Welcome to the Empirical Cycling Podcast. I'm your host, Kolie Moore, joined as always by my co-host, Kyle Helson. Thank you, everybody, for listening as usual. And of course, if you're new here, please consider subscribing if you like what you're hearing on the podcast. And if you're returning, thanks so much for coming back, and we really appreciate it. And if you want to support the show because you're liking it, you can always share the podcast. That always goes a long way. Really appreciate that. Giving a nice rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And of course, donating, because we are ad-free at empiricalcycling.com slash donate. Coaching or Consultation Inquiries, because that is really our ultimate Patreon, if you will. You can come to be a client of ours for Coaching or Consultations. We're always doing that. We are taking on people of all levels, and we are doing consultations all the time, and we are going to basically sort you out and make sure you get going in the right direction. So if you're curious about that kind of stuff, it's January, a good time to get started. So shoot me an email at empiricalcycling at gmail.com if you are interested. And if you want to ask questions or just check out the weekend AMAs up on the Instagram, go follow me on Instagram at empiricalcycling and ask a question, give me a follow there. And we're going to, at the end of this episode, answer a bunch of questions that I got on the Instagram about our specific topic today. And the topic you will remember because like three months ago, Kyle and I did an episode, which... Honestly, I had kind of forgotten about. And then we're talking and we looked over the list from the last time and looking over the list from this time. And we have way more than enough to do a part two of common strength training mistakes that cyclists make. So we're going to get started. And Kyle and I are going to kind of go back and forth again. But also, of course, as before, we're not just going to go purely negative. We're also going to tell you what to do to help yourself if you are making these kinds of mistakes. And so we want to be as constructive as possible. So I hope that makes sense. And no, you're not having DJ Vu. This really is two episodes on the same thing in three months. So Kyle, who wants to get started, me or you? Real fast, before we get started, I do want to have a slight addendum to something I said last week. I believe last week I said that Ethan Mitchell had the standing lap world record for Team Sprint P1 with like 16.9. It was actually... He used to have it. He, uh, shout out to Aaron Young for correcting me. So, uh, Lee, I just knocked something off my desk. Uh, Lee Hoffman from Australia now does have the record at 16, 9, 4, 9. Wow. I looked up, like, Mitchell was, uh, 16, 9, 9, 4, 9, or 9, 9, 5, or something like that. So it's like a, it's a, you know, four or five hundredths difference. But yeah, shout out to Lee Hoffman. Sorry, bud. I forgot you. It was 2022 World Championships. Oh, cool. Yeah, so that was our track cycling episode that was done by popular request and has been not quite as popular as the other episodes. That's totally expected. That's okay. Track cycling is a bit of a niche, but if you live near track, it is a lot of fun. So go listen to that episode. We actually had a lot of fun recording it. So if you want to hear us just having a good time, go listen to that episode. It was fun. So actually, we should probably also... We'll discuss what we kind of talked about in the last one in case everybody missed that. I can't imagine a lot of people did. It seems like it was pretty popular. But last time we actually talked a lot more about like periodization. and nutrition and like sets and reps kind of things. So like kind of more of the basics. I think this one, we're going to be a little more thinking about like more advanced stuff, like how to do your reps and what kind of reps you should do. Like, you know, we'll talk about concentric and eccentric phases and things like that. So we're going to get a little more into the nitty gritty, a little more advanced lifter kind of stuff. But yeah, so should we flip a coin or should I just toss it to you? Sure, I'll start off with one. I would say a big one that I have noticed is that people thinking that they are not strong enough or not capable enough or not, I don't know, deserving enough of using either straps or a belt or hard-sold shoes of some kind. Like, this doesn't mean, you know, go to Rogue and plunk down $400. you know on like a super fancy setup of like $300 shoes and $100 belt or something like that like you don't need that necessarily but just assuming that oh you know I only kind of do lifting a few months out of the year and then maybe once or twice a month after that like oh I don't need to be serious about it I'm not strong enough that I need those things and especially for cyclists who probably don't do a ton of upper body work straps can help a ton and things even like Deadlifts, not just in things like deadlifts, but also in things like rows or lunges, where you do have to hold on to something, or even like lat pulldowns, things like that, where you can get a lot more work out of it. And I know that lots of people say like, oh, well, you're also training your grip too. It's like, that's true, but if you wanted to train your grip, like do dedicated grip work. Don't, you know, like if you're doing rows, is it a rows for grip or a rows for your back? Yeah, and actually that kind of thing, Saps Neural Drive, and it can cause a lot of extra fatigue, and also the actual thought, like literal thought you have to spend thinking about your grip while you are doing exercises reduces the quality of the exercises. So like when I do rows, I use straps. I'm doing like barely 100 pounds sometimes, but... I use straps. You know why? My hands are tired. I'm tired at that point of the day. And I'm not here to win a grip competition. I'm here to lift some weights and make my back stronger. That's all I want out of it. And actually, a good point on lifting shoes, because one of the things I'm going to talk about in a second is range of motion, especially for squats and deadlifts and that kind of stuff. High-heeled and very hard shoes are amazing for lifting. Like, I actually changed out my lifting shoes this year. I had been on a stack of like, what, like 15 millimeters, something like that, which means the heel is like 15 millimeters taller than toe. So it raises your heel and actually allows you to basically get more range of motion, more depth easily by pushing your knees out further. And I went up to 21. And immediately I was like, oh, this is the deepest squat I've ever done, clearly, right now. Like the first one. It was absolutely fantastic. And I had to reduce the weight a little bit, but it was so great. Yeah, and it also will help you stay more upright. So if you are a little bit worried about your backgrounding over because you have, you know, back issues or whatever, things like that, like staying more upright can help because you're not actively trying to like... Sit Up, or I guess it's not sit, it's kind of a sit up, but you're not, you're, you have less, like, lever arm, like, squishing you over. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, on the belt issue, because I've heard a lot of people say that, that lifting belts, like, if you didn't, if you didn't lift it without a belt, you didn't lift it, which is absolute bullshit. Just. It's like, I've heard people be like, yeah, you didn't earn the weight if you had to lift it with a belt. It's like, do you realize what a belt is for? It's to help stabilize your spine. I think that's a good thing, isn't it? Yeah. It allows you something to press against and it increases intra-abdominal pressure. It's not like you can slap a belt on and then forget to brace your core. No, it actually helps you brace harder. Yeah. I kind of liken it to the idea that, oh, Do you need clipless pedals? Like, oh, if you're pedaling your bike and you, you know, you're clipped in, like, that doesn't really count. Like, well, it's not like, it's not, it's not doing the work for you, right? Like, just being clipped into your bike is not doing the work for you. It helps, it helps, and you can feel more stable, and you can feel more confident, and there, you know, it's that extra, I don't know, 10%, something like that. Like, plenty of people use a belt, and, you know, no one's taking it. Lifts away from them or something. I don't know. I think it's weird to be like, oh, a belt is cheating. It's not, a belt is not wearing like a equipped powerlifting like squat suit where like the suit itself is actually taking up a bunch of the mechanical stress and then returning it for you for free. Yeah. Yeah. Powerlifting suit for people who are not aware of how it works. It's the equivalent of riding an e-bike in a race. Yes. It literally is like. because part of because one of the reasons that sometimes you will see like powerlifters kind of what we call bomb a descent where they kind of control it for a little while, and then they kind of let it go fast. What you're doing is you're using the natural elastic portion of your muscles where like it literally acts like a spring and you kind of bounce out of the bottom to get yourself like, I don't know, maybe a half inch to an inch or something like that of extra coming out of the hole so you don't have to spend your actual energy on it. So that's where that comes from. And so the suit basically what? Doubles, Triples, the amount of elastic energy you could absorb and release again. Who knows? Yeah, I mean, I don't, I think the other big thing about suits, and this is way beyond the scope of this, but it also drastically changes people's technique. Yes. Whereas, like, wearing a belt does not drastically change your technique. Because people, if you're wearing a squat suit, you squat in a way that is most advantageous to getting as much drive out of that suit as possible, as opposed to, like, a belt is just, like, Oh, no, like go set up just like your regular squat, come down just like your regular squat. And, you know, there's a little bit of a learning curve in terms of like, how do you brace into this thing, but it's not substantially technique altering. True, yeah. And also, I would say the fatigue is another part of wearing a belt that kind of goes unheralded sometimes because, you know, you and I have done a billion squats. You've probably done like a... 2 billion for my billion. And so, so at this point, you know, in our, you know, lifting lives, I guess we could call it, you know, we, we know that when you do high volume squats, like you're doing set and for, for most cyclists, especially sprint cyclists, like 10, because it kind of starts to get real aerobic and you get out to 15 and it's, you're just like, Like doing a kilo or like having a baby or something. Yeah. You just don't want to be standing there with a barbell anymore. You're like, this is cool. Like five reps ago, it stopped being cool. Yeah. And it actually makes you ask some very deep questions of like, why am I doing so many reps? Could I get the same with more weight and fewer reps? Probably Could, Maybe I Should Do That. And then you have these thoughts, and then you lose track of whatever you're doing, and you're like, shit, was that 12 or 13? Oh, God, what am I on? Basically, what I'm saying is, a belt is great. Well, mostly because it reduces, it doesn't eliminate, obviously, but it reduces the amount of fatigue that you spend having to brace your torso. And like, one of the things that I see people making the mistake with the belt is they wear it constantly. Like, you should be excited to get it off of your waist when you are done with your set, but it also shouldn't be so tight that you are getting lightheaded or like red in the face, but it also shouldn't be so loose where you can just wear it around. Like, no problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will like, you know. Leave mine on, and then loosen it in between sets, right? And then you like, you loosen it like two or three holes in between sets, and before you get ready for your set, you tighten it back up two or three holes, you put it back on, and then when you're done, you loosen it two or three sets. This is a two or three holes type thing, you know? Oh, I didn't know you were one of those people. This has changed my opinion of you, Kyle. Yeah, I just, I slap mine on the safeties in between. And I'm just like, ah, God, get this out of my sight. I don't want to think about it. It's like, after like a one minute test effort or a sprint test effort, like, like when I'm stopped on the side of the road and I'm lying there, I take my helmet off. I'm like, I can't have this thing on me anymore. Get it away. Like unzipping the jersey, taking the jersey off, just like, oh, let me breathe out of my skin. Anyway, that's me. Yeah, so you can actually train your core to get stronger, because yes, it is actual core training to do this, but I usually don't put my belt on until I get about to my working weight if I know that I'm going to have a fatigued core, and also that's going to impact the lifts I have later in the day. And so I really want to just try to think, how do I get the most... Stress into the muscles I want without stressing anything else too much. It's like, we're not heroes here. We're not strongmen. We're not out here to be bodybuilders or anything. We're not here winning grip competitions or who's got the biggest beltless