We've all seen the footage of Té Pagacha before the start of any race. If the camera cuts to him, he's at the side of the team bus and he has these elastic bands around his legs and he's doing these strange little crab walks. If you think they're for show, they are absolutely not.
The top pros do activation drills because they work. They know how to fire up their glutes, hips, and core before they ever clip in. They know how to protect their joints, prevent injuries, and squeeze every ounce of performance out of their bodies.
Not just during the ride, but after it, too. And yet, most everyday riders, especially us guys in our 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, we just hop on the bike cold and hope for the best. Then we wonder why everything feels so tight, so sluggish, and so sore.
In this episode, I'm breaking down exactly what you should be doing before and after your rides. We're talking about short, powerful activation routines using resistance bands, dynamic movements to wake up the system and postride stretches that'll keep you mobile, strong, and injury-free. Today, I'm going to show you the science, the exact movements the pros use and give you a complete routine you can follow starting today.
Anthony, so today we are going to tackle something that we know every cyclist needs to hear about. That is pre-ride activation and postride stretching routines. I have to admit that my warm up is usually rolling out of bed a little bit late, probably chugging a coffee and then pedalling like a crazy person down to the meeting spot because I'm already, you know, 30 seconds late.
Totally. And when I'm seeing sometimes when I'm at races with you, but again with the pros watching races and pre-race TV, we do we are starting to see the pros kind of use these stretching bands and do a lot of activation. So, let's have a chat about this.
Is it really necessary? And what is the point of pre-activation? The idea is to wake up muscles and to get your body primed for the effort that's going to take.
You think about these guys are going, especially how competitive it is getting into the early break in some races. So, if you go from totally stationary sitting in the team bus to full gas, 1200 watts in the wheel trying to follow moves, it's maybe not brilliant for the body. So, they've developed this sort of activation routine to wake up the body.
And what we really specifically try and target is, we call them quote unquote lazy muscles. This is stuff like your glutes and core. We want to get them to fire properly because cycling can make us quite dominant in certain muscle groups.
Like it's quite a quad centric movement, constantly pushing down on the pedal. So, activation drills help to recruit the muscles that you're going to use when you start riding. So you're using your glutes, you're using your core, you're using a lot of stabilizing muscles just to hold yourself posturally on the biker when you're getting out of the saddle.
So you're not just relying on quads and hamstrings. You're trying to wake up all those other muscles. Also, the benefit of this is research has shown that it actually does improve your power as well.
Yeah. Amazing. makes a lot of sense because more of those muscles that you're activating and kind of waking up, you know, setting that alarm for them means less fatigue in any single muscle group, as you said, our quads, which we kind of very dominantly use.
But why can't I just ride easy as a warm-up? I mean, we do see the pros again on rollers before races or people having a little spin around. Why is that not enough?
And why do I need to do specific off the bike exercises? Riding easy at the start of a race definitely works. You see some people, especially before a mountain stage or if it's going to be a difficult start to a race, they will warm up on rollers.
This is definitely common. And I don't think I'm not suggesting this as a replacement, more of an add-on as well. The main benefit of the roller warm-ups or the indoor trainer warm-ups you see, it's just to raise core body temperature and to start blood flow around the system.
What we're talking about here, activation warm-ups are slightly different. This is the band workout that we see the Pagacha doing all the time. So the activation workouts, they target those weak spots.
So if you think about glutes, for example. So many cyclists, especially if you're sitting like we are here in the podcast chair in this quite upright position all day. We've underactive glutes.
Like my glutes haven't moved sitting here for the last two hours. So you can spin easily on the bike. Like I'll probably jump up and do a session after the podcast.
You can spin easily on the bike, but the glutes aren't going to wake up really or at least for a long time from spinning, especially in that seated position. But a quick set of something like glute bridges or band walks, they can tell your nervous system to kind of spring into action instantly. And like we do see, not like I mentioned Pagacha a couple times, but it's not just Pagacha.
