Below are snippets of the 6 studies cited above and, in addition, a seventh from a study I’ve cited a few times. All show increased endurance performance resulting from including strength training. There are also studies that do not show any benefit to endurance performance from strength training (my personal opinion is that this is the result of poor strength training protocol). The best conclusion one can draw is that people who have a bias in favor of strength training will point to studies showing it is beneficial, and people who have a bias against strength training will ignore those studies and pretend they don’t exist.
Power output at 2 mmol l(-1) [la(-)] and mean power output in the 40-min all-out trial were improved in E + S (P < 0.05)
…improved mean power output in a 40-min all-out trial, fractional utilization of VO2 max and cycling economy (P < 0.05)
CE improved in E to reach values seen in SE. Short-term (5-min) endurance performance increased (3-4%) after SE and E (P<0.05), whereas 45-min endurance capacity increased (8%) with SE only (P<0.05)
…heavy strength training is recommended for improving cycling economy
The results showed that strength training improved time-trial performance, economy, [Formula: see text] and vMART in competitive endurance athletes.
The implementation of a strength-training mesocycle in running, cycling, cross-country skiing, and swimming was associated with moderate improvements in middle- and long-distance performance (net SMD [95%CI] = 0.52 [0.33-0.70]).
The purpose of the current study was to determine if the addition of HVRT for 8 weeks to ongoing endurance training would improve OBLA. The main finding of the current study was a significant 9.4% improvement in exercise intensity at OBLA after 8 weeks of supplementing HVRT training in aerobically trained individuals
I’ve been analyzing my performance and power-duration curve for years. In my own training, there has been very little gains from lifting heavy. I’ve got a lot more color commentary, but thats what I’ve seen.
You’re showing an incredible amount of bias yourself here. First you state that the studies you show are only the ones that agree with you. Then you state that your personal opinion is that that the ones that don’t agree with you must have been done poorly. And to top it off, you state that if people agree with you they point to the good studies and people who disagree with you are pretending they don’t exist, right after you stated you choose to pretend the studies that disagree with you are wrong.
Discussion is mainly here. Quotes from Coggan, input from Kolie.
You need to read through a lot of back and forth, maybe look for the Coggan quotes I posted and Kolie / empiricalcycling’s responses towards the end if you want to avoid the back and forth
Good podcasts here too:
Short answer:
Strength training is good for a LOT of things. Prevention elimination of muscle imbalance, Top end / Sprint power, injury prevention, general health / longevity / lower risk of all-cause mortality, prevention of sarcopenia, look and feel better. But, increasing aerobic power / FTP isn’t one of them. Yes, strength training should be a part of pretty much everyone’s routine (IMO), just need to be clear what you’re doing it for, and doing too much / wrong kinds of it can actually inhibit FTP gains
Can someone please give me a link to the actual papers cited to support the claim that strength training has no effect on FTP? I’m hearing a lot of authoritative sounding statements but no citations.
According to @empircalcycling, “strength training is only shown in the scientific literature to have power benefits across the board.” Which matches my understanding of the literature as well, but it has also been a few years since I have looked into this.
I will say, having snooped around that older thread, I have no interest in rehashing debates over how to interpret the science interpreters. But I’d love to read the primary lit myself.
I poked around the Ten Minute Tips #30 podcast, there’s a brief mention of a study at 1:08, where the presenter says “20 minute power went up [in the study, due to strength training]. But if the VO2 max is not going up, odds are, your FTP is not going up, unless you are doing a f-load of volume.” Which is based on the presenter’s theory that FTP cannot really increase unless VO2 max increases, not the actual contents of the paper. I’m not sure what “FTP” is supposed to mean here, at least practically, because one of the ways we assess FTP is by… 20 minute power.
It seems that @empircalcycling has a separate opinion (from experience as a coach), referenced by the “n > 100” remark (emphasis added).
using only best effort power data, tell me when I was lifting heavy.
Hint: started Feb 2019 and posted this “To remediate / rehab I’ve done a slow progression to rebuild core/glute strength, while working on proper hip hinging mechanics so that someday I would be able to work on leg strength in the gym. As a result, within the last month I’ve finally been able to incorporate (low weight) deadlifts and squats into my 2-3x/week strength training.”
