I incorporate the following polymeric exercises into my two-day split strength training sessions:
I don’t get too crazy and usually do 2 sets of 10 reps for each. I mostly use them as a supplement for strength training, reduce injury, and for overall balance in the stability muscles that aren’t as targeted through the standard strength training exercises.
Thanks for your reply Garratto.
I’ve found the concept of interference to create most of my scheduling issues.
I really enjoy going to the gym. As a 70kg 50 yr old I have found enormous performance benefits after 2 years consistent strength training.
I do 2-3 full body workouts/wk, using MAPS Aesthetic currently, simply because it’s nice to follow a program. Usually often split each workout into two sessions due to time constraints; completing the bulk of it at 6am, then popping in the final sets after work or the next morning.
What I’ve been trying to do is separate any strength work by at least 8hrs, but ideally 24hrs from my running training (mainly z2, but includes all zones). This can make things tricky.
One session I’d really like to do is a leg strength workout, mixed in with plyometrics, stair climbing, incline treadmill etc. I’m training for mountain running these days (my next A race is a Skyrace in 35 weeks time). I’ve shied away from this session in the belief I may be creating fatigue but dulling the adaptations by mixing it all up. What are your thoughts on this idea?
Thanks for taking the time to answer.
If you look at the paper that gets cited most often about the interference effect (forgive me for not having a link) what they did was have an endurance group, a lifting group, and a group doing both.
Literally both. They just took both protocols and slammed them together. Now ask yourself how your body might react if you tried that. I know mine wouldn’t like me very much. It’d just be too much work to recover from, and I’d probably get better adaptations from doing less total work but programming it more intelligently.
Bottom line (as @Garratto pretty much already said) is - don’t sweat the details too much. Program what you can perform with good (not necessarily perfect) quality and can recover from (FAFO) and enjoy yourself.
I think it’s a fair guide but it’s a guide.
Ultimately, more than “interference effect” imo is the more generic principle of executing your workout now so that you can comfortably do the next workout.
So blowing your legs out on maximal squats at 8:00 when you have a 90 min vo2 Stretch workout at 12:00 is going to be a bad idea. Probably a bad idea even if the gap is 12hrs.
So yes it’s pretty unlikely I’m going to have a high quality run session, and probably increase injury risk if I lift heavy beforehand on the same day.
I would not worry so much if I want to lift heavy before a moderate indoor bike or after a moderate run or swim.
I like Maps Anabolic, but the 3rd phase with supersets is rough. I’m currently doing maps symmetry, coming back from injury so the isolation movements have been Great for getting back into more dynamic movements.
Their Programs are more aimed at people who wanna lift more than cyclist. Like you, I do at least two days a week using one of their programs if I’m full on training with cycling.
Right now, my goals are more aimed towards building strength back.
Did my first (relatively light) set of squats for a while and my legs are already complaining.
Trainer session tomorrow should be interesting.
I think it was maybe 2 months ago I started back into strength work after doing little during the summer. I only did like a short 30 minute mostly leg strength workout. My legs were not all that happy. I had a zone 2 ride the next day and it took me a good 30 minutes before my legs warmed up
One thing to keep in mind is that regardless of “interference”, doing more work requires more recovery, no matter what you are doing. This is especially the case when the work you do directly causes muscle damage - strength training is a different beast than aerobic exercise and combining them means more recovery. Let’s say you don’t do any endurance exercise, only lift, you certainly cannot do legs at the gym every day. Twice is ideal, some people do three days, but most people end up injured doing legs three days a week. The point I’m making is that I don’t bother with interference I already know that strength training recovery and adaptation takes a lot of time even if you aren’t doing other exercise. Adding endurance exercise means more recovery time because it’s more work you just have to accept that and plan your training accordingly. In your case - running - you are dealing with eccentric contractions and impact at foot strike that causes microscopic damage, so even more recovery than you would need if you were lifting and pedaling.
Regarding weights, I would recommend doing both Bulgarian split squats and single leg leg press. Both are unilateral, both work quads and glutes, but the BSS develops balance and knee stability while the leg press, due to the fixed path, allows increased weight and thus greater force production. Doing both is very complementary. As single leg exercises I would not go below 8 reps (higher weight can strain the knee and, during the eccentric phase, can risk a hamstring or glute strain) and use this regimen: most weight you can use for 8 reps (leaving 1-2 reps in reserve) with a slow and purposefully controlled eccentric phase, increase the reps over time (weeks/months) until you get to 15, then drop back to 8 and increase the weight a bit, repeat. Distance and hill running benefit more from increasing the fatigue resistance of fast twitch 2A fibers than learning how to recruit greater numbers of 2x fibers and this will accomplish that. I’m not saying only do these, there are plenty of bilateral exercises with greater weight that you can/should do, just offering these as good ones for running.
