OBoile

While moderation is required as one ages, the idea that you can go hard, or that it is somehow damaging to you is silly.
This is absolutely terrible advice that contradicts pretty much all the current expert advice.

cyclintom

By all means ride as hard as you like. Was there anything in my statement that somehow prevents you from doing so?

What "experts" are these that give you your advice? The overwhelming medical advice from Doctors is that a brisk walk is "exercise".

cyclintom

Neither of your references came through. Though I agree with your point #1 there is definitely a limit to #2 since increased strength comes from first toning your muscles and then you have to increase their size to increase their strength. In the case of a cyclist increasing the size of muscles also increases their weight so there is a limit there as well.

Endurance cycling has a lot of limits. Most people can reach all of them save for one - oxygen intake. This is definitely a genetic gift. This is why you have perhaps 20 cyclists in the world that can win an endurance race like the Tour with anything other than luck.

cyclintom

In general I think that Friel's training bible is a very good source for people. But though I haven't looked into it, from his training regimens I would think that he is a crit racer andsprinter. So you have to maintain that in mind.

OBoile

There are studies that show cyclists' performance improving after a period of resistance training. Having said that, is it worth the cost? I.E. would they have been better off doing something else during the time they spent lifting? Not sure anyone knows the answer to that, and what answer there is likely depends on the current time in the athlete's training plan as well as a number of factors.

What does seem clear to me, at least, is that, from a cycling performance perspective, the decision to lift weights likely isn't a critical one. People have been successful at an elite level while lifting and others have been equally successful while abstaining.

For most of us reading this, general health should be a priority. Lifting is an excellent compliment to cycling in developing overall fitness and health.

OBoile

You imply intense exercise is a bad thing. The evidence indicates otherwise:
https://www.iflscience.com/health-an...most-a-decade/

What "experts" are these that give you your advice? The overwhelming medical advice from Doctors is that a brisk walk is "exercise".[/QUOTE]
The experts I'm referring to are the scientists who study this stuff.
https://www.businessinsider.com/best...w-aging-2018-4
https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Articl...resistUNM.html
https://www.npr.org/2011/02/21/13377...-pressing-iron
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14552938
https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity...g_stronger.pdf

I've also never seen anything that indicates strength training wears out your joints. If anything, properly programmed strength training strengthens your joints.

Dan333SP

Random aside- Jasper is one of my favorite youtube people, love his videos. Pumped that he did one with the vegan cyclist recently, it's worth a watch. VC has his uploaded, Jasper hasn't gotten to it yet. Dude is jacked. He's definitely not a climber.

cyclintom

I've passed your posting on to the old farts I ride with. Of course they are all at least 5 years younger than me and think that they are still young, but if another one of them has a heart attack maybe they will begin thinking. I've always had an interest in survival. Strangely enough I've never worried much about cars. I am always polite to them and they in general are polite with me. But I have always known that pushing yourself too hard is not good for you. But I come from a family of fighters and perhaps my view of "too hard" and other people's is different. I remember my Uncle John after a middle weight fight would take 2 months to heal. And those were the one's he won.

Carbonfiberboy 

I just checked all my links, including the links inside those links, and they all worked on my browser. In the link to the 3rd study in my second BF link, one must page all the way to the bottom of the web page to find the link for the PDF. What difficulty did you encounter?

No, you don't have to increase the size of your muscles to increase strength. Everyone who lifts understands this. Strength comes first from fiber recruitment. The reason one must lift to failure is specifically to cause full fiber recruitment. Our muscles are designed to do as little work as possible in order to be more calorically efficient. We have to train them to achieve their full potential strength. That's the reason that in-season strength training improves cycling performance: it's necessary to keep after them to maintain strength. Increased size comes from increasing calorie intake, not simply from lifting weights.

We can't improve our genetics, however we can work to perform at our personal limits. Very few people manage to do this. While weight training won't improve VO2max, it does improve endurance. VO2max intervals improve that marker. Weight training improves endurance because of increased fiber recruitment. When more fibers are in use, each fiber does less work and is thus more slowly fatigued.

GreenAnvil

Dan333SP

Same. He started road racing, what, a year or two ago and finished 2nd to one of the Williams brothers at the SoCal crit championships on minimal training? He's insanely strong. Would be cool to take a KLM 747 somewhere and have him as the pilot.

cyclintom

The experts I'm referring to are the scientists who study this stuff.
https://www.businessinsider.com/best...w-aging-2018-4
https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Articl...resistUNM.html
https://www.npr.org/2011/02/21/13377...-pressing-iron
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14552938
https://www.cdc.gov/physicalactivity...g_stronger.pdf

I've also never seen anything that indicates strength training wears out your joints. If anything, properly programmed strength training strengthens your joints.[/QUOTE]

I'm an electronics engineer who has worked in medical instrumentation most of my life. I worked on the first real heart/lung machine. I subscribe to most of the science publications and read the studies. I was fundamental in designing the laboratory instrument that used Dr. Kary Mullis' polymerase chain reaction chemistry which identified HIV as the cause of AIDS in the blood banking system. This gave him the Nobel Prize in chemistry as it should have. So I'm not speaking from a position of ignorance or from as someone that reads an article in Popular Mechanics and believes it blindly.