You can find a lot of references to studies at the bottom of the blog post I provided above
You sound like you’re well read on the topic. Can you (or anyone else) share a paper where they took well trained cyclists who were on an efficient and effective cycling training plan already and had half of them reduce their cycling, replace it with heavy lifting and that half saw better cycling results than the other half who maintained their efficient and effective cycling only training plan?
I don’t say that to be argumentative, but out of curiosity. It seems like most people just migrate to the paper/person who agrees with them and then argues that their way is the best way because they read a paper that proved their position to be factual.
The issue is you have studies that show improvement, and then studies that show a negative impact or no improvement.
And, conversely, one of the biggest critiques that comes up, are there any studies that actually compare adding more cycling volume (Z2) to added resistance training? I haven’t seen one and I think that would be very telling if your goal is improved Aerobic performance.
Also, it’s just human nature that we tend to migrate to the study or person that says what we want to hear.
I should have also stated I was interested in overall cycling improvement and not just sprints. We all know lifting is going to benefit the person with the massive track sprint legs.
My legs are NOT big. I lifted heavy for two years and literally saw no improvement on short power. Legs got a little bigger. You know what has really driven up leg size to a 8 year max? Swinging and lifting 16/20/24kg kettlebells. Maybe I just suck at lifting heavy barbells. Or I’m not “well trained” because I thought some improvement was possible from reading the literature. It just didn’t work for me, for whatever reason.
Here’s the thing - you won’t know if you don’t try. And trying is not doing it for a couple months. In the endurance world “trying” is something that you measure in increments of 6 months or 1 year.
Just curious. Was that dropping cycling time and adding the bells, or adding the bells on top of your existing cycling volume, or maybe even adding the bells AND increasing cycling volume?
I was just going to post the Ronnestad. They did get a 1-4% improvement at 4mmol (threshold) thought it didn’t translate to a 40km TT time.
For the regular amateur riding 6-8-12 hours per week, the extra two hours of gym time don’t translate to much improvement. If you are a pro, then you do all that you can do to get the extra 1-4%
And no doubt the amateur may benefit in other ways from some lifting.
Not easy to answer as I didn’t fully commit to the kettlebells until summer 2023, and then adopted StrongFirst minimalist programming later that year. By late 2022 / early 2023 my old thumb injury was causing a lot of issues on the bike, and I also had developed what felt like tennis elbow on same arm. Stopped focusing on cycling and started focusing on strength training. Again that is all big picture.
Granted, part of the point is that lifting can be done in addition to one’s endurance training (not as a mere replacement). This can be useful for amateurs as well who still have to worry about overtraining (relative to their current fitness).
It may also be worth pointing out that the original cycling discipline mentioned by the OP was the ultra endurance/adventure cycling category. 10+ hour rides/races. There’s quite a lot of reasons lifting can improve overall race performance (outside of raw aerobic capacity) when you move into the really long races.
14 “competitive” cyclist trained 1.7 hours a week? Did I read this right….
The total training volume for both groups was the same [E: 8.8 (1.1) h/week; C: 8.9 (1.7) h/week], but 37% of training for E consisted of explosive-type strength training, whilst C received endurance training only
If so, that’s not a very competitive cyclist, IMO, maybe they’d be good at bmx racing with those low hours.
I’m sure someone will come along and argue against, however in my mind there is no debate on the overall positive impact of (gym) resistance training to maintain/improve posterior chain and upper body. My double century was made enjoyable by renegade rows in the office, and cable rows in the gym.
Thanks for this. I’m interested and I’d like to know more about what “explosive training” the one group did versus the “endurance training” of the other, and what the real world result of that was, but not interested enough to spend $40, especially when it was only 14 people.
If you don’t have access to this article, you can see the actual program in this systematic review (Table 3).
High rep squats, leg press, and step ups, encouraged to be done as explosively as possible.
(fwiw, n=14 is par for the course in exercise science… we really lean on meta analyses that pool all of these smaller studies.)
EDIT I’ll go ahead and dump the paywalled figures here. STP = 30s erg mean power, TT = 1 hour effort (kinda, it’s complicated), Wmax = a ramp test where 80+ rpm has to be maintained, delta efficiency = change in work accomplished per minute to energy expended per minute.
Maybe I just suck at lifting heavy barbells. Or I’m not “well trained” because I thought some improvement was possible from reading the literature. It just didn’t work for me, for whatever reason.
