If you're a cyclist skipping strength training, you're missing the biggest untapped advantage. And no, you don't need to be lifting 500 lb or living the gym to see these gains. Today, I'm joined by Art Oconor, the strength training coach who is trusted by some of the top names in the sport, including Alex Wild, Keegan Spencson, Sophia Gomez, plus many, many more.
He breaks down how cyclists can get stronger, faster, and healthier without compromising time on the bike. So whether you're chasing podiums or you just want to stay sharp, Art reveals the essential exercises, smartuling, and strength hacks used by pros and amateurs alike. Plus, you'll learn a genius method to maintain strength anywhere, even with no equipment, in just 10 minutes a day.
This one's packed with easy wins you can start today. So, let's dive in. It's Art Oconor.
Art, welcome to the Roadman podcast. Thank you, Anthony. Really excited to be here.
I want to kick things off by starting quite high level. How do you approach designing a strength training program specifically for cyclists? like is there a guiding set of principles that you're thinking about when you're trying to evaluate what's most effective?
Well, I always kind of look at it from the lens of you know, strength is kind of the foundation for everything. Um, you know, the question I get a lot from from cyclists and endurance athletes in general is uh you know, should I be lifting weights? And the answer of course is yes.
But I always answer that question with a question which I know is super annoying. And I said, "Well, do you know a sport where being weaker is better?" And you know, if there if that sport exists, let me know because I'll go do that because this is hard.
Yeah, I I love strength training. But um so I'm I'm just trying to get their baseline strength as as high as possible for for their sport. Like I'm a big believer in being strong enough for your sport.
You don't need to deadlift 500 lb to rate to pedal a bicycle fast. Um, so I have some things that, you know, that I look at like that I I think are standards that most most competitive cyclists should meet. You know, it's going to be certainly, you know, higher for a pro than than most than just a regular rider, but I'm just trying to make them more durable um and just a stronger athlete in general.
You know, I always look at um a lot of strength programs online and for cyclists and they seem to be really leg ccentric, which is fine, but I have yet in, you know, 30 plus years of of coaching seen a person that their leg strength is the limiting factor for them. It's usually they can't access the leg strength that they have because they have a weak core, they have a weak upper body, and they're not able to access the strength that they already have. just the weak link of the chain theory.
Exactly. Exactly. So, I have a little thought experiment that I do with people to kind of illustrate this point.
Um, most people have probably been in a leg press machine and if you know if you've been in one, you know, you can put a you can put quite a bit of weight on there and be able to press that for reps relatively easily, even as an untrained person. So, like let's say we take someone who's never never strength trained before. They could probably put 300 lb in a leg press machine and press that, you know, four, five, six, seven times relatively easily.
If we took that same amount of weight, loaded it up on a barbell and put it in a squat rack, if they could even get it off the rack, they're not going to be able to squat that. It's going to end really badly for them. So, we've just proven that their legs aren't the weak link in that equation.
The reason when somebody Oh, go ahead. When I'm trying to think of this in like almost sequential. If I was coming to you for strength training, like what does an initial assessment process look like?
Is there specific strength or mobility me benchmarks that you'd look for before putting a program together? Um, not necessar Like for my in-person people, I I bring them into the gym and I have them go through, you know, some mobility drills. um you know I'll have them just do some body weight squats just to see how they can move.
Uh in a lot of cases it's not appropriate to load somebody immediately because they're not moving properly in the first place. So if we're take someone who can't squat effectively they they can't get the depth or they uh you know they have some mobility issues that that are impinging them. Loading that movement doesn't make a whole lot of sense because it just gets them really strong at moving poorly.
So, it kind of takes a So, even with my remote athletes, uh, I always ask them to like send me a video of them doing a squat or a deadlift, and we can kind of coach from there because I want them I'm not necessarily worried about them moving the most amount of weight immediately. It's more about getting them to move properly so that when we start loading the movements, they can do it safely and and effectively in a way that they're not going to get hurt. Because the number one rule in my gym is don't get hurt in the gym.
Cycling is a dangerous enough sport. If you get hurt doing your sport, we all understand the risks there. We don't want to get hurt in the gym.