The levels of exercise discussed in those articles could hardly be compared to the levels that Joe Friel and others have suggested are necessary to maintain racing form. As I said they are more on the level of a brisk walk. But it is really even worse than that. Most "studies" on human health of any sort suffer from far too small a sample size and consequently pretty meaningless statistics and repeat studies do not repeat the results in more than 80% of cases. So you have to be pretty skeptical of such things. Do you think that heart attacks are only from poor living habits?

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/c...ge-your-heart/ Now this study is a widely based statistical study without a limited sample size. But I would also have a skeptical eye on that while at the same time knowing that it makes sense that you can over-stress any muscle in your body and your heart is the strongest of them all. This article provides several references to the studies showing these things.

But we do have multiple repeatable studies that show that lifting heavy weights (like my cousin a farmer or my brother who was a switchman on the railroad and would jump off of the cars to throw switches) CANNOT always be done carefully and correctly and inevitably damages joints. And it NEVER builds them up. While performed correctly and in perfect alignment it may not damage your joints and the increased muscle strength may increase your ability to hold these weights more carefully giving the appearance that they help (and I suppose that is a form of help) your joints all have a limited lifespan. Hell, even my friend, a retired NCIS agent, has worn out his right hip at just under 60. And it is my opinion that is because he always rides with a triple which puts his right leg at a more splayed angle. And he rides a lot. He is due for hip replacement next week I believe.

Now joint replacement is not necessarily the end of your cycling career but you have to be very careful to do ALL of the physical therapy just as advised.

But what can you say about Master's racing? If Joe Friel is finishing 2nd should you train up to beat him? That is YOUR decision.

Wattsup

Friel isn't exactly cutting edge. For example, regarding weight training, he recommends heavy weights, lower reps. He explains there's a risk/reward relationship, heavy weight/low reps being the best way for master's athletes to keep valuable muscle tissue and strength, but admits there is risk involved too, risk of injury. The thing is, recent research, two different studies in fact, show that performing sets with 25 reps using lighter weights that completely exhaust the muscle at the 25th rep is just as effective in building strength and muscle as high weight/low rep sets, and it's a lot safer.

cyclintom

As I said, initially you can increase your fitness with weight training, But muscle fibers are all the same and all have the same strength. So after a point the only way of increasing your strength is by increasing the number of muscle fibers. You aren't going to "recruit" the muscles in your butt to lift a weight on your arms.

Also, physical therapists are educated in the way muscles work and they disagree with you. They use rather light weights and multiple repetitions.

asgelle

OBoile

Did you even read any of the articles I linked?
Do you actually have any evidence that strength training "inevitably damages joints"?
Are you aware that a human body is not a car? Pretty much the entire field of exercise science is based on the principle that the body reacts to a physical stress by making the affected area stronger?

OBoile

This is false.
This is not always the case.

cyclintom

There are fast twitch and slow twitch. Fast twitch have more strength but for shorter duration. Slow twitch less strength but for longer duration. The mixture of these muscles in any group varies depending upon the area of the body they are in. You can change the composition of muscles slightly through weight training. But not by much. And we don't know about long term effects of doing this to non-skeletal muscles such as the heart.

OBoile

There's some debate about whether heavier weights or lighter ones are actually safer. The issue with high reps is that a person's concentration often slips as the set goes on which can cause a breakdown in form.

In either case, as long as you're not being an idiot, weight training is a fairly safe and healthy activity.

PaulRivers

And neither do pro's who train powerlifting competition winners like boris sheiko:

I don't remember exactly where it is but he says his competitors never do more than 85%-90% of their max in training. The only time they go above that is for competitions, or in order to qualify for the competition, but in regular training he avoids lifters going to their max. Advanced training also involves "periodized" training where you cycle through different percentages of your max.

The "must lift to failure" idea is a myth...it's about as true as "red bikes are faster". ;-)

asgelle

Wattsup

I'm thinking blood pressure. During heavy squats for instance, blood pressure can spike to 345 over 245. Aging arteries aren't as flexible, and stroke risk is higher, as well as the risk of rupturing a plaque and causing a heart attack. Lighter weights @ 25 reps is much safer.

cyclintom

Can you think of any way I could prevent you from doing whatever you want or even desire to? You are free to follow your dream. Arnold Schwartzenegger can be your dream. Oh, wait, someone else said that your muscles don't grow from weight training. So I guess he was born that way and you're out of luck unless you were born that way.

OBoile

Is there any actual statistical evidence that short term spikes like these are dangerous? I think it's pretty premature to say that using 25 reps is "much" safer. I've been a member of the powerlifting community for over a decade. This includes a large number of masters lifters. Despite lifting heavy several times a week, I've yet to hear about this happening.

OBoile

Of course you can't stop me from doing what I want. Of course, what I do only affects me.

If only there were a way to stop you from dispensing incorrect training advice. That has the potential to affect others.