Strength Training for Cycling Where Does That Strength Come From?

Unless you Have Born Strong as a Mountain
You May Find Some
Strength Training for Cycling Really Useful

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Are you really able to keep your body fit only riding your bike? Or do you need some extra exercises? And the answer is...

Yes, You Need Exercises

Surely, this is not the rule. You can easily ride your bike after work or lessons. You can sweat on various trails. And that will be just fine.

However, if you are thinking about more active workout and sport achievements, cycling won’t be enough.

According to the theories, strength training for cycling should be based on full-scale training program. That means you need to train not only your legs but also your whole body. And that is considered to be a cardiovascular sport. Together with cycling.

No matter how well trained your heart and your veins are, you still need muscle to maintain your pedaling power. Especially on races. You need to spurt.

Overtake and...

Keep up with the group or conquer steep uphill. And that’s exactly the situations where you realize that cycling needs power and not only endurance.

Amount of efforts you put while pedaling combined with repeats of your legs strokes per given time unit results in overall output power of your cycling. So...

Strength training for cycling is required. And the strength comes from exercises.

Therefore...

Get Off Your Bike

It may be quite unexpected request for you as a biker, but so it is.

There are at least two types of strength and you need to combine them all in order to ride your bike well and be competitive on trail. Let’s take a short overview of those “strengths”.

Your muscles need to endure long periods of pedaling and keep the same level of power.

So, you need strength endurance. You also need pure strength while speeding at finish or riding uphill. This differs from endurance strength as you need to “fire” quick and successful increase your power output.

And there is one more thing why you need to get off your bike and take some exercises in good old gym.

The speed you are turning your legs is limited. You cannot do 500 rpm on your bike. There are limits of possible leg turns per given time unit. What you can do is to use those limits with more power.

See the logics?

If you reached the limit of possible repeats of leg turns set yourself another goal. Improve the limits of your strength. This time you won’t reach your limit so easy.

Strength of your muscle can be trained much more than speed of your legs. As you see, there is some work to do.

And it is worth it.

Finally, your body is more than legs. It is really nice (may I say practical?) to have all your body trained equal and not just pump up your legs.

So, take advice form a bike trainer, follow your off-bike training program and...

Wake up your sleeping muscles!

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