How to build maximum strength?

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger“: this obvious truth also applies to muscular strength, one of the components of power and thus pedaling efficiency. Let’s see what maximal strength is, its relevance for cycling, and especially how to improve it.

By Guillaume Judas – Photos: Scott, PEdALED, Pixabay, commons.wikipedia / DR

A cyclist’s power is like a car’s. It determines their efficiency and thus their speed (instantaneous or average, or over a given time, or their acceleration capabilities), and it depends on their natural physical abilities and the quality of their training. Cardiovascular and muscular capacities come into play.

A cyclist’s power depends on their musculature and cardiovascular system.

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Muscle strength – those directly involved in the pedaling motion, but also those used to maintain posture on the bike – is one of the components of power. Simply put, power is muscular strength multiplied by the speed of movement. One does not go without the other to produce power. Muscles are used to push the pedals, and breath and cardio are used to turn them at a good cadence.

What is max strength?

When we talk about strength in cycling, we first think of a form of resistance that induces muscular tensions identical to those encountered during sustained efforts, such as time trials or climbing hills. This submaximal strength or strength endurance, as it’s called, is worked by pushing a big gear on the flats or in the hills, adopting a lower pedaling cadence than you would normally. The idea is to solicit the muscles to strengthen them, to emphasize the strength component in power production, and especially to prepare muscles and tendons for the real demands they will encounter during more intense efforts, when the pedaling cadence will be more normal but the intensity more engaged. If you ride mainly on flat or moderately hilly terrain all year round, strength endurance training will be very useful before riding in the mountains, for example, because you can quickly find yourself under pressure for a good hour without much possibility of muscular relaxation during a climb. With the associated adaptation problems.

Whatever the cycling activity, you need strength to move forward.

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Maximal strength, on the other hand, is the ability of muscles to produce the maximum amount of force in a short instant. Like a weightlifter trying to lift the heaviest possible load. It involves even the deepest muscle fibers and their coordination. It requires recruiting more motor units (connection between neurons and muscles). But contrary to popular belief, while a large muscle certainly has a lot of strength, maximal strength training does not necessarily make it grow.

Strength reserve

A priori then, when practicing endurance sports such as cycling, triathlon, or running, maximal strength is useless since performance is achieved over the long term. But an effort is rarely totally linear, especially on a bike. A road is rarely perfectly straight and perfectly flat. You have to accelerate after turns, or maintain pace on false flats or small hills. And sometimes you also have to face gusts of wind. Not to mention specific situations in competition where a brief and very intense effort is necessary, such as a start, launching a sprint, staying on wheels in a peloton after an acceleration or an attack: a brutal acceleration for a few seconds that occurs in the middle of an endurance effort.

Overcoming short difficulties requires a reserve of maximal strength.

You then understand the benefit of having a certain reserve of muscular strength, which in these critical situations allows you to briefly increase your power output. High maximal strength facilitates accelerations and surges and gives you leeway during more prolonged efforts, because your muscles are capable of withstanding even greater stresses. This is why maximal strength should be regularly integrated into your training, even if you shouldn’t neglect the fact that regular rides on varied courses and simply responding to the terrain already contribute to maximal strength training. Because on the road, you always have to accelerate or overcome false flats.

How to gain maximal strength?

Beyond a natural resistance to terrain or weather conditions, two types of training help to progress in this area.

The best known is, of course, weight training in the gym, using machines and exercises designed to work the legs. We’re talking about the leg press, squat, leg curl, etc.

Well-structured, a weight training session can be very effective.

To gain strength, you first need to know the maximum load you can lift in a single repetition. This test is performed after a good warm-up, and especially after four or five average weight training sessions where you have become accustomed to the technical movement and the simple activation of the muscles on all machines will have already acted as a small muscle strengthening. From this maximal strength test, you will retain 85% of the load, and you will use this value to perform sets of 3 to 5 fairly dynamic repetitions per machine. Allow 2 to 3 minutes of recovery between each repetition (4 to 5 per machine), which forces you to concentrate on only a few exercises. At the end of the session, twenty minutes of exercise bike or better, indoor trainer with a small gear, will allow you to maintain the muscle coordination specific to cycling. The ideal is of course to perform this type of session in winter, but a weekly reminder session during the season can also be considered. After a few weeks of this regimen, another maximal load test on one repetition should show some progress. And when combined with good road training, the gain in watts on a short sprint should also be noticeable. For example, we observed a gain of 40 watts for a 62 kg rider over a few seconds in a sprint after three months of specific gym work.

Simpler is maximal strength training directly on the bike. Several variations exist, but the idea is always to perform a maximal intensity start for about 7 seconds. Some choose standing starts with a medium gear, others prefer “all the way to the right” but with a little momentum. This latter solution has the advantage of forcing you to change your lead leg and not always start the first pedal stroke on the same side. For example, you can imagine performing a sharp start with a very large gear for 7 seconds, then maintaining the same gear by spinning without forcing until the next beep of your stopwatch. This kind of session generates little fatigue and leaves few traces. You mainly feel a little nervous fatigue at the end of the session, because the starts force you to mobilize completely for a short period of time, while remaining stable and in line on the bike. It’s an easy training to do, and it can be done all year round. And more particularly after long periods of base training, and especially at the end of winter when returning from training camps, to regain muscle tone. Its only drawback is that it is difficult to determine the exact benefits, since the conditions are fluctuating unlike inside a weight room and a dedicated machine, you cannot precisely measure the gain in strength after a few sessions. The fact remains that in terms of sensations, you should quickly feel the benefits on the road, whether you are a competitor or a recreational cyclist, road cyclist or triathlete.

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