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How do you train your strength on bike?

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How do you train your strength on bike?

Old 09-12-17, 08:44 AM
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Franklin27
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How do you train your strength on bike?

Just wanted to know your personal experiences in this matter. Not looking for training advices, only experiences and results you would like to share.

Greetings.
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Old 09-12-17, 12:20 PM
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There are 2 basic schools of thought:

- Train strength and power in the gym then learn to use it on a bike.
- Train strength and power on the bike or spin bike by using various gears or resistance levels.

Both work.
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Old 09-12-17, 05:31 PM
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Work out your race gear, add 10" and do rolling seated accels from a slow roll for 150m

Get a Wahoo Kickr, turn the resistance up to 100% and grind it out in the saddle for 15-20s (I do 12 pedal strokes) in big gear (53/12) = squats on a bike. You just don't get better specitivity than that!

Last edited by brawlo; 09-12-17 at 05:34 PM.
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Old 09-12-17, 06:31 PM
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Standing starts and sustained overgeared efforts have been my go-to's. Of course I'd never take strength training advice from me.
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Old 09-12-17, 06:35 PM
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If you're training strength on the bike by overgearing, just remember to do overspeed work as well, including in your race gear. This can be motorpaced "overtakes" (sprint past the bike), or find a flat with a downhill leading up to it that allows you to sprint 5-10 kmh hour faster than you would under your own power on the flat. Try to hold the speed in your race gear as long as possible, as soon as you drop down to your own intrinsic top speed, back off.
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Old 09-12-17, 07:56 PM
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Originally Posted by taras0000
If you're training strength on the bike by overgearing, just remember to do overspeed work as well, including in your race gear. This can be motorpaced "overtakes" (sprint past the bike), or find a flat with a downhill leading up to it that allows you to sprint 5-10 kmh hour faster than you would under your own power on the flat. Try to hold the speed in your race gear as long as possible, as soon as you drop down to your own intrinsic top speed, back off.
That too^^. 10" under and developing into doing it in your race gear as you get close to your focus event
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Old 09-13-17, 03:52 PM
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Originally Posted by carleton
There are 2 basic schools of thought:

- Train strength and power in the gym then learn to use it on a bike.
- Train strength and power on the bike or spin bike by using various gears or resistance levels.

Both work.
I remember reading that during your best season ever you only did strength work on your bike. How was that experience? Perhaps it is too personal, but how were your strength sessions on the bike? Was only in your track bike or did you have strength work with your road bike too? How was your criteria for duration of efforts, gear choice, programming, etc.?

Edit: Thanks for your contribution to this forum. Your information and opinions really helped my as a rider.
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Old 09-13-17, 04:01 PM
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Originally Posted by brawlo
Work out your race gear, add 10" and do rolling seated accels from a slow roll for 150m

Get a Wahoo Kickr, turn the resistance up to 100% and grind it out in the saddle for 15-20s (I do 12 pedal strokes) in big gear (53/12) = squats on a bike. You just don't get better specitivity than that!
Brawlo: Do you only train for sprinting or you prepare yourself for other races (endurance)? Have you ever tested shorter strenght intervals on the turbo trainer? Or longer? How is your programming or this is your standard on-bike strength training?

Thanks for replying, by the way.

Last edited by Franklin27; 09-13-17 at 04:07 PM.
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Old 09-13-17, 04:06 PM
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Originally Posted by taras0000
If you're training strength on the bike by overgearing, just remember to do overspeed work as well, including in your race gear. This can be motorpaced "overtakes" (sprint past the bike), or find a flat with a downhill leading up to it that allows you to sprint 5-10 kmh hour faster than you would under your own power on the flat. Try to hold the speed in your race gear as long as possible, as soon as you drop down to your own intrinsic top speed, back off.
Thanks for replying, Taras. I have been training with the Up-Up book and there advices to have under-geared 500m efforts before the strength work intervals during the same session.

In your opinion, should be the under-geared sprints before or after the strength intervals?

Edit: Thanks for your wisdom in this forum (overall in the Weigthlifting post). Your contributions are pure gold.

Last edited by Franklin27; 09-13-17 at 04:09 PM.
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Old 09-13-17, 05:29 PM
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Originally Posted by Franklin27
Brawlo: Do you only train for sprinting or you prepare yourself for other races (endurance)? Have you ever tested shorter strenght intervals on the turbo trainer? Or longer? How is your programming or this is your standard on-bike strength training?

