Core | Stronger Cyclist

Why you should do Single Leg exercise

posted on January 7th, 2010 in Cycling, Strength Training by Stephen

Everyone hears that they should weight train to gain strength. That’s true, take 2 athletes with the same body/endurance & the one that is 10% stronger will always win!

When you go to the gym is most of your strength training take place with 1 leg or 2? Most equipment in the weight room is designed for you to use 2 legs – why? Because the training philosophy that has dominated the industry for the past decade has been body building – building large amounts of muscle, and to impress the judges on stage. But does all the muscle size translate into speed & endurance?

When you train and race, all the force production is generated with single leg contractions – running, only 1 leg is on the ground at a time. Cycling, 1 leg is creating the force while the other tries to pull-up or at least not interfere.
So if your workouts should help you become better, faster, stronger shouldn’t your weight training also include specificity to your sport – for example single leg training.

I like to warm-up with squats on a balance board – each leg has to press equally or the board will flop to one side. I will follow this exercise with cone reaches on one leg – this requires using balance/stabilization as well as hamstring & glute activation.

Next I often do lunges – trying not to use the back leg and using the front leg as much as possible. Also, with doing single leg lunges, I find out if 1 leg is producing more power than the other leg. Optimally, both legs produce an equal amount of power!

I will follow this up with another single leg hamstring exercise that mimics the cycling and running foot/leg action, such as hamstring roll-ins on a stability ball.

I always use the best form possible & rely on Quality over Quantity of each exercise – do something until I can no longer hold proper form – then stop, move on to the next exercise.

I hope you like some of these tips and put the ideas behind them to use in your next workout!

Cycling Circuits

posted on December 10th, 2009 in Strength Training by Stephen

I have a workout by the same name. I did this because it is a great way to think of a good workout for an Athlete. Circuit training.

As I was riding with a friend yesterday he was asking me about workouts for cyclists. It slowly became apparent that he was just doing some exercises with no basis of why. I can remember doing the same thing with my cycling training when I was a category 4 rider and all I did was the group rides…..but when I got serious and wanted to improve my cycling using a plan was a huge improvement and boost for me to upgrade to a category 2 rider the following year!

The same preparation that goes into a cycling training program should go into a cyclists weight training program! Don’t use machines! Use Body weights and then add Free-weights!

Another guy asked me about doing weighted squats. Asked him to demonstrate a squat for me. As he squatted, he could not get to parallel and his heels came off the ground, which is pretty typical of guys. So, I showed him the difference in the way he squats and the way I squat. How and why the mechanics of it were different. Part of the reason that his heels come up is because he is not engaging his glutes, and using mainly the quads. Tight hamstrings may also be a contributing factor to this also.

If your squat isn’t using proper form, WHY would you then want to add weight and Amplify improper form? That leads to injuries! You will get much more out of your workout if you correct the muscle imbalance.

Pretty good workout video of Lance at his home gym. Notice that there are no machine based exercises!! You shouldn’t do them either.