Originally Posted by nitropowered
My brother is a baseball player (He's a junior in HS on the Varsity team) and was wondering if it would be beneficial or not to have him go out with me on long rides as i hate riding alone.) He does ride sometimes but only for about 10 miles. My dad said that cycling does not use fast-twitch muscles that running fast requires and said cycling wouldn't be that great for him to develop speed. (He is a biologist/geneticist so he knows [partially] what he is talking about)
So would taking him out for 30-40 miles a day during the summer hurt him more than help? It'll definitely help his aerobic capacity but not too sure about his running.
P.S. Tell your dad that if he's doing the intervals and working on power drills, you ARE working fast twitch muscle fibers. But if your dad was talking about pure endurance rides, it will not build up fast twitch muscle fibers as much. Still, there are always ways to train so that you're doing tempo training rides and lactate threshold training rides. Then fast twitch muscle fibers will come into play.
Koffee