Original episode & show notes | Raw transcript
This document provides a detailed analysis of the principles discussed in the “Strength as a Skill” podcast episode from Empirical Cycling. It is intended for educated athletes who wish to move beyond generic advice and develop a more nuanced, effective approach to strength training. We will deconstruct the conventional definitions of strength, explore the central thesis that strength is a highly specific, trainable skill, and outline how to apply this knowledge to create an individualized program that serves your primary goals on the bike.
One of the most significant hurdles in strength training for cyclists is the ambiguity of the word “strength” itself. The podcast highlights a critical distinction:
Colloquial Strength: Being a “strong cyclist.” This usually refers to the ability to produce high power on the bike, sustain attacks, or sprint effectively. It’s a performance-based, context-specific quality.
Gym-Based Strength: The ability to lift a maximal weight in a specific exercise, such as a one-rep max (1RM) in the back squat or deadlift. This is a measure of force production under very specific, controlled conditions.
The mistake many athletes make is to treat these two as identical. While related, they are not the same. Your ultimate goal as a cyclist is to improve your on-bike performance. Therefore, any gym-based training must be a tool in service of that primary goal, not a goal in and of itself.
Limitations of Standard Metrics: While percentile charts or bodyweight-to-lift ratios (e.g., “squat 1.5x your bodyweight”) can provide a rough starting benchmark, they are poor measures of an individual’s potential or needs due to:
Individual Differences: Anthropometry (limb and torso length), muscle insertion points, and neuromuscular efficiency create vast differences in how easily one person can perform a lift compared to another. Someone with proportions ideal for deadlifting will progress faster and further than someone without, regardless of their on-bike ability.
Training History & Genetics: Athletes start at different baseline levels of strength and respond to training at different rates.
Key Principle: Your primary measure of strength improvement as a cyclist should be relevant on-bike metrics, such as peak power, time-to-exhaustion at a given power, or performance in goal events. Gym numbers are secondary indicators.
The central thesis of the podcast is that strength is a skill. It is not merely a function of muscle cross-sectional area. It is a highly refined motor pattern coordinated by the central nervous system.
The Neurological Pathway: When you perform a lift, your brain sends a signal to your muscles. The efficiency of this signal, the number of motor units recruited, and the coordination between muscle groups all determine the force you can express. Repetition refines this pathway, making the movement more efficient.
Explaining “Newbie Gains”: When a novice begins lifting, they experience rapid increases in the weight they can move. This is not primarily due to hypertrophy (muscle growth), which is a slow process. It is the rapid acquisition of the skill of the lift. Their nervous system is learning how to execute the movement efficiently.
The “Darts” Metaphor: Throwing darts is a perfect analogy. Your physical strength is largely irrelevant; improvement comes from practicing the specific motor pattern until it becomes precise and automatic. Lifting weights, especially complex movements like squats, has a significant component of this skill-based learning.
The Implication for In-Season Training: This concept fundamentally changes how we should view in-season strength maintenance. If you stop squatting heavy for a month and your 1RM drops, it does not necessarily mean you have lost the underlying force-producing capacity of your leg muscles. More likely, you have experienced a decay in the specific skill of the heavy back squat.
If, during that same period, your peak sprint power on the bike has been maintained or has increased, you have successfully maintained your sport-specific strength. You have let a less-specific skill (the squat) decline in favor of a more-specific one (pedaling powerfully).
Your strength program should be periodized, with its structure and goals changing throughout the year.
The more a movement replicates the biomechanics of cycling, the greater its potential carryover.
Unilateral vs. Bilateral: Cycling is an alternating unilateral activity (one leg pushes at a time). Therefore, single-leg exercises like split squats, lunges, and single-leg presses are more specific than bilateral squats or deadlifts.
Stability: A barbell squat requires a great deal of full-body stabilization that is absent when clipped into a bike. A leg press, by contrast, removes most of the stability requirement, allowing you to focus purely on leg force production, which is more analogous to cycling.
Once your primary focus shifts to on-bike performance, the goal of lifting changes from building to maintaining. The podcast outlines two distinct strategies for this, based on your goals.
Option A: Maintaining the Movement Pattern (General Fitness) This is for general health, bone density, and maintaining a basic level of strength without creating excessive fatigue.
Protocol: 1-2 times per week, perform 2-3 sets of 8-15 reps at a low-to-moderate intensity (e.g., 5-6/10 RPE).
Purpose: This keeps your body familiar with the movements and provides enough stimulus to prevent significant muscle loss, but it is not designed to maintain peak force production.
Option B: Maintaining Maximal Force (Performance Focus) This is for athletes whose performance depends on maximal force, such as sprinters, track cyclists, or mountain bikers who need to power over steep, technical features. The goal is to provide the minimum effective dose to maintain top-end neuromuscular recruitment.
Protocol: Based on research by Dr. Pack, this involves 3 to 6 total sets of 1 to 5 reps at a high RPE (7-9/10), spread across 1 to 3 sessions per week. For most cyclists, one session per week is sufficient.
Example: A single weekly session consisting of a warm-up followed by 3 sets of 2 heavy reps on the single-leg press.
Benefit: This approach is neurally stimulating but generates minimal muscular damage or fatigue, allowing you to continue high-quality training on the bike.
Maximizing Strength, Minimizing Mass: To avoid unwanted hypertrophy, the key is low volume. Stick to heavy, low-rep sets (1-5 reps). The initial 3-5 lbs of weight gain when starting a program is almost always water, glycogen, and inflammation, not muscle. True muscle gain is a slow, difficult process.
The Interference Effect: While there is a cellular basis for endurance exercise inhibiting muscle growth pathways (AMPK vs. mTOR), the more practical issue for most athletes is accumulated fatigue. Hard lifting and hard riding both tax the nervous system. It is best to separate your hardest lifting sessions from your hardest bike sessions by at least 24-48 hours. An easy ride the day after lifting is generally fine and can aid recovery.
Foundational Exercises: A robust program for a cyclist should be built around:
A primary compound lift: Squat or Deadlift (for overall strength and bone density).
A primary unilateral lift: Single-Leg Press or Bulgarian Split Squat (for cycling-specific strength).
Accessory work: Hamstring curls (for muscle balance and injury prevention) and core exercises.
Bodyweight-Only Training: It is difficult to create sufficient overload with only bodyweight. However, challenging exercises exist:
Walking Lunges or Rear-Foot Elevated Split Squats: Can be loaded with a weighted backpack.
Reverse Nordic Curls: An extremely effective but advanced exercise for the quadriceps. It requires careful progression and padding for the knees due to high patellofemoral forces. Proceed with caution.
Sprinting vs. Gym Work: You should prioritize on-bike sprints to develop the skill and coordination of sprinting. When you find that your sprint performance has plateaued despite consistent on-bike work, that is the signal to use heavy gym work to increase the foundational force component, which will raise your power ceiling.