We're seeing most of the world tour riders, the camera just loves to target Pagacha, but we're seeing most of the world riders pre-race doing these. And when I speak to coaches on the podcast, they all say, "Yeah, everyone's doing them even before training sessions now." But yeah, almost I don't know any amateur that does this.
My physio has because I had a bit of knee problem because of underactivated glutes. So I do I have been told to do activations before I arrived, but I never really understood why. So the secret to winning all those true to Frances for Pikacha is just that little rubber band.
And we do see the videos of him and he's doing this with his teammates and having a it looks like a little bit of a laugh because he do look kind of ridiculous to it. But um yeah, so I think I'm a little bit sold but what is the science behind this warm-up? Look, we know if Pagacha and all the world tour people are using it.
It's not just bro science, right? There's definitely a lot of research behind it. I don't know if Paga looks silly in his like 250 Richard Mle watch.
Like I think he looks pretty cool. But the science is pretty solid to back it up. Like a warmup, it is literally, as we said, it's raising the core temperature.
It's warming up the muscles. It's raising the muscle temperature. So it makes them a lot more pliable and it helps them to contract faster, I think, which is really, really important, especially for the start of those hard races.
Like you can imagine going straight into doing a V2 max effort from stationary. So you want to warm up that. And studies have found that a proper dynamic warm-up, so not just on your bike, like the band exercises that we're talking about, it can improve muscle force, power, and explosiveness in the short term.
Yeah. And that is something that I think you're going to go into a little bit later, these dynamic stretches as opposed to static stretches. So, Anthony is going to cover both of those in a little while.
What about injury prevention? I mean, we all have grown up with this idea that warming up and stretching can actually prevent injuries. Is that true or is that a myth?
Yeah, warming up has for a long time generally been believed to reduce injury risk and some research does back this up. Although it is a little tricky to prove definitively. A few studies in sports science have shown that a structure warm-up can significantly cut injury rates.
There was one study I was looking at and it said injury rates were cut in some sports by up to 50% with specific warm-up routines. But you got to take that with a pinch of salt because that could be coming from a a contact sport with very specific warm-up routines or a lot of dynamic movements like football where it's side to side movements. But in cycling, we're not typically doing those explosive side to side movements like soccer or basketball or one of those sports.
But activation can still help avoid muscle strains, knee pain by ensuring you're getting everything moving correctly. Cycling isn't massively high impact on the joints. And many riders, especially older ones, they don't get that many niggles and aches normally.
But the ones who do report getting niggles and aches, they report getting fewer niggles and aches when they're going through a dynamic warm-up routines. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned knee pain there.
We all know that I've been suffering from knee pain over the last couple of months. This is the second time I've mentioned it in this podcast alone. So, I know you're sick listening hearing about it.
Um, and as I said, the physio has given me those preride activations. I'm probably not being consistent enough with them at the moment to see a big difference. Yeah.
One of the guys I coached was at a physiootherapist and he diagnosed him with something called sleep and glute severe. No. So, apparently it's a real thing.
And he went to him with suffering knee pain and he diagnosed him with glute pain. and the PT or a physio or whatever it was, he gave him a 10-minute glute activation routine that got rid of his knee pain magically, but also he did notice quite a significant bump in his critical power numbers. Like his one minute and five minute power particularly had quite a big jump.
His glutes, it turned out, weren't stabilizing his knee, so it was causing pain on every single ride. And once he switched them on pre-ride, it seemed to solve this issue. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what I have.
A lazy glute or a sleepy glute or a lazy glute. Both. Okay.
So, what exactly should we do for a pre-write activation? I want to talk specific exercises here. And I know that our editor Wes is going to magically put in some video content on top of this so you can actually see these exercises rather than just uh hearing about them.
I think a pre-ride routine, you don't need to. As you say, most of us, the reality is you maybe even had a couple of beers on a Friday night and it's Saturday morning. You should have laid your kid out the night before.
You didn't lay your kid out the night before. You didn't get up on time because you hit the snooze button and now you're in a panic and you're kind of thinking, "Where's my kid? Should I have breakfast?