Yeah. I had this moment uh a couple of years back with strength training where I started thinking away from for a long time I was, you know, like Alex Wild who you're coaching with, cycling was my life. It was performancedriven.
So, what I was optimizing for was performance. And I had this this switch flicked where I thought, you know what? I'm not optimizing for performance anymore.
I should be optimizing for health. Downstream of health is performance, but health isn't always downstream of the inverse. If you optimize just for performance, it's not always health.
And when I looked on what makes somebody healthy, I was like, well, it's not riding the bike 25 hours a week. It's got to be some combination of other activities. And when I started to put them together, I was like looking at the data and I was using some AI to help me parse peerreviewed data and I was like strength training seems non-negotiable.
Diet seems non-negotiable. Some sort of cardiovascular activity in our case cycling is non-negotiable. And just general movement like walking and being active is non-negotiable.
They were the baseline activities I found. But I've seen that the conversations online were so much dominated not by that baseline activities. They were dominated by nichy stuff that had borderline good data on it like sauna use, uh, cold immersion, ketone use, meditation use.
I was like, you're talking we're arguing about the cherry on the top of a cake here and we're neglecting the full cake underneath. If somebody's still in that frame of mind where I was before I had that epiphany moment and I don't realize the non-negotiable aspect of strength training, what would you say to them to try and bring them across and say, "Hey, you're not going to get the outcome you want if you're just riding your bike 100% of your time?" Yeah, that's a really good point and I love that you brought that up because you know the I mean I'm fortunate enough to work with some really high level people like like Alex and Keegan and Sophia and people like that but their programs are going to look a little different than like if I'm coaching somebody my age.
I'm you know I'll be 59 this summer. You know what I want out of a program is very different than what a top professional wants out of a program. So my program is going to have you know a more well-rounded approach to to strength.
So, more upper body strength than, you know, someone like Keegan or Alex is going to do, you know, a lot a lot more core and and more just kind of general purpose movement. So, a lot of weighted carries, um, things like that because to your point, you know, there's very few people that, you know, are at the real tip of the spear, whether even even at like a local level, you know, most of those people have, you know, jobs and things that they want to do outside of cycling, even though they, you know, they certainly want to get the most out of their cycling training, but I think that people place too much emphasis on performance. when it when it comes to, you know, racing at a local level or, you know, even at a national level in that they'd be a lot better served by taking a a kind of more the 30,000 foot view of things like what is going to make me a healthier person.
And to your point, that goes back to diet. It goes back to strength training. um you know it doesn't matter at the end of the day if you know you can bench press 300 pounds if you can't you know run across the street without pulling a hamstring or something like that.
So it's it's really about just hitting you know what is the sport not giving you? So like with my recreational or even like you know local local like cat one cat 2 racers what is the sport not giving them? And I want to approach that in the gym so that they're not developing these massive imbalances.
You know, a top pro, yeah, they don't really care if they can um, you know, touch their toes or dunk a basketball or whatever, whatever it happens to be. They really just want to p you know, pedal a bike as fast as they can. And that's fine.
That's that's what they need. That's their job. But for the rest of us, if you're not getting paid to ride your bike, you should really be looking at it from a health lens.
and what is going to make me, you know, a more effective person in my day-to-day life, whether that's being a father or a partner or, you know, business leader or whatever. Um, you know, I'm fortunate enough that I I work with a lot of business professionals as well in my in my gym locally and they all tell me that, you know, starting that starting a fitness routine has actually improved their performance in their job because they've, you know, they they have they've developed the discipline and they see, you know, there's a the thing I love about sport and athletics is you see input equals output in a much more condensed fast way than you do in anything else. But everything in life works that way.
You know, if you're super diligent with your job and your relationships, you're gonna you're going to reap the benefits of those. Those take a little longer time to see, but in sport, you know, you see that it's a much more condensed version of kind of life itself. And so, what do you how do you think about minimum effective dose in the gym in terms of days?
Do I need to be in the gym three days a week? Will two days a week work? If you're not a professional racer, I think three days a week is a is a good place for for most of us.
Um, I think you're going to get more benefit from that that third day. Like my my pros will train, they do two days a week in the gym, but they're also doing, you know, 20 plus hours a week on a bike consistently, week in and week out. So for them, it doesn't make sense to do a third day in the gym.
for the rest of us. You know, for me, a big training week anymore is a 12-h hour week. If I get 12 hours on the bike, that's a that's a monumental week for me.
