The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an Annual Strength Training Plan (#289)

• CTS • Season 6 • Episode 289

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OVERVIEW
Endurance athletes are accustomed to building Annual Training Plans for the phases of their sport-specific training, but are less familiar with building annual training plans for strength training.  If this is you, Episode 289 of "The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast" features Coach Adam Pulford taking you through the steps of creating and managing your annual strength training plan. He breaks it down for novices/beginners, cyclists who are familiar/experienced in the gym, and athletes who do not have access to gym facilities. He also reveals what not to do in various parts of the season. 

TOPICS COVERED

  • Three types of strength training for cyclists:
    • Novice/Beginner
    • Advanced, for Endurance Performance with Gym
    • Advanced, Endurance Performance, Limited Gym Equipment
  • Strength training phases with recommended set and rep ranges
  • Recommended strength exercise categories
  • Why cyclists shouldn't get stuck in a hypertrophy phase
  • What not to do when planning strength training as a cyclist

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HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Coaches and experts in the field to provide you with practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. So I wanted to make a separate episode for that. If you missed last week's episode, be sure to go back and listen to that first or at some point, as we'll be using some resources and concepts from that for today's show. Additionally, I ended last week's show with a message that we as athletes and as humans tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. This leads to thinking that one training session or some epic ride will someday make us. But it won't. That's not how training works. It's consistency over time of doing hard work, proper rest, and effective training with recovery habits that will deliver results in the long run. This is the reason why you want to spend time now in January getting organized and plan out the season so you keep the big picture in mind and you stay the course for achieving your goals throughout the season, especially when it comes to adding strength training into the overall plan. So let's look at how best to do that now. So there's really like three ways or three scenarios that I'm going to provide to you today to structure and organize strength training throughout a year. And it's really, number one, if you're a novice or a beginner, number two will be you're advanced or somewhat advanced in strength training, and you have endurance performance as the goal, and you have uh a full-on gym and gym equipment. The third scenario is you're advanced, you have good knowledge of what you're doing, your endurance performance focused, but you have limited or no gym equipment. Okay. So let's look at how you can deploy each of these strategies along with a general endurance periodization plan. The one that I went over last week, by the way, and I'll remind you that this is the place to start. It's high-level, it's a roadmap. Further learning is needed to put in all the specifics in there about the daily structured routines and in exercises. Okay. But I'll provide you with a general framework as well as uh provide some good resources later on in our landing page, and I'll and I'll mention them um throughout the episode today. So let me first share this document with you. This is the same document that I shared last week, where it's looking at the general periodization concepts for endurance training, uh cycling in particular. Uh, but what I did was I added a column for strength training that you see down here below. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna walk you through first the novice beginner and then the advanced with gym equipment and then the advanced uh with no gym equipment. Okay. First and foremost, novice beginner, how do you identify with that? Really, I mean, I mean it's as simple as have you done strength training before? If no, you're a novice beginner. Also, if you haven't done strength training in quite some time, that's where I would say start as the the novice or beginner because the movement patterns and strength stuff that we're going to talk about, you need time to build that up in your system. Okay. I would default to the novice beginner or the lower, lower rung on the ladder if you are in doubt or have any question. Okay. So that's why I'm I'm starting with this novice and beginner. The final note to this, and I've said this on my podcast before: endurance athletes were usually just like feeble athletes when it comes to strength and force production. Not all of us, but oftentimes we are, especially the ultra endurance athletes, because we don't spend a ton of time off of our bike. Same thing with like uh swimming and things like this, where we're having to resist a ton of force against gravity, like other team sports, athletes, wrestling, football, all these kind of running and jumping sort of sports. Okay. So that's why I say that we're a little feeble. Okay, but uh a little bit goes a long way when it comes to strength training in endurance sport. Okay, so let's start with novice or beginner, how I would structure it. And uh a lot of the terminology, methodology is what we use here at CTS as, and we're we adopted that from the NASM or the National Academy of Sports Medicine. So uh when it comes to the puritization of the strength training concepts, that's really where that is coming from. And I've linked to the NASM in our show notes as well as our landing page. Okay, so the first one to two months, this would be like in your base and build phase of the general puritization. We would call this foundation stabilization, and I like to call it coordination, where we're spending time mostly on body weight-based exercises, we're movement focused, and we have limited equipment at first. Okay, even if you have a full-on uh gym at your disposal, we're just gonna limit the