If you decide to experiment with endurance exercise after lifting (same day, not necessarily immediately after), you might find cycling or stair climber to be easier to tolerate and recover from than running since there isn’t additional stress from eccentric contraction and impact, and you still get cardio time in. Or you might find that what works best is running after lifting one day, stair climber or easy pedaling after lifting on the other. Gotta find what works best for you. Regardless of the form of aerobic exercise after lifting, you have to have your dedicated longer running days, and day to day and week to week your legs might feel terrible, but this isn’t about being ready in a day or in a week, it’s long term, both 35 weeks out and months/years thereafter. Every week should have one or two recovery days, and every so often you should have a recovery week.
FWIW, IMO the treadmill should only be used if you cannot run outside. In that case it is clearly better than not running at all. The issue I have with it is that the motorized, posteriorly moving tread reduces the amount of force your leg muscles have to produce to maintain a given pace. You’ve probably seen people who set the speed at 10 mph (6 min mile) and their legs are flying for the next 20 or 30 minutes, but they can’t last more than a minute or two trying to run that pace on the road as their muscles have to do a lot more work than they are used to doing.
Wow! What a wonderfully detailed answer. Thanks so much.
Ya the first day’s squats definitely had me feeling lots of parts of my hamstrings I haven’t felt since I last lifted. I did my second day of lifting yesterday morning, and it’s already not affecting me as severely.
This is like a base, build, specialty programming for a competitive powerlifter or weightlifter. Hypertrophy → Strength/Power → Peak. This usually correlations with progressively lower rep ranges and higher loads. If you did low-reps forever, your strength gains would eventually taper off, limited by your muscle mass and volume tolerance (the fatigue to stimulus ratio is terrible). If you did higher reps forever, you’d end up like these bodybuilders, gawking at the strength of a climber half their size. The periodization attempts to maximize all the components of improved 1RM (see below) prior to a competition. If your sport does not revolve around a 1RM, there’s much less to be gained from 1RM’ing and quite a lot that can be lost. I haven’t 1RM’d anything in years.
Idk when leg press would be programmed alone, other than a “we don’t trust you to not injure yourself squatting” scenario. Leg press is a great leg developer but it is somewhat divorced from functional movement. Physique athletes can get away with leg press as a solo act. There was an interesting study where they compared leg press to squat on matched sets/reps, and while both groups got stronger, jump performances were significantly higher in he squat group. They aren’t 1:1 replacements of each other, even if the movement is quite similar. Squat is not well-suited for high-rep hypertrophy work (form tends to crumble after 12+ reps), while leg press totally is—you can go to failure and then some with less systemic fatigue and risk of injury. Meanwhile the skill of squat is more useful than the skill of leg press (for most applications at least), so it makes sense to put it in the rep range than develops technique better.
I’m not familiar with cleans only appearing later in a season, given how technical the skill is. Sounds like a recipe for injury. You’d want to keep some amount of cleans in rotation to rehearse the skill. The thing that will change is the rep ranges for clean. But for sports that aren’t weightlifting, there’s less of a need to dip into the super low numbers, other than on Max Day. One of the big differences most sports have compared to to weight/powerlifting is that they still need power and speed and vertical for practice. So you’ll see more emphasis on these aspects year round.
I tend to think single leg work is a great accessory to their associated lifts, to be worked on in parallel, throughout the season. You can see where I put them in above, very similar to the link you shared. I don’t do truly heavy (low rep) single leg work because:
I could see cutting out single-leg work to make time for other things that might be more competition-relevant as you near the season. For most people single leg work is aimed at rounding out strength and coordination imbalances. In my case I have a severe left/right imbalance downstream of old knee injuries. So fixing my right quad is a constant priority.
Or the opposite could be true! There are disciplines where heavy single leg might be something to focus on for sport-specific strength. Like I mentioned above, Quadzilla drills heavy Bulgarians quite frequently, which no doubt help him in his sprint discipline.