But, you know, I'm lucky in that I work in the gym. So, I get, you know, I get my strength training in. And I realize most people don't have that luxury.
But, three days a week is pretty doable for most people. And it's not, you know, my programs are pretty simple and pretty basic. I don't throw a lot of exotic movements at them and think, you know, what I call Instagram exercises.
We just stick to the basics and if you're diligent with with your in and out of the gym in, you know, 40 to 60 minutes. Okay. So, talk to me about those exercises.
Is there a handful of exercises that you find yourself programming for almost everyone? Yeah. So, a hip hinge movement, which is going to be a squat or a deadlift.
um some kind of pressing motion for the upper body, pulling motion, uh weighted carries. Um those are kind of the kind of the basics. Um and within that, there's a lot of variety, but most most of my programs, it's you're going to squat or deadlift uh every session.
You're going to do some kind of single leg movement. Bulgarian split squats or step-ups are kind of my go-tos for that. uh for upper body, you know, push-ups is a great place to start for most people.
Um pull-ups, most people can't do a pull-up when they come to me. So, we we scale that. We do things like plank pulls, you know, single arm rows until they can get to a pull-up.
And so, again, it goes back to like we don't want to weight movements that you're not good at in the if you're not moving properly. So, you can scale anything. Like a lot of people have can't do a push-up when they first come to me, especially, you know, if they've been cyclists their entire lives and they've never really done traditional ball sports or, you know, spent much time in the gym.
We have to teach them how to do a, you know, I have to start really basic with a lot of people and just teach them how to do the most basic exercises that a lot of people, you know, gym culture people would just take for granted. Like, God, who doesn't know how to do a push-up? Well, you'd be surprised.
A lot of people don't know how to do push-ups. And with that then, so when you're programming something like a squat or a deadlift, what would you start out on reps and sets for an initial? So I have a 12-week program that I kind of start everybody with and they spend four weeks of doing like 8 to 12 reps of super light.
Like they should rack the weight knowing they probably could have done, you know, five to even eight more reps with the same same form, same same intent. Um, for some people that's just body weight when they first start. From there we go into more of a strength phase where it's going to be five to eight reps close.
Usually I don't usually do more than five in the strength phase. And some people may stay in that phase for, you know, six months a year even, you know, if they're if they're really really new to the sport or to to strike training. And then for the performanceoriented people, we'll do more of a power phase where we're reducing the load by, you know, half or more, and they're doing very explosive movements, uh, three to five reps with long rests in between, like two to three minutes between the sets.
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Back to the show. So you're playing around with both the amount, the weight, and the tempo as your progression variables. Exactly.
Yes. And so what does a typical heavy phase in that look like? So in a heavy phase, so like in a max strength phase for again it varies from from pros to like you know general population folk, but lifting in the 70 to 90% of one rep max, but that that's that's kind of a can of worms because I don't test one rep maxes with anybody ever.
The the riskreward isn't there. So we we estimate I'll do a five rep test with with my adv a three to five rep test with my advanced people. But for people that have never trained before, I try to teach them the concept of doing it looking at those numbers more as an RP number.
So if I say we're doing five reps at 70% of your one rep max, I want them to think about it's a seven out of 10 in terms of intensity. That's cool. I like that.
And so you you build it into these different phases, but I'm wondering how do these phases line up for someone like Alex who's going to have his a priority events across the year or I'm not entirely sure how Alex or one of the lifetime Grand Prix guys structure it because the lifetime Grand Prix is so far spread apart from each event. Maybe they don't go with the typical periodization model. But for your typical cyclist who's looking at maybe two a priority events across across the course of a season, how do you approach periodizing strength work?
So assuming they started in the fall, you know, after their pre after their off season's over, once they get into their competitive phase, I kind of do a blend of power and strength movements throughout. So if they're do most of my cyclists once their race season starts, they'll drop down to two days a week. um if they're racing on the weekends, which most of my amateurs are racing almost every weekend it seems like.
