Legs (muscles) feel heavy, cardiovascular system super happy: what's going on?

Training
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This is a weird one: after restarting strength training, my legs feel heavy on the bike, especially on the first interval. Usually, they feel much better and the last interval feels better than the first. My cardiovascular system is not maxed out at the moment, though, as I can see from heart rate recovery figures (= time it takes until heart rate reaches <= 129 bpm). Today they have been under 1:15 for all 4 intervals of Mount Baldy +1, which for me is really great. Just looking at heart rate recovery, I’d say my workout was way too easy. But even during harder workouts that go into VO2max territory, they stay under 2 minutes.

Still, my legs feel uncomfortably heavy, and it takes more out of me mentally to finish work that should feel a bit easier than it does. Is there anything I can do to mitigate that a bit? Should I extend my warmup? Should I go easier on the strength workouts? Should I decrease intensity or volume?

2
  1. Eat more protein
  2. Lower the reps in lifting (quads)
  3. Don’t program hard intervals or even SST in the 2 days following squats.
  4. Be patient, it takes about 4-6 weeks for adaptation.
1 Like
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Thanks for the response, to the point! :slight_smile:

I’ll definitely do that. It is really weird how much fatigue I can incur by 3x8 pistol squats. :sweat_smile:

That might be hard just from the point of view of my training schedule. I train Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays with three days of intensity, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. My current plan is to do strength training on Wednesdays and Fridays so that I have either a complete day off (Thursdays) or an endurance day (Saturday) followed by a day off the bike (Sunday).