Everything is highly dependent on what your goals are. I think people often make the mistake of cargo-culting whatever the powerlifters/MMA fighters/crossfitters do in the gym (because they’re so strong!!!) without thinking critically about what aspects of these regimes aren’t optimal for general purposes, but rather the specific requirements of the respective sports.
To me, clean = the first part of an olympic clean + jerk. The bar path, hip drive, and ATG pull under the bar are pretty technical and stuff starts to break down at high weights. There’s 5 phases in the lift which have their own accessories for practice. Are you power or hang cleaning? That’s a bit different, and yeah, those are less technical.
Cleaning is also fun, so I would not discount it as much when you try to optimize your workout, if it’s something you enjoy.
Do I have it in the strength range? It’s Rx’d as “3-4 sets of 10-20 @ 0-1 RIR” but I would also do 5-10 as well. It’s a lift where I think I can discern an impact on my cycling; I talked to a coach whose experience matched mine—he said that he didn’t feel some of his leg work had as much impact on his cycling until he started doing some single leg work.
My thoughts on the leg press have evolved some and I’m mulling over the idea that the skill of pressing hard with one leg while very flexed at the hip might have some benefits specific to cycling. The position of most leg presses is very unnatural—one of the reasons it is so lampooned in the non-physique athletic community (and evidence suggests this bias is somewhat founded). However cycling is also a very unnatural position, which isn’t too dissimilar to the leg press—very flexed at the hips. It might the only sport where there’s some functional qualities to leg press (more specifically the single leg variant).
[EDIT: I was thinking about this more in my lifting session today and my muscle group that really seems to protest during the single leg variant of leg press is gluteus medius, the major hip stabilizer. If you think of the mechanics of cycling, you will get better force transfer when your hips are stable. This could explain my and the aforementioned coach’s observations that leg work in the gym seemed to be unlocked by single-leg work. If this is true, single leg work is in fact a lot more important than most programs assume.]
The elevation to Big Lift is somewhat experimental, and I noted above that I think it could be folded into one of the other two days. You also have to understand that I was coming from a place of strong bias against the leg press and have since started to begrudgingly accept that it might be useful based on my own experience.
I feel like my program is very light on dedicated core work. 1 dedicated core exercise per session. 3 sets, largely at the appropriate rep range for the particular exercise. Most cycling lifting programs I see do a 3x3 ab circuit, which I’ve certainly had programmed for me in other sports. The thing is that abs are often an afterthought, cranked out as fast as possible at the end of a lift. I think if you’re loading your torso with compounds, you can get away with less core, especially if you load the core work like any other lift and train close to failure.
Core is just a different beast when it comes to rep ranges. It’s almost like the range got shifted upwards. 8 reps might be considered low for core. A lot of core work involves spinal flexion, possibly rotation, which puts the vertebrae in an vulnerable position. So you need to balance loading the core enough with the risks. Stuff where the spine is in a neutral, braced position can be pushed more (eg, weighted sit up). There are other reasons higher ranges are generally used, but truthfully I haven’t thought too hard about it and just osmosed the conventional ranges over the years. If there’s one place to be risk adverse, it’s with stuff involving the spine.
Hey Samus - regarding bilateral leg press, have you or your coach performed the press with a low and extremely narrow stance (feet 4-6 inches apart)? I agree re: single leg leg press but found that placing the feet very, very close together was amazing for pedaling power.
I have not tried this but it makes sense. We have some evidence that foot position on press doesn’t matter as much for overall hypertrophy. So your observation would lend some credit to leg press being a useful skill for cycling. I’ll give it a go sometime. Also see this edit I added above:
I’d drop the AMRAP. It’s excess volume and fatigue which is ok when you’re only lifting and probably have the next day off or on other body parts but for cycling then yeah…
You’re doing 11 sets on your quads/glutes. I’ve been lifting for a decade and that’s what I do for hypertrophy, with 3-4 days to recover each muscle group. No way would I give that to someone who lifts a few weeks/months a year.
For strength, drop to 1-2 sets per session of 4 reps or less, then for everything else drop to 2 sets. Consider clustering your deadlifts and squats together so you’re grooved into the motor pattern by doing a heavy set or two then backoff sets for some volume, which is a powerlifting staple.
