 If you're a cyclist who's trying to improve your performance on the bike and you're not doing gym work, then you're missing out on potential fitness gains. It's that simple. I look at what the research has to say about a lot of different cycling topics and rarely is the evidence strong enough to come to any firm conclusion. But when it comes to this topic, almost every study on the matter shows that weightlifting increases cycling performance. And when I say performance, I'm not talking about some subjective feeling of being stronger on the bike or being a more well-rounded athlete or injury prevention. I'm talking about objectively being able to produce more power or having a longer time to fatigue or even a higher lactate threshold, essentially meaning lift weights ride faster. I've done videos on lifting for cycling in the past, but this one is going to go a bit further. I'm going to be looking at some studies that I haven't talked about before and get into some more of the nuances of a gym session, like how your gym work should evolve over the course of a season, squat depth, optimal number of sets, optimal number of reps, rest between sets, does located work count as on the bike gym work and give you example workouts showing you exactly what a cyclist gym session should look like from start to finish. This is going to be an information packed video. So I recommend busting out the notebook notebook. How about you just entertain me? This is YouTube, not the fifth grade. But before we get into all the nitty gritty details, let's start with the basics. Why is weightlifting beneficial for cycling? Study after study on weight training's effect on cycling performance shows that lifting is beneficial and it's not just with sprinting or short efforts, but longer efforts at threshold and time to exhaustion studies as well. This is because many of the factors that affect endurance performance are improved with strength training including exercise economy and lactate threshold. Meanwhile, evidence for potential negative effects of strength training to endurance performance is lacking. Adaptations within the strength trained muscles are the likely cause here. People who are new to lifting will often see huge increases in strength in their first few months of lifting. For example, they may be able to double the amount of weight that they can squat, but their quads aren't twice as big. So where is all of this extra strength coming from? As you lift, your body learns to lift more by recruiting more motor units. It turns out that these neuromuscular adaptations also translate into increased power on the bike as well. At this point, I really don't see this question of whether or not strength training increases cycling performance to be controversial, so I won't spend too much time on it. The question now becomes, how do we implement weight training into our program as cyclists? No better place to start than by talking about how to start. The best time to start lifting as a cyclist is during the off season, and this is because when you first start lifting, you're going to be extremely sore as in hardly able to walk up and down the step sore. So needless to say, your intensity on the bike is going to suffer. In the off season, that's not a big deal though because the intensity and volume of training that you're doing during this time should already be low. If you don't normally take an off season, well you should, and I have videos discussing why, but I would choose a two month period where you can commit to riding a little bit less and riding at a lower intensity as your body gets used to weight training. Don't worry, you'll be faster in the long run if you do this. After your first gym session, you'll probably need a bit longer to recover than usual, but I would try to quickly get into a cycle where you're doing two gym sessions per week, and these sessions should be separated by at least two days. As an example here, we've got a Tuesday lifting session and a Friday lifting session during this week. If it was a Tuesday and Thursday session, that probably wouldn't be enough recovery time after Tuesday's workout to get good quality in on Thursday. After a month or two of doing this, you should reach a point where you're actually not getting that sore after your lifting sessions, and this is a great time to start ramping up the volume on the bike again. Alright, now what exercise should a cyclist gym session include and what does a typical gym session look like? The research tends to find good results with heavy squats or other leg extension exercises. This is not surprising, leg extension is the primary driving force of a bicycle. Squats and deadlifts should be your go-to exercises and performed first when you're the freshest so they can be done at high quality. After that, you may also want to add in some other leg focused work like lunges or other one leg exercises or box jumps. If heavy free weight exercises are a problem for you because you have a bad back or some other issue, then a leg press machine is your next best option. Here's what a typical gym session should look like. Warm up on a stationary bike for five minutes and once you're done with that, do a warm-up set of squats with just the bar. Then get into your main heavy lifts, the squat and the deadlift, and finish with some lighter lifts like lunges, box steps, or box jumps. This is just an example and not every workout should look exactly like this. In fact, your gym sessions should be changing over time, but we'll get into that in a minute. Finally, finish the session out with some core work. Now core work is important. For example, studies show that core training may reduce injury risk and help maintain form when fatigued, but these exercises are very much secondary to the leg work that you're doing and there's a lot more wiggle room for what constitutes as an effective core routine, which is probably why you see some athletes like Nino Schurter or K Courtney getting creative with their core work. Is all that creativity really necessary? Well, it's hard to say and I haven't seen any research