equipment because we don't need it. The whole goal is to get moving well, move the body well off of the bike, okay. It's kind of boring. I mean, it can be, right? Or it can be amazing, just depends on how you look at it. Because when it comes to the quality of movement, how you move, when I'm bringing someone through this, within a couple of weeks, they're just like, man, I feel better. Even though their VO2 max is not going up, their sprint power is not going up, but it's just like I feel better, I move better, I stand better, think posture, think I can do a deep lunge without any creaky hips, that sort of thing. Okay. So if you're a novice or a beginner, we're actually gonna spend several months there uh getting really good at it. Okay. Next, as we move on to the build phases or a late base phase in the general periodization or uh the first build phase, we go into what's called movement mastery. Okay, this is where we get into some strength endurance, and we're gonna spend a couple months there. Okay. What this looks like is if you have gym access, um you're gonna be starting in on the main lifts, main lifts, main movements, main exercises. What I talk about there is the squat, hinge, lunge, push, pull, and carry. Okay, look those up for more, but that would be at the core, the core concepts of the exercises in the gym or at your home gym that you'll be doing. Okay, the reps are low to moderate, but overall the effort is also moderate. We're we're spending time like loading the body in a medium way, okay? We're not gonna, I don't want to overdo it at this point, especially with novice or beginner, but I want to get them loaded and then moving well with load. Whereas the first phase of this was just moving well with body weight, maybe some bands and this type of thing. But here we start to load the body. Um, it's medium because I'm gonna be careful too, because we're ramping up the sport volume or the cycling volume, the endurance volume at this time. So I'm gonna tread uh carefully and I'm gonna go uh slowly with this, and I'm getting feedback from them while we're doing it. Okay. You want to focus on good form and quality of movement, especially with those main exercises or the main movements. This is where honestly, if you're a novice or beginner, probably get um a personal trainer for I don't know, three or four sessions just to kind of make sure that your form is good and you're getting some real-time feedback. Even as a remote-based coach, I think that there's definitely high value in in-person coaching and training uh from various coaches uh that that an athlete, you, the listener, can value from when it comes to um uh some of the more skill and technique-based stuff that happens a lot in strength training. Um, and we also talk about that when it comes to like mountain bike skills, sprint training, all this kind of stuff on the bike. There's just in-person stuff that can be really valuable. And this is where this this period, especially for a novice beginner, can be very good to have some uh eyes on and hands on there. The next one to two months, we're getting into the peak and performance side of things for the general periodization or in the cycling world uh for your main sport. This is what we call the maintenance and transfer phase. We want to maintain the gains that we've established over the past several months, and we don't want to add a ton more strain or stress to the system. And so, what this will then look like is probably like one to two times per week of strength training in very modest, moderate, movement-based body weight things again. So we're just maintaining here. Whereas the movement mastery, this could be two to three times per week and the foundation stabilization coordination two-ish to three times a week as well. So we're just gonna decrease the volume of sessions, decrease the volume of time. Oh, and by the way, uh the session duration here is maybe 30 to 45 minutes and 30 to 60 minutes, kind of depending on the recovery um uh periods that you have between the sets and reps here. And I and I'm kind of backtracking here, but uh the movement mastery um uh phase, we might be doing two to three, maybe four sets if you have a gym, but two to three sets, and here with the strength endurance, the rep range will go up to anywhere between like uh six to eight, maybe ten, depending on what we're what we're doing there. In the foundation stabilization coordination phase, the the reps will increase, but we're it's really about practicing and end moving well. So you're not loaded, so we're not causing a lot of strain to the system. And this is where the way I do it anyway, is I uh I'll start with a rep range of perhaps you know eight to ten. And it may scale up or scale down depending on the actual exercise itself. Here we start to load, so we bring uh reps down a little bit as the intensity builds, and then the maintenance and transfer phase uh somewhere between four to eight reps total, uh moderate load. And like I said, we really want our sport training to shine through there as we focus on the main events. We'll then go into uh transition mode and uh last week's episode I did talk about having a mid-season break. I don't think you need to be doing much here, especially in the gym, right? We take a week off from training, uh, and and then maybe we just go some endurance and you do some core work, but that's really what it looks like. Finally, you'll notice I didn't even um you know talk about going super heavy or uh or like a uh a heavy load with a novice and beginner. That phase is called the strength development phase or max strength. I might hit that, but I might not with somebody who is a beginner and hasn't done strength training in a while for their first season and doing it. I may just repeat the movement mastery um phase right here and then go into a maintenance and transfer phase when we're talking about the the build peak and performance time period for that second peak of the season. Okay, so if you're listening, if you're listening to this only, uh I do want to remind you I've I've got a visual showing here on YouTube, and it's really useful um