Cycling-Related Strength & Conditioning

Power comes from increasing strength. Moving maximal loads (even slowly) causes maximal recruitment of muscle fibres and imrpovement of fast twitch qualities of those muscle fibres.

The key is quality over quantity.

Your single session in the weight room would be better spent just doing deadlifts, or just doing squats.

Keep the reps at 5. Increase the sets across if you can feel the need for more training volume, decrease sets if you have problems with recovery. Your goal above all else should be to add weight to your lifts each week whilst maintaining good technique. This is more important than the ability to do more sets/reps.

Deadlifts are more taxing than squats. So one workset of 5 is probably enough. If you are reducing your worksets on squats to just one, a back off set at reduced load (after your workset) is a good idea. To reinforce perfect technique (and supportive weaker muscles) as well as adding little more less stressful training volume.

Dont worry so much about the unilateral=bike specific thing for now. That is only relevant when you get a lot stronger. So I would ditch the idea of lunges for now.

Deadlifts & Squats will absolutely be all the low back work that you need. Do not add exercises. They will also work your "core" or abdominal stability very thoroughly. Specific anterior abdominal work is largely a very poor use of time. If you want to do somethine for them, do overhead presses. They will work your abominal stability extremely thoroughly (your glutes & your abs) while imrpoving shoulder strength which will also be useful on the bike.

In terms of your bike stuff, I would suggest your find some time to programme in some high output sprinting. You are already doing a lot of commuting which I am guessing is more leisurely paced. You want an opporunity to really go balls out, focusing on anaerobic sprints and V02max work seperately. Interval stuff and what not. Ill let someone else step in here though.

Make sure you do not take lance's video as inspiration. That was the most horrendous thing I have ever seen.

Thanks for this. I used to be a gym junky a few years ago and spent about 2 years doing 3-4 sessions per week at the gym. Mostly to gain body mass and to boost confidence (used to weigh 105kg!). So I am familiar with correct techniques.

Will do what you said and just concentrate on cycling with an occasional deadlift/squat. But by looking at the comments it seems like there is not much benefit from weight training this early for me.

Oh, this is more inspirational than Lance's video (1.26) :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPAGHOIEGx4&