Why every cyclist should lift weights (and how to start)
The Moveee team
Free coaching · a real route for every ride
Ask most cyclists why they don't lift weights and you'll get one of two answers: they're worried about getting heavy, or they'd simply rather spend the hour riding. Both instincts are understandable, and both cost you real performance — especially after the age of about 35.
Strength training doesn't make you a bodybuilder. Done properly, two sessions a week for a winter makes you a rider who fatigues later, holds position better on a long day, produces more force on a steep ramp, and is markedly less likely to get injured or break a bone in a crash. Here's how to do it without it eating your season.
- Durability — you hold your power later into a long ride instead of fading in the fourth hour.
- Force on demand — steep ramps, standing accelerations and getting back on a wheel all need raw force, not aerobic capacity.
- Injury resistance — stronger tendons, connective tissue and a trunk that holds your position together.
- Bone density — cycling is non-weight-bearing, and riders are known to be at elevated risk of low bone density. Lifting is the fix.
The six movements that matter
You don't need a complicated programme. Six movements, done consistently and with decent technique, cover almost everything a cyclist needs. Sets and reps below are a sensible starting point — adjust to your experience and how you recover.
Squat (back or goblet)
3 × 5–8The closest thing to a cycling-specific lift. Loads the quads and glutes through the exact range that drives the pedal down.
Deadlift or Romanian deadlift
3 × 5–8Builds the posterior chain — glutes and hamstrings — which most cyclists are badly under-developed in relative to their quads.
Split squat / lunge
3 × 8 each legSingle-leg work. Cycling is a one-leg-at-a-time sport, and it quietly hides left–right imbalances that unilateral lifting exposes.
Step-up onto a box
3 × 8 each legAlmost a direct rehearsal of a hard seated climbing stroke, with the added benefit of loading through a big hip range.
Calf raise
3 × 12–15The ankle transmits everything your hips produce. Weak calves leak power at the bottom of the stroke.
Plank & side plank
3 × 30–60 sA stable trunk is what stops your hips rocking. See our full guide to core strength for cyclists.
How it fits across the season
The mistake that ruins strength training for cyclists is doing the same thing all year. Lift hardest when your bike training is easiest, then taper the gym as cycling intensity rises.
Build the base. Higher reps (8–12), moderate load, learn the movements properly.
The best window of the year. Little cycling intensity to protect, so lift genuinely hard.
Get strong. Lower reps (4–6), heavier load, longer rests.
Maximum strength work. This is where the neural gains that transfer to the bike are made.
Maintain. One session, moderate load, well away from your hardest bike days.
Cycling intensity is rising. Lifting drops to maintenance so it doesn't steal recovery.
Keep the lights on. Short, light, movement-quality sessions.
Enough to stop the adaptations disappearing entirely. Never near a race.
The scheduling rules
- Never lift heavy the day before a hard bike session. Legs full of DOMS will ruin a VO2 session and you'll blame your fitness.
- Lift after riding, not before, if you have to do both in a day. The bike session is the priority; do it fresh.
- Leave 48 hours between lower-body sessions. Two gym days a week is genuinely enough.
- Start lighter than your ego wants. The first three weeks are for learning the movement patterns, not for testing your maximum.
Four myths worth putting down
"Lifting makes you bulky and slow."
Endurance riders training 2× a week alongside high aerobic volume gain very little muscle mass. The adaptation is mostly neural — you recruit what you already have, more effectively.
"Just ride more instead."
More riding builds aerobic fitness, not maximal force or bone density. They're different stimuli and they don't substitute for each other.
"It's only for sprinters."
Strength work tends to show up most in durability and late-ride fatigue resistance — which matters most to long-distance riders, not sprinters.
"I'm too old for the gym."
The opposite. Muscle mass and bone density decline with age, and resistance training is the single most effective countermeasure there is.