to be looking at that as I'm talking about it. Okay. Finally, we cap the year off with a transition and off season, and that's where we get out of the gym a little bit, and then we actually will start um in with a loaded phase at some. And that's where we again uh decrease training, we take a week off again. We're not doing too much on the bike, we're not doing too much in the gym. And um, I can and in the next phase, I'll talk to you about how um you can take that first year as a beginner and then start to work as an advanced. Now, let's talk about if you have some good experience in the gym, you consider yourself advanced, or you've done a couple years of strength training. Now let's talk about you. Let's talk about how to handle that, how to structure it, how to plan for it. For everybody, especially after a transition phase or like end of the season, I always encourage everyone and for the people I coach, I encourage them and prescribe for them to take this phase, which is called foundation stabilization. It's two to three weeks back of kind of what I described with where to begin with the novice and beginner. It's a lot of reorientation sort of movement, okay? Uh, body weight-based and just getting the body to move again. It's meant to get the neuromuscular system as well as the muscles ready to do the next phases of training. Okay. Big thing here, don't just jump back into heavy squats or deadlifts like after the season because you're like, man, I just want to get back to it. No, no, no. Take two to three weeks of like light-loaded movement so that the legs, the hips, the the everything is ready to start to load and get strong. Okay. Now that next phase, then, depending on the athlete, okay. There are some athletes that have they're very advanced and they have a lot of time in the gym and they're very consistent. I'll I might go from foundation stabilization basically into the strength development and max strength. However, most of them, I would say I spend three to four weeks in this movement mastery phase where it is um medium. Okay, but I don't for an endurance athlete, this medium training is not where I spend a ton of time. What do I mean by medium? Rate of perceived efforts of seven to eight out of ten, rep ranges of eight to twelve out of ten. You may have uh heard of the word hypertrophy, okay? Um, that means muscle growth, and uh it's really where we like load the body in the gym with a higher volume and higher repetitions and higher load or weight. Okay. For a lot of team sports athletes, for bodybuilders, and a lot of we spend a lot of time there. For an endurance athlete, you don't need to spend a lot of time there. However, uh two, three weeks of that just to get ready for the strength development is certainly ideal or is certainly good, in my opinion, especially in the base phase where uh we may just have you know high volume, low intensity going on, and we're not doing too many intervals or things like this. Okay, but this is the asterisk, and I'll give you a reminder of this later. You don't want to spend a ton of time there in the hypertrophy or like movement strength endurance phase simply because we get enough of that in our sport. Okay, we get enough training on the bike. Now, as we move to the really important stuff, this is uh pretty popular right now, the strength development and max strength phase. And I spend a lot of time here with my advanced um with my advanced gym athletes who are focused on performance. What this looks like, this is kind of the tail end of base, the beginning of build, and uh the the overall goal here is heavy load, okay. Lower reps, uh quite a few sets. The sessions should be two to three times per week, 45 to 60 minutes at tops for the duration of the session. And uh, like I said, the reps are low, two to five typically. Uh sets can be anywhere between three and five, maybe two and five, depending on if it's an auxiliary lift or something like this. But three to five sets, two to five reps, longer rest periods between two to four minutes, depending on the actual movement or lift itself. And the main movements here again, I'll remind you squat, hinge, lunge, push, pull, carry. We're talking pull-ups, back squats, um uh body or uh weighted lunges, maybe overhead, uh split squats, Bulgarian squat, split squats, things like this. Okay, so like advanced movements with load. And I spend uh like I said, depending on the athlete, uh two to three months uh in this phase, and that goes up to this uh into the peak and perform time period, and that's where I transition quickly to the maintenance and transfer phases, where again, general concept is to simply reduce the sessions down to one or maybe two per week. Whereas this was two to three times per week, this is two to three times per week, this is two or three times per week. Because there's a whiplash effect, there's a delay effect. All the gains I've made here will be with us for six to eight weeks, especially if we do a good job at maintaining it. So the whole theory here is to build get really strong and have a high force output so that it's here with us when we get into the race phases. And there's carryover here, okay. So when you're if you're looking at the document, there's a little bit of carryover there. Um, I don't always bring this, you know, right up to the perform phase. It's kind of somewhere in this peak phase. Um, but that's a general concept is to get really strong and then capitalize on that as we uh it let our cycling performance shine through with the maintenance and transfer phase. Now, as I bring training load down on the bike, I might keep some core work in there, just some general movement during the transition phase to help them feel good and keep good habits. Okay, that's why I put the main maintenance and transfer phase all the way through the transition phase. And then I go back into a strength development, max strength phase, maintenance and transfer phase going into that peak and race time period. Um, and this is just kind of boot up to make sure that the this wave or whiplash effect of strength enforced development, we get booted back up. Okay, we