It takes time to build big muscles. Before a muscle would start to grow it needs regular training sessions and plenty of the right calories served at the right time. You will need more calories than normal because building is muscles not essential for your body to survive.

When a muscle increases its square diameter we call it hypertrophy. Nutrition plays a big role for hypertrophy and therefore I have included a nutritional article in the series about how to avoid additional body mass. Elite cyclists and other serious riders should normally try to avoid hypertrophy since it slows them down on the hills.

Read the full article about nutritional tips

Comments

If you have decided to enter the weight lifting gym this winter, implementing squats in your training program is difficult to avoid. This exercise is the best way to increase your leg strength in a very functional way. If only have the time to do one exercise, please make some good squats. In a cyclist’s strength training program, squatting should be the bread and butter. Actually squat is often mentioned as ‘the king of exercises’.

Heavy weights matters
Well, first of all you have to reconsider how you can make your muscles stronger. The short answer is that you have to lift heavy weights frequently. If the weights aren’t heavy enough, they will not force the muscles to make neural adaptations nor hypertrophy. You can read more about neural adaptations in the post: How a muscle develops force. The good thing about squats is that it is possible to work with heavy weights, which put an enormous stress on legs, calves, hamstrings, gluteus, abdominal and back muscles. As you can see most of your body is working in coordination to manage to lift the weight. Can you imagine what this exercise will do to your overall strength? You will get a great boost not only for your leg extensors (m. quadriceps) but also several other important muscles at the same time.

Functionality
As I previously described in a post about typical mistakes, non-functional exercises are very difficult to convert to something useful in your cycling. This is because strength training is a kind of teaching for your nervous system. I will give an example: If you compare an elite tennis player with a pro golfer: Who will win the match if these elite sport people play badminton? That would probably be the tennis player, because tennis is a racket sport that has similar movements like badminton. Thus, the tennis player gets an advantage because his nervous system is optimized for movements that are similar to the ones in badminton. It is easier for him to convert his skills from tennis to badminton, than it is for the golfer to start playing a racket sport.

Squatting is a lifting style that is close related to pedalling and therefore gives you the best opportunities to convert strength gains made in the weight lifting gym to a better cycling performance. On the other hand, commonly used exercises as leg extensions (or even worse leg adductions or abductions) are single joint movements that are very difficult to convert to cycling power. Leg extensions should be used only by cyclists with injuries and otherwise left available for regular people that don’t know the power of squats.

Comments (9)

Here is a very effective strength training program for cyclists. The program is based on multi joint exercises with free weights, which indicate that this program is not for beginners. If you are not familiar with lifting free weights, consider training the same exercises in a machine. Ask a fitness instructor in your training gym.

When using this strength program:

• Warm up before lifting
• Never train to failure
• Use as heavy weights as possible (still no failure training)
• Be explosive in the concentric phase
• Rest periods of at least 2 minutes between sets

Read the full strength training program for cyclists

Comments (9)

It is very difficult to train the hamstrings and hip flexors on a regular bike. Basically we use most of our efforts to push the pedals down and never to pull the pedals up. Power Crank offers a different way to train for a better upstroke pedalling power. The pedal arms on the crank work independently of each other, which forces you to work much harder in the upstroke pedalling phase. Now you are forced to make an active upstroke to keep pedalling. That should make you stronger and more efficient. I can not recommend the Power Crank yet, because I have never tried it and neither have the riders I work with. But hopefully I will try it in the future.

Better than one leg riding
I have tried to ride my bike with only one pedal clicked in, but I don’t think that works very well. It does not feel like cycling and it is difficult to maintain a reasonable speed. Therefore I am quite interested in experiences made with the Power Crank system. So if you have tried it, please let me know about it. Otherwise, we will have to wait until I have tried it and made a review of the Power Crank.

Official Power Crank Website - incl. videos
Power Crank blog
Pezcyclingnews.com - Review and pictures

Comments (2)

This is a very short description of how a muscle can develop force:

What is a motor unit
A motor unit is a functional unit that contains a single nerve and all the muscle fibres innervated by the nerve. All muscle fibres are grouped together as motor units and have an average of 150 fibres pr motor neuron.

Hypertrophy
Larger muscle cells (that will say larger square diameter) can generate more power. That is the most commonly known way to increase power, though it is not desirable for cyclists. The problem is that a large muscle mass is heavy to carry and there is a dilution of mitochondrias. Thus, an increment of maximal strength made through hypertrophy will probably not result in a better overall cycling performance.

Nervous regulation of force
Basically there are two ways to control a muscle’s force. One way is to recruit more motor unit, which will activate more motor units. You can think of this as the brain tells the muscle to use a larger percentile of the muscle’s fibres to generate power. Motor units are recruited to in order of size. Small motor units are recruited before large motor units. This is called the size principle of recruitment. The second way to regulate force production is through rate coding. It is an increment of the frequency of impulse signals to the motor unit. When a motor unit is stimulated more frequently, the twitches begin to overlap each other, which will generate a larger force.

So now we know the basic physiology behind the mechanisms used to increase the force. It is either to build larger muscle mass, make a better recruitment of motor units or fire a higher frequency of stimuli to the motor neurons.

Comments (2)

Strength training is a controversial topic when we discuss optimizing of training programs for cyclists. There is no definitive answer to whether cyclists should include weight lifting in their winter training plans. There have been made several studies which have not yet proved that cyclists can benefit from strength training.

One of the biggest problems for these scientific studies is that they are done at untrained people and the study group is usually small. That makes it rather difficult to prove a significant difference between endurance training only versus endurance training combined with weight lifting.

Comments (1)