squat competition. It's like, no, how much power can you put out on the bike? That's what I'm concerned about. And so all this other stuff really comes from all these old gym traditions, this like bro shit going on, like, oh yeah, you didn't earn that lift, man. It's like, yes, I did. Just go away. We are not, we're not here to like impress people in the gym. We're here to get faster on the bike. So I guess that brings me to my, let's see, oh boy, do I have a list. Why don't we go to, Actually, yeah, why don't we go to, you're targeting the wrong muscles, or potentially targeting the wrong muscles, as my first one. So, what I mean by this here is, if you are trying to, let's say, let's say you need some quad work, your quads aren't quite strong enough, and you are, let's say, doing high bar squats, and you are finishing up your sets and reps, and you're going back and you're like, man, my back is sore, my glutes are sore, but like my quads aren't that tired. That's what I mean by targeting the wrong muscles. Or let's say you're doing like front squats, because front squats are pretty quad heavy. They're also very torso, core heavy. Like every time I do front squats, which I hate, my abs are just dead at the end of a set. And so by the end of a set of front squats, my quads are like... No problem. And my abs are like, what did you just do to us? And the question for me is like, do I do more front squats? Do I practice this until it all gets stronger? Or can I just do back squats like normal, which make my quads absolutely wrecked? And I know that way that I'm getting the right muscle group. And it's like also single leg squats, because I don't have a leg press in my garage, obviously. So if I do single leg squats with a certain technique, I will get more quad focused. And if I do it with a slightly different technique, I get a lot more glutes. And so you can adjust your technique to get the right muscle group too. And so when you're thinking about targeting your muscle groups, think about what is your limiter and then make sure when you go lift, that's the one getting tired. Because if you do squats and you're trying to make your glutes tired and you're trying to like, okay, low bar squats is going to... You know, hammer my glutes. And your quads are tired and your glutes are kind of like, meh, fine, not bothered. Then you probably want to pick a different exercise or change your technique. So, um, yeah, and I think that's true. Like some people just, you know, they, they don't think about it like, oh, like, you know, I go in and I squat and I leave. I'm generally tired and I leave. So that was good, right? But yeah, you should, you know, if your first few weeks, first few weeks back, whatever it is, like, yeah, there's going to be some relearning of, oh, I feel this here and this there, especially if you're not lifting that much in the, you know, race season and stuff like that. But within a few sessions back, you should have hopefully have figured out, oh, yeah, I remember now, this, this, I like this best for this, and, you know, oh, no, the low bar squats don't really do it for me, or what have you. But also, this is where... Taking Notes and Writing Things Down, like a training log. Even though it's gym work and it may not be the focus, you might be pretty good about remembering what stuff does and doesn't work for you on the bike because you do the bike more. But this is definitely where writing notes to yourself can be really helpful. Yeah, for sure. And actually, because you brought up belts and shoes and straps and everything, one of my sub-notes on this topic is actually... Watching for different kinds of fatigue that are getting to you before you actually get to your target muscles. So for instance, if you are, like, let's say you kind of want more quad size, for instance. Not a lot of cyclists out there want to actually grow their muscles, so we'll talk about that in a little bit. But let's say you're somebody who's like, okay, my quads are definitely a limiter. I think if they were a little bigger, I could... probably get a little more power out of them, et cetera, et cetera. So you're thinking, all right, I'm going to go grow my quads a little bit. And now you go, okay, I'm going to go high bar back squat and hit my quads real hard. And you do a set of like 10, you do a set of 15, and like, you know, sets of like 8 to 10, usually okay for hypertrophy and kind of strength overlap-ish. But you're like, man, I just don't feel like I can do much more. I'm just tired everywhere. My quads aren't really burning. They don't have a good pump or anything like that. What's happening is you're probably getting fatigued axially, as in you are loading your weight through your torso all the way to the floor. And if you eliminate that axial fatigue or reduce it with a belt, but eliminating it altogether can actually be a game changer. So like, for instance, Kyle, what options do we have that you've been doing lately that are a good alternative to back squats that can really hit your quads or glutes? Yeah, these are definitely a little more specialized. Hopefully your gym has it. this option, but I would say leg press, single leg, or two leg, doesn't matter, and also belt squat, and you can also, there are ways to configure a belt squat to do two leg or single leg, but usually I feel like it's easiest with two legs. And also, you know, I think for some people too, it's not my favorite necessarily, and it's also not that cycling specific, but also like knee extensions, leg extensions, whatever you want to call it. would be another one where you don't have to pick up anything at all. It just sits there. It's on the... Yeah, leg extensions are not my favorite. They're an okay supplement if you can get a good burn on it. I usually would leave it as a finisher kind of exercise, but I personally find that goblet squats with elevated heels is actually a pretty good hypertrophy kind of finisher for me. I hope you've enjoyed your sets of those lately, Kyle. Oh yeah, this is so much fun. Yeah, nothing like getting crushed by like 30 pounds. But also another option is the Smith machine, because the Smith machine is like a, it's almost like a free barbell, except it only moves in one plane up and down. And it's got a tiny bit of kind of back and forth. It's a slight angle, but like was a five degrees, 10. But you can put your feet anywhere, like on a Smith machine or a hack squat. You can put your feet anywhere you want relative to your body. Same with actually the leg press. If you want more glutes, feet go up. If you want more quads, feet go closer to the body. And you can position them in any way that you get the biggest acute angle of your knees. But watch your back. Of course, if you're in the leg press. At all costs, do not let your ass get off of the seat, almost called it the saddle, of the leg press, because that is going to round your back and probably like pop a vertebrae or something like that. So don't do that. Yeah, and that's why they have the handles on the side where you can like pull yourself down into the leg press. Use them. Use them. Yes, grab those things like you're trying to, I can't even say it out in public, my thought. Anyway, so yeah, so all that means to say like if you are looking to target certain muscle groups and they're not getting tired or sore, think about why they're not getting tired or sore and either adjust your exercises or pick a different exercise and there's no real reason that you need to include squats, you know, especially like advanced lifters like Kyle. I was figuring, you know, Kyle, you're at like month, like what, two and a half-ish kind of like hypertrophy training again? And I figure you're getting probably pretty tired of holding a barbell on your shoulders, which is one of the reasons that, you know, we're rotating those things out. Yeah, definitely. And I think, honestly, just it, even I was like, had kind of forgotten like how much more quote-unquote work you can get done if you're not thinking about stabilizing a barbell. Even because sometimes you just think, oh, it's just part of the game. Like, oh, I just, I just have to do it. That's, that's what a squat is. But then you're like, yeah, it like. It's a weird sensation when you're like, oh, I'm, you know, other things are tired and it's not just me just getting really sick of standing there. Yeah, for sure. You know, it... All right, what do you got next? All right, it kind of goes along with this, but I would say people trying to do... High-Intensity Interval Training-type circuits in the gym with their lifting. Oh, damn, I got that one, too. Okay, yeah, well, I figured these kind of go hand-in-hand, right? Like, in a certain sense, it's very tempting to be like, oh, I can get more cardio work, more aerobic work in the gym if I turn these into, like, you know, HIT circuits or whatever you want to call them. But on the other hand, You're already doing a bunch, presumably already doing a bunch of aerobic or even high intensity interval training on the bike. Doing more of it in a gym is not why you're in the gym, right? Like you're in the gym to develop force production and lift weights and that's supposed to be not very bike specific or not look very bike specific right now. And so trying to cram in. Oh, but if I superset everything with only 10 seconds, and there are good reasons, especially for, say, hypertrophy or time limit or things like that, why you may want to do these things, but having that be your only lifting thing or being like, oh, this is better because I'm trying to be more efficient about this or something is not ideal. And also, if you think about it, if you're tired, just like we were talking about, you're going to reduce the quality of the lifting anyway, and you're in the gym to lift weights, you're not in the gym to do 30-30s. Yeah, totally. And we've had clients who do like a weekly like HIT kettlebell class like once a week or like twice a week or something like that. And they really, really, really want to keep it in. And the same thing with like those, the gym like spin classes that are super high intensity too. Love those kind of things. Oh, what can we do around this? Not much, honestly, not much. They're hard. And like, you know, it makes sense if your sport is CrossFit, because that's what CrossFit is, is high-intensity intervals around, you know, lifting moderately heavy objects. But that's not cycling. And while they're, it's tempting because it also falls under the fallacy of like, it's difficult, therefore it must be effective. Like, is it, it's, you're doing something, but is that something, the thing that you want to be doing? Or the thing that you're trying to do? Yeah, and actually, one of the things that I remember very, very distinctly about a lot of our clients who used to go to these HIT classes all the time, is the fatigue stacked up so much, even if we controlled for it as best we could, it still held people back, like, a lot. Especially if you are trying to get in shape in season, it takes a lot of energy to recover from, and it saps your energy from being on the bike. And, you know, from, you know, if you like doing the stuff in like November, you know, if it's off season for you, then I know, I know for the Aussies, that's not off season for you. But, you know, here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's off season for a lot of people. And so doing that kind of stuff for fun is awesome. Please do it. Go have fun. Yeah. That's the time to do it. Totally. But as you get more specific, you're going towards racing. On the last one, we kind of talked about the periodizing of strength training as one of the things here. So you can go listen to that episode if you want to. But generally speaking, you should be getting more specific on the bike as you get closer to racing. And swinging a kettlebell is not exactly very cycling specific. And I know a lot of people are going to say, oh, it's like going to build power or something. Why don't we talk about this one? Because that's actually my next one is. Doing weights that are too light for power development. Yeah, I think that's a good one. You know, the power, like, you can think of it, some people think, oh, like, if I'm going fast, like, they know that, like, a grindy, really heavy, like, deadlift where you're like, oh, God, I'm not sure, not sure this person's gonna lock this deadlift up they've been pulling for a while, like, people kind of know that that's not very powerful, and so then... The natural assumption is things like jumps and running sprints and kettlebell swings. Box jumps, yeah. Yeah. Those are all very powerful and they can be, but as with a lot of things, the actual implementation and execution makes or breaks whether these things are true or not. Yeah. Actually, whether these things are true or not, that's interesting you bring that up because In the scientific literature, there's actually been quite a bit of stuff on power development. And if anybody remembers the kind of like force velocity and power curves from way back in the day, if you Google it, I'm going to do it right now. The power curve actually has a skew to it because the force velocity... Graph that you see is typically, what would you call it, hyperbolic? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, so the issue with this is that this comes from single muscle fibers. Like, this is one of the way earliest studies in this thing. It's from the 20s, 30s, something like that. It's been a while since I've seen this paper. But it comes from, yeah, I think it was A.V. Hill, actually. Yeah, so must have been the teens or 20s. So the thing is, when we actually put this all into whole muscle or whole body stuff, as far as I've ever seen, especially on the bike, this is absolutely true, force velocity is actually a straight line. And so when you look at force velocity for single fibers, when you translate this into power, The power actually goes like way on the left side of the spectrum. It's like at 30% of maximum shortening velocity. And that is very, very light. And so if we think about what's happening on the bike, we're actually at 50% of maximum shortening velocity. And if we look at what are the velocities that we're doing, like 120 RPM is something like what? It's like two meters a second, something like that, depending on your crank length. in terms of leg speed. And so if we're looking for developing power on the bike, one of the things that we actually need to do is lifting heavier weights. Actually, let me back up one more second, because more recent studies on like Olympic weightlifters, do you know where they find their peak power output relative to how much they can like one rep max front squat, for instance? Take a wild guess, Kyle. Unless you notice already. Oh, it's probably like, you know, 70-ish percent or something. Higher. It's like 80 to 90 percent. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so the human body is very trainable at this. And one of the things that they're doing is basically, this is a phrase I've heard in strength training before, and it kind of applies here. It's called displaying strength quickly. or Creating Strength Fast or something like that, where you are turning on all of your motor units very rapidly and you can move a ton of weight. I mean, just watch Olympic lefters. They are moving a fuck ton of weight that they can barely front squat once they get it up. Yeah, and that's another way. It's like you want to move moderately heavy weights fast. Yeah, so... Like, so you typically, I would say you want to start at like 50% of one rep max or about something you could do for maybe, I don't know, a set of like 15 to 20, start there, and then you can get heavier, but I would say don't do more than like what you can do for like a 7 out of 10 for like 2 or 3 reps. Yeah, I think that actually is a good point that we didn't talk about. Like if you are doing strength or exercises to develop power specifically, not strength. All of the reps need to be good, and fast, and high quality, and grinding out 200 kettlebell swings is not bad. Like, the, not only are you, you know, I don't know, I don't know how you, one would even try to attest to one rep max kettlebell swing. The thought kind of makes me nervous. You are also... Nervous about what? Smashing your balls with a kettlebell? Yeah, or like, you feel like you have to wear steel-toed boots, right? Yeah. Clear out the whole gym behind you. Like, this kettlebell might fly from any direction. If you can pick up and swing like a 50-pound kettlebell for a set of 30 or whatever, right? That is way, way, way below 50% of what you could hypothetically pick up and swing for three. Right? Yeah. And so if that's the goal, I want to swing three pretty heavy ones. Like, do you have 120-pound kettlebells at your gym? Like, do you want to drop one of those? Like, talk about needing straps earlier. Yeah, guys like us who can, like, deadlift, like, four or 500 pounds, or even if you can deadlift, like, two or 300. Like, you've got to get, like, a 100-pound kettlebell to start with. Like, yeah, I'm good. Thanks. They do sell some cool ones that are like Darth Vader shaped though, have you seen these? I remember the ones that are like gorilla head shaped, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But that being said, yeah, like just the nature of, yes, kettlebell swings, you know, if you're poorly trained in like a hip hinge, like a forceful hip hinge, I think it's a good exercise for learning how to do that, like, you know, like snap your hips through, like actually use your hips in that like leg extension because you are, you are, You know, extending both your hips and legs at the same time. But for actually, and obviously it's a good cardio workout, like that sucks, like doing 100 kettlebell swings or whatever. But yeah, I think assuming that it is developing power, you also have some momentum. So there's, you know, questions there too of like, what force are you actually putting in? How much force are you actually putting in every time? If it is like, swinging for you, right? Right, yeah. And how much of the elastic component are you using versus how much of the actual muscular component are you actually using? And how much rate of force development is it actually saving you? How much of that neural drive do you not have to do? Because if I snap a 35-pound kettlebell up from swinging behind me as hard as I could, it's probably going to fly out of my hands. Well, another reason he used straps, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just not heavy enough. And granted, there are some noob gains here to be made, for sure. Because if you've never really worked on this stuff before, and you go start trying to do some explosive things, like, sure, there can easily be some transfer. And the same thing actually happens with lifting heavy. If you lift heavy, and your sprint power goes up. Great, you got some noob gains, you got some easy transfer. It's gonna stop. And that's usually where I think about, do we want to lean into the noob gains and let everything just kind of work for a little bit or see if it does first? Because not everybody gets the noob gains out of the strength training stuff with their sprints. However, I usually like to think about doing it the way that an advanced lifter would usually from the beginning, or an advanced, not lifter, but like an advanced trained athlete, I should say. And so, because that's really what we're really discussing is like, if you're a really advanced strength athlete as a cyclist, and I know a lot of you are out there for sure, advanced lifters, and you're trying to develop Power on the bike by doing box jumps with your body weight. Well, first of all, the injury risk, please don't do this. Like, you could easily slip off and crack your head open or break your neck or take your pick. We don't assign box jumps ever at Empirical Cycling. That is a strict no-go. I will say, I just looked it up, Rogue will sell you a 203-pound kettlebell. Okay, now we're talking. I think I'd need to start with like 250, but yeah, but also here's the thing. Grab two of them, one per hand, right? Straps. Question. When you pick that up and you swing it behind you for the first time, is it going to actually like pull your head between your legs? Like, are you going to flip over like that? Can you actually control that much momentum? Do you have the grip in your shoes? That's a good, I mean, so, it's definitely, and people who've done, like, Olympic lifting or, like, have experienced this, once the weights actually start to be equal to or exceed your body weight, it does, your body positioning does shift around, right? Because you're trying to keep the center of mass of you plus the... thing that you're swinging relatively centered over your feet. Otherwise, you're going to tip forward or tip back. But now, once you're actually holding more than you weigh, you actually will probably find that you have to lean back or lean forward a significant amount to counteract that movement. Yeah. I guess it's sort of like when you watch motorcycle racers lean off their bike and put their knee on the ground. The bike is heavier than they are. And if you try that on a road bicycle, you're going to tip over very easily. Yeah. Actually, one more thought on this is actually a lot of people in other sports do very light stuff for power. And especially in running and track and field stuff, there's a lot of light weights for power. And one of the reasons actually behind this is that their ground contact times are like so, so, so fast. Like if you are in a 100-meter dash, you are brushing the ground. Basically, well, you're not actually, you're pushing really fucking hard, but like, the contact time is so short, and on a bike, we've got a quarter second to develop force, and so we can actually produce a ton more force, and it's way less, there's no elastic component to it. Yeah, no, the, like, some of the, some of the, like, ground contact times for, like, world-class track and field sprinters, they're like, 100 milliseconds or faster, right, so. I don't know, I can't do that math fast enough to figure out what kind of RPMs that is. Well, if 120 RPM is about a quarter second, or maybe even like, maybe even a little less. Yeah, because 120 RPMs is two revs every second, right? And so that means you're, yeah. So that's one, oh god, live podcast math, this is going to lead to bad places. So one pedal rev is a half second long, and so that means the front half is a quarter second long, and so if we kind of take away the top and the bottom, we have roughly about 0.2 seconds to develop power. Yeah, so then you're cutting that in half, so that's 240 RPM? Give or take? Yeah, about 240 RPM, where I think I can do about 50 watts at 240 RPM. I know at 200, I can do about 1100 watts, but I know that's a long shot from a world-class sprinter. I mean, at 240 RPM, I think the only time I've ever done that is, like, the bike is locked off in a trainer in, like, 3928, and you just, like, rev, you know. I actually am not sure if I've done more than 200. I'm not sure I've done 240. I've definitely done 230. 240 is a lot. It is a lot. I think I've brushed 240 once or twice. But yeah, it's up there. It's really up there. And that's like, yeah, that's the track bike on the trainer without the flywheel cinched up. Anyway, so, all right, so that's my next one. What do you got next? Actually, to go hand-in-hand with... Kind of something you said earlier about being advanced and thinking about these things as an advanced lifter. I would say not treating the gym work as also a long-term project. Like, you may think, oh, I'm only in the gym, like I said, a couple months out of the year, and then maybe once, twice a month after that. Like, I don't have to think about it. It's not a big component. But it can be a big component of time if you're planning on using the gym every year for many years of cycling. It doesn't mean that you have to agonize over it all the time, but it does mean that treating it as just as important as other things that you're doing, like dialing in position or looking at wheels or lusting over these new 3D-printed titanium TT extensions or whatever it is. 3D-printed titanium barbells. Yeah, yeah. Whereas, sort of... A lot of the other stuff is cool, like wheels are cool, and new shoes and all this stuff, but it can be just as big of a component of those things as the next latest, greatest 80mm front wheel for your time trial bike, but it's just not as cool. You don't get to feel like it's as much as cycling, maybe, as buying wheels and equipment is, but it can be just as important or more important, honestly. And so, actually treating it like a long-term project and investing in it, like we said, you know, you don't have to buy $300 lifting shoes, but you can go online and get decent lifting, decent healed weightlifting shoes for like 80 bucks. Yeah. Yeah. And that's way cheaper than any, like, nice pair of... Ultra High Modulus Carbon Soul Cycling Shoes, and you're not going to wear them that many times a week, not that long every time, and so they're going to last you for years and years and years, and if you're an adult, your shoe size isn't changing that much, so. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I've had the same pair of lifting shoes for, well, I just got a new one, but my previous shoes I had had for years, yeah, really, like three, four, five, six years, something like that. I had a thought that just left my head. It was, oh, right. It was about also long-term project for health. A lot of cyclists don't do a lot of weight-bearing activities. And so if you're thinking about what happens when I'm 40, 50, 60 years old, starting to get into good habits with weightlifting and having good technique. and knowing your way around a gym is absolutely phenomenal for your long-term health because you can build bone sensitivity this way. Your joints are going to stay healthier when you lift heavy with the right technique, of course. You're going to know the signs of like, go, no, go. You're going to know how to build it into your season after you've lifted for 5, 10 seasons or something like that. And there's always going to be tweaks. Like Kyle says, it's a long-term project and you're always going to be learning, but so is your training plan. Training plans are the same thing. So, yeah, so getting into the gym, or just, you know, getting some weights and lifting at home, safely, of course, is a great way to start to kind of invest in your own health for your future. Okay, cool. I guess my next one is going to be, let's see. All right. Here's a big one. Partial reps. For most cyclists, I think partial reps are... Wait, wait, wait, before you... First, let's define partial. All right, you go ahead, because I'm thinking about... I'm thinking more into the weeds. You go ahead. In my mind, a partial rep is when you pick an exercise, like a leg press, or like a deadlift, or a bench press, and... You have some natural range of motion that you can do all of the time. You know, with good technique, you warm up a little bit, and yes, you can, you know, you can, you know, for example, is like bringing the bar in a bench press all the way down and touching your chest with it and then extending your arms again, right? That would be like a full range of motion bench press. Right. In that sense, a partial bench press would be if you set up the safeties or you put two-by-fours or a foam block or something on your chest. And so when you bring the bar down, you touch either the safeties or the thing that's on your chest, and it stops the bar one, two, three, five inches off of the top of your chest, and then you extend back up. Like, you are purposefully going through a range of motion that is less than what you could do if you were not purposefully... Purposely modifying the exercise. So that's not to say that just because you can't squat as deep as I can that you're doing partials and I'm not. Like, no, you're doing squats that are full range of motion squats for you. and your anatomy and your, you know, all these things and I'm doing full range of motion squats for me and we could both do partials if we set up the safeties and just, you know, squat it only down till our knees bent 60 degrees, 80 degrees, whatever it is and sit back up. Yeah, and here's the other thing too is we should probably preface this with, especially this is something where people ask me about with squats constantly. Some people are not built for squats. I am just barely not built for squats. I can do them. They are not my favorite. I cannot lift nearly as well as Kyle can. I am way better at like trap bar deadlift. I'm better at things that really don't involve, like because my joint lengths, like my limb lengths, my proportions are not great for squats. They're fine, but they're not amazing. So me, for me getting to like parallel or just a touch below, which is your thighs parallel to the ground or just a little less, is like has been accomplishable, especially with all my hip issues. I got to it a long time ago, got hit by that car. I took months and months and months to re-get back down to parallel for squatting, because I knew I should be able to, theoretically. And so that's usually a pretty good goal for a lot of people, is a parallel squat. And it could be a project. So if you are like an inch above parallel or something like that, and if you make yourself do bad technique, you can actually get down to parallel or lower. Don't do that. No bad reps, please. Good technique all the time. Shout out to my boy, Dr. Mike. So with partial range of motion stuff, this can definitely apply. Well, it's going to be basically impossible to do with like a deadlift. You're picking up off the ground unless you only, you know, bring it back to rack pulls. Okay. Yes. Thank you. Rack pulls are don't do rack pulls. Let's say for a leg press. Because there's a bunch of ways you can do a leg press. Feet up, feet down, et cetera, et cetera. So like I love feet down on the leg press because I have hip issues and I don't have a lot of great range of motion on my left hip. And so feet down allows me to get a lot more knee heavy and that's great for me. So like, so let's say I can get down to a certain depth without my butt coming up off the seat. To me, that's full range of motion. And so the question is, should you load more weight and do slightly less range of motion? Yeah, and especially on a leg press, a lot of times you can set a stop where the sled will only come down to a certain distance, and then if you, so you can set that sort of higher than you would need, and then you would be able to only bring the sled down, you know, three quarters of the way that you could theoretically do, you know, if that little bar or clamp or whatever it is, it wasn't there. So the question is, there's an asterisk to all of this, of course. Because the asterisk to doing lightweights is like, you know, if you're new to it, okay, sure. If it's fun, you know, off-season, whatever, sure. You know, if runners are doing it, totally fine. But for cyclists, for just general strength training, general strength training for anybody, partial reps are... And so, you can get the same stimulus. with less weight going full range of motion instead of just, you know, stacking up a ton of plates on the bar and doing like a 16th squat like for like, you know, two, three centimeters of depth and coming up and going, wow, that was heavy. Yeah, I bet it was. But your muscles are not getting a lot of stimulus. So for me, when I see cyclists doing partial range of motion, it's only slightly less cringy than a gender reveal party. I do want to point this out. People are constantly, constantly worried about getting hurt in the gym, especially if they're not comfortable with the gym, things like that. So they hear things like, oh, you should never do this, you should always do this, blah, blah, blah. And then go and load up a partial because they hear... that, you know, oh, squats are bad for your knees, don't descend below 90 degrees, there's something magical there, something like that, and you're like, yeah, but now you've just tripled the amount of weight that you have to use, and surely the risk goes up with that too, right? Like, the heavier the thing is, there's inherently more risk. Like, I don't know if there are actuarial tables where you could look up such things, because I don't think that people probably care so much, but, like, yes, Lifting is risky, and just like bike racing is risky. Why would you do things? Why would you go out of your way to make it more risky? And actually, it's funny you say that, because the only time squats have ever made my knees hurt is when I tried partials. I was like, I wonder how much this could transfer to do like half squats. So I loaded up, I think my full squat depth at the time was like 365. So for a half squat, like not even half squat, like a little more than half squat, like down to the bench. And so a half squat would be like halfway to parallel in terms of height, or like maybe 90 degree knees, something like that, we could say. And so I loaded up, I think I got up to like sets of five or six for like with 450 pounds. And my muscles didn't really, I mean, I could feel that they were working hard, but. My muscles weren't like, wow, this is a good strength stimulus like you're used to. My knees were like, please stop, we are about to break. And of course, I didn't like, you know, load up to the, load up the weights gradually or anything like that, but regardless, this is exactly the same thing, even if you do load it up gradually over time, in theory, you might be okay, but it's just a might, it's not a guarantee. It's like, it's like... More Than Your Body's Usually Meant To Take On Such A Consistent Basis. And this is not a great parallel, but it's an okay parallel. This is why a lot of like pro bodybuilders, pro powerlifters, pro strongmen, they tear muscles on their body constantly because it's literally more than the human anatomy and evolution has designed us to take because of all the gear they're on. And so it's not a great analogy, you know, because Clearly, we can, without drugs, like, load up a bunch of weight on a barbell and do partials, but the risk, oh god, there's no reason for it. And so, do you have one more thought? Because then I want to get to the asterisk. Yeah, I would say that the big thing, too, is, like, it's not, like, it looks cool, and, like, there are There are plenty of examples where you will see people do things like pin squats and things like that. And they are doing them for a very specific reason. And they are usually, hopefully, if people are programming them in, they're doing so intelligently and not, like you said, just diving in like, oh, I've been doing full depth squats and today I'm just going to add 50% more and do partials just to see how it goes. It's not great. Yeah, like you said, there are reasons, there are lots of reasons where people could do these and they could be good, but just copying it because you saw someone do it doesn't seem like a great choice. Yeah, and, you know, like, we watch a lot of Olympic weightlifters do this kind of stuff all the time, where they'll, you know, overhead, what is that, overhead rack? Yeah, like a jerk. Yeah, like they'll... Like jerk recovery, yeah. Yeah, like they'll hold it up over their head, they'll pick it up off of blocks, and it's way more weight than they can actually get up there naturally. And one of the reasons they're working on technique, because this is something that stabilizing heavier weights than they're able to do, like that is a very important thing in Olympic weightlifting. However, in cycling, it is not at all an important thing. So when we are... Thinking about what kind of partials would we do? Could we do? There is some research. I'm sure a lot of you have been thinking, oh my God, hasn't Cole seen this research? The answer is yes, I have. Where angle, like joint angle specific ranges of motion for weightlifting have a really good transfer to your sport. But there's a couple things that we need to caution about this before you just go doing like half, Press on the legs, half a range of motion on the leg press with one leg or something like that. When you see the world-class sprinters doing that, first of all, they are very advanced strength athletes. They are very advanced in terms of their physiology and what they need and where they're going to get little improvements. For most cyclists, where this is not the case, there's no reason to do it. because you are lifting for either general health or general strength or bone health or whatever, like you're putting on muscle, especially if you're trying to put on muscle or get stronger, just generally speaking, or even specifically, like if you make partial range of motion your only thing that you do, eventually you are, it's not a guarantee, but you are likely to get injured, very likely. Yeah. It's not worth it. But, you know, that's why sometimes when you're looking at, like, people who do jumps, things like that, track and field athletes who jump, they'll do partials. But usually they're not doing it with as much weight as they could do for that partial. They're doing a partial and they're, they're, it's pretty heavy, but they're coming up explosively. And that's the difference is they're, the neural transfer for those joint angles, sure, there's a thing there. For cyclists, our joint angles are still pretty damn acute. when we are on a bike. We are nowhere near what a track and field or an NBA player would do when they're jumping around. Yeah. If you want to do a deep dive on Johnny Whale's Instagram, he tried to do a heavy pin squat or basically a squat off of jerk blocks in the gym and he tore his ACL. It's kind of like a horror story of this is what could happen. Could he have, and he didn't, he did not, like, I think he did, I think he did get the rep up partially, anyway, I don't remember exactly what happened in the video, but like. I remember he was fighting for something he should have let go. Yeah, and hypothetically, like, okay, you take 20, 40 kilos off the bar, he probably doesn't get hurt, and he probably gets what he's looking for, which is like neural drive, neural activation, out of it, it's just, you know. Live and Learn. Yeah. You know how else you can get neural activation? With lighter weights from a deeper range of motion. I don't know if we covered this yet. Yeah. So, all right. I got one more, but I'm going to toss it over to you. Okay. So, this was kind of like one of those, like, you know, it's going to sound weird to say maybe, but I would say Not taking video of yourself lifting. Like, it's gonna sound vain, and like, I know some gyms, like, especially because of Instagram and TikTok and all that shit. On the fact that you can knock over somebody's camera that they set up on a tripod, like, halfway across the gym. Yeah, exactly. They don't want you to set up tripods and stuff like that. But, like, actually getting, if you're not sure of how reps look, if you're not sure if your technique is improving, if you're not sure you're hitting constant range of motion, constant, you know, consistent depth, consistent things like that, Actually taking a video of yourself and putting the camera, your phone, in a place where you're not going to be tempted to stare at it while you're doing the reps, just like set it up, you know, who cares if someone walks in front of it for a little bit, but actually getting video of yourself, you know, in real time and being able to see, am I doing what I want to be doing? Does this look like I think it should look, oh God, that looks weird, what was I doing? You know, like... It can look weird or extremely vain to set up videos of yourself in the gym. And sure, everyone loves to post them on Instagram, send them to your friends, whatever, which is cool too. But actually doing it because you get something out of it, I think is good. Everyone has a frigging camera in their pocket these days. You may as well use it for something useful. Actually, yeah, we should... Well, I should probably asterisk that by saying it doesn't look vain. It feels vain. Because I've got a squat rack in my garage now. But back when I was going to the gym all the time, there were people setting up cameras constantly and nobody batted an eye. Nobody cared. People only cared if it was a tripod in the middle of a very high traffic area. That was the most annoying thing. And you look around and you're like, wow, that guy's huge. Or, oh yeah, she must be an