. And then similar trunk angle. Yeah. That's gonna bring more gluten back on my lead leg whereas your other style was very like this. Okay, it's very quad dominant, which was fine but we're gonna bring quad dominance via the leg press and your new technique on the deadlift. So now I can have a bit more of a balance in your lunge pattern and it's gonna be a slightly more stable lunge variation and you should be able to get quite heavy on this one. So we need to find a weight that you feel you could get about seven lunges per leg on but in seven to one seven on each leg with that weight we're gonna do five to four each leg and what that's gonna do it's gonna give you the strength impulse minus the soreness and high amounts of fatigue. I should add some further context here because Aaron's really focused on managing my soreness and my fatigue and that's because I'm currently in a hip phase in my cycling training meaning I'm doing roughly two to three hard sessions on the bike per week meaning adding a lot more additional stress through the gym is not really what we wanna do. We just wanna be optimizing and maintaining strength during this particular phase. Now of course if I was in an off season or doing a lot of zone two base training then this gym stuff would look a lot different but that's a rapid hole for another day. Still wanted to go back to my old school upright. That's it, looking forward for me as you do it. You as a cyclist, very championing in these positions to do tailbone tuck. See my tailbone's tucked under me because that's what you guys are used to on the bike. For the safety of this lift, you have to be here. See how I've flattened that out just a tad versus that. When you're doing it, a good idea to just practice in front of a mirror that you can be walking past. Make sure you get that, the trunk the way I just demonstrated. Okay, because cyclists have that habit of going cycling mode. You could use this in replace of lunges if you wanna mix it up. If you're a real die hard, you can do both of them. I think you could, you could alternate on this one. Cause we've got the single leg leg press coming in later. We don't need to go doubling up on these single leg balance demanding ones. So you want for your height, 45 centimeter to 18 inch box height. It's cause I want deep hip flexion from you and I want deep knee flexion as well at the start of the movement. So deep knee bend, trying to resemble something at the top of the pedaling stroke. Yep. And then lean forward. Like I mentioned earlier, the back, you still have to avoid the curling of the back. Okay, so the back position needs to look good. Now drive up. Drive. Four heavies using your 80% load, but I want you to do three to four sets per leg. No, go for it. I'll put that. I made it look easier. Bring the knee further forward. Okay, now lean your trunk forward slightly. That should take off position. Oh, you felt that one. Now reset, give me that good position. I did do four hours this morning. Give me that good position again. So knee further forward. Yep. Oh. As you master this, the goal is to get to a point where you don't feel like you're bobbing off the rear leg, where it feels lead leg dominant. For now, we'll give you a free pass where you're just feeling it out. Oh. Oh. I do want to bring in a single leg leg press. Why? Think of it as like, we're wringing out a wet cloth. Yeah. So if you're using the deadlift and your lunges, hands, or a couple of other variations I'll give you shortly, that's the meat and potatoes of the workout. But once we've done that, fatigue's kicking in, and your ability to balance is going to go down, your motivation is potentially starting to take a dip. So if I bring in a machine exercise, because the trunk doesn't need high stability on this, because I'm in a reclined posture relaxing on the bench, in terms of this chain, this is quite easy for me to control now because I can't fall over. So for the single leg leg press, you're going to do a double leg warm-up. Much happier that, you're going to lock out. This time I'm going to use this leg. You make sure the safety stopper is higher than the non-involved knee. See how this is above my knee? Yep. That's my safe place. Right. Please adjust that if anyone's going to use this. I'll demonstrate on this leg. I'm going to line up my hip, knee, and ankle from my perspective in a fairly straight line. Right. So if you're peering over my shoulder, that'll look in the ballpark. And now from here, I use my other leg just to help unwrap, and away we go. So deep hip flexion, driving. To a point where you still have lower back contact and rear pelvis contact with the bench that you're sitting on. Okay. If you go so low, you feel your pelvis slip out of the seat. You've gone way too deep. Okay. Because now you're getting into lumbar flexion of the back. Beyond the level that would be deep safe. If you want a little bit more knee bend, you can go a little bit lower down the plate with your foot. Take it down this way. That's going to increase ankle-dorsy flexion and be a little bit more knee flexion. That's not always comfortable for everyone. Me personally, at my height, I just go mid-plate. When you transition to the other leg, it's usually a good idea to lock out first. Yeah. Rewind up your other leg. And away we go. At this point in your workout, just controlled. Okay. As best you can. You can see we get nice, deep ranges within your flexibility range, but we're still getting some really good strength out from the lower body. Based on a strategy of, we want peak strength. And your priority is peak strength in the lower body from a cycling performance perspective, yeah? Yeah. So we want you going to loads that are over 75%. I've been ballparking about 80% weight. And an 80% weight is one that you are probably going to be able to lift the weight for seven reps. Yep. And if seven's like the last rep you can do, we're at 80%. Yeah. But we don't want you lifting up to seven reps because there's going to be too much fatigue from that and your recovery time is going to be extended. It's going to affect the next day on the bike, definitely, and possibly in the day after that if we keep training like that. So what we need to do while we're at these higher loads for you, because you're well trained, we're going to come down. We're going to use that same seven rep maximum weight, but we're only going to do four to five reps of it. Oh, okay. And then you're going to do three to four sets on each of those lower body exercises at that weight that I've discussed. Yep. And if it's the deadlift, you're going to add the band to it. Okay, I want the variable resistance training on that one as well. Because it's huge strength improvements from that. Now let's talk about your rest periods. This is peak strength training, so you're probably going to want between two and three minutes rest minimum between sets. Okay, before you feel ready to go. I know you're used to the circuit style, but the circuit style increases fatigue because you've got low rest. Okay, so even if you're training antagonists or polar muscle groups, like up at a lower body, there's still fatigue going on. So we're just going to take the rest period and then get the next set done. Okay. Once you've done your single leg variation, whether that's the lunge or the step up that I showed you, and you've done your deadlift, and then you go to your single leg leg press, you're then free to get circuit mode going. Okay, you can circuit in your core, remaining core exercises with your upper body, and go blotter on that. Okay, so that's the fun bit. Yeah. But we get the priority stuff at the start of the session. And that's really the bang for our buck with your cycling performance. It's a lower body sport. Yeah.