Uh so they'll do like their Tuesday workout, for example, will be kind of a heavier where they're in that kind of 70 to 80% of one rep max and they'll do like three reps, like three sets of three would be a a typical thing that I would throw at them. And then their their Thursday session will be more power based. So, we're going to drop the weight to about 30% of their one rep max.
And they're going to move very explosively. Again, like, you know, three sets of threes, four sets of four, that type of thing. The whole idea is I'm trying to get their fast twitch muscle fibers to fire and get and get online quickly because that's that's the thing that most endurance athletes lack is that ability to kind of recruit as much muscle fiber as possible because a lot of the strength adaptations that we're going for in cycling or neurologic, not necessarily muscular.
In other words, we're we're teaching teaching our brain to recruit more muscle fibers for a given effort. And are you stacking these workouts on days that currently have hard bike sessions to preserve recovery days? Yes.
Or are you slotting them in on recovery days? No. No.
Their hard days are hard recovery days or recovery days. Interesting. That's been a big evolution we've seen in the last few years because prior to that, I'd seen a lot of people saying, "Oh, I'm only doing 60 minutes cafe ride on Friday.
I'll slot in my hard day here." But very soon you zoom out and you realize, hey, I've been training hard seven days a week for the last four months and I'm wondering why I'm cooked, right? Yeah.
When's your recovery day? If you're doing your strength training on your easy day, you know, and you you talked about the inseason plan being slightly different when a rider executes a taper, whether it's a traditional taper or some sort of non-traditional taper where they pull back two weeks before the event, do you typically pull back and strength work during that taper period as well? Yeah, it's so most like the Grand Prix riders, uh, you brought up a point that they have a big time typically between those races.
So, they're not doing really a very traditional periodized approach because we can do like a strength block like there's almost six weeks before unbound for, you know, the people that just did Sea Otter. So, they're going to I'm going to have most of those guys and girls do a strength block next week and then we'll start to do more power stuff and that'll the strength stuff will kind of taper off and the power stuff will ramp up as they get closer to that race. And the same thing with my amateur racers.
Like they'll have, you know, one or two A events a year and starting about two to three weeks out, we will I'll I'll drop the weight, increase the the speed of movement, and and increase the recovery times. So during those phases, like I tell most of my athletes, you're going to you're going to leave the gym probably feeling more energized than when you started because we're going to be doing very quick explosive movements, long recoveries, and you're going to be in and out of the gym in about 30 to 40 minutes. In that in that case, it's quite similar to the principles of a periodization on the bike.
You're dropping duration while maintaining or increasing intensity with longer recovery periods. 100%. I mean, when I when I started developing these programs, I looked at, you know, I kind of started from the top down.
I looked at who are the strongest athletes in the world, pound-for-pound. And the answer to that is like Olympic lifters and and powerlifters because they're, it may not seem obvious, but they're a lot like cyclists in that they don't want to gain weight. They want to stay they want to be as strong as they possibly can be at their current body weight because if they gain weight they have to go they compete in weight classes like fighters do particularly at Olympic lifting they if they gain weight they have to move up to the next next weight class and they have to add 20 30 pounds to their weight to be competitive and and at that level adding 20 to 30 pounds to your weight when you're really a tip of the spear athlete that's a big big ask.
So unlike combat sports, they don't cut weight like cuz cutting weight you lose strength. So they're a lot like cyclists in that they want to be as strong as they can possibly be at at their current at the lightest weight that they can possibly be. And so the way they train is they lift really heavy with long recoveries in between.
You gain a lot of strength that way, but no size. And they also lift really fast at, you know, at certain times of the year. But interesting enough, they don't ever like real tip of the spear like Olympic lifters, they'll only max out once or twice a year either for the Olympics or the world or national championships.
The rest of the time they're training in that 70 to 80% range. We're in a really data driven era at the moment. And you know, I've had podcasts debating the merits of this data driven and are we leaving some gains on the table by ignoring field in the way that Ethiopian athletes almost exclusively don't use data and are really just in touch with themselves and their body.
They don't need to wake up and look at heart rate variability to tell you how ready they are to train. They understand this. Gauging the fatigue using our traditional cycling metrics for a strength session has been hard.
like what TSS do we attribute to a 60inute gym session? It's been historically quite a puzzling thing to try and figure out and people have their own rules at home for it. How do you think about assessing the load of a strength session and do you even do you even consider putting it into training peaks or do you totally admit it or what way do you juggle that fatigue management piece?