Instagram influencer or something like that. And it's like, who cares? Get this tripod out of my way. I am trying to move a heavy weight from this rack over to my barbell. Please don't make me like, you know, do some sort of like weird, like edging around your tripod to not bump it. So I don't, sorry. Anyway, yeah, record yourself because And this is why I have our athletes or my athletes send me video if they're not sure of their technique. And I tell everybody like, look, we are not as good as a personal trainer standing there cuing you as you're lifting. And of course, if somebody sends me video of them without safety bars, Mark, every time I say something, so even if it's lightweight, I'm still like, you know, you should have some safeties on there. The, yeah, so it's just a thing to watch yourself do, and it's actually helped a lot of people. It helps me, too, still to this day. Like, I've been squatting for how many years now? And, you know, all this stuff. And I still record myself. I'll record at least one set every time I'm in the garage and lifting. And I'll just review it and go, how's my depth? How's this looking? Do I need a little more ankle mobility? Do I need a little more? Do I need to, like, warm up my back a little better? Get some, like... Shoulder Mobility. I don't know what I need, but I'm going to watch this video, and I'm going to figure it out. Yeah. And at least it might feel, you know, the first couple times you do it, you may not know what you're looking for, but at least after doing it and getting in the habit of it, you will start to notice patterns. Oh, yeah, my back felt a little weird on that one, and if I look at this, like, oh, I did, like, shift to the left or something, and now, oh, yeah, my back feels a little weird. Yeah. I've got one more that I think we didn't cover last time, but I could probably conjure up another one. How many do you have left? I think I'm out. Hold on, let me check. We've got some great questions, by the way, so those are going to be great. Yeah, I'm done. Okay, cool. I would say my last one is, it actually is definitely more towards advanced lifters, which is... Always sticking to the program that you had when you started with. And I was victim to this for longer than I would like to admit. And then I realized one day... That's why I max out with your bros, man. Well, I didn't have any bros to bro down with in the gym. It was just me by myself. I was bro-ing by myself, I think. And there's no reason to do that. So what I was missing, and this goes for advanced cyclists for your bike training too, is the stuff that made you fast initially is not going to make you fast after like a year or two or three. And so with strength stuff, this absolute same thing applies. If you remember back in the day when, oh, I just, I went into the gym and I did... Starting Strength, I had three sets of five squats and some deadlifts and whatever, and I added five pounds every single time I went in. Great. And then it stops working and you're like, oh, what did I do wrong? You rest and you try it again. And then like the next year, yeah, sure, you can do that to start with, but it's going to get faster and faster and faster where it taps out as you get more and more advanced. And so some people are in it's kind of always a state of being like an intermediate lifter in cycling, and that's totally fine. You're definitely not a strength athlete primarily. You're a cyclist primarily. That's not a bad place to be, right? You get gains faster than if you're advanced, but you're going to be stronger and moving heavier weights and making more power than if you're a beginner. Yeah, and the technique is down, too. Way better. And that's lower injury risk over time. And also, again, it sets you up for health in the future. So when you are looking at, oh, I want to improve XYZ, like there's no harm in trying new stuff. The, you know, I'm a big fan of fuck around and find out. Big, big fan. And so, so the worst thing that happens is it doesn't really work. It takes you like maybe three or four weeks to figure that out, that you should try to do something else. And you're like, okay, great. Well, now I know to cross this off, but maybe in the future, that didn't work this time, but it might work in the future, depending on if your situation has changed. For instance, I used to do a lot more barbell deadlifts. I got hit by a car, hurt my hip, can't really get good range of motion to get the bar off the floor. I had to switch the trap bar. No problem at all. And it's just a changing situation. If ever I have range of motion back, would I go back to doing barbell deadlifts? My low back is pretty damn weak right now compared to everything else. So I think I might, yeah. If just to supplement my low back strength, for sure. So your situation's always changing, and don't be afraid to change with the times. So I think that's probably my last point. Nice. I like it. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I think definitely... Barbell Deadlifts, like, if you've never had to do a bunch of barbell deadlifting, like, man, we were talking about axial fatigue earlier, there's no better way to load up just a ton, a ton, just that overwhelming amount of axial fatigue than doing just a bunch of deadlifts, like barbell, conventional barbell deadlifts, like, woof. Like, sometimes you, sometimes you just get down there and you're like, I should be able to pick this up, but I just can't. I just can't pick this up. I know. How many days have you and I had in the gym where we're like, we finish up and we'll text each other like, I have such a low back pump right now. And it's like doing nothing to target the low back. It's like squats and whatever. And the funny thing about that too is like it doesn't matter if I've ridden my bike to the gym and you hop on the bike and you have to like lean over a little bit. No, sure, it's not like super aero. It's just like like a round time bike, but you're like, oh, leaning over kind of doesn't feel good. I want to be sitting down, but then if I drove to the gym, I sit in the car and I'm like, oh, being seated doesn't feel good right there, like the low back pump is just too big, I just gotta, oh, lay down. Yeah, oh man, and for me, whenever I got in the car after, when I used to drive to the gym, it would always be that my shirt was so wet and sticky, I would like lean forward. Off of the seat, so it didn't like stick to the seat, because I felt worse, and I have the AC blasting, and I'm just going home, and I'm like, being bent forward still doesn't feel good, but it's also sticky back there. Alright, that's enough of our bullshit. Alright, listener questions. So, we're going to start with, oh, speaking of the devil, why do some coaches suggest lifting such light weight? Injury Risk, probably. Because here's the thing. When I do consults, I look at a lot of training plans. I would say 80% to 90% of the consultations I do, I look at people's files. And one of the things that I see with a lot of strength training stuff in there is they say, do these exercises. They don't really program any progressive sets or reps or loads or anything like that. And when people are saying lift light weights, honestly, probably. A lot of it comes down to not being able to know if they can trust your technique to not hurt yourself, is my guess. My other guess would be you don't want to add too much fatigue if this is something that you're doing midweek when you've got intervals all the time. That's another reason to do pretty light weights. So there's a lot of reasons that you might want to do light weights, and this is where we talked about programming and periodization in the last Strength Training Mistakes episode. Yeah, I would say I agree with that. You just don't want to mess up the bike stuff, and not that it's the fault of people who are primarily cycling or triathlon or whatever coaches, but sometimes their focus is more on the sports and the training for those sports, and they know that you should do stuff in the gym, but they don't want to tell you something that's going to be too disruptive, and so they want to give you something that you'll feel good about doing. Terrible, it just needs some refining. It's not like they're telling you to do, I don't know, like, high rep pull-ups or something for cycling. Kipping pull-ups. Can a cyclist do a pull-up? I think I could do, like, two. And so, yeah, so I think that's a good point. Like, you just want to be safe. You definitely don't want to have someone get hurt in January when they're, you know, and be ruined for the whole season. because they did something in a gym that was stupid. Yeah, totally. All right, next question is, should I be going for deadlift PRs during build? We got to the one rep max testing on the last episode, but just to retouch on it, don't. It kind of goes along with the partial reps thing. It's so much load, and there's no reason that you need to test your max. Like, you can easily do lighter weights with safeties, of course, for like squats or something like that. and do squats until you're like, I think I got two left in the tank. And stop. And you're done. And that's enough. Because when you progressively add reps and weight over time, you know you're getting stronger. Like, there's no reason to test what your max is because there's no reason to test. You can see the progression regardless. It's like you don't need to do, if you can nail your FTP, Brought by just riding for like 5-10 minutes, and you go, okay, I got it. Like a lot of advanced cyclists can do that. And there's no reason to really do a full long TTE test once you're at that point, unless you want the information or you like doing it, totally fine. I've got a lot of clients where we don't do that a lot of the time. And so I'm just like, give me your FTP. Go out and ride at it. Okay, we're up 10 watts. Cool. Awesome. Let's go. Test by Training. Yeah. And honestly, if you still want, if going for PRs in the gym, don't do one rep maxes, but like you said, if you do three, five, that range is still pretty heavy, much lower injury risk. Yeah. And you just keep track of that. So you keep track of your three RM. Four RM instead of your one. Well, for advanced people, yeah. But I would say for not advanced folks, like always keep it like two, three reps in the tank just because you don't want to get to that last rep and find out that you don't know how to bail out of this lift. Ah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, if you're going to go for max attempts, you should first learn how to bail out of a lift safely. And that is something that people probably aren't. No, people have literally, even advanced lifters who know how to bail out of lifts have died by getting a bad bailout. Yeah. Don't Google that. Well, here's the thing. Strength training, advancing your strength training is all about little PRs. Being consistent and being like, okay, I did a little more weight, I did another rep, did a little more weight, did another rep, et cetera, et cetera, and just doing that for years. And that is honestly... the best way to do it. So if you're thinking about little PRs, yeah, but if you're thinking about like my three rep max PR, my one rep max PR, there's no reason to do that to actually max out. So yeah, you can keep it going. It's sort of like you don't need to do FTP intervals until you are cross-eyed and you're like, man, I'm out of food, I'm out of water, I'm out of daylight. There's no reason to do that. All you need to do is be like, alright, I got to the point where I'm kind of tired, and I know that next time I'll probably be able to do a couple more minutes of time, and you just keep progressing like that. It's super, super easy. So, yeah. Okay, next question is, lifting heavy year-round to build anaerobic power, is this bad if still managing to ride just fine? I would say it's... This is one of those things I would want to periodize. Because building strength, building muscle mass for anaerobic power is definitely a thing. But if you are really doing that kind of hypertrophy and strength training into your season, usually most of the time you are taking away from recovery on the bike. If you are okay with that trade-off, then that's fine. If it's working for you, then it's fine. If you're meeting all the on-bike goals you have for yourself. Totally Fine. But if you are finding yourself like, man, my FTP was 20 watts higher at this point last year, but I wasn't lifting as much last year, now you might be finding that this is the limit of that tradeoff. Yeah. And like you said, if it works and you know that it's not, you know, like going to be soul crushing and ruining a bike workout the next day. Yeah. You know, like plenty of people will lift in season. and yeah they also have to be smart about the progression of lifting and season like you're not gonna make you're not gonna be in the gym as much and you're not gonna make nearly as big of gains in small amount of time as you might if you're lifting two or three days a week and now it's down to one but yeah um yeah and actually there's a lot of people asking some very similar questions like uh this next one is I gave up lifts to maximize my build phase should I do some lifts closer to Chris Chris sorry dislexing that one crit season start I would say, well, here's the thing, is if you bail out of the gym completely for a while, and then you get back into it right near race season, you've got a little bit of ground to make up. You're probably going to be sore for a little bit. You're