to suggest that a more complicated core routine is more effective, but it certainly won't hurt you. Personally, I'm more of a fan of doing simple body weight exercises like push-ups, sit-ups, planks, etc. If you want to add in more upper body work with heavier weights, then that's really up to you. If your goal is performance at all costs, I would stick mostly to body weight exercises for your upper body in order to keep your weight a little bit lower, but most people don't mind being two seconds slower up a climb if it means they have a little bit more muscle mass up top. Again, I'll leave that up to you. Are you really going to make me choose between being jacked and getting Strava KOMs right now? That's like choosing a favorite child. Definitely, Strava KOMs. Now that we have an idea of what exercises we want to be doing, what about lifting volume? How many sets and reps of these exercises should we be doing in each session? Let's start first with the number of reps. If you have a basic knowledge of weightlifting, then you may know about the strength, hypertrophy, and endurance rep ranges. Depending on who you ask, the ranges might be slightly different, but usually six reps or less is the strength range, six to twelve reps is the hypertrophy or muscle growth range, and more than that is the endurance rep range. There is, of course, a lot of crossover here, but this basic framework does have evidence to back it up. So with this being the case, it seems logical to conclude that as a cyclist, you want to be working in the endurance rep range, so 15 to 25 reps per set. However, studies on cyclists often use a much lower rep range of 4 to 10 reps with great results. Why go with such a low number of reps that's more typical of athletes looking to build strength? Well, keep in mind that cycling is already an endurance activity. Riding a bike is kind of like doing a squat over and over and over again for thousands of repetitions. You don't need more of this when you go into the gym. Remember that what we're after in the gym is those neuromuscular adaptations, and the best way to get them is by doing sets in the strength rep range. This is why I recommend that cyclists use very heavy weights for six reps or less, with a few exceptions. You could make the case that an experienced lifter would need to do a variety of rep ranges in order to break through a fitness plateau that they may have reached. This is also why at home workouts with a very low amount of weight are not particularly effective. You need a lot of weight in order to adequately stress a large muscle like the quads for such a low rep range, and doing air squats while holding two dumbbells that you dug out of your garage is simply not going to cut it. That being said, if you're not an experienced lifter, then you will want to start in that endurance rep range at about 20 to 25 reps, simply because you don't want to be using a lot of weight so you don't injure yourself. As you get stronger and more experienced, bump up the weight and drop the number of reps until you get down to that four to six rep range. Starting at around 20 reps and dropping two reps per session and bumping up the weight accordingly is a good progression. Now I have seen lifting programs from some cycling coaches that go through a full periodization cycle, and while this is well intentioned, after all experienced lifters need periodization just like experienced cyclists do, it's largely unnecessary. I already touched on why endurance lifting is unnecessary for cyclists in most cases, but the hypertrophy phase is largely unnecessary as well. Remember that what we're after is neuromuscular adaptations and the strength range is the best way to achieve this. On top of this, hypertrophy isn't even the goal for most cyclists. We're not trying to get bigger necessarily. We're trying to get faster. It's okay for some of your accessory lifts like lunges or box steps or box jumps to be done at a higher rep range, but your main lifts, meaning the squat and the dead lifts should be done using a high weight and low number of reps. Once you've worked up to that point, obviously. So that's the number of reps per set, but how many of these sets do we want to be doing in a single gym session? Well, it's important to note that more is not necessarily better here. Studies like this one find that even just one set per session may be just as effective as doing three or five sets. This is good news for maintaining strength into the season. It seems like a very low number of sets will do the trick. However, for gaining strength in the off season, you may want to go with a higher volume. This meta analysis looking at many studies suggested that 10 sets per week may be optimal. With two gym sessions per week, that's five or more sets per session. And when I say this, I'm talking about the heavy lifts where you're really pushing yourself like the squat and deadlift. I would not add the warm-up set or the accessory lifts onto this total. Again, though, when you're first starting out, you'll need to start with a much lower volume. I'd say two or three sets on your first session, and then add a set each week until you're up to five or six heavy sets and two or three accessory sets. All right, now let's get into how hard you should be lifting. You've probably heard the term training to failure, which means doing as many reps as you possibly can. The issue with this when doing heavy exercises like the squat and the deadlift is that you greatly increase your chance of injury as your form goes out the window when you approach failure. And on top of this, it takes longer to recover from. The good news, though, is that for the most part, going to failure is not critical. For example, this meta analysis looking at many studies on resistance training to failure found that going to failure was not necessary for increasing strength. Now, don't get me wrong, you should be significantly exerting yourself, but you don't need to go until you physically can't anymore. I would leave one to three reps in the tank, so a perceived exertion of seven to nine out of 