After that, how you approach it depends what you want to get out of this. If you’re looking for both strength and hypertrophy, keep the reps in the range you feel you’re getting close to your muscular limit (within 3 RIR) but not aerobically or neurally taxed. Guessing this may be in the 6-10 range on single leg, and 5-8 for squat and deadlift. You’re not getting DOMS from novelty, you’re getting it because you are destroying yourself. Just like in cycling, we can see faster improvements from increasing the program intensity, but we also risk a massive dropoff in compliance/adherence at some point. Leave some effort in the tank for next time. You want to look for a reasonable minimum dose that fits into your overall goals right now, not just the maximum you can barely squeak by with.
If you want overall health, add in a push and a pull, and some hip abduction. I think hanging raises are silly, switch for lying on a bench.
2 sets per exercise, so 6 sets. And a single set for strength is usually enough if you’re looking to reduce fatigue. Additionally, what you’re doing out of the gym can have an effect too but since I have no info there, I can’t comment on that.
I’m not really sure what this means in terms of programming goals? Or… strip weight off what, the bar? Your body?
I’d reorient your goals, then. Lift in such a way that doesn’t add muscle but improves strength for the muscle you have. I think the hypertrophy volume you’re doing doesn’t make any sense if that’s your goal. Adding in “torque” work on the bike to an already intense lifting program is a guarantee for burnout, IME.
If you’re a cyclist first, then prioritize cycling and make lifting work in service of those goals. If you’re doing both, accept that you’ll have to make tradeoffs to lift the way you want to and then ride the way you want to. But hey it’s your program so do what you want, though you did ask for input.
Can I ask what your percentiles are on DL and squat? I’m reading between the lines here, but if the load for triples doesn’t scare you, I would guess you are either a seasoned powerlifter or you’re still at a point in your training where you could be getting decent strength gains in the 5-8 rep range (which would be far less systemically fatiguing). If you’re trying to avoid hypertrophy, then you don’t need as much volume.
If you’re truly at a point where you need to minimize the weight gains, I’d consider moving DL out of the program. At least, as you’ve programmed it, I see a lot of downsides. It’s one of the most systemically fatiguing lifts in the book, and on your AMRAP you’re doing it in a very systemically fatiguing rep range. It also is a big mass-gainer, and the proportions of what it develops aren’t the best for cycling if you really progress the lift (a lot of back/erector/trap). I truly believe most cyclists would stand to benefit from regular DL… up until a point (and 95+% of cyclists are not at that point). I’d nix pulling from the ground and switch over to RDLs (or straight leg—it’s a continuum) for more focus on hamstrings. You might also consider BB hip thrusts, maybe.
A trick I’ve heard from climbers is to eat less protein during strength training to avoid the mass gains. This is all anecdote, though.
A lot of systemic fatigue comes from axial loading plus the bracing needed to stabilize an exercise with high degrees of freedom, along with mental fatigue from coordinating a compound movement. If—after modifying to a 2-3x5+ —you still find the systemic fatigue is interfering with cycling, you could look at Smith or hack machines to reduce degrees of freedom. Belt squat will reduce axial load. Leg press reduces both. All come with their own tradeoffs.
You might try:
A
GPP
Squat 2-3x5-8
*Hip Thrusts/Belt Squat 2-3x10+ (maybe… might be too much volume still)
Barbell 1L RDL 3x15
SS Hanging Raises / Pull up 3x15B
GPP
RDL 2-3x5-8
Leg Press/Hack/Smith 2-3x10+ (maybe… might be too much volume still)
Bulgarian Split 3x15
SS Russian Twists / Dip 3x15
*I’m spitballing a little here, but you might consider another squat accessory in this slot and rotating it with a DL accessory. Right now the program is 50/50 squat/DL. Squat is a more important lift to cyclists than DL and does a pretty good job hitting the posterior chain on its own. Most cyclists have a neglected posterior and can get some easy gains from a 50/50 split shoring up posterior chain engagement. Once you’re past that point, I might think critically about which part of cycling / pedal stroke is the weakest and needs the most attention.
I have the opposite opinion, as someone who has more recently switched to hanging leg raises after a lifetime of leg raises/candlesticks on a bench. Modified candlestick is the only thing that comes close to proper leg raises, imo, and it’s more awkward (a lot of strain on the shoulders to control the eccentric). For leg raises you just have to get past the point where hip flexors are the rate-limiter, and that’s not a bad thing for a cyclist to address. Grip limitations can be solved with straps, which was the ah-hah moment for me. Even if you have the grip strength, the straps help you mentally focus on the core work.
Either way, just see what gives you the best core stimulus. For me it’s definitely the hanging variety.