Thanks for replying, by the way.
I am currently focusing on sprinting. This summer will be my 9th season of racing. I've been concentrating on sprinting for the last 2 seasons, gradually getting faster. I could hang with the guys at club level racing in pretty much everything, with more strength in my sprint/power, but when I go to higher levels I'm just left behind. I am a strong scratch racer even, but when there's good racing with constant surging I'm just out the back door. So I decided to take a general hiatus from everything else and just concentrate on pure sprint for a while to see how I go with it, with an aim to head over to LA for 2018 world masters. I did have a go at concentrating on sprint under a coach in 2012/13 but his method and volume just didn't work for me and he wasn't very responsive to my feedback to I went back to just racing.

So for about the last 3 years I've been doing pure sprint work with some weights, UpUpUp trainer drills and track work when I can get there. I was doing weights over winter the first year and then dropped that as the track season started, just doing the trainer and track. I got a little faster. My biggest breakthrough came when I didn't bother with weights at all over winter. I did the trainer drills but instead of using the gearing guide, I did all hard efforts in 53/12. I amassed some serious strength out of that and set a PB of 12.0. Then last season I moved to bigger gears and more of the efforts mentioned and set 11.8. Even better than that was I rode a bad line and some more experience guys told me it could have easily been 11.7 with a tighter line. This last off season I purchased the kickr and am yet to see just how much of a difference that will be making. Unfortunately life with kids has kicked in this winter and messed things up a bit with training consistency, but hoping to at least be as fast if not faster than last season.
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Old 09-13-17, 05:35 PM
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Originally Posted by Franklin27
Thanks for replying, Taras. I have been training with the Up-Up book and there advices to have under-geared 500m efforts before the strength work intervals during the same session.

In your opinion, should be the under-geared sprints before or after the strength intervals?

Edit: Thanks for your wisdom in this forum (overall in the Weigthlifting post). Your contributions are pure gold.
Before, but ideally in separate workouts (if you're looking to max out with each one).

Strength is a component of power (power = force x speed, sort of). You need to be well rested to have a productive speed workout. You can grind out a strength workout as long as you have enough recovery between sets. As the workout goes on, you may be able to produce the same amount of force, but the rate at which you produce it goes down. This is okay in a strength workout, but not ideal. You NEVER want to allow this in a speed or power workout. If you train slow contractions, guess what your muscles will learn to do, contract slowly. This is why I wouldn't necessarily follow undergeared work with strength work. You can use undergear work as a "warm-up" to potentiate or prime the muscles to contract quickly IF the strength workout is primary workout in the session. The body will adapt to the greater stressor, so just keep in mind the purpose of that specific workout, and go through it accordingly.

When doing a speed/undergeared workout, you always stop as soon as the rate of work slows down. You can set yourself back a workout or two by not adhering to this principle.

On the flip side of potentiation, you can also use strength to prime power/speed. Get the body to generate a huge force, then remove some resistance when you want to apply speed. Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin were doing single sets of ~600lb squats in their warm-up to running the 100m relay in Atlanta in '96. The secret is NOT MAXING OUT, and not cooking yourself with reps.
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Old 09-14-17, 08:43 AM
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Originally Posted by Franklin27
I remember reading that during your best season ever you only did strength work on your bike. How was that experience? Perhaps it is too personal, but how were your strength sessions on the bike? Was only in your track bike or did you have strength work with your road bike too? How was your criteria for duration of efforts, gear choice, programming, etc.?

Edit: Thanks for your contribution to this forum. Your information and opinions really helped my as a rider.
The strength sessions on the bike were akin to overgear interval drills.

I had a road bike but rarely used it. I was on the spin bike more than any other saddle that year.

Programming was written by my coach who had been writing such programs for years. As Taras suggested, it trained strength, power, and speed separately.

I like to call it "Wax On, Wax Off" like from the Karate Kid film where Daniel trains the components of his karate movements separately then Miyagi puts him in a situation where he brings then together at once and everything is in perfect form with strength, power, and speed.
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Old 09-14-17, 03:47 PM
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I think there are warm-ups included in those up!up!up! sample sessions. You definitely want to train speed and strength separately.
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Old 09-14-17, 04:26 PM
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Originally Posted by Baby Puke
I think there are warm-ups included in those up!up!up! sample sessions. You definitely want to train speed and strength separately.
Every one of those workouts I've done there's a low gear revout at the start and one at the end. Interestingly when I was at my fastest back in Feb, the warmup and cooldown revouts were at the same rpm peak. I hadn't ever achieved that before in the years that I'd been doing the UpUpUp trainer drills
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Old 09-15-17, 03:52 AM
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Also, for getting some REALLY big-gear workouts, I hear there is a new hubset on the market that will take a 10t cog. Theo Bos was training on his over here. HUGE.
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Old 09-15-17, 07:11 AM
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Originally Posted by Baby Puke
Also, for getting some REALLY big-gear workouts, I hear there is a new hubset on the market that will take a 10t cog. Theo Bos was training on his over here. HUGE.
Interesting. Who makes the hub? Pics?
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Old 09-15-17, 02:47 PM
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Have only seen a video of it in use, don't know who makes it.
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Old 09-15-17, 03:34 PM
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Originally Posted by carleton
Interesting. Who makes the hub? Pics?
Apparently it's a custom hub with the sprocket built on, and it's of Russian origin.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVrVX3tF...ken-by=bostheo

