 Gyms are closed for the foreseeable future, gym equipment is astronomically expensive, has insane shipping times or is simply sold out right now, and my home gym equipment consists of a set of purple 5 pound dumbbells. As a cyclist, the solution may seem simple enough. Just go out and ride your bike and quit complaining. After all, I am lucky enough to live in an area where riding outside has been permitted for the past few weeks. I'm going to explain why hitting the gym as a cyclist is so important though by taking a look at some of the science and I'll also talk about how I built my own squat rack which more or less allowed me to keep my same gym routine through the quarantine. Welcome back to another video. My name is Dylan and for weekly science-based coaching videos just like this one be sure to subscribe. This week's video is going to be a little bit different in that I'm just going to be talking about my own training. I can't guarantee the safety of the equipment that I use and I don't recommend that people piece together squat racks out of household items as that's probably a good way to hurt yourself. I talk a lot about the importance of strength training on this channel and if anything, hopefully this video will be a reminder of that. When the coronavirus outbreak hit the US and gym started closing, I along with all the other gym rats had a mild panic attack but I wasn't so much worried that my muscles would wither away. Dude, have you seen your T-rex arms? Don't worry man, you already got that covered. I was instead worried that my performance on the bike would suffer. That's right, based off the research I've done I valued gym work enough that I wasn't willing to go a few months without it and I'll get into some of that research in just a minute. My gym closed and I scoured the internet looking for cheap gym equipment but all of it was either sold out or would require me selling my kidney on the black market in order to afford it. I started thinking up alternatives. For example, social media right now is flooded with at-home workout videos however for large muscles like the quads, which is the main muscle group that you should be targeting as a cyclist when you get into the gym, you need a lot of weight to adequately stress the muscle. That's like 300 pounds right there, try to have extensions. Okay, that's enough of that. I had to get pretty creative with what I could find at my local home improvement store but the result is that I was pretty much able to replicate my typical gym routine with no gym equipment. Before I get into that let's get into some science so I can show you why I'm making such a big deal about this. This study on the effect of strength training on cycling performance took well-trained and competitive road cyclists. Definitely an important distinction there. These aren't couch potatoes that they got off the couch and into the gym and then as a by-product of actually doing something physically active they became faster on the bike. These were already well-trained cyclists. They separated them into two groups, one that incorporated strength training into their normal endurance training and one that did not. What they found was that work efficiency and power significantly increased in the lifting group and time to exhaustion at 70% of maximal oxygen uptake increased by 17.2% while the control group did not see significant improvements. Now the topic of weightlifting for cycling can be somewhat controversial. Even if some cyclists admit that they should be doing it they claim that it's not to make you faster per se but that's not what this study is showing. It's at this point that it's helpful to discuss the physiological reasons for why weightlifting is beneficial for cycling and when I say beneficial I don't mean that it'll make you a more well-rounded athlete or help with injury prevention. Sure those are great side benefits. I'm talking about literally being able to produce more watts on the bike. This review on strength training for running and cycling endurance found that there was no effect of strength training on VO2 max. We would expect this as strength training doesn't tax your aerobic system. However adaptations within the strength trained muscles including postpone activation of less efficient type 2 fibers, improved neuromuscular efficiency, conversion of fast twitch type 2x fibers into more fatigue resistant type 2a fibers, and improved muscular tenderness stiffness had positive effects on exercise economy, anaerobic capacity, lactate threshold, reduced fatigue, and endurance performance. If you've never lifted before and then you start getting in the gym it's not uncommon to double your strength in the first couple months. You'll be hitting new PRs every time you step foot in the gym. Much like when you first started riding you were faster every single time you rode. However your muscles aren't twice as big so why do you have double the strength? Where is all this newfound strength coming from? As your body gets used to lifting it learns how to lift more by firing more motor units and stopping your muscles from fighting each other. This translates into huge strength gains and it turns out that these neuromuscular adaptations translate into more power on the bike as well. Study after study on weight training's effects on cycling performance consistently come to this conclusion. The same effects have been found in women and the