Hi! I'm a 20 year old male that is 5'10.5, weighs 160 pounds with around 6-7% BF. Do I need strength training? Will it help my cycling/triathlon goals?

I do not want to gain much weight, but I know that some weight must be gained with strength training.

I've also read articles about strength training being unable to help because you mostly use your slow twitch muscles in events lasting longer than an hour. And that its the slow twitch muscles that help prevent injuries and not the fast twitch muscles.

My theory to lifting is that, lifting will release testosterone and HGH which would benefit both slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers overall right?

What are some lifts and # of reps do you recommend? (if any)

Strong core is a good thing to have in general. Strength training does not make you faster on average, but it has other benefits, such as longer time to exhaustion and being more comfortable during long rides. The primary reason cyclists do strength training is that it improves sprint power.

Do not worry much about gaining weight. It's harder to gain muscle weight than most people think. Bodybuilders use specific exercises and supplements to bulk up. If you don't follow bodybuilder routines (particularly, if you stick to lower reps and avoid overeating), you're not going to gain much.

There are as many training programs as athletes, and many of those have merit. The general principle is that you want some hypertrophy in quads/glutes and no hypertrophy if possible everywhere else. One way to get there is to start with 8 reps to exhaustion all around and drift towards 10 on lifts involving legs and 5 everywhere else. It depends on what machines and tools you have available. I have some background in powerlifting and I think that basic powerlifting exercises can be applied effectively here too, they are simple and work multiple groups of muscles at once. But squats and bench presses require either a spotter or access to a Smith machine, deadlifts require free weights, and none of the three put much load on the upper back so you need to supplement them with seated rows and/or pull-ups.

I'd personally look into a program like starting strength or stronglift's 5x5.
Lower reps are geared more towards strength than hypertrophy.

You will gain some weight. Initially your body starts retaining a bit more water so you'll see an increase from that.
Also, in order to recover from lifting you will have to take in a few extra calories, which will in turn cause you to gain some weight.
But depending on where you're from, cold winters may mean less riding, so it's a better option to do some strength training instead of just sitting around.

I think, too often, we think of strength training as building large pec's or biceps or,,,, whatever ...

But real strength is internal -- yes, it is the Qi of which the asians speak -- but also physical core strength that doesn't show. Like that built with such things a swimming, yoga, pilates, etc... And, it makes sense: the body contains many hundreds of muscles. Layer after layer of them. But yet we mostly think of building and strengthening only the few on the outermost layer.

Increasingly, I am thinking it is the core strength that doesn't build mass that counts -- and that the weight lifter's biceps are mainly for show...

I can largely agree here.

But I think you can benefit from a strong back/core and strong quads/hamstrings/glutes which you aren't going to achieve just from doing yoga and swimming IMO.

You can be insanely strong without having particularly large pec's or biceps. It's a question of training.

Does this guy look visibly overbuilt?


https://jaroslawolech.pl/gfx/bg02.jpg

He's reported to be somewhere between 5'3" and 5'6" and around 160 lbs. So, stocky but no Arnold.

This is him in action:

Your BMI is 23. Lance is also 5'10" and his racing weight was 157. So no, you don't really want to put on weight.

Everyone is different in how they put on protein as their bodies respond to training stress. I'm slow - lucky to put on a pound of protein/year, and hard for me just to keep my thighs the same size. It's personal. You might be able to lift like a maniac and not get much bigger. I have a noticeable response to weight training - I get faster and have more endurance. Doesn't seem to matter a whole heck of a lot how I do it: reps/sets, etc. But I don't get much bigger, if any. I do keep the calories down so I don't get fat, but if I don't, I seem to gain fat more than I gain protein. I get plenty of high quality protein in my diet, so it's not that.

However, I never put much time into weights: 25 to 45 minutes once or twice a week. More than that, and it takes away from my cycling, and that sure as heck doesn't make me faster. Hours on the bike is what really makes me faster. I fit in the weight training around that, and make certain it's not interfering.

