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.
