I don’t incorporate gym strength work into my triathlon training plan so am trying to include high torque workouts in my base training to target cycling specific strength!
I have so far tackled, Power Station, G.O.A.T and I.Boswell: Strength Endurance.
Are there any other workouts with similar targets? It’s a shame “Strength” isn’t one of the filter training categories!
There is also
Some of the On Location rides also have some low cadence work, but it’s not so easy to track down. One is OL Portugal: Nazaré to Foz de Arelho.
Agreed. You can at least search on keywords in the titles, so I found the above list by searching on ‘strength’ and ‘torque’.
For this purpose, I’ll sometimes modify a workout by doing higher power intervals at a low cadence, sometimes standing, instead of the instructed cadence. On longer workouts, it also gives my butt a rest.
Throw in “standing starts” once a week
Outside the box thinking which seems so simple I don’t know why it didn’t cross my mind! Thanks
For anyone who is interested there is also some lower cadence (75rpm) work at the end of each Round in Fight Club!
Not quite Boswell and his savage 55rpm reps though!
I found another Low Cadence 55-60rpm strength reps workout …
On Location: Catalunya Costa Bravo Coastline
You can take any threshold interval workout and ride it at 60rpm?
Also tbh I think strength work on the bike will be more efficient than strength work in the gym, if the goal is to push more watts. If you focus on pure strength in the gym (e.g. low reps, high effort, long recovery) you are working anaerobically. That’s not going to help you much when you want to push more watts on an extremely steep climb for a couple of minutes.
I think (but that’s pure speculation, maybe some coaches can chime in) that you’re better off doing hypertrophy work in the gym (mass building in the legs) and complement this with strength training on the bike (aka low cadence work) as the hypertrophy work will give you bigger muscle fibers to work with, and the bike work will learn your body to use those extra fibers more efficiently in longer durations.
Purely doing longer duration squats (20-30 reps) still is nothing compared to a multi-minute steep climb on the bike. I have a hard time imaging how those 20 reps is going to help you push for 4 minutes on the bike as your squat training set will take 1 minute max.
I don’t want to say strength work is useless for general conditioning and health, but I don’t think it translates to better performance on the bike as much as some might think.
@TheBelgian of course I can simply reduce cadence on any workout but sometimes it’s preferable to follow the prescribed workout and I was finding it tricky to pinpoint “strength” workouts!
I suspect the “climbing” filter is the way forward as the lower cadence workouts I’ve found are all contained within.
Can anyone in the know confirm the designated climbing workouts have lower cadence strength based sections?