Originally Posted by
headwind15
I would seriously consider the credentials (or lack of credentials) of the people who post on this forum. As far as me: I raced on the velodrome and road all three years as a junior and then continued to race (both) for five more years, so I am not your average armchair poster. I used to start doing machine leg press squats mid September, because I dislike doing them when it is hot. I really had the best success with doing them on Mon, Wed, & Fri. I usually started with 250 lbs increasing the weight on Mondays (5%) per week, so my legs wouldn't hurt when I went to race on the velodrome on a lot of saturdays. I know that there are a bunch of posters on this forums that believe that cycling is entirely an aerobic sport. IT IS TOTAL B.S. You might have a look at the the new Velo News and about Aston Lambe's new 4000 meter world record where he used weight training to be able to hold 60 kph for four minutes. It did not happen because of his aerobic conditioning! I used to be friends with Shaun Wallace (former world pursuit champ) he did all sorts of weight lifting to be as good as he was.
There's a Track Cycling forum down the page in The Racers Forum. You might find that more satisfactory than this general cycling area which is mostly non-racing roadies.
Track cyclists need an entirely different training program than do road cyclists as the demands are very different. For many years, it was thought that strength training made road cyclists slower or at best no better. There were many RCTs (randomized control trials) of strength training which showed no improvement in time trial times for road cyclists. The problem with those studies was that the training protocols were wrong. it took coaches and trainers quite a bit of experimentation to figure out what worked. The result of all that was that many road cyclists were and are discouraged from using strength training and it's a long road to get to where one can do it effectively, well, unless one is quite young, in which case one has not been burdened with old tales of how ineffective it is.
And all that said, what works for roadies is quite different from what works for track cyclists.