10 for your heavy lifts. We've discussed what to do during the lift itself, but what about the time between lifts or the rest period? Inexperienced gym goers and especially cyclists will often go from one exercise to the next with very little rest in between. After all, we are used to a constant workload, but having more of a break between your exercises may lead to better performance. This review article on rest intervals looked at 35 studies on the topic and found that three to five minutes allowed for the greatest number of reps over multiple sets and produced the greatest strength gain. Three to five minutes may seem like a long time between sets, and it is. If you have a workout that has 10 sets, then if you include the warm-up in that, that may take you over an hour to complete. Add in core work after that and you're in the gym for quite a long time. Wait, so you're saying three to five minutes between sets is a lot of time? I'm usually taking 20 minutes between sets, but that's mainly so I can get the perfect mirror selfie to post on my Instagram. You should follow me. My recommendation is that you want at least two minutes between sets, and if you have the time to go longer than do it, especially on your heavier lifts. Now let's move on to season progression. After this two month off season slash lifting period, should we continue to lift? Well, this will depend on a couple of different factors. In general, I would continue lifting through the base season, although this is also the time of year that your volume of riding will start to steadily increase. In order to make way for this increased volume, you will probably have to reduce the amount of volume you're doing in the gym. And the most common way to do this is by reducing the number of sets you do in each session. For example, you may start the base season doing seven to 10 sets per session, but then slowly decrease that volume as your base season progresses until you're down to three to five sets per session. Remember that you don't necessarily need a high volume of lifting in order to maintain strength. You can of course also reduce the intensity of your lifting by reducing the amount of weight or by reducing the number of reps for a given weight so that you're at a lower perceived exertion and further away from failure. You can also go from two gym workouts per week down to just one gym workout per week. As you get into your build or race season, whether or not you keep gym as part of your training program will depend on a couple of different factors. The first one being whether or not you race and how busy your race schedule is if you do. If you have a busy race schedule, then you'll likely need a cut lifting out completely because recovery from races and hard workouts needs to take priority. If you only do a couple of races or you don't race at all though, then you can probably keep lifting in your program in season. Another factor is age. Research shows that the benefits of strength training are even greater in older athletes. This makes sense because older athletes are dealing with a loss of muscle mass. For this reason, maintaining strength becomes even more important and makes a good case for keeping strength training in your program all year. These are some of the lifting basics, but let's get into the weeds a little bit more here. What about squat depth? Some cyclists argue that you don't need to squat that deep because you aren't bending your knees that much in a pedal stroke, so a shallow squat is more cycling specific. However, there is evidence to suggest that squatting deeper is more beneficial for gaining strength. This study on squat depth had subjects trained with a full squat, parallel squat, and half squat, and found that not only did the full squat lead to more strength gains, but also better performance in a 30-second sprint on the bike as well. To be fair, there isn't a lot of research on how squat depth affects cycling performance specifically, but I would imagine that it's probably similar to the rep range question. Yes, doing a higher number of reps is more cycling specific, but when we get in the gym we're after neuromuscular adaptations, which requires a lower rep range. The same could be said for squat depth, although as your season approaches, squatting shallower may be another way of reducing your training load in the gym, which would give you more energy for on-the-bike workouts, and at the same time it would be more cycling specific and specificity should increase in season. All right, finally, let's talk about locadence work or big gear training. Does this count as some sort of on-the-bike strength training? In this study on the topic, subjects performed either a five-by-four minute locadence interval session or a four-set leg press strength session, and then decrements in force production were measured to see if neuromuscular fatigue had been induced. What they found was that locadence interval training was not similar to traditional weight training and does not drive strength development similar to weight training. If you take a minute to think about this, it's really not hard to figure out why. When you're doing locadence interval training, it's kind of like doing squats at an extremely high rep range, way past what the typical endurance rep range is in the gym. The amount of force being produced is significantly less, and remember that it's the strength rep range that drives the greatest neuromuscular adaptations. This is one of the reasons why locadence training does not appear to be particularly effective. This systematic review states that studies indicate no clear performance enhancing effect of training at locadence or even indicate a superior effect from training at freely chosen cadence. Basically, there's no shortcuts here. If you want the benefits of gym work, then you need to actually go to the gym. Thanks for watching. If you still need help planning out your gym training, I have cycling specific gym training plans, as well as other training plans linked in the description. Be sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.