Old habits die hard!

There are certain aspects of cycling tradition that I love. But when it comes to training and/or nutrition I am all for modern methods and think some people need to be dragged into the 21st century. I experienced this first hand a few weeks ago.
I was down at Herne Hill velodrome waiting to borrow a bike for my track session. A friend and I were discussing training and the gym. We were talking about squats when a guy overheard us and yelled "no no no lads! stay away from the weights! if you want to get strong find a steep hill and cycle up it 10+ times!!"
I laughed and nodded, it was Saturday morning and I didn't feel like getting on my high horse just yet. However I came very close when as we were leaving the same guy yelled across the car park "AND STAY AWAY FROM THOSE WEIGHTS!" 
This got me thinking, do many cyclists still think this?
I don't confess to know everything, far from it in fact, but one thing I do know is that no matter how many times you cycle up a hill it won't make you stronger! It will improve your muscular endurance but not your strength.
I recently picked up on a post on Facebook where a guy wrote that cyclists seem to neglect the importance of all the different muscle fibre types. I think this kind of ties in with the old school idea of hills make you strong. Or is it just a misunderstanding of what strength actually is.

Strength is the maximum force you exert against a given resistance.

Strength is at the basis of all sports to a greater or lesser extent. Obviously for someone competing in World's Strongest Man, strength is of more importance than say a tennis player.
To be cycling specific, strength will be of more importance to a sprint track cyclist than to a GC road cyclist. However that doesn't mean that a portion of the GC guy's winter training won't be strength training because it will.
A muscle is made up of 3 fibre types, the fast twitch which as the name suggests contract quickly and powerfully but tire quickly. The slow twitch which are the opposite, and ones in between that can become more fast or slow depending on our training regime.
Cycling is a sport that uses all 3 fibre types and therefore all types should be trained.
So why won't cycling up a hill make you stronger? because it's the wrong training stimulus. Strength is the maximum force you exert, it requires the firing of fast twitch fibres and therefore can only be performed a few times. Endurance is an action repeated over a long period of time therefore a large force cannot be exerted and requires the firing of the slow twitch fibres.

Muscular endurance is a combination of strength AND endurance.

So thinking of a hill, lets say Yorks hill in Kent which is short and bloody steep, it will take you around 5 minutes to ride up it. A repeated effort of 5 minutes will not stimulate the central nervous system to increase motor unit  recruitment. What it will do is improve those middle fibre's ability to fire and eventually the hill will become easier or more accurately you will be able to go up it faster. That is put very very simply but I didn't want to delve into biochemistry I wanted to point out that hill training is not strength training.

Just to be perfectly clear I'm not slagging off repeated climbs, its a great way to get some interval training in and to increase your muscular endurance which IS more important than maximum strength. But strength training must come first otherwise you're missing a piece of the Strength + Endurance puzzle.

My review of the Armstrong Lie

As with most cycling fans in the U.K I'd been waiting to watch this film for a while. Having been totally drawn in with 7 Deadly sins and The Secret Race, I couldn't wait to hear Lance's side of the story!
I had been really disappointed with his Oprah show, so much so I didn't even bother watching the second part. I wanted him to come completely clean tell us everything he did and how he did it. Unfortunately I think he held a LOT back.
So with this film I expected to learn a lot more of the dirty goings on that had occurred in the "wild west" days of pro cycling.
However again I was disappointed! There was nothing new regarding his cheating that I hadn't already seen/read. In the interviews with Lance you can still see he's trying to salvage something of his "legacy" and that deep down he still doesn't really think he did that much wrong!

One thing that really gets on my wick and comes from the man himself as well as the people who are still trying to defend him, is this whole nonsense of "it was a level playing field". No Armstrong wasn't the first (or last) cyclist to dope and yes plenty of other cyclists in that era were on all sorts too. But it was never a level playing field. Only the richest teams/cyclists could afford the "best" doctors and therefore the best drugs. Plus some riders responded better than others to the drugs, EPO in particular.
The film only touches briefly on this subject. I really wanted the film maker to give Lance a bit of a grilling in regards to that, especially when at the end of the film he has the front to say "people will look back and say yeah he won those tours"! If that doesn't show someone who was sorry they got caught and not actually sorry for what they did then I don't know what will.

My main problem with Armstrong and why I can never forgive him and what sets him apart from other doped cyclists, for example, David Millar, is the Godfather like control he had over the sport at that time. This film picks this up quite well, you really get the sense of how the Armstrong machine just crushed anyone who stood in their way. It's a shame most of the footage is from the 2009 version of Lance not the '99 - '05 version where I think you would get a lot more of an insight into his control and bullying.

Maybe one day the extent of his control and the extent of the corruption within the UCI will come to light but I cant imagine it will happen any time soon.

To sum this film up I'm going to quote my what girlfriend said about it. "Good but I thought it would be jucier"!