Strength Training

Anyone know of a good 2 day plan? Mostly barbell movements? Also curious if anyone has any resources on what percentage of 1rm would be optimal to work at?

5x5 works on 2/wk

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I’m curious whether you guys feel that carrying additional upper body mass (mostly muscle) is impacting your endurance performance.

I have been gaining quite a bit of muscle last year (6ft, 195lbs, ~15% bfp) and i feel like while i increased my ftp i struggle to breath more and my RPE is higher at a given percentage of ftp.

Any resources on what percentages to work at?

Yes and mostly climbing. But it’s worth it to carry the extra weight up a hill and be slightly slower because the muscle helps with so many other parts of life. And probably makes riding mountain bikes better too, but I can’t quantify that easily.

Perspective: a few years go I dropped from a skinny-fat 145 down to a race weight of 130-132 pounds at 5-7% BF. Which is just plain skinny. FTP around 4.25w/kg. Was climbing very well. But lost a lot of overall body strength. That wasn’t healthy. Now running 140-145 in season, more like 10-12% BF and lifting year round. I’m slightly slower on the bike and work harder on steep climbs. But heck, life is much better.

5x5 type programming

Find I can lift a couple times a week in season at 70-75% of 1RM without being too beat up. Drop that to 70% and maintaining strength is fine, not too much fatigue, but won’t make lifting gains. If just maintaining, will do 70% 5x5s then every couple weeks throw in a few heavier 1-3 rep sets up to 85% Nothing fancy but lifting year round is important to me now.

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Essentially start at half your 5 rep max, or if you’re new like me, start with an empty bar (20kg).

I worked up to Chads L2 targets:

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Sounds good I like that idea above also of lifting at 70% of 1rm most the time, then go up to 85% once in a while on a good day. That puts me well above Chad’s targets, and is also light enough to me personally that I can keep form nice and strict

I would be surprised if many people do, but there’s edge cases for everything - when you say you’ve gained “quite a bit”…how much are you talking about?

I’ve been strength training since October and my body composition hasn’t changed much +1kg muscle -1kg fat, if the gym’s Boditrax machine is to be believed:

I’m 172cm, and currently 62.2kg muscle (76.3%), 16kg fat (19.6%).

When you say struggle to breath, do you mean constrained, or say, that you get to VO2max more quickly?

Wouldn’t more muscle = more ability to recycle your lactate? Even upper body muscle?

Another good option for strength / conditioning programs is The Helm . The app has a lot of different programs, and you can select which days you want to do strength training on and whether or not you have gym access.

Haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere yet, but the best thing I’ve done regarding strength training was picking up a set of 16kg, 24kg & 32kg kettlebells & working my way through the Simple & Sinister programme.

Plenty of work/weight involved & it’s literally been designed as a minimum schedule to keep your fitness/strength up for your main sport (or job!). Couldn’t recommend it enough. The book by Pavel Tsatsouline is on Amazon & well worth a read if you’re going to follow it. There’s a good outline here though - the gist of it is 5x10 swings (starting with 2 handed, working up to 1 handed) followed by 10 turkish get ups. There’s a time/weight standards to meet, but as with FTP tests you only test yourself against the time every now & again. Most days you can take your time with it if you want as long as you get it done

Part of the reason I love it so much is that the kettlebell swing, 1 or 2 handed, is a great ballistic movement done at full intensity that works the posterior chain as well as being great for your grip etc. On the other hand the TGU is the complete opposite, a slow, steady grind of a movement. I’ve noticed huge improvements in my posture and core strength after focusing on these two movements alone. I also like to pick up my combined 72kg of kettlebells & walk up & down my stairs a few times to really test my legs/grip after a workout :boom:

There’s a good summary of Simple & Sinister here https://amp.reddit.com/r/kettlebell/comments/1s29hc/pavels_new_simple_sinister_program_minimum/

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So I started doing leg day again 2 days ago… I last squatted seriously in like August.

HOLY $&%]

I can barely walk. This is absolutely payback for neglecting leg day.

How long did it take for you guys for DOMS to abate?

Going to have to push back my general build program AGAIN until I can lift and train without issues.

I lifted legs on Sunday…went a little overboard, and today is the first day that my legs haven’t felt like they were on fire…

Depending on how hard to went it could easily take 4 days. But usually the second time I lift it goes away in 2 days and then after that it’s maybe the next day at most.

I didn’t think I went that hard. I had a squat PR of 160KG.

So I did 5x8x80kg, warming up with 20kgx8 , 40kgx8 and so on.

Two days on, and its at it worst. I’m going to definitely go squat and DL again on Saturday. But yeah, I’ve shelved all hard intervals for a bit.

The way I see it, I’m investing in my sprint for august

How long did it take for you guys for DOMS to abate?

First time I did squats this winter it took like 5 days to recover from. Now that I’m conditioned I’d say 2 days for DOMS to disappear but still not fully recovered for high intensity intervals.

In my experience DOMS is more closely related to total volume than it is to the heaviest weight that you hit. So after taking 6? months off doing 8 sets of 8, 5 of which are at maybe 75-80% (total guess based on detraining) is a pretty decent amount of volume.

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I have and have had no DOMS since starting in October, I’d suggest you’re lifting to heavy and too infrequently?

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Infrequently is an understatement. Like I said, I’ve been neglecting.

Back when I was a gym rat, squats were an every other day occurence. But I haven’t been under the bar in months and months.

Like I said above, I tried to go lightish… but definitely overdid it. A bit annoyed with myself as it’s ruining my bike sessions, but I do think in the long run this has to happen. Before I was in anyway interested in cycling I could put down 1800W+ on a wattbike pro, now though I’m peaking around 1400W… , I really want to push my top end up.

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Yeah, so sounds like 5x5 and a bit lighter might be the way to go? How often can you lift per week now?

I’m still doing 5x5 but since I switched to 2/wk it’s a lot harder than when it was 3.

I give it four+ hours between lifting and running or biking too.