Big ring training for leg strength?
 

Just read a post from a professional trainer. He dedicates 1 day to leg strength training. Basically the suggestion is to ride a difficult route with a good amount of hills in the big ring only. He said you should mash and grind the entire route and only use the big ring. More reading indicated that you should only increase cadence if you have knee pain or soreness. Apparently the target cadence should be around 60-75.

Anyone do this type of training before and have any tips? Hoping to build more strength to get my up and over the hills faster as a Clyde.

Yep. I think it helps but don't expect miracles. Rather than mash, I suggest pedaling circles at that low cadence. Try to keep your upper body still. Just use your legs. Which ring doesn't matter. Just keep the cadence down. I've done 3000' climbs entirely at a 50-55 cadence just for fun.

I do occasional hill intervals at 50 RPM but not often enough to notice a difference.

Leg strength is seldom a limiter in getting up hills. Lose weight and increase your threshold power. Higher leg strength is unnecessary for either.

This. Aerobic fitness and power/weight ratio is much more important in climbing than is leg strength. Look at the legs of the really great climbers - they're like birds. If you want to be faster up the hills, concentrate on losing weight and getting fitter. Nothing the matter with strength training, but it wouldn't be my top priority if improved climbing is the goal.

As you get older, this could be a recipe for knee surgery. Muscle pain is fine, joint pain is troublsome at best.

I do low cadence 70-75rpm drills, often at Level 3/Tempo power levels. However, rather than it being a dedicated ride unto itself, I mix it in as an interval during a set. I do most of that kind of training on a stationary, though, rather than road. For example, just this morning I did the following set 3x, plus 10min warm-up and 5min cool-down:

5min L3 power at 70-75cad
5min L2 power at 95-100cad
5min L4 power at 85-90cad

Whether doing a whole road ride dedicated to grinding is beneficial would depend on your training program, or lack thereof. Being able to perform in various modes is part of being a well rounded cyclist; having the strength do low cadence hauls is another tool in the bag, and one that accepts attachments, too! You can pull out that low cadence to aid recovery at Tempo level, or you can marry the power to leg speed for L5/L6 action before hitting the HR limiter. So I think doing some work in that way is definitely good (i.e. low cad/hi pwr big ring stuff), it's just a question of how much/long/often, in my mind, and that depends on what the rest of the training regimen looks like.

Ok so the ring isn't as important as the cadence? I usually try to keep the cadence high, but because my legs seems to be stronger than my Aerobic engine I often end up shifting up to catch my wind while my legs take the brunt of the load and shift back down after my HR has gone down a bit.

FYI I tried that single leg workout on the trainer you suggested and you are right it's horrible pain! I couldn't last more than 2 minutes at a time after feeling like me leg almost fell off. However on my next few rides I did feel like that leg is putting in more effort as a result.

I already know less weight = better hill climbing, but I'm not about to try and loose 100 lbs just so I can climb a hill better. I rather work with what I got and improve on them instead of trying to be someone I'm not. I am actively trying to loose weight, but at my age I have to acknowledge I'll never weight what I did in high school lol.

Ahhh thanks for the tips. I think working on the trainer may be better on an old guys knees anyway. For longer training sessions like an hour do you just repeat the 15 min cycle over or just ride at tempo after the 15 min. I only get to ride on the road 1-2 times a week so I'm on the trainer more and more as a result. I typically try and do at least an hour on the trainer now.

Leg strength is only a limit for efforts well under a minute. After that your muscles run out of phosphocreatine.

Speed over anything taller than a highway overpass comes from your lactate system and aerobic fitness where the goal is maximizing the power (increase it with training) to weight ratio (decrease it with a calorie deficit) as suggested by gregf83.

Where your Clydestale status comes from middle-age-spread you can make much bigger gains by dropping weight.

I increased my power to weight ratio by 80% as in use the same cog but a 50 ring where I needed a 30. 28% increasing FTP from 180 to 220W, 49% dropping weight from 205 to 138.