Can I have time for oats?" The last thing you want to hear is, "I need to do a 55inut pre-ride routine." You don't.
Like five minutes is plenty of time. that you can do the trick and you can hit all the major areas like glutes, hips, core, and a little bit of dynamic stretching for the legs. So, the first exercise in this kind of five to max 10 minute routine that I would suggest is a banded glute bridge.
And you want to be holding this for around two seconds at the top, aiming for 10 to 15 rep range. This exercise, it really wakes up the glutes. You'll often feel the burn in the glute muscles in the last reps if you're doing this properly.
So, the pro tip on this one is to keep outward tension on the band so your knees don't cave in. This engages your glute medius. That's the side of your butt.
And why do you want to do this? Because strong glute activation. It helps stabilize your pelvis and your knees when you start pedaling.
Okay. So, the second exercise, it is called monster walks. I've always called these just lateral band walks.
And you should feel this on the outside of your hips after a few reps. This one is fantastic for hip stability. After 30 seconds, your glutes will be absolutely on fire.
Even a short set really gets the side hip muscles working, which can improve your knee tracking on the bike and prevent that inward collapse on each pedal stroke. The next one I'd be looking to add in is a low lunge with a twist. You should feel a stretch in your right hip flexor and a nice spinal twist.
You want to hold this for a couple of seconds, come back, and then repeat a few times each side. This is a dynamic stretch, hitting the hip flexors, quads, and loosening up your lower back. It's sometimes called the world's greatest stretch because it hits so many areas at once.
Cyclists hip flexors get really, really tight from all that seated pedaling. So, open them up like this before a ride. It can improve your posture on the bike and even your power output by letting you a fuller range of motion.
The fourth one I would add in is the sepine heel tap dead bug variation and this is a cycling specific core wake up. It engages your deep core stabilizers without fatiguing you. A solid core helps you transfer power better to the pedals and stay stable on the saddle, especially if you're going out gravel riding or rougher terrain.
We want to activate the core, not tire it out, just activate it. So, keeping the move slow and controlled here is important. If you start to shake a little bit like a dog that's having a that's your core starting to work.
So, the last one I recommend is leg swings. So, these dynamic swings loosen up your hamstrings, hip flexors, groin, and outer hips. And it's a great way to finish the warm-up routine with a little bit of momentum.
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Details are in the episode show notes or description down below. your rides. Yeah, I think the core idea is to do those dynamic moves and the muscle specific activations before you set off, right?
And as I keep kind of reiterating, we want to avoid those really long static stretches before a ride because they can actually reduce your peak strength and power for a short time. And there's a lot of studies that back that up. One sports science study found that static stretching before cycling sprint te sprint testing significantly decreased riders peak power output whereas a dynamic warm-up improved it improved it.
So we save all the static stretching for later and that brings me very neatly on to postride stretch stretching. So we've covered pre-ride. I'm activated.
I've had a great spin and now I'm home after my ride and what are the next steps that I should do? This is just about building a routine here. And I actually had a teammate, I interviewed him on the podcast, Kier, like the guy I started cycling with, and he was like the master of this because he was just dialed as soon as he got in the door.
It was like military. He'd be like straight into the shower, out of the shower, into his recovery garments, com uh like his compression trousers, all that type stuff, have his recovery drink while he was doing this, his post ride stretching routine. And this gets more important as you get older.
Young cyclists can get away with it. The idea of just having this little bit of movement straight after the ride, it's primarily to restore the muscle length and to maintain the flexibility. Because when you cycle, a lot of your muscles like your hamstrings, your hip flexors, your quads, they repeatedly contract and they never go through a full range of motion.
And over time, this causes them to shorten and it causes them to tighten. So stretching helps to counteract that, keeping the muscles long, the joints moving freely. There's a Harvard paper I was looking at that put it nicely.
