Combining zone 2 and strength training?

It’s great to see you’re working on optimizing your schedule to fit in both strength training and cycling. Combining a strength workout in the morning with a zone 2 ride in the evening can be an effective strategy, especially since the adaptations from zone 2 riding are different from strength training.

Doing a HIIT session after a leg day might not be ideal, as you mentioned, but incorporating zone 2 rides should be less taxing on your legs and could actually aid in recovery.

Since you’re already doing hypertrophic strength workouts, you might consider adding more zone 2 rides to your schedule, especially on days when you’re doing leg strength training. This could help enhance your endurance without compromising your strength gains.

By the way, if you’re interested in learning more about hypertrophy training, RP Strength has a comprehensive guide that covers everything you need to know about structuring your training for muscle growth. You can check it out here: Complete Hypertrophy Training Guide

Feel free to share any other ideas or strategies you’re considering!

Ah, Dr. Mike … very knowledgable, but his information is always extremely limited to the 100% hypertrophy crowd (e.g. his dislike for exercises that include instability).

As for me, since the last time I posted here a year ago, I’m just “keeping the plates spinning”. I have no fixed schedule (every time I try to make one something comes up and it breaks down within 5 days) so I just go by feeling doing 1 or 2 workouts every day. This is also weather dependent as I have done everything in my powers to avoid indoor rides (and this during the wettest last 6 months we had since 1905!). In 2023 I did more rides/workouts than there are days in the year, so I’m keeping busy :smiley:

I did nearly zero structured training the last 6 months. My only goal was to get on the bike 3 times a week outside in the horrible period of the year. From October to let’s say end of February 2-3.5 hours zone 2 rides (a lot of riding in the dark on wet roads. Long live full mud guards and waterproof winter clothing). Then I started increasing intensity and now I’m just doing 2-4h rides with whatever intensity I feel like doing that day, with quite a bit of elevation. Sometimes it’s zone 2-3, sometimes I destroy myself on the uphill because I want to, and sometimes I have to destroy myself because the hills are extremely steep and I don’t have a choice.

I’m planning to incorporate some VO2 max work outside now. Again, no structured training but I can guesstimate how much time I spend in VO2Max and just hammer some uphills until I have accumulated enough fatigue. Pretty sure that using Wahoo SYSTM is more efficient, but outdoors like this is a lot more fun (and that’s why we ride, no?). I just need to make sure those rides are shorter so I can go all out and not suffer for 2 hours after destroying my legs in the first hour. I presume the lack of high intensity work over winter has made my Garmin Edge show a lower VO2Max than I had last October, although I don’t feel any slower.

On the strength side, as I said. Spinning plates. Z2 rides “do not count” in my plan, so I just go to the gym and do my thing (especially upper body is 100% independent), but now I’m upping the intensity it’s getting hard to incorporate leg training, even once a week, because I sometimes feel my legs need to rest to be good to go on the bike again, after 3 consecutive days of riding, but this is where trouble begins. 3 days of riding + 1 day off = 4 days. So on day 5 you can finally hit legs in the gym, but you’re not going to hit them again on day 7, because you still want to ride the bike if the weather is good, so 2 leg days a week becomes problematic.
In theory you could perfectly space out the bike days to minimize this problem, but outdoor riding is king and where I live the weather sometimes dictates the schedule (e.g. sun mo/tu/we, and rain the rest of the week, well, then we’re not taking Wednesday off).