Watch Johan Museeuw big ring tempo climbing to the finish of the tour of Flanders . the rest of the field is well off to the rear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnX4uaDYyIU

Holy $%@$% that's how real men climb hills!! If I'm not mistaken I think his weight was around 180 also which means there is hope for me as a climber yet. Just need to drop that last few lbs and start my big ring training!! I think his cadence on some of the steeper parts was single digits lol

Better climbing through chemistry?

I am a big believer in leg strength training rides. I learned the importance of leg strength on my first trip to the mountains for some training rides. I had always concentrated my training on aerobic endurance with lower resistance and high cadence. But I found out that in order to be able to rely on your aerobic endurance to get you up hills you have to have sufficient gearing for the given climbs. In other words, put on the right climbs, you may eventually run out of gears to maintain a high cadence. At that point all you have left is your leg strength to grind your way up.

You said that at your age you are too old to get back to your high school weight. Out of curiosity, how old are you and how over weight do you think you are? Losing weight will help tremendously with your climbing ability. I am 40 and over the last few years, I have dropped my weight to below my high school weight. I still have some weight I could lose and probably will over the next couple of months. Losing weight will probably be more about motivation than age. I would think if you're active enough to ride regularly you are probably active enough to facilitate weight loss.

I don't want to get back to my HS weight - I wasn't very muscular. But this morning, I weighed what I weighed when I climbed in Yosemite at 21. Finally made it to my goal weight. I now have a little more weight in the legs, less in the upper body, but about the same general appearance. I'm 70 and squat more now than I did then. Being able to recruit the muscles you already have is a good thing. I didn't do anything weird to lose weight. I just ate a little less and rode a little more, so that I had a straight line graph of weight loss - with lots of wiggles of course, but the general trend was a straight line. I manipulated my diet and riding time to keep it that way.

It doesn't matter how fast you lose it. A pound a month can be just fine. That would be 48 lbs. in 4 years, which is nothing to sneer at. That's about the rate I used over 2 years. I'm going to keep on losing for a while. I could have been leaner back then, too.

It'll make you more relaxed, decrease snoring so you sleep better, cut your sleep needs so you have more time for other things like bicycling, drop your cholesterol, and extend your lifespan.

Joel Friel is over 70 and still races at 154 pounds like he did at age 18.

If you weren't athletic in high school and didn't have a growth spurt afterwards you can weigh less than you did graduating.

Given some patience (not over a pound a week) you can do it without ever being hungry. You can even still drink beer and eat desert albeit not too much of either.

You repeat intervals until your power drops unacceptably where you can approximate that with your trainer's speed to power conversion curve.

While fun for group rides, tempo doesn't serve a useful training purpose unless you're trying to maximize your endurance given limited training time.

+1
Been there; Done that;
Won't be doing it again.

I've always ran out of "gears" to shift down to on hills and as a result I just end up with a cadence around 50-60. Never really stopped me, but I noticed on longer climbs my HR never gets past Zone 3 as I just slow down and keep pushing.

I"m 45 and currently and weight between 210-220 on a given day. I have lost a good amount of weight in the last year, but I enjoy cooking and food too much to really get back down to 130 which was my high school weight. Back then I ran track and was on the swim team. During college I did a lot of weight training and bulked up to around 175 and put on a lot of muscle. Life and times later I still have a lot of muscle, but also have a lot of fat also.

Realizing that my leg strength is really the only thing keeping me going on hills and I have pretty strong legs already I was just thinking of ways to work on that.

Not sure I follow. I looked back at my last easy ride (I don't often ride in groups just me and the hills) and it was Z2 40% Z3 40% and Z4 20%.

My previous ride I was pushing hard and doing intervals on the hills and it was Z2 28% Z3 49% and Z 4 22%.

Those are pretty typical for easy / hard days on the same loop.

I agreed with everything you said until this. I find tempo rides to be very effective. Of course, given unlimited time, one would spend comparatively little of it in Z3 - long z2 rides mixed with HIIT would be the answer. But few people have unlimited time and a tempo hour once a week or so is pretty useful, imo.

Empirically with few data points I've noticed no difference in the rate of power gain adding tempo rides to a weekly schedule including at least one day of maximum effort 10 minute intervals with 5 minutes rest between.