It said stretching keeps the muscles flexible and healthy and we need that flexibility to reta maintain range of motion in joints. Without it, muscles shorten and become tight. So basically echoing exactly what I pulled out and said before that.
Yeah, I mean it's it really is so important. It's kind of an insurance policy but also future proofing. And that brings me on to muscle soreness.
Like for a long time, I know when I was playing sports in school and university, we always did a warm day with a lot of stretching because and we were told that this was going to prevent us from getting doms, which is delayed onset muscle soreness, which is absolutely awful. Is that true that stretching can help with doms? Yeah, for a long time, people did think that stretching helped with DOMS.
And maybe there's some people out there that still do think that stretching helps with doms, but the research uh doesn't show that. Like a 2021 study I found showed almost no connection between stretching and a decrease in doms. DOMS are caused by something totally different.
They're caused by micro tears in your muscles. So you think about how I was struggling to go out of chair the last few days. It's because I was squatting heavy not been in the gym.
Squatting heavy. I'm going to expose you here and say tell tell everybody how many kilos. H but that micro tears in the muscle.
So micro tears in the muscles. I would maybe argue, I haven't seen data on this, that stretching after those micro tears does more damage and increases the severity of the doms, but that's just anecdotally for me. It definitely doesn't help though.
Yeah, I mean, why do it then if why do this? Is it just for flexibility? Why do postride stretching?
We have enough to be doing. Well, like I said, if you're just building into routine, you're having that stuff anyway. Like you're having your recovery drink anyway.
It's just you're not ploning down on the couch and having your recovery drink. And yeah, like I said, there is benefits to it because there's flexibility benefits to it. There's long-term mobility benefits to it.
And the same review did note that post exercise stretching, it didn't harm recovery. It wasn't a miracle cure for soreness, but including stretching as a key part of that cool down routine, especially for older athletes. It maintained range of motion and muscle health for flexibility and long-term mobility.
Like that same review that I was talking about, it did note that post exercise stretching, it didn't harm recovery. It just wasn't a miracle cure for all soreness. So including stretching in that routine like I was talking about that Kieran used to do.
It's really important for anyone who doesn't have that natural supplement. So younger athletes normally have that, but as you age, like I'm talking post 30 onwards, you need to be doing this to maintain range of motion and muscle health. Yeah.
Yeah, I sometimes get that lower back tightness after a long ride. I know you hear me talking about it as well. That could be now that I'm hearing you speaking about my hip flexors.
Yeah, very likely like tight hip flexors. That's the muscles at the front of your hip. It can pull on the pelvis and it can strain your lower back.
I rode 300 km the other day for no reason only just to ride 300 km. And at the end of it, I could hardly stand up. And I was thinking the exact same thing.
it probably was hip flexor tightness that was causing it. And that's very common in cyclists who spend a lot of hours because if you think about that posturally, we're bent over constraining that hip. So you're if you don't have that, you know, discipline to stretch after the ride, you're never lengthening that hip flexor muscle again.
Yeah. Would you see the pros stretching and doing the pre-ride? But I've never really seen a pro doing any cool down stretching.
I mean, they're straight into the bus. they go straight in and probably have a team of masseuse and swanies taking care of them at that point. Yeah.
No, you wouldn't be going straight to massage tables like cuz they're going straight into the bus. Uh so massage rotors and stuff are normally that evening. Their protocol might be a small like bit of stretching although it's not as prevalent as the stretching pre-race.
Their main thing would be getting out of the shorts to prevent stuff like you know saddle sores which you've suffered with a lot and getting a recovery shake in. Now in the evening a lot of pros do incorporate that stretching or yoga into their you know evening routine also as part of a windown as well because it starts bringing cortisol down before bedtime and that's just another reason to get you off a screen. I feel like any reason to get off a screen is nearly a good reason.
Yeah because that stretching would have that other benefit wouldn't it? It kind of mentally winds you down and it re it amps up the parasympathetic nervous system and cools down the sympathetic nervous system. So that's going to have so many more benefits for letting your body to relax and let your heart rate come down.