Found this on the interwebz, but I don't know if it's similar (I also know very little about track hubs, etc because I'm a noob): https://bombtrack.com/parts/hubs_and_guards/owl-hub/

Last edited by SyntaxMonstr; 09-15-17 at 03:42 PM.
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Old 09-15-17, 05:53 PM
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Originally Posted by SyntaxMonstr
Apparently it's a custom hub with the sprocket built on, and it's of Russian origin.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVrVX3tF...ken-by=bostheo

Found this on the interwebz, but I don't know if it's similar (I also know very little about track hubs, etc because I'm a noob): OWL HUB | BOMBTRACK BICYCLE COMPANY
Thanks!

I'd imagine that they simply CNC'd the cog as part of the process of CNC'ing the hub. This probably wouldn't be a bad idea to do a flip/flop fixed/fixed-10 as a training wheel for elites. A small market, but a market nonetheless.


That Owl Hub turns a fixed cog into a freewheel by moving the freewheel action inside of the hub body.
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Old 09-15-17, 08:39 PM
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The Boss gets all the cool stuff, him and Buchli are on avanti's at the moment in Japan
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Old 09-16-17, 09:38 AM
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Originally Posted by carleton
Thanks!

That Owl Hub turns a fixed cog into a freewheel by moving the freewheel action inside of the hub body.
Ohh, haha. So the opposite of what you need. I just saw that it came with a 10t cog and thought it was relevant. I just heard back from a russian hub company and they said that apparently the manufacturer of those hubs discontinued them. So I'm guessing Dmitriev et al had a few lying around, or one was fabricated specifically for The Boss.

Originally Posted by pierrej
The Boss gets all the cool stuff, him and Buchli are on avanti's at the moment in Japan
Yeah, I believe that's part of a sponsorship deal Beats Cycling Club worked out with Avanti, because Roy Van Den Berg is on one as well and those three make up their marquee sprint trio.
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Old 09-16-17, 12:42 PM
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You could always go with an 80t chainring.
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Old 09-16-17, 01:20 PM
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Originally Posted by topflightpro
You could always go with an 80t chainring.
I wonder if going larger and larger with chainrings increases the risk of "taco-ing" the chainring under a lot of force. This is not uncommon on road bikes with 130 BCD crank arms and chainrings combined with narrow chainrings and lightweight components. The further the chain is from the support of the chainring bolts, the more leverage it gets if the chain is off-center from the chainring.

I would assume that 10t cog might present new challenges as well.

Campy used to have 151 BCD back in the 60s, which spaced the bolts further out. Maybe it's time for that to make a comeback...or a manufacturer to simply start a new standard based on new science and trends. Or 144 BCD is fine.
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Old 09-16-17, 04:24 PM
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I think 144 is sufficient. Most road rings are heavily machined. Track rings tend to be a little heavier, and currently, full depth rings like the FSA and Zen rings are in vogue. With the full depth, and the thicker 1/8th width, I think 144 will be fine. If your chainline is really off, then maybe you would be prone to taco chainrings, but otherwise it should be okay.

I used to trash derailleurs on my road bikes doing standing starts, but never chainrings. I think I ended up wrapping 4 of them around my cogsets.
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Old 09-16-17, 04:25 PM
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Originally Posted by pierrej
The Boss gets all the cool stuff, him and Buchli are on avanti's at the moment in Japan
I saw Shane Perkins is also riding an Avanti over here, some kind of foreign pro Avanto give away going on??

On the 10t hub, an ex-pro and current bike shop owner in Kanazawa is stocking them. I'll shoot him an email and see if I can get the lowdown. Maybe repurposed BMX stuff? 9t and 10t are standard sizes in freestyle and park bikes, but as above they are free hubs or freewheels.
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