When I did that my heart rates for power-based Z2/Z3 rides clumped up closer to LTHR suggesting my aerobic threshold was lower. Presumably my maximum power output over longer durations was also a lot lower, although I'd yet to realize I had the patience and motivation to train 14+ hours a week and regularly ride 2+ hours so I could monitor that. When I was down to at most one Z1/Z2 day my weight loss stopped about 40 pounds (37%) over what I weigh now instead of continuing with Z1/Z2 4-6 days a week.

At least one study showed a correlation between time training in polarized zone 2 (Friel Z3/Z4 through FTP, between aerobic and anaerobic thresholds) and worse (longer elapsed time) performance, but improved performance training in polarized zone 1 (Friel Z1/Z2 in average individuals, below the aerobic threshold):

Training-intensity distribution during an ironman season: relationship with competition performance.

It doesn't say whether the training intensity was causal - maybe people do worse because more time in the middle means less at low intensities.

If you're going to do a steady 1-1.5 hour hard effort once a week, make it zone 4. That correlates with hard efforts of that duration feeling easier for me and nets more total training stress, although I suspect the science doesn't support that impression.

Falling into the naive "ride hard to get faster" assumption with plenty of Z3 but minimal Z4/Z5 I arrived at a "not slow" plateau very close to what resulted from just riding Friel Z1/Z2 miles.

Doing a lot of Z3 riding 8-10 hours a week did work well before a week long 418 mile 28,000 vertical foot supported tour.

Tempo is a nice pace for group rides which won't leave you too spent for your hard days, and the appropriate pace for some time trials.

Otherwise it's both too hard to improve your aerobic performance and not hard enough to boost threshold and VO2max.

Ok I looked at my last ride which was a new route for me. Basically the new route cut off about 10 miles and added 300-400' more incline. So now I'm riding 24.4 miles and 2761' of incline. I really had to push harder on the new route since the climbs are pretty steep and there is less flat time to recover. It was a tough ride, but not impossible. I did feel the leg strain a lot more after the ride. Looks like half of the ride was Z3/Z4 and the other half Z2.

I'm going to try and push a little harder on the next ride to see if I can keep my HR in Zone 4.

Here is a pic of the stats for reference.

http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=464826

All that is interesting and I don't entirely disagree. When I was training, as opposed to just keeping fit, the bulk of my time would be Z2 (Z1 on recovery days) with a couple of days devoted to Z4/Z5 intervals or to actual races. That kept me race fit (interestingly, my average HR during races was typically within 1 bpm of my LTHR) but I found it extremely difficult to lose weight during the racing season. If I restricted my calorie intake I couldn't hit the numbers for my interval training.

In the off season (and now, when I'm no longer racing) i'd spend a lot of time in Z2 and add in a tempo ride or two. On that regimen, at about 12 hours per week on the bike, I found I could manage my calorie intake and lose the weight I needed to while building the aerobic base. I don't have data to support the efficacy of the tempo rides, but subjectively they felt extremely effective in boosting my endurance and preparing me to tolerate the HIIT worload later in the year. YMMV.

I don't understand why leg strength is not relevent... I have a 17km avg 5.4% hill here, and often times i feel im not, cannot push down hard enough to get moving faster then 20km/h.

If my leg strength is stronger, that will mean i can push down the pedal harder, hence generate more watts, hence if i were to back down my wattage to be comparable to a lesser leg strength guy - it will be easier for me yes?

As long as you are able to push down the pedals hard enough to keep them turning, speed is about turning them faster.

Couldn't speed be about turning a bigger gear at the same rate? Obviously it is, so then it's a matter of defining whether leg strength equals being able to turn a bigger gear at the same cadence without rapid fatigue.

It seems like a lot of this discussion is people not connecting because they're using the same word, strength, to mean two separate things.

The limiter on a long hill like that is not leg strength. The force required to climb a long hill is fairly low, 300W @ 80RPM takes a peak force on the pedals of under 100lbs which is less force than you would use climbing a set of stairs.

If you want to climb hills faster a structured training plan with intervals will help much more than strength training.