Originally Posted by
terrymorse
Ah, good old resistance (weight) training. I have that one permanently filed in the "probably should do--don't want to do" folder.
Except for rehabilitation after an injury, I just can't find the motivation to grunt away in a weight room. I'd much rather be on the bike. And the best training plan is one you will actually do.
If I want to increase pedaling strength, I seek out some steep grades to climb. Nothing else works for me like fighting my way up 15% grades in the saddle. Soreness in my quads and glutes tell me that these climbs are working. And those steep workouts make 6% climbs feel like flat roads (well, sort of).
Another strength workout of mine is simply sprinting up rollers in a big gear, in the saddle. That's a nice whole leg/glutes workout. After some time, I can produce as much power in the saddle as out of the saddle.
Also exactly my experience . . .until. '03, so 58 y.o. I ran a wooden boatshop for 40 years, lots of hard manual labor, mostly upper body though. But the high effort stuff was really intermittent. You'd be doing fine work for a couple weeks and all of a sudden have an 8 hour day when you're using the hand plane hard enough that the thing gets hot. The answer was the gym twice a week. Didn't do that, couldn't do the work.
Then at 58, I noticed that I was losing my kick on the bike, so more lower body in the gym. Sure enough, in a couple years I was slaughtering the group on short OOS hill sprints but after enough of that the others stopped competing and I didn't want to just vanish, so I quit doing that but kept on with the strength training. Anyway, the gym made a big difference, like doing a lot of running in summer if you're a skier in winter. The older I got, the bigger deal it became. I'd do an hour of moderate on the bike, then hit the gym all warmed up..
For me, the gym was a hrTSS of 30-40 twice a week, out of 400-600/week in spring and summer in my late 50s, 60s. not a show-stopper. It's actually quite enjoyable to push one's limits in the gym, just like we do on the bike. More endorphins, please. I started with 3X30 of about 8 exercises, right out out Friel's recs, gradually reducing reps down to 3X10-12 over a couple years, not months or weeks. However many the reps, I'd adjust the weights so that the last rep of the last set was barely possible or impossible. I could tell not to even start that rep, never purposely failed in the middle of a rep. The web has some very convincing studies of young competitive cyclists adding strength training. Getting old makes it even more effective.
My motivation was to be more competitive with younger riders in group rides, like 10-15 years younger. If one is competing with oneself, maybe not the same thing. I should mention that I started lifting in my early 20s, helped with rock climbing as well as skiing, but in any case, I learned to do all the big lifts safely and never have been injured in the gym, quite the contrary, prevents injury. The Olympic lifts are really fun, but I've never been in an ordinary gym where they had an Olympic platform to use for that and I wasn't training for that anyway, I trained to ride.