So, that's a really good question. I look at it as how much weight did they lift during the session. So, tonnage tonnage for the session.
Uh, and that's how that's how we manipulate it with, you know, with my pros is they'll I'll look at what they did during the session and I'll and I'll and I'll adjust it based on that. So, I use I don't use like a I kind of wave my intensity a little bit more than doing the traditional three weeks build, one week off. With strength training, it's that the Soviets have done a lot of research on this and they they have found that waving the intensity where literally you roll a dice at the beginning of the week to kind of figure out what you're what that week's focus is going to be has gotten has shown to be a better way to increase strength and explosivity.
Expand on that for me a little bit. How does that work? So you have a template in which you know you let's say that you have a strength a strength week where you're going to be working at that 70 to 90% of one rep max.
You have power weeks where it's 30% of your one rep max and really explosive. Then you have like more of a volume week where you're you know your your goal is to move the most amount of weight possible. So you have those kind of three parameters and rather than doing a traditional where you would build one on top of the other and then have a D load week.
you kind of randomize it so that one week you may be doing a really heavy week and then rather than you know going to a power week after that which you would traditionally do, you would just randomize it and maybe do you know a volume week after that or or in some cases a power week and you kind of just randomize it throughout the throughout the year. Interesting because I was chatting to Professor Steven Syler on this not about weight training but about allocating intensity across cycling training. Traditionally we started out with like the Joe Freel traditional periodization model of we build from tempo to threshold to V2 to sprint a decompression week every fourth week building blocks and then it became vogue to what happens if we invert that and we start with reverse periodization.
We'll start with sprint first, then we'll go V2 threshold tempo. And Siler was talking to me about a study that recently, I'm not sure if he conducted it or if he was talking about it, but it looked at contrasted those two types of periodization versus uh random allocation of intensity across the training week. And I found that there was no difference.
There was no difference to adding it in randomly or going through one of these traditional structured periodized models. So it it was very eye openening for me because I was maybe a slave to that very formulaic template of traditional or inverse periodization for a long time. No.
Yeah. I'm a big fan of Dr. Sidler's work.
Um you know I I you know I'm a nerd when it comes to this stuff. I I I read a lot of stuff from a lot of different sports and when it comes to strength training, you know, kind of the the gold standard is look at like what the Soviets and the Bulgarians and the East Germans did. You know, take the take the performance-enhancing products, shall we say, off the table.
You still have to do the work. And they they invested a lot of time, money, and effort into developing their their training modalities and their training systems. And it's still, you know, if you look at some of the world records that the Soviet lifters did in the 80s, some of those haven't been surpassed today.
Um, so that what they did worked. And, you know, it's it's easy to kind of throw the baby out with the bath water and say, "Oh, they were all on drugs." It's like, yeah, but you still have to do the work.
If you're getting subjective feedback from an athlete that indicates they're tipping past the point of normal fatigue into borderline overtraining, how would you typically adjust the strength plan? Would you move it to mobility based sessions, reduced intensity or pull strength training altogether? A little of both.
I kind of leave that up to the athlete. Um, I always tell my athletes, you know, I'm training you to pedal your bike faster, not to win the CrossFit games. So, if something has to be cut from your week due to training fatigue or just life stress, it's always going to be the gym.
Like, at the end of the day, you're you're a cyclist and that's your priority. So, your bike work is always protected. You know, I don't I always tell my my new athletes and my pros like, if I give you a workout that leaves you so sore that you can't properly do your bike workout the next day, I need to know about it because I made a mistake and we need to adjust for that.
and young versus old athletes, how would the programming change? So, young athletes, I I work a lot with So, Nika is the high school league here here in America. I work with a lot of Nika athletes in the winter and for them, I'm really just mostly teaching them proper form and teaching them just how to be strong and and really how to be an athlete.
Uh because that's, you know, I I came up, you know, I had a modest pro career. I was a, you know, a journeyman pro at best. But the the one thing that I always attributed my advantage in whatever sport it happened to be was that I was I I developed a strength training practice really early.