probably going to not... Literally not be lifting as much weight as previously. And so here's the thing is once you are an advanced lifter and you are thinking about, oh, I want to lift more closer to race season because I feel like it really helps my top end power or something like that. There's a totally different style of lifting that we have never even touched on on the podcast where, well, we kind of just did actually where, you know, you're looking at heavy, short, you know, very short sets, like one, two, three reps at most, maybe four. Reps, like explosively with heavy weights, and you're doing a handful of those. And that's a different type of lifting, and I would want somebody to at least stay familiar with the gym before we get them into the gym, like lift, you know, three reps at like, you know, 70% kind of explosively in the leg press. Like, that does not sound like a good day one back in the gym in like, in April. Totally, yeah. And this is also the sort of thing where If that is something like, stay in contact with it, like we said before in the previous episode, once a week, once every 10 days, you know, is probably enough that you can stave off some of that, like, haven't lifted in a month, that first day back, the doms are going to be crippling. You want to avoid that, like, oh, it's three days before my first race, and I can't find the stairs. Can't sit down in the toilet, can't get into my car, can't get on the bike. Yeah, be gentle on yourself. And if you are going to do it, you can easily lift fairly light as long as you're maintaining the full range of motion. And I usually say if your balance is being challenged a little bit, just a little bit, that's a good place to think about maintaining. And don't have any fatigue. You want to get out of the gym, be like, that was a 3 out of 10, maybe a 4 at the most. Yeah. That's a good, that's an easy way to maintenance for in the gym and you really don't gather that much fatigue. The fatigue is the big one. So yeah, so be careful with that. So next question is, how many hard reps are too many for monthly maintenance sessions during season? It all kind of comes down to how many, I think, I'd like to think more about sets. How many hard sets? And are we doing sets of like, Two or Three out to Five or Six, so heavier strength kind of stuff. Or are we thinking about like five, six, seven, eight, ten reps, a little more kind of technique-based hypertrophy kind of-ish. And so I think about that way rather than how many heavy lifts are you doing. But I would say go with your fatigue after the gym. That's the big way to check. Yeah, I would say it's too many if the next day you are regretting what you did before. Or if you notice that the next workout that you do, bike or gym, is crippling. You haven't recovered enough to be able to do good work the next workout. Whatever kind of workout it is. Yeah, let's say the bike stuff is your top priority at whatever point in the season. And let's say you've got a workout, you've got to do Tuesday because your next workout is like Friday and Sunday and you've got to periodize it like that because you don't recover from your Tuesday workout until Friday if you push that off to Wednesday. Oh, now we've got Saturday workout and Saturday it's going to be too hard. So like when you've got to kind of... Switch things around like that. If you absolutely have to hit that Tuesday session and you're lifting weights on Monday, your Tuesday session should not be compromised. Let's say that should be our gold standard. Do not compromise your bike sessions once that becomes your top priority. And you can kind of rock and roll within those parameters. Oh, here's a good one. Why is there a myth about not putting your knees past your toes in squats? Or actually, this goes for any lift. So, where does this come from? I think, I forget what it is. There were some papers, some studies done, where they measured the sheer forces experienced by the knee throughout the range of motion of a full-depth squat. And the paper found that the greatest sheer forces occurred when the knees were in that 90 degree range. And so they were thinking, if you don't, you know, or wherever they were, maybe they were registering in relation to the toes, I forget. Anyway, it goes back to this idea of, like, trying to limit the amount of sheer force that your knees experience, and if you do, if you have a much more acute angle between your femur and your tib-fib, like, you're gonna experience greater sheer forces. And I think at some point in that, you know sort of like standing up out of the bottom of a squat is when the sheer forces peak and they go back down and so then their people their thought was there is avoid the peak area by just staying above it where you know the sheer forces get high but they never hit that peak and so one way to do that to limit the sort of you know amount of Flexion that your knee goes through is to stop your knees from going too far forward over your toes. Do you know where this increases sheer stress? On the spine. I mean, sometimes we've gotten videos from clients and they get sent to me like, what the hell's going on here? And it's people who are deliberately pushing their ass out so far back. And I'm like, what? It looks like they're doing a hinge like a good morning. But they're also squatting at the same time. It's the weirdest exercise I've ever seen. And I'm like, I don't understand. We're trying to, oh, we should try this, we should try this. And eventually, after like weeks of like, okay, no weight, no more weight, no more reps, let's fix the technique here. Please go see somebody in person, et cetera, et cetera. And eventually we get it to, oh yeah, somebody told me a long time ago not to push my knees out past my toes. And we're like... Okay. All right. This is going to be a very quick and easy fix now. Yeah. So, yeah, it doesn't hurt. Look at Knees Over Toes guy. He's fine. Oh, there's some good memes out there. But this is also one of those things where, yeah, this came out of some source years ago, and people hear it, and then it gets repeated, and you can find it on the internet. You know, if I was going to Google right now and say, like, Knees Over Toes in Squats, like, like, now I think it's becoming more well-known that, like, you can have your knees go over your toes when you squat, um, but it, yeah, I think it was just this, like, weird way to limit squat depth and, uh, Well, it's interesting. Thankfully now, actually. Well, because you look at Olympic weightlifters and their knees go like, what, three, four meters out past their toes, something like that. It's ridiculous. And they have some of the healthiest joints because they're lifting weights and they're getting all that strength and they're recovering and all that. Well, hopefully they are. So it doesn't – if you're doing it right, if you think it's good, you're – Probably gonna be fine. If your doctor tells you not to, obviously don't. And also, should you push your knees past your toes if they don't naturally do that? I've seen some squats where they don't go past the toes much, if at all. The answer is no, you don't have to push your knees past your toes if that is not where your natural proportions put you. So it's not a necessity, but it's definitely not harmful if they do. Yeah, just don't artificially limit yourself. Kind of in the same way we were saying, don't artificially limit for partial reps. Just don't introduce these weird limitations without some very good reasons. Yeah. And actually, there's a lot of this stuff out there. Like in the PT world, I've had a couple physical therapists at this point. and one of them previously was like always keep your everything in line in your body she was very concerned about like things being basically square plumb and level in your body everything's got to be in the same plane yada yada and like if your knee if it's your knee yeah your knee only works in one plane but like if it's your hip or something like that your hip can actually rotate and so she was always like you know keep your keep your hip in line etc and I met PT for this round, because I guess I have to do PT every couple of years now for my hip until I die. The dude was like, yeah, rotate your, I'm on my left knee and I'm stretching out that hip. And he's like, you can move your foot in and out until you feel that stretch where we need it. And I was like, Is that bad? He's like, no. And I'm like, immediately, I'm like, oh, I'm the victim of this stuff, too. I had no, I didn't really realize that you can just kind of move stuff around in their natural kind of range of motion. And so, yeah, I mean, the body is like, don't do anything dumb, for sure. But I always think for like rotation and playing, you know, that sort of stuff, I always think of like, have you seen like a hammer thrower? Oh, yeah. I love hammer throw, and javelin is probably, I probably prefer watching javelin to hammer throw just because the training is so much more insane. Yeah, but just the amount of rotation and like weird planes, like one joint of one limb versus the other is in and stuff, like yeah, human body's pretty remarkable. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but still, don't get hurt. If you're not sure about something, please see a PT or get a... Get a proper strength training professional in person. I highly recommend that. There are a lot out there. They are definitely not paid enough for what they do. And, you know, just get them to check your technique. And it's usually a really good investment. So next question is, oh, I heard limit range of motion in squats to be the same angle as the pedal stroke. Yeah, I would say we kind of touched on this earlier. Actually, we really touched on this earlier. If you are wondering if you need to do this kind of stuff, ask yourself, am I an advanced track sprinter? If the answer is no, you probably don't. Moving on. And keep in mind, when track sprinters are doing that, they're not doing that for every single one of their lifts. Right. Yeah, usually that's like they do a handful a week or it's not even daily. It's not even year-round either. Yeah, I mean, there are the, you know, I think we've talked about it in other episodes too, like there's good science out there that shows rate of force development is best trained through similar angles and ranges of motion and things like that. And so these are, this is what people are usually, I think, trying to get at and thinking like, oh, I can really improve my RFD by trying to mimic the pedal stroke and all this stuff. And like, that is true, there are these things, but Yeah, that's the sort of like extra 10% on top, not the months and months and months of just doing like pressure squats and deadlifts. Actually, you know, I just had a great idea. We're going to invent a thing that perfectly mimics the pedal stroke on a bike. It's called a bike. And you're going to get on this bike, and you're going to sprint just like it's a bike, and it's going to perfectly mimic your range of motion on a bike. I'm so sorry, that was such low-hanging fruit. Okay, next question is, barbell, okay, the actual text is, does deadlift versus trap bar matter? As in, does barbell deadlift or trap bar deadlift matter? Or is it just pick up heavy things and put them back down? So, in my experience, most cyclists have a pretty weak low back compared to their legs and everything else. And so, if you are trying to really really think about making the legs stronger. A lot of the time, I usually suggest the trap bar deadlift because low back stuff can get dicey for cyclists a lot of the time. If you've got experience with barbell, for sure, by all means, do the barbell deadlift. There's no harm in it. I usually just think of what's the greatest reward for the least amount of risk. For most cyclists, in my experience, there's a fair bit more risk having them do barbell stuff rather than trap bar stuff. Yeah. And I think, too, with also with the, you know, oh, you're worried about back, things like that. That's for conventional barbell deadlifts, that's where intelligent loading and sets and reps and not going for 1RMs comes in. And recording yourself, please. Make sure you're not rounding that low back. Like, and watch some of the best deadlifters in the world. Watch Thor Bjornsson, watch Eddie Hall. You know, they're upper back rounds, but that low back stays real, real flat, so you don't want to hurt yourself like that. And if you're wondering, is my deadlift technique okay? Find a personal trainer, get them to come help you. In the same vein, next question is, could it be helpful to drop the eccentric part during race season? Race Season or Event Season. Now, this is a really interesting question, because a lot of the time, the eccentric part of the movement is something that we usually really need for hypertrophy, if you're looking to improve anaerobic capacity and strength and stuff like that, or muscle mass. And a lot of the time, what happens is with... Deadlifts and things where you drop it at the top or you just kind of travel down quickly with it and not slowly lower it. Getting rid of this kind of stuff can help a little bit, make you less sore. However, it does not alleviate the fatigue that you get from doing these movements. And take it from me, my main lift when I'm trying to build my sprint. One of them is a trap bar deadlift. And I deadlift very heavy. And you know what it causes? A ton of fatigue. Ton of fatigue. So it can help a little bit because if we're thinking about cycling-specific