McRussellPants

You're describing a hypertrophic routine, its what body builders use to look big, its known for increasing muscle volume. The idea that you can do 20 reps and somehow gain more endurance than you could build by hitting the bike for three hours is a myth. Most endurance athletes are completely over the high rep scheme for improvements. THAT BEING SAID, use a high rep low weight scheme when starting to condition all of your atrophied accessory groups that don't get hit on the bike. My hip abductors have been a sticking point for me since I started.

I know it makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy to think about how "tailored to cycling" their workout is and yell "chappau" at themselves while hitting 40 reps for 5 sets, but lower rep bigger weight schemes will increase strength without as much of the mass as doing 50 reps of nothing. if you want to do 500 reps of nothing go ride your bike.

Use the gym for low rep power on cycling relevant lifts, dead, squat, use conditioning reps of other assistance groups to make sure you don't snap yourself up, leg extensions, abductors.

Carbonfiberboy 

If you fail a set, you're not doing "nothing." Pete Penseyres could sled 50 reps at 450 when he was over 50. That isn't nothing. Please, have a go at it. I usually try to fail my last set no matter how many reps I'm doing. That's how I know I did enough reps for that weight. It worked for Penseyres.

Gyrine

There is no evidence if you don't look. In just 15 sec of searching on PubMed I found numerous scientific pubs showing a benefit. Here is the latest one: Strength training improves performance and pedaling characteristics... - PubMed - NCBI

qualia8

Did they just ADD strength to the endurance workouts? If so, isn't some of the benefit just down to increasing total training load? Our relevant question is whether to take that time spent in the gym and put it towards more miles (or intervals).

My interest is overall health anyway, so I'm not skipping the weights. But if I were time-limited, I wouldn't spend any time lifting beyond some injury-prevention PT designed to undo the effects of sitting, bent-over, on a bike.

achoo

And your qualifications to rebut that published and peer-reviewed paper are what exactly?

You can do a good squat workout in five minutes. That's a huge advantage. And there are different types of endurance. 20 - or in my example 60 - reps is going to build a different type of endurance than 3 hours of mostly z2 riding.

OldsCOOL

That's what I'm looking for. Thank you.

Carbonfiberboy 

Question on training the iliopsoas:
A set of Norwegian researchers published several of the studies which I found through the links in this thread. One of the exercises performed by their subjects is described as "single-leg hip flexion." They don't mean the usual unloaded stretchy kind of thing you can see on youtube, because they refer to doing sets at 6RM and call it heavy strength training. So it's weight training. What equipment did they use? One of their papers has a list of figures, but only the figure titles came through, not the images. The reported benefit was increased pedaling efficacy through better unweighting on the backstroke.

Carbonfiberboy 

One thing to keep in mind in the discussion of the benefits of weight training for endurance cycling is this:

If you look at the performance increases obtained through the studied strength training and compare that to the performance increases obtained through doing LT and LT+ intervals, they are pretty small. That is, if one were to substitute one for the other.

Note that the subjects were divided into 2 groups: E (endurance only) and E+S(endurance + strength). One assumes that both groups were doing their intervals and had similar cycling TSS, and I believe at least one of the studies indicated that was the case. In which case, adding S was certainly a benefit. However substituting S for interval work gets you nowhere. Subbing a small amount of z2 is probably OK, but not much. I think this is well documented.

McRussellPants

I'm just some guy loling at a thread on Bikeforums.

But heres some dude with a masters saying what I said.

Bodybuilding.com - How To Strength Train For Cycling

Voodoo76

Interesting read. My own experience lines up with this (disclaimer: I have no credentials off a bike). Really believe way too many fellow cyclist have gone down the light weight/high rep path and concluded that resistance training offered little benefit.