Ski racing was my first sport and my high school coach was a big barbell training enthusiast. Um, and so I learned that really early on and I always attributed that to whatever success I had as an athlete. I went to, you know, I got I went to I competed in division one track and field here in the states, then transitioned to cycling and it was a relatively smooth transition to me because I was strong.
I'm a bigger guy. I don't know. I'm I'm 6'7 or 2 m tall and when I was competing, I was about 85 to 88 kilos.
So, I was a bigger guy for a cyclist. So, for me, it made sense to be in the gym even, you know, in the 90s when people weren't doing it because I'm like, I'm bigger than all these guys. I need to be stronger than them.
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Yeah. Cyclones kind of splintered since probably the last four or five years we've really seen this splintering yet crossover. Before we were in silos.
You were a mountain bike rider. You're a roadie. Now, especially with the series, you're kind of everything.
Your mountain bike, your gravel, your road, your dabbling in time trial, you're doing a bit of cyclross. Do the demands of your strength training change based off your cycling discipline? Yeah, I think they do.
Like I would I'm not coaching anybody that's racing like at the World Cup XCO level, but an XCO athlete has a very different physiology and very different requirements than you know somebody completing competing in the lifetime Grand Prix or at the in World Tour road race. Um you know it's it mountain biking at the in the international XCO level is so much more explosive. Take it's kind of a different phenotype honestly.
Uh it's, you know, we've seen, you know, people that have not done so well in the World Cup that are now crushing it at the Lifetime Grand Prix. And I think it's just, you know, they've kind of found their niche and they found a sport that works well for them where they're kind of beating their head against the wall in the World Cup where, you know, they had some some decent results, but they were, you know, they weren't the Ninos or the, you know, the Yolandos or, you know, the those super explosive kind of endurance athletes. Hannah Otto being one of those.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, even Keegan, you know, Keegan had a, you know, was Keegan's an amazing athlete, but, you know, I think he'd be the first to say, you know, he wasn't thriving at the World Cup level, but he's now in the Lifetime Grand Prix and, you know, he's been more or less untouchable for the last three, three or four seasons.
Does that give you a lot of personal satisfaction and vindication that you're doing the right stuff with these athletes? It does. I mean, you know, I think everybody that starts out coaching dreams of of coaching, you know, somebody at the very top level, and I've been very lucky uh to to work with the people that I that I've been able to work with.
And, you know, I take a lot of pride in the fact that they're doing well. You know, I think, you know, I don't know how much I'm contributing to their success, but it's definitely a com I'm definitely contributing to it. It it does fill me with a lot of pride to to go back and look at the and and know that these people are trusting me with their with their strength training, you know, and across the board.
Like whether it's, you know, a local local amateur rider that comes to me or a pro that comes to me, it's a huge honor to know that somebody is trusting me enough to allow that allow me to help them with something that's so personal and so important to them. Yeah. And that takes a while for that to sink in.
And sometimes I think if a coach doesn't get that, it's not a right fit because the Thursday night World Championships are more important to me than or as important to me as Leadville is to Keegan. Like I don't care if Keegan wins Leadville. I care if I win the Thursday Night Worlds.
Yeah. I mean, I go out and ride with my buddies that I raced with 30 years ago and like, you know, I'm not going to win a lifetime Grand Prix or anything like that ever again. But if I can beat my buddy to the top of the local canyon, that's that's my world championship.
You know, h we've I chat with a lot of world tour riders in the podcast and I know some of them tune in to the podcast. Strength training during a world tour season kind of reminds me of some of my friends who work busy corporate jobs and they're sent all over the world and they've kind of unpredictable schedule. when the guys can't get into the gym, be it calendar difficulties, you know, the classics are on at the moment, you're staying in hotels, don't know where you are from one week to the next, team doesn't always want you going into the gym because it has programming that day.
What can you do or should you consider keeping this practice alive all through the race season or, you know, travel season for the busy corporate executives? Yeah, I mean, there's some minimum stuff you can do. Um, you know, you don't need equipment to do like push-ups, for example.
I think push-ups are a fantastic exercise for cyclists because it requires core strength, requires a certain amount of upper body strength. Uh, for lower body, doing things like box jumps and just super explosive movements because again, I look at strength training um as what are what are they not getting from their sport? And for most cyclists, they're not getting a lot of that fast twitch activation and they're not recruiting a lot of their fast twitch muscles.