motion, cycling doesn't have an eccentric component. And so if you really want to get super specific, you would just, I don't know, single leg press from the pins on the bottom or something like that. But regardless. It's not a thing that most people need to do. Also think, depending on the exercise, completely eliminating the eccentric component is going to be hard and or maybe not advisable. Or dangerous, potentially. Yeah, also, gym owners may not like if you're doing, let's say, deadlifts and you're going to just start dropping deadlifts on the floor with metal plates on the barbell. People are not usually huge fans of you doing this on purpose. Like, obviously, everyone has seen someone trying to deadlift a heavy barbell with metal plates, and they drop it because they don't make it. That's fine. That's like a one-off thing. If you're repeatedly dropping metal plates on the ground, people are not going to be particularly happy with you. And like, for a squat example, I don't even know how you would eliminate the eccentric part of just pin squats, I guess. But then you still have, like, you shouldn't dive bomb the weight back down. to the pins. I just don't know. Yeah, you actually just sent me a video of a guy failing a squat. He drops the weight off of his back, and it hits the pins, and the bar snaps in half completely. And the guy's fine, but the barbell is toast. Yeah. And he made it two-thirds of the way up. He just had hit the sticking point in the squat. isn't going to make it, comes back down. And it's not like he drops it like 10 feet under the safeties. He drops it only a few inches. Yeah. I remember at the MIT gym once, some dude I had never seen before, he walks in, he does deadlifts, and he's doing it without the bumper plates. He's doing like the regular plastic wrapped plates that are not made to be dropped. And he's like, and he's doing like one single reps. and just piling on more weight, single rep, put on two more plates, single rep. He got up to like seven something hundred pounds and he's dropping the weight completely and it's shaking the entire building and you're not allowed to do this in the MIT gym. And after he left, I go over to the platform and I'm deadlifting. I'm warming up. I have two 45s in the bar. I'm just getting my first set. So somebody comes up to me and is like, don't drop that. And I'm like, you think this was shaking the building? Are you kidding me? You should have seen that monster who was in here. Like, go look for the guy who looks like Godzilla. Go find him. He was... Anyway, so... Yeah, so getting rid of the eccentric part is like... It's a strategy. Usually it's a strategy you usually reserve more for... I want to get stronger, but I don't want to put on as much muscle mass as if I was doing proper hypertrophy, full range of motion, whole through the thing training. But it's one of those things where, you know, you... Just, yeah, try it, it's probably not going to help that much. Yeah. Yeah, let's see. Is it a mistake to do your strength training before your rest day? No, that's what I love to program strength training in before somebody's rest day. It's one of my favorites, honestly. Yeah, and like, I think that is like a common question, like how do I fit strength in, into my bike and everything else, so. It's a good question. Yeah. Let's see, what's next? Okay. Strength training will increase FTP, or so I have heard. Well, that's all it's going to be. You've only heard it, because you're not going to see it. I mean, in the limit where someone is so weak that they can't battle. Nah, no. Yeah. People may see anaerobic gains, which contributes to 20-minute power, 5-minute power. 2x8-minute FTP test. Yeah. My favorite. Call back to episode one. Look, I did a lot of squats in my ramp test estimated FTP. Didn't you write a fake paper once? That was like, I'll find it. I'll actually probably put it up on Instagram for this episode. It's like the relationship between FTP and one rep max bench press or something like that. So yeah, no, it's not going to increase your FTP. Go back to our episode on, where was it? It was the strength versus size episode, the Alimetry episode. Elementary, was it? Where if Wattstock number 42. Wattstock number 42. Yes, the elementary episode where we go into size and power and we also talk a lot about muscle mass and strength and that kind of stuff. So definitely get into that episode. Go check it out. That was put up, I think, about... about a year ago. So yeah, it's back there. But anyway, let's see what's next. High reps, low weight versus low reps, high weight. Yeah. For what? Yeah, for what? Actually, go to the last episode and go to our previous strength training episodes from like, what, two-ish years ago, maybe a little more, where, yeah, two, three? where we definitely got a lot more into the sets and reps kind of scheme stuff. So go check those out. They'll be more helpful than we can be in, you know, 30 seconds. Let's see. Are going too hard when I restart strength training or are the doms unavoidable? You can go light enough where you're not going to get too sore, but at a certain point, you're going to get sore. Yeah. It's like- Is it better just to rip the Band-Aid off or- I mean, I think there's a middle ground between like, oh, I barely lifted anything. I'm not sore at all. Like, I'm not gonna, you know, don't start with like, oh, I front squatted. I did goblet squats with like the 10-pound kettlebell and my one rep max might be like 200 pounds or something like that. Like, don't start there. You can definitely start with some, you know, Goblet Squat, some single leg stuff, and just kind of maybe two days where you do the super light stuff before you start getting into the heavy stuff, because getting it to those deep ranges of motion with some mechanical tension, usually that's a lot of like your body's going, whoa, whoa, it's been a while, and then after that, like you can start to load things up, but you don't want to be too sore because getting on the toilet the next day is the worst when you're too sore, and you can just avoid that. You don't have to have the world's most crippling doms ever and be like, wow, I'm really back to it. And then you're still sore and tired like four days later when you're going back to the gym or something like that. Like you don't need to do that. It can also really make the RPE for a bike workout, even if it's just an easy like zone to ride, like insanely high when you're like, oh God, I can't even just my low back hurts. I'm sitting here. I just can't. It's the inverse of that first nice day outside in the springtime when the RPE is one tick lower for everything because you're so pumped to get outside in the nice weather. It's the exact opposite of that. Yes, it is. And the soreness doesn't necessarily overlap fully with fatigue either. And so you've got to watch out. Am I sore or am I tired? Those are very too... different questions that can overlap and oftentimes do, but not perfectly. So you've always got to be watching out for soreness versus fatigue. It seems that a, okay, next question is, it seems that a common mistake is trying to be super specific. What's the silliest bit of over-specificity? I got one. For cycling or for anything? I would say for cycling. What's yours? Because I got mine immediately. 

Oh, that's a good one. I don't know. All right. All right. While you think, mine is doing super, super, super high rep, low weight exercises in the gym, because it's quote unquote, just like riding a bike. You know what else is just like riding a bike? Riding a bike. Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty good one. I get that kind of that kind of goes up there in with like circuit training like oh it's just like high intensity intervals yeah or actually well the other thing that happens with circuit training I think we forgot to mention earlier I just had this thought I was like oh we should mention this is um is that when you don't fully rest between exercises that are like supposed to be heavy let's say let's say you're doing heavy squats and in between you're like you know what I'm bored and I don't want to be one of those people who just sits on Instagram in the gym Then I'm going to go do some pull-ups or some bent-over rows or something like that. And that kind of stuff doesn't, it like, sure, your legs are resting, but whole body, you are not. And so that's one of the other downsides of circuits is if you are really trying to get stronger or anything like that, or you just, if you just want to go in and get a good workout and you don't really care, whatever, sure, go ahead. If you are really trying to get stronger or build muscle or something like that, you absolutely need to rest fully between your sets. So that's a downside of circuit training is when you put too much stuff like close together because you're like, I got to get out in an hour. If you're getting out in an hour and you can get like maybe a couple warm-up sets and maybe five sets, six sets of like really good quality heavy exercises, then you've really got to prioritize. That's it. There's no other way. I got one. All right. I would say it's the thing, it's the times when people try to big brain the specificity too much and go, oh, you already work on, you know, your low back and your quads and things like that a lot on the bike. We're going to do every exercise that isn't that. So we're going to really focus on hamstrings and we're really going to focus on, I don't know, overhead press and things like that. Because like, oh, you get all the rest of that stuff when you're riding a bike. I've never encountered that one. Yeah, I mean, I think maybe it's not as trendy. I feel like a few years ago, it was super trendy to be like, oh, we're going to really go to the gym and work out imbalances. And so we're going to do everything that's not the prime movers of your sport. Yeah, actually, yeah, because I think that was the trend right before functional training about five, ten years ago. Yeah. Yeah, God, that was before my time as a Yeah, because I lifted a little bit back when I was doing martial arts, but it was really not a lot and not very well guided. I was not plugged into the internet in terms of strength training at the time. I cannot imagine what that looked like in the late 90s, early aughts. That must have been a... God, who can imagine? Anyway, a couple more left. Bodybuilding.com, how many days of the week? How many days in a week are there? Let's see. How much bar speed should be looking for in the big lifts for sprinting if already at a high weight? There is some research showing that the velocity of the lift can transfer well. And I used to be way more into this than I am now because while it... is fine training, for sure, looking for velocity-specific stuff. That's why one of the reasons that when I had Bill Renfro program in the force velocity chart in WKO5, I asked him to put the x-axis as meters per second and not RPM, because I wanted it specifically for this purpose to transfer to the gym, so I could see, okay, somebody's peak power is in this range, this is where we want to do our heavy lifts for Power Development, yada, yada. Honestly, it's not a bad way to go, but this is like a 1% thing. This is a marginal gain. And one of the things that I've learned over the years of coaching is why spend so much energy on marginal gains when there are macro gains to be made? And so... Well, and I think too... Yeah, this is like a periodization thing. So I would say like in the last like two months before your big race, like, okay, you can... Do some of this stuff. But it's not going to be like the thing that suddenly brings you from 1,500 watts to 2,500 watts for your sprint. Yeah. And with that too, I think it's more of a, I've always thought of the velocity thing is you want to hit some velocity or be close to some high velocity because it means more power. But you can kind of tell when reps get slow and grindy. And so, in real time, it can be nice to see that number and be like, yeah, that's motivating, yeah, I like it, which is one of the things I like about the barbell tracker. But I think if you don't want to put yourself in the place where you are trying to hit some arbitrary velocity number, and in order to do so, are going down to like 60 kilos in a back squat, when you could do 160. Right? Because you want to hit some big, big velocity number. Yeah. And actually, I think this is, this is one of those things where we can actually kind of break past our previous conceptions of what proper strength training should be. Because I, you know, it's like if, you know, one of the classic things is like power cleans, right? But if you can, if you can, And if you create more power in the bar by doing just a clean pull instead of a full clean where you rack it, then why not do that? Because if racking is your limiting point, then why do that if you can develop more power with heavier weights that you don't have to front rack, right? Because it looks cool. It looks cool. It looks cool as shit. But at the same time, most cyclists do not have the lat mobility. to do a proper front rack. And also the risks versus the rewards for this are like, I don't know, it's 10,000 billion trillion to like three in terms of risks versus rewards for most cyclists. Because, I mean, how many people do we know right now who are learning to Olympic lift and they've been at it for over a year and they're still learning the technique and still kind of getting it? Yeah. You can, potentially, like I said earlier, view that as a