I enjoy weight training a lot and tend to get caught up in the intensity of it, and overdo it. Also, just from the weight on my bike handles, my arms are super muscular and my quads are growing quite a bit too. I'm just a husky person, kinda fat, kinda muscley. Goal is to lose the fat, which is why my focus has been more on cardio, but I do find weight training fun so I'll probably get back into it soon. I wish I had more home equipment, I think I would do more if I did.
Originally Posted by
livedarklions
You're more than welcome! I think these threads are great because you are asking the sort of questions so many other people have, and a lot of us have practical experience in how we make this sort of change work. I want to offer my two cents on the question you asked [MENTION=460678]CAT7RDR[/MENTION] Other than unweighted squats, I don't do weight training that focuses on my legs For a couple reasons. One is that I do think at some point overuse of a particular set of muscles is probably not a good idea and I think my biking pretty much maxes that out, but more importantly, I find if I don't focus the weight training on my upper body and core, that those muscles tend to get progressively weaker as my leg muscles get bigger. I don't know if this upper body focus is sound from a preventing osteoporosis perspective, but the science doesn't seem to give a definitive answer on that.
Long story short, the upper body workouts don't cause soreness that makes cycling harder.
In general, though, I think the science is very clear at this point that soreness is a side effect, and that you don't need to make yourself sore to get gains from weight training. The notion that you need to actually harm your muscles to encourage hypertrophy has been thoroughly debunked at this point, and overtraining is a real thing that actually works against muscle growth. Some soreness is probably inevitable, but it definitely should not be seen as necessary.
As always, this is the answer that works for me, and I don't know whether it will for you.