Cyclists - Here is why you should do strength & conditioning 🚴‍♂️

Traditionally cyclists would equate more time on the bike to increased performances, and not pay much attention to things off the bike, like strength training, nutrition, and optimising recovery. This is where sports science support comes in. This article will summarise the benefits of strength training for your cycling performance 🚴‍♂️

Strength training for cycling undoubtedly improves performance on the bike (Sunde et al. 2010, Vikmoen et al. 2016).

You might be thinking how?

Getting stronger in the gym, improves your ability to produce force. This means you can apply more force to the pedals, a.k.a more watts on the bike. This is much easier to understand when it comes to indoor track cycling or sprinting to the finish in a road race. But equally, increasing your ability to produce force, means at all intensities you can produce the same amount of watts but at a lower energy cost. This is referred to as cycling economy or efficiency.

Imagine you are in the peloton in a race, you’ve been strength training for the past year and made some huge gains in strength and therefore force production. Compared to last year, you will be working at a lower RPE (rate of perceived exertion) or Heart Rate than you were the year before (provided all conditions were the same of course). This is improved cycling economy or efficiency.

Mujika, Rønnestad, and Martin (2016) suggest that strength and power work contributes to enhanced performance on the bike by reducing fatigue, improving anaerobic capacity, maximal speed and economy of movement.

Let’s look at the science in more detail to how this works.

Force Velocity Profile

What is a force-velocity profile? It is relatively easy to understand, when you lift heavier weights you ultimately are producing more force (think strength), and because it’s heavy, you will move it slower (velocity/speed) than a lighter weight. You can think of this like the gears on your bike, a big cog/gear will require a lot of effort/force to move, and a smaller cog/gear will be much easier to move quickly.

You can improve this by strength training, in various ways (article coming soon). But, I will briefly explain one element here. If we improve maximal strength, meaning the heaviest weight/force you can lift/produce, you will now be able to lift a heavier weight at the same speed as before, or the same weight but faster or with less effort. Meaning more force/watts through the pedals on the bike, or the same amount at a lower energy cost. This is why we strength train 🏋️‍♀️

The Back Squat Profile graph below show’s one of our cyclists improvements on their force-velocity profile, whereby you can see that he is moving the same weight faster than before, higher m/s (metres/second aka speed) is better. You can also see he has moved 90kg (kilograms) faster than 80kg previously, and 100kg almost at the same speed as 80kg previously. This is after only 8 weeks of strength training, following an individualised strength programme. Estimated 1 Rep Max improved from 119kg to 127.6kg. We continued training after this and increased his estimated 1 Rep Max to 150kg after a further 18 weeks of heavy strength training, this cyclist only weighed 65kg which is a huge strength to weight ratio of 2.3x bodyweight!

Not convinced? Here is some research to back this up. In the bar graph below, you can see that in the intervention group who completed 2 strength sessions per week for 8 weeks, increased their 1RM Strength (One Rep Maximum) by 14.2%, RFD (Rate of Force Development) by 16.7%, CE (Cycling Economy) by 4.8%, WE (Work Efficiency) by 4.7%, and MAPtime (Maximal Aerobic Power Time to Exhaustion) by 17.2%. (Sunde et al. 2010)

(Sunde et al. 2010)

If you want to maximise your performance on the bike, you need to be hitting the gym and following a highly specialist strength training programme.  Let us know if you want any help with this via the contact us page or book a free call to discuss our programmes!

References

Mujika, I., Rønnestad, B.R. and Martin, D.T., 2016. Effects of increased muscle strength and muscle mass on endurance-cycling performance. International journal of sports physiology and performance, 11(3), pp.283-289.

Sunde, A., Støren, Ø., Bjerkaas, M., Larsen, M.H., Hoff, J. and Helgerud, J., 2010. Maximal strength training improves cycling economy in competitive cyclists. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 24(8), pp.2157-2165.

Vikmoen, O., Ellefsen, S., Trøen, Ø., Hollan, I., Hanestadhaugen, M., Raastad, T. and Rønnestad, B.R., 2016. Strength training improves cycling performance, fractional utilization of VO2max and cycling economy in female cyclists. Scandinavian journal of Medicine & Science in sports, 26(4), pp.384-396.