very long-term thing, but you can't let those long-term things also derail you from doing things now. Yeah. Yeah, and think about getting a good Olympic lifting coach. And if you're going to do it, dedicate some significant amount of time to it because you think it's going to pay off in the long run. Or you just want to do it because it's fun. And if you've got history doing this stuff, you know, by all means... Go for it. If I know somebody has done this stuff safely in the past, I'm just like, go for it, have fun, don't hurt yourself. And that's really kind of my guidance for that stuff. Because when we are actually thinking about power development, like, okay, yeah, we're going to program in some other stuff, we're going to program in derivatives, but we're not actually going to program in the actual, like, full Olympic clean and jerk or anything like that, because why? It's not going to get us much. So our last question. I think this is a really, really good question after we think about it for a second. Empirically, this is what it says. Thank you for noticing. Yes, we are empirical cycling. So empirically, after what pound squat one rep max do you see significantly diminishing returns for the sprint? Oof. Well, it should probably be also be slightly normalized by body weight, right? Like, if you are one of the smaller, I don't know, you know, female track sprinters, like, some of them don't have to be particularly heavy. So, you know, if they're squatting more than two times their body weight. Yeah, and they'll be like, what, 61, 62, 63 kilos sometimes? Yeah. You know, you're just, a 65 kilogram person's not gonna, who's not an Olympic weightlifter or a powerlifter is not gonna be repping like 180 kilogram squats. Which, you know, to be fair, there are a bunch of like female lighter weight, lighter bodyweight Olympic weightlifters who can do well over three times bodyweight squats, you know. But, you know, if you're a, but on the other hand, if you're a heavier male, more like 200 pounds, like, yeah, you're still, you're gonna have to squat two plus times your body weight? Like, eh, you know, I don't know. Yeah, maybe, if you're squatting, here's the thing, I remember when I first started really going ham on my squat, I think I was at my best for squatting, I think I was doing like just about 400 pounds, and My sprint didn't get any better from when my squat was like 315, which is like the bar plus three plates on each side. So it's not just a question of like at what percentage of your body weight will your sprint stop getting good. The question is, is it transferring to your sprint at all? Because when I was barely squatting like 200 pounds right when I got into the gym, I mean, You know, I guess that says I'm strong-ish, naturally. I'm not very strong. But like, I was, you know, I started out as repping sets of five with like 205, like day one or something like that. And so it didn't take me long to get to, you know, 300 pounds and my squat went, or my sprint power went up with this. But I was also doing a bunch of one leg stuff too. So there's your specificity. and for a little while, I was like, I'm just gonna make my squat better and I'm gonna get a lot stronger, it's gonna be awesome. So I mostly bailed on the single leg stuff and I really focused on my squat, brought it up a lot and my sprint didn't get any better. But when I started focusing more on the single leg stuff and, you know, using and thinking, okay, if my single leg stuff is kind of tapped out, I need to, you know, Bring Up My Bilateral Stuff, that I would go back to squat and deadlift and things like that. And so that's when my sprint really started to get good. Because it's not like, how much can you lift on two legs? My personal predictor for sprint power is like, what can you do on one leg? Let's talk about the bilateral deficit. I think we touched on this in probably two or three other episodes, but it's worth touching upon again right before we wrap up here, just so that people kind of get an idea of why we're talking about one versus two. Yeah, so bilateral deficit for people. And it's weird because you think, oh, maybe it's just some people. It happens in all people and in... Many different exercise modalities. So it's not just squats where if you do, but the bilateral deficit is where you see that you can lift more than 50% with one limb of what you can do with two limbs. So an example would be like, oh, I can bent over barbell row, 180 pounds, let's say, maybe 225 for like one rep. But I can go over and pick up a dumbbell and I can pick up a 100-pound dumbbell. and bent over dumbbell row that for like five reps. But I couldn't do, you know, 200 pounds for five reps with a barbell with two arms. Right. So, like, let's bring this into squats. So, like, if you can squat 200 pounds, let's say, don't run one rep max test this, but let's say you could one rep max 200 pounds. And you're like, all right, what can I do on one leg? And you test your one leg and it's... 100 pounds, you have zero bilateral deficit. The deficit, yeah, it's like if you can single leg squat 135 pounds, but you can only two leg squat 200 pounds, there's your deficit, because it should be, I should be able to squat 270 on two legs, because I can do 135 on one, but in reality, that's not the case. So that's where the difference really comes in, is because I remember when I could squat, 400 pounds on two legs. My one leg was like 200 pounds. And my best sprints were when I could single leg squat 275. That was my one rep max on my single leg squat. And I tested that and the next day, I tested that and my one rep max deadlift, which was like mid 500 something. And then the next day I went out and I snapped off a 2186 swat sprint, 2186. was my peak power. Nice. So that, for me, at least, is a great predictor of my sprint power. But, you know, if you go and only work on your single leg stuff, I found that at one point, it just taps out and there's not much you can do to improve it until you really start doing the bilateral stuff again because just so much stuff on one leg, actually, there's actually a fair amount of injury risk when you do, if you were going to do, like, let's say, Hypertrophy work. Like, let's say you're going to go into the gym, you're going to do like six to seven sets in the legs of like glute and quads and hamstring focus just on one leg only. First of all, you are doubling the amount of sets you are doing by having two legs instead of like doing them both at the same time. So that adds time and energy and everything. There's also the stabilizing muscles that also get worked and they can get stronger over time, but like you really don't want to push that stuff. So bilateral stuff is generally safer to really hammer with and then you can kind of tweak in the one rep max stuff. So like, so for both me and you actually, I remember our bilateral deficit, like our single leg squats were like something like 75% of what we could do on two legs was like about the max for our bilateral deficit. Yeah, for sure. And I remember, you know, I was surprised with this too, the first time I experienced it, like, that's weird. Like, because it's, it's a total mindfuck when you start doing it and really hammering that single leg stuff and you're like, this, there's something wrong, you know? And you, and, and you would hope that you would be able to switch right, right back to two leg stuff and get, get back to zero deficit, like, oh, there must be, must be a lot stronger, like, no, not really, like. Yeah. Well, this is where our initial stuff on, like, belts and fatigue comes in, and axial loading, because when you are – because all that extra neural drive goes somewhere. Like, it's – you know, it's like if you're having to think about – Like we talked about this in the last episode, if you have to think about being on a 45 degree banking for the first time and you're standing up to sprint, you're not thinking about, I got to put out the most amount of power I can to the pedals. You're thinking about, oh God, I'm going to fall off. I'm at 45 degrees to the earth right now. What is wrong? And then you get used to it and okay, cool, it becomes natural. All right, now I can really hammer. But the same thing happens kind of with lifting where you don't have literally enough brain power. to power your two legs at the same time the same way you do with one leg where you can take more than half of your brain and shove it into that one leg. I suppose that's how it works. I'm not entirely sure. I think that's the potential mechanism I heard on a paper once. The old saying of we only use 10% of our brain or whatever is stupid. Well, yeah, well, because it's bullshit, but that's not the point. Although, there are some people at a certain national governing body who I think only use 10% of their brains. They shall remain nameless, but shout out if you're one of the OGs dealing with these folks. And I know they're trying. God knows they try. Anyway, so, do we have any other thoughts before we end on that weird note? Yeah. I think that never has that has like I think with especially with social media and stuff like lifting and things like that it definitely feels more approachable and I think just culturally there's been a lot more acceptance and I think partially maybe even due to the surge in popularity of things like CrossFit gym being able to go to the gym having gyms in your area that are not just Planet Fitnesses has never been more accessible, and so it seems like a good time to take advantage of it, you know? It's no longer just some dark garage with a bunch of squat racks in it, and it smells bad. Which, to be fair, if you like that kind of gym, more power to you, you know? Yeah, I mean, I appreciate a gym that's a stripped-down essence. I mean, like, my gym in the garage is... It's not a gym. It's literally a squat rack and a barbell and a trap bar. But it's dark in there. It's quiet. I don't have any frills. It's also a rental, so I don't want to put too many holes in the walls or anything like that. But yeah, I appreciate a place where you can just get in, get right down to work and get out. And it's like all the frills and all this stuff, that is great for most people, but it's really not what I'm looking for. So yeah, I think... But, you know, those gyms certainly do exist, and they're nice, and if you like those amenities, they're actually awesome. They tend to cost a little bit more, but if you really like having a smoothie bar in your gym, there are some gyms with some great smoothie bars. Peanut butter smoothie, oh my god, please, yes. I'll have two, thanks. 100 grams of protein, I only need 40? Okay, I'll take 100. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so, all right, so I hope that was helpful, because I know a lot of people out there have been asking me a lot of lifting questions lately. It seems like a lot of people are still out there lifting, so I wanted to do something special for you, and also because I thought, I generally thought we had not done this before, but I came up with a whole bunch of new stuff because, well, that's just how this works. And actually, I have in the works a whole bunch of episodes on mistakes that we see, like beginner cyclists making, in terms of their training plans. and intermediate and advanced stuff. So we've got some stuff in the pipeline for that kind of stuff. If you have any other ideas on stuff that you'd like to see where we talk about our coaching experience and our training experience and kind of knock down, you know, kind of discuss and knock down some and fix or discuss our fixes for some of the mistakes that we... seem to make, or people seem to make, or generally speaking, anything like that, or you get any more myths, we got a bunch of myths in the can, but also if you want to submit more, please reach out to empiricalcycling at gmail.com, or just hit me up in the Instagram DMs and be like, hey, this is a good episode I want to hear, or whatever. Please send me those requests. And if you are looking for a coach, we are coaching people. We are taking on new clients all the time, and we are also doing consultations. So if you are cool coaching yourself, or you just want to bounce some ideas off somebody, or kind of help periodize your season, or figure out what went wrong, or you want to discuss periodizing lifting and stuff like that, or develop a specific lifting plan for you, well, we're not going to write you a plan, but we're going to give you all the tools that you need to plan it yourself because That is really what we are all about, is individualizing. So if you want to talk about that, shoot me an email, empiricalcycling at gmail.com, and we will help teach you the tools that we use to plan and adjust training successfully. Because obviously, what's that old saying? Like, no plan of not getting punched in the face works until you get punched in the face. I forgot the quote. I'm exhausted. All right. So thanks everybody, if you want to share the podcast, if you liked it, please share it, we really appreciate all of that, and if you want to donate, empiricalcycling.com slash donate, because we have no advertisers, nor ever will we at this rate, because my asks are ridiculous, because I want to keep the advertisers out, so we can just say whatever we want, and yeah, yeah, oh yeah, if you want to ask any questions, follow me on Instagram at empiricalcycling, and if you have any other questions, you know how to get in touch with it, so we will see you all next time, and don't get hurt in the gym. P-R-E-R baby