Lifting Heavy During Cycling Race Season? When I Shift My Lifting During Cycling Training

Published: Feb. 20, 2021, 9:53 a.m.

This Question came in regarding lifting heavy during the cycling race season: Can I pick your brain? Been trying the lift heavy regiment (GZCLP style) 2x per week. I’m progressing out of base into build phase and starting to see some C and B races on the calendar. I don’t think I really want to be continuing to add weight on the bar while also ramping up the intensity on the bike. Not confident I can recover from that much work. Do you shift to “maintenance” lifting in season? If so what does that session look like compared to your usual progression? My gut tells me to cut my two sessions to one per week, warm up into 1 or 2 sets of 3 at my most recent 5x3 weight. And just do that with all my T1 T2 lifts in a single session. Trying to keep strain low while telling the muscles not to forget the weight. Any thoughts you can offer would make my month. Hope to hit the start line with you someday soon. Thanks! Let's talk about lifting heavy and how to balance making gains in the gym, with hitting high performance on the bike. Remember, the science is not definitive on a lot of this, so use your best judgement on how you feel, and are you getting faster and stronger? If not, try something else. For example: I was getting really high watts for 1-2 efforts after lifting heavy, HOWEVER, the end of my interval sessions were struggling. So, I moved these efforts to endurance days, and I'm still hitting the high watts BUT also being able to do them for longer; this is important to me as a road and gravel racer. You have to understand why YOU are training and what YOUR goals are. Brendan@EVOQ.BIKE https://youtu.be/s4Yh0ZBF4U8