I was reading on Cyclingnews.com and I came across this in the Question & Answers section which I found to be helpful. Although I wouldn't do this during the riding months, weight-lifting for the legs (squats, leg presses, etc) is definitely something that I would incorporate into my training schedule during the winter (non-riding) months.
This is the Q & A:
Gym work and cycling
Hi,
I recently performed a session at the gym doing both squats and inclined single leg presses. Afterwards I suffered from DOMS, however I rode my bike to work and back without the DOMS affecting my cycling at all.
From this can I conclude that the gym work used parts of my quads that are not used when cycling? And if this is the case, why bother doing these exercises if they do not improve cycling performance?
Regards,
Primod
Scott Saifer says:
Primod,
You pose an excellent question. I've used the same argument myself in the past, though I would not today since I've had more opportunities to think about it.
Since you've done a bit of somewhat scientific testing and jumped to an unjustified conclusion, let me a do a bit of the same before answering your question. I just poked through my data base of current clients and found that roughly 60 percent of my clients include lifting, including squats and leg press in their programs, while 40 percent do not.
For each of my clients, I collect their highly significant accomplishments, including such things as podium placings. I have another list for smaller accomplishments such as improving training speed or finishing races. Essentially all my clients post at least the lesser type of accomplishment but among the riders who lift, 46 percent have recorded highly significant accomplishments, while only 20 percent of those who don't lift have recorded those highly significant accomplishments. That proves that lifting is very effective in improving cycling, no?
Actually, it is suggestive but proves nothing. Here's the problem: Many of the ones who don't lift don't lift because they are more pressed for time. The ones who do not lift, in some cases, are more rushed in their daily lives, negatively impacting recovery. Some of the ones who don't lift are just plain less serious about riding.
The point here is that you sometimes need a deeper understanding before you can draw a valid conclusion from a "scientfic" test. You need to look at the assumptions that go into your conclusion and check whether they are justified.
So, let's look at your experiment and see what might be going on. You did hard weight lifting and got sore afterwards. You notice the soreness when you move your legs in particular ways and conclude that you feel the soreness when the muscle fibres that were damaged by lifting are activated, and not when they are not.
That's a reasonable conclusion and as far as I know it's correct, though I don't know that it's ever been tested so there's a possible weak spot in the argument, but let's say we stipulate that. That means that when you rode to and from work and did not experience pain in the worked muscles, you must have been using different fibers. That involves another assumption that may not be justified.
You've probably noticed that when you are sore in cycling muscles, they often "loosen up" during a ride, and get less sore. That is a central nervous system effect: The brain ignores repeated signals that go on for too long, like learning to ignore background noise or other irrelevant stimuli. It is possible that when the brain sends out a signal for the leg muscles to start pedaling, it turns down the awareness of pain signals from the same muscle. I'm not saying this is the case, but that you are assuming that it is not, and we don't know for sure.
I don't know if you measured power on your ride, but if you didn't, would you admit that it's possible that power could have been down a few watts even though you didn't feel the soreness in your legs? Did you do repeated sprints on your ride to work? If so, was your power the same as usual? Did you feel the muscles?
Since lifting calls primarily on fast twitch muscle and fast twitch muscle is minimally recruited during steady state riding, you wouldn't expect steady state riding to make you feel your sore muscles, but you might feel them when sprinting.
Did you try any multi-minute maximal efforts to failure? Such efforts also call on fast twitch muscle, and have been shown to be positively affected by strength training, at least in certain sports. In particular, strength training has been shown to increase the time that an athlete can maintain a VO2-max level effort.
What if the brain selectively uses fibres that are not sore in pedaling even though it might have recruited the same fibres when they aren't sore. This is another wild hypothesis and probably wrong according to motor programming theory, but you'd need to check before drawing the conclusion that you've drawn.
I hope I've convinced you that you've over-generalised from not feeling the leg soreness while pedaling on a particular ride to strength training not helping cycling at all. Here then is a theory that justifies lifting, even if lifting didn't impact your current ride.
The power of a short sprint or several-minute bit of hard riding depends on what proportion of the muscle fibres in the relevant muscles can be recruited during the effort. Muscle fibres that are rarely recruited have relatively high recruitment thresholds. The brain has to send a very strong signal to trigger those fibres. That ends up feeling like you have to work hard to recruit them. You have to try hard to go that fast or push that hard.
Muscle fibres that are recruited regularly undergo physiological changes at the motor end-plate (where the nerve attaches to the muscle fibre) that literally makes it possible for a weaker signal from the brain to trigger that fibre. That makes it feel easier to recruit that fibre. If there are fibres that never get used during your regular cycling training, but that could help generate a sprinting or extended VO2-max effort if you could recruit them, lifting is a possible way to reduce their recruitment thresholds enough that you can learn how to use them in hard cycling.
Riding in very large gears with tremendous resistance could do the same thing, but in a much less controlled way since it's much more challenging to set the resistance when riding a bike than when loading a weight bar. So far as I know, the assumptions in this theory are all justified and the result is consistent with actual practice among racing cyclists.