So I know that yoga, stretching, that's all really really important if you're trying to upregulate your parasympathetic sympathetic uh nervous system. And I'm sure these world tour riders in particular need that if they're kind of on the edge for the previous five hours when they're in the middle of a race. Okay.
So maybe you could give us the first the top couple of postride stretches that you would do after a spin. Yeah, definitely. I think to start off, let's go with a kneeling hip flexor lunge.
So this is crucial for cyclists because we spend hours with hips bent. So hip flexors shorten stretching them post ride. It prevents that chronic tightness that leads to lower back pain.
Secondly, I think important is the glute stretch. This stretch is an assaver. Really is like our glutes do a lot of work and they get tight.
Plus the performance, that's the small muscle under glute that can compress the sciatic nerve if it's too tight causing pain and tingles down the leg. Regularly stretching these muscles can prevent that pain in the butt and it keeps your hips moving freely. Thirdly, I'll move on to a hamstring stretch.
Cyclists often have surprisingly tight hamstrings. Even though we don't use a full hamstring extension in the pedal stroke, tight hammies can contribute to lower back stress and also limit your pedal stroke if severe. The next one I would throw in is a chest shoulder opener.
The chest stretch helps prevent that hunched, rounded shoulder look by loosening the pectoral muscles. Important for gravel racers, too, because you often feel very tense after a long day just gripping the bars tightly. So, opening up that chest can help you breathe better by freeing up the rib cage.
Next, I would throw in a kitchen sink stretch, lat and back stretch. It's great for lengthening your spine and stretching your latimus dorsy. That's the side of your back and shoulders.
After hours on the bike with compressed posture, this stretch, it really decompresses you. You might even feel your back pop or release. It's a nice finisher to relieve any lingering tension in the back.
I personally finish up with a calf stretch. Cyclists don't move through a huge range of motion. We tend to pedal with a relatively fixed ankle position.
So, calves can tidle, espec tighten, especially if you're doing really long clims. A quick word from today's sponsor. A few years ago, I came out of my local coffee shop after a long winter spin to find my cafe lock on the ground sliced clean in half.
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There's some amazing stretches there that we can all do after we come in from the spin. The chest stretch one is great. I didn't realize how tight that area was until I started to stretch it out.
Gravel beats you up bad as well. Uh if you're holding on to the bars, you know, this is actually quite relevant for newbies as well because when you're new, you're often very tense on the bike. So, it's quite relevant there.
But don't rush the stretches. You're not trying to get through them as fast as possible. Like I take at least 30 seconds to ease into the stretch.
Maybe throw on a bit of Beyonce in the background. You know, also with this, like anything in sport, consistency is the cheat code. You're better to do a little and often rather than go and do a narrower stretching today and then don't do it again for a week.
One stretch set, one stretching session isn't going to make you a yogi, super bendy. But over a month or two, if you consistently incorporate these into your routine, you will start to notice improve flexibility. Yeah, I promise.
This is something I am definitely going to focus on more pre-ride activation and postride stretching. Yeah, look, you're going to enjoy the ride a little bit more. Like the last 50 km of my 300 km ride, my back was locked up and there was nothing enjoyable about it.
I sat down having a like a bottle of coke at about 10 km where I called you from the finish and I could hardly get back up. I was like an old man who'd been thrown out of a wheelchair. Do you remember last year was it?
I can't remember which crazy gravel ride ride you were doing. you had to ask somebody to pick your bike up. I busted and ripped.
Yeah. Yeah. I think after hearing all this, I'm going to definitely have a little bit of um more of a focus on pre-ride activation and postride stretching.
And actually, you know what? I am as well because often times it's I spend so much time researching some of these podcasts, coaching athletes that I often don't take my own advice, but I'm still riding quite a bit and doing the occasional long ride. And I know this works.
So, it's a case of maybe do what I say, not what I do. So, my resolution is to actually start incorporating this back into my rides again, like I used to do when I was riding the bike full-time. Folks, thank you for tuning in.
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