top it off, so to speak. And then we spend a lot of time, a lot of time, you know, latter part of the season in this like maintenance and transfer phase, and then finally uh transition and off-season. And it's really important. It's really important to take that off season, kind of reset it all. And I tell everybody to get out of the gym and just do less, you know, recover, reset, um, and you know, enjoy that the time away, maybe enjoy the holidays, and we'll get back to it in the in the following season. So now finally, I'm I won't go super deep uh into detail on this one. I will give you good examples of this, but this is actually probably the majority of how I coach uh athletes is uh because I I have people who uh I have athletes who are performance focused, they want to do some strength training, but they have limited gym equipment or they have no gym. And it's important to recognize that you can get good gains with body weight and and with body weight movements and very minimum equipment, okay. And the periodization or planning looks very similar to that advanced um performance with gym equipment uh athlete type, but we're probably gonna spend a little bit more time in the movement mastery, okay, because uh The load there that I'm using is not as much. Okay. So here's where it gets like uh a little gray area and a little uh let's call it artsy in the way between science and art. Uh I'm using a little bit more art to drive this, okay? Or I'm spending a little bit more time in that movement mastery, and then this strength development, I put in a slash velocity because I'm gonna do more plyometrics and jumping with this advanced performance person with no gym. It's not to say that I don't use any uh plyometrics with the gym people. I certainly do, okay. But the reason why I wanted to structure it like this and communicate this is that jumping up on boxes and jumping rope and and uh line jumping, all this kind of stuff, man, you uh you can produce a ton of force output by not loading your body and jumping, and that it is very effective for cyclists. And I said this on previous podcasts uh before, but it it's it's to the tune of our highest power output. Let's just call it a thousand watts. If you can sprint for a thousand watts and that's your biggest sprint that you can do, if I bring you inside, and don't even like practice or train or anything, but put you on a force plate until you just jump and reach as high as you can. The force production for that jump and reach is five to seven times greater than your force output on the bicycle. Okay. So, in the way of overloading your body and training it, yes, jumping is definitely gonna move the needle. You don't need uh gym equipment to do that, okay? And that's a huge focus uh for my people that don't have a gym. Okay, so you you can see this. You walk through similar concepts on the maintenance and transfer, and then the second um peak and and uh uh end of the season, it's gonna be coming back to that strength development and max strength with velocity, maintenance and transfer, and then we transition out of this phase. With the people with no gym, it is movement focused. Okay, so you you train the movement, not the muscle. That's a great quote from Aaron Carson, who I've done three or four episodes with. Okay, she's a strength coach out of Boulder, Colorado. And like, if you want to know how best to do this, if you want key exercises of uh what to do without a gym for an endurance athlete, go to ecfit.com and look at what she has available there. She has uh built out a lot of video progression and exercises and workout routines. Um, she's a great friend of mine. And if you're just want to gather ideas or you want to go full on and go in the Aaron Carson mode of things, sign up there. You can use TrainWrite for the first month for free on what she does. And it's a subscription-based model uh for strength training. It's super awesome. I would even encourage you to do three, four months of that um just to get in the root, like get good routines established, or you carry it through the whole season. Okay. Really good resource for that. Okay. But as I said, we get enough muscle training on the bike. So we're using movements outside of our sport to enhance our sport. That's that's a key concept, okay? I use high velocity jumping and strength and all that kind of stuff. Like I said, in in the um, you know, off the bike for this strength and power phase, but it's also minimal load throughout the season. It's not a ton of reps, it's not a ton of like quote, training, it's it's movement focused stuff. And that movement is high quality, oftentimes at high speed, uh, during that strength and and max velocity time period, and that's gonna be enough to move the needle for most of us out there. Okay. Some final key concepts and reminders here. Again, because endurance athletes are not super strong really in the way of force production, we don't need to do a ton off the bike in order to see a benefit. Okay. Now, if we move differently off the bike to enhance our physical self, we don't need to mimic the bike movement, okay? We get plenty of this on the bike. So I if you see stuff out there on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube of like quarter squats because that's the best weight, that's how we produce power in the crank, you know, uh on the cranks of the bicycle, something like this. I've seen that all the time. It's uh not productive, in my opinion, or not as productive as a full squat or strength through a range of motion. You'll get more out of that, not only on the bike, but in life. Okay, so don't mimic the sport uh with strength training, in my opinion. Focus on the the key movements that I talked about, focus on getting strong and fast, and you will benefit. Okay. And finally, all of this will help in injury prevention and feeling good in everyday life versus kind of the tight, weak endurance athlete who can probably climb really good and go the distance. But with strength training, we're really working on utilizing movements and loaded uh exercises in order to develop us as a whole athlete that can produce