Fast riders I've known have sometimes gotten sidetracked into joga and the like, usually a female influence, never a bad thing, but it made them slower, not faster. So it's a whatever you want most kind of thing, same as big muscles and all the rest of it. It's quite clear that intervals and getting light, down to a BMI of around 19, makes one faster. The rest of it is not so clear.

BTW, I don't think it has anything to do with fast vs. slow twitch muscles, and more to do with with the precise training modality: range of motion, force distribution within that range of motion, speed of the movement, time spent with muscles contracted, percentage of muscles used in sport movements which are stimulated, etc.

Lots of powerlifters in the lighter classes don't look big or bulky at all.
The mass comes from eating.

I can't imagine some weight training being detrimental to your riding as long as you're recovering properly.

But that's the thing, isn't it? Recovery. Weight training is a huge training stress. Stress accumulates over each week's microcycle. So you have to make choices about where to accumulate that stress. Weight training will always reduce the amount of free training stress available for cycling, or in the OP's case, cycling, running, and swimming in each week, assuming that one is walking the edge and really training, not just fooling around. So one has to balance one against the other, making choices about where to allocate the stress, then observing results. Did one get faster doing that or not? For sure allocating a good bit of stress to weights helps track sprinters. For everyone else, it's not so clear.

Very true. But you have to account for a couple of situations.
1. Winter is the offseason for a lot of people. If it's too cold to ride, or you're reducing your ride volume, then the strength training would be a good replacement as opposed to just not riding
2. you can improve your GPP (general physical preparedness) via strength training, so ideally your recovery could improve and you'd now be able to handle an extra 1-2 workouts per week.
3. improved body composition is typically going to lead to better performance. so say you're 180 pounds and 16% bodyfat, working out and eating properly could get you to 180 pounds with some muscle and only 12% bodyfat. who do you think is going to perform better?

I know cycling isn't about absolute strength, but I can't help but feel that some aspects of cycling would be improved by being stronger.
I'm not advocating that anyone try to put on 20 pounds or spend their time doing curls and flyes.

Check out this thread in the BF racing forum. There are some interesting workouts and discussion.

I've kept up with that thread. There are a zillion different workouts on the web, some with heavies behind them, making various claims for them. What I don't see and would like to, is a long-term analysis of FTP watts/kg vs. lifting plan followed and vs. no weights. What really works? A few years ago, I got strong enough to drop all the usual suspects on long climbs, and I'm no climber. I was doing Friel workouts, 3 X 30, circuits. Anymore, I'm pooped after a 1 X 30 these days and just don't have the energy to go around again. These are weights chosen to be just below failure, same weights each round. Maybe I should ask this over there, but I'm intimidated. The only proof over there is the tweet about improving sprinting performance at the end of a road ride. Well, heck yes! No argument there.

You've probably seen me quote this study:
https://www.sportsci.org/jour/04/cdp.doc

I'm more of a sprinter, so I started doing weights after riding or spin class, on the theory of specificity and leaving nothing on the road. I think that worked. Then I came across this a while back:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21836044
so that's what I still do. I never fail to be amazed at being able to do the same weights after a 1-2 hour ride as if I hadn't been out and had just warmed up a little. Different energy systems is my explanation.

I think the key distinction is "just below failure". That tends to increase capacity and endurance more than strength, which I would expect to much more beneficial for cycling. Lifting to failure would be a completely different ball game. I wonder what the differences would be comparing concurrent E/R with E + R at preformed at different times during the day.

That's a good question. I haven't tried it.

There's also this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23053125
which suggests that at least some of the changes associated with E+R could be due to lowered glycogen levels. So possibly if not concurrent, then going without carbs between bouts could produce the same effects. The E/R study's abstract doesn't mention feeding. Since the exercise times for both E and R are relatively short, might we assume that there was no feeding?