benefits of strength training may be even more pronounced in older athletes. On top of this right now may be the most important time for cyclists to be hitting the gym since the cycling season has been shifted to the late summer and early fall so right now is the cycling off season. This is the time of the year when you want to be building up your strength and tolerance to gym work so that you can be strong for the season or maintain gym work at a lower level into the season. For these reasons I knew I had to do something and as badass as it might seem to do a rocky style workout where you just find something heavy and then pick it up and put it down squatting household items my girlfriend or my non-existent goat just wasn't going to cut it. See what he did there? He's trying to subtly brag that a nerd like him could both get a girlfriend and lift a lot of weight. I'm not buying it. So I headed down to my local Lowe's to see what I could find. No, this video is not sponsored by Lowe's. I stepped foot in the store and had absolutely no idea what I was looking for. I just knew that I needed something heavy. A teenager who worked at the store asked if he could help me and I said I was making a squat rack. His response was oh is this for a TikTok video or something? I don't even watch TikTok and he didn't even ask about YouTube. Maybe that's a sign I'm getting old. We proceeded to spend the next hour and a half scavenging the store for supplies. I found a 20 pound metal bar four five gallon buckets and hose clamps to create the squat bar but I still needed a squat rack of some sort so we headed over to the cinder block section and actually set up the rack in the store to make sure that it was the right height. All of that came out to just under 100 dollars which is about 20 times cheaper than anything that I could find on the internet and that's not an exaggeration. We loaded up the car and the kid told me that that was the most fun he'd ever had at work. So glad I can make your day I guess. Now here's the critical part. Would my makeshift squat rack work and would it provide me with enough weight that I wouldn't have to compromise my gym routine? You see while many endurance athletes believe that they need to do low weight high reps in order to improve their endurance which will help with their sport the science actually says otherwise. Almost all the studies showing benefits of lifting for cycling performance use heavy weights and low reps often maxing out in the 4-10 rep range. Like I said though in order to do this for a large muscle like the quads you need a lot of weight. Everyone is different in terms of strength but for me my 5 rep max is around 225 pounds or 100 kilos. The good news is that the setup was rock solid with the bucket's hose clamp to the bar and the cinder block stacked three high under each bucket the bar was at the perfect height and performing squats with this setup feels just like it does with the real thing. Now to see if I could get enough weight in the buckets. The bar is 20 pounds and each bucket can hold five gallons of water which is a little over 40 pounds per bucket which if you add in the weight of the buckets and the hose clamps is right at about 190 pounds. I tried this at first and it worked but I needed a little bit more weight so I added six bricks per bucket and at five pounds per brick that was an extra 120 pounds. However the volume of the bricks displaces some of the water roughly one and a quarter gallons per bucket worth or just over 40 pounds. This brings the total weight up to about 270 pounds or a little over 120 kilos. This is great because it means that I don't have to fill the buckets up all the way and it gives me room to increase the weight if I get stronger. With that let's get into what my quarantine gym routine looks like. I started off with five to ten minutes of warm-up on the bike. After that I do two warm-up sets of seven to ten reps first with no water in the buckets at 140 pounds and the second with the buckets filled to about 180 pounds. I then filled the buckets up to around 230 pounds and performed three to six reps for four or five sets. The rest period in between the sets is three to five minutes. I finish up the workout with some single leg work again using five gallon buckets filled with water and some box jumps. These exercises are very much secondary to the heavy squat work which is why I do them after squatting. The only thing missing from my typical gym routine is deadlifts. Since the buckets raise the bar pretty high off the ground and the bar is wider in diameter than a normal bar and doesn't lend itself well to doing deadlifts. I do this workout twice a week and try to do it when I'm well rested so it can be done with high quality. I don't include core or upper body work in this particular workout. That's a separate workout that I do all on its own and it doesn't require very much equipment because it's mostly body weight stuff. Honestly I like the goat lifting workout better. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this different style of content where I talk about my own training let me know down in the comments. If you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a like. Follow me on Instagram to stay up to date on my training and racing. I also announce when I post new videos on there and finally be sure to subscribe if you haven't already. Thanks and I'll see you in the next one.