really good power when we have to and move really well against gravity when we're off the bike. Okay, so real quick, here's what not to do. If you're going to do some strength training, do it throughout the season. Don't just start and stop every few weeks and then get back into it. Because what'll happen is you'll you'll just get into this cycle of like doing it, getting kind of sore, and then you'll get a little bit good response, but then like the gains just like go away, and then you'll start again. You'll get sore, it'll interrupt training a little bit on the bike, and then you'll get no benefit. So, really, you're just like adding more training and soreness with no benefit if you start and stop all the time. So, if you're gonna do it, commit to it two to three times a week mostly, and that goes to like one to two times a week during that peak and perform time period. And that's it. It's not a ton of total trying, and it's not a ton of commitment. You just have to commit. Second thing, stay away from hypertrophy or that muscle building higher volume uh style of strength training. Okay, what I mean by that is the eight to 12 rep range with load, where the perceived effort is kind of like seven, eight, maybe nine. Uh, nine is good and beneficial. And in fact, during the strength uh development and max strength phase, you should be reaching you know nines and tens almost failure. Failure is good so long as you're prepared to do it. But this hypertrophy of like medium hard, it's just not something we need to spend time with. That it can actually cause some disruption if you put that in, especially during that high volume um phase of training. If you put in high volume and heavy strength training, like in that middle of the season or the base two build time periods, you can really get tired real quick and it's hard to recover from, both like the central system as well as the peripheral system, so cardiovascular and the muscles. Finally, the the last thing is don't do hard strength training before a VO2 session or uh uh a hard threshold session or a long ride. Okay. Typically, you want to space those out. If you're doing hard VO2 training, for example, and this is a question I get all the time is is when to put the session in? Should I do it on hard days? Should I do it on easy days? Should I do it on a rest day? Well, strength training, doing strength training is not rest. So don't put it on your rest day. You still need rest days. Second, I have found good success by putting in strength training along with a hard day, but I do the hard bike session first, and then I wait at least four to six hours before I do the strength training session. If you have time, that's really effective. It's effective because when you're going hard on that day, and say you can fuel well for both workouts, you've already flipped the anaerobic switches on for that day. And Dr. Steven Siler talks a lot about this is like those hard days should be hard. So when you're going hard, when you're going deep, like deepen the uh the training effect that day. That does a good job of organizing the training of hard, easy, hard, easy in his polarized model of training. Okay. The problem with a uh time crunched athlete is we don't have a ton of time. So often, oftentimes we have hard days frequently. So this is where if you have a VO2 session on Tuesday, strength training session on Wednesday, VO2 session on Thursday, and strength training Friday, all of a sudden that's four days fairly hard. We can get away with that as time crunch athletes because we spend a lot of time recovering. Just be careful on that long ride day or on a fifth and definitely a sixth day. I mean, four or five days hard as a time crunched athlete. You're training, okay? But you still need your rest days and you need some easy weeks. Uh, so in effect, my advice here is it's it all depends on the individual, okay? So if you can, if you have time and you can do double sessions of hard bike, hard gym, put those on the same day. See if that works for you. If not, space them out. But really, you got to get your sleep, you got to fuel for what you're doing and adjust for it along the way. If it's not working for you, definitely change it. Or if you can't figure it out, just give us a call. You know where to find us. All right, finally, let's bring this thing home with a few summary points. Strength training can help endurance cycling performance, especially in the ways of increased sprint performance, power for repeatability, improved fatigue resistance, and potentially minimizing risk of injury when it's done properly. When it's done improperly, though, it gets in the way of endurance training by causing too much fatigue at the wrong time, preventing recovery from the sport training itself, and it can lead to burnout, staleness, or even increased risk of injury. Lastly, you want to identify what your goals are, where your starting points are, and then plan out your phases for strength training along with your concurrent endurance training. And this will help you to stay on track for increased performance, health, and hitting all your goals all season long. That's it. That's our show for today. I hope you liked it. And if you did, please share it with your training partner or a friend that does the best job of growing this show and making sure that you get more actionable advice like this. So the past couple weeks, we've talked about this annual training planning concepts. I hope it really like hits home and provides you with some really good resources. And those resources, again, you can find them on our landing page at trainwrite.com backslash podcast, or uh wherever you find your podcasts, we'll have a landing page there as well where you can find links to what I've cited on these two episodes. Thank you again. We'll see you back here next week. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrate.com backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast that'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.

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Adam Pulford

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