So, we want to be doing that in the gym. I think of the gym almost as like skills training. You know, mountain bikers go out and practice, you know, their, you know, jumping and and cornering and, you know, roach like crit riders do the same thing.
they pract like a lot of my lifetime Grand Prix riders, they travel a lot and they're in places for an extended period of time where they might not have a gym. So most of them travel with like resistance bands and they can do some they can use like squats and box jumps and things like that and some pushing and pulling mo movements. Um, core training is something they most of them do daily anyway, even before they came to me.
But there's a concept in strength training called greasing the groove. And it works really well for body weight exercises where you just do a little bit of work every day kind of throughout the day. So let's use push-ups for an example of this.
So the num the formula you have to remember is three to five sets of three to five reps. And this is something I took from Pavle Satsuan who is you know one of the greatest in my opinion one of the greatest strength coaches of all time. And it's you get up in the morning so using a push-up do like five push-ups like five really good push-ups.
Couple hours later you do three push-ups. And then randomly throughout the day you're just doing like these little sets of exercise. So by the end of the day you've done three to five sets of three to five reps.
that's gonna maintain your strength, but it's not going to add a lot of it's not going to add size and it's also not going to have a big recovery cost. You're not going to get sore doing that. So, by the end of the day, you may have done 25 push-ups and you're not going to be sore from that.
Whereas, if I told you to do 25 push-ups right now, you'd probably get 25 push-ups done, but you'd be sore tomorrow from that. You'd be worse the next day. So, you're not going to do push-ups again for three or four days.
I love that. I had that during lockdown where I'm not sure what it was like in the US, but we were stuck at home and confined for quite long periods. So, I almost gified the house where if I went for a piss, I had to do 10 kettle bell swings every time I went for a piss.
If I wanted to boil the kettle, I had to do six press ups before I boil the kettle. I had to do three chin-ups before I done something else. Before you know it, if you look back at your day and you add all this up, you're like, "Oh, I didn't leave the house, but I actually moved a lot.
" Yeah. And that's, you know, consistency is the king for everything, whether it's, you know, on the bike, you know, if you can string together 12 weeks of consistent training where you don't get sick, you don't get injured, you don't miss days, you're going to be a much better athlete than you were three months ago. Same thing with the gym.
you know, if you're consistent with your strength training, you know, stringing together those wins, those small wins day after day, week after week, that's that's the one thing I see with like the top performers that I've worked with is they they don't miss. They hit they do their training week in week out. They they hit they do their nutrition right week in week out.
Like there's nothing is left a chance. Yeah, I love that saying that missing once is a break in the habit. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
Yeah, 100%. Like I I was recently was doing this kind of personal challenge of uh I've kind of struggled on and off with meditation over the years and it's never really taken with me. So I started doing Chiang and I was trying to do a 100 days in a row and I got sidetracked at sea otter and missed a day.
So I I stopped at 77 days like I came so close. Um, but I want to get back into it because it actually I've seen some positive benefits from doing that of just taking 20 minutes a day of just being mindful and being in the moment, being present, whereas just sitting and trying to meditate never really took off with me. I think adding that like movement to it was kind of the game changer for me.
But again, kind of reminds me of that Simpsons. You remember Homer had the in the nuclear power plant days since a workplace accident and it's like back to one. Yeah.
Yeah. That's got to hurt back to one. Yeah.
Exactly. And that's, you know, that's what I try to do in my own training in general. I mean, you know, again, I'm in my late 50s.
My my days of peak performance are well behind me, but, you know, I have my own modest goals that I want to achieve. And when I'm most consistent and can get out day after day, whether it's, you know, on the bike or even at this point just going for going for long walks with my dog, you know, all of that adds up. Art, I've enjoyed this an awful lot and I think it's been a great insight into how to set up a strength training plan for cyclists and not compromise their speed, endurance, and effectiveness on the bike.
So, thank you very much for sharing kindly of your time and have a great day. Thank you, Anthony. Keep doing what you're doing.
It's really impressive what you've accomplished. Thanks for watching Roadman. Take one second.
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