Making it stick
The reason most riders abandon the gym isn't the lifting — it's that it sits outside their training plan, so it's the first thing to go in a busy week. Treat the two gym sessions as fixed appointments in the same schedule as your rides, and they survive.
It also helps that the bike side of your winter is on rails. Moveee writes the cycling half of your week around the days you can actually ride, so you can slot the gym into the gaps without guessing whether Thursday is meant to be hard. And when the weather makes the ride itself the obstacle, Moveee Indoor puts a structured session and one of your own real routes in front of you in the browser — trainer paired, targets held in ERG, no install, free while in alpha.
Two sessions a week, six movements, one winter. It's the least glamorous training you'll do and it may be the highest-return.
Sources 7
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Rønnestad BR, Mujika I Optimizing strength training for running and cycling endurance performance: A review · Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports · 2014
- 2 Rønnestad BR, Hansen EA, Raastad T Strength training improves 5-min all-out performance following 185 min of cycling · Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports · 2011
- 3 Rønnestad BR, Hansen EA, Raastad T In-season strength maintenance training increases well-trained cyclists’ performance · European Journal of Applied Physiology · 2010
- 4 Aagaard P, Andersen JL, Bennekou M, et al. Effects of resistance training on endurance capacity and muscle fiber composition in young top-level cyclists · Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports · 2011
- 5 Vikmoen O, Ellefsen S, Trøen Ø, et al. Strength training improves cycling performance, fractional utilization of VO2max and cycling economy in female cyclists · Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports · 2016
- 6 Olmedillas H, González-Agüero A, Moreno LA, Casajus JA, Vicente-Rodríguez G Cycling and bone health: a systematic review · BMC Medicine · 2012
- 7 Fragala MS, Cadore EL, Dorgo S, et al. Resistance Training for Older Adults: Position Statement From the National Strength and Conditioning Association · Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research · 2019
See this in your own numbers
Moveee builds your power curve, fitness and fatigue from every ride you upload, and writes a training plan around them. It is free, it takes one Strava connection, and it will tell you more about your riding in a week than any article can.
Start freeKeep reading
The 15-minute core routine every cyclist should be doing
A strong trunk stops your hips rocking, stops power leaking sideways and keeps your lower back quiet in hour three. Six exercises, no equipment, twice a week.
How to build a cycling training plan around a full-time job
You don't need 12-hour weeks to get properly fast — you need the right 6–8 hours, placed where your life can actually hold them. Here's how to anchor a working week around two quality sessions and one long ride, what to cut first when work explodes, and why a plan that adapts beats a plan that's perfect.
Do long slow rides still work? The evidence for volume
Intervals get the attention, but the adaptations that make a cyclist durable come mostly from time. What the research says about volume, why low intensity isn't wasted time, and how short a long ride can usefully be.
Big-gear, low-cadence work: strength on the bike, or just slow?
Fifty rpm up a climb in a gear you can barely turn feels like it must be building something. What torque intervals actually train, what the evidence says about transfer to real power, and the knee-load caution nobody puts in the session description.
Ramp rate: how fast you can add training load without breaking
Every rider who discovers load tracking tries to make the number go up as fast as possible, and a few weeks later is ill. The conventional bands, what actually sets your own limit, and why a build that never comes down is not a build.
Fast twitch, slow twitch: what fibre type means for how you should train
You cannot know your own fibre composition without a needle, the proxies people use are rough, and "train to your type" is weaker advice than it sounds. What is genuinely established about fibre types, and the handful of training decisions it should actually change.
Strength training for cyclists: sets, reps and when in the season
Heavy or explosive, how many sets, and where it goes in a week that already contains intervals. The programming detail behind the evidence that lifting makes cyclists faster — including the interference effect.
Critical Power vs FTP: which number should you train with?
FTP is a practical estimate. Critical Power is a physiological boundary with decades of laboratory work behind it. Where the two agree, where they diverge, and which one your training zones should hang off.
Indoor training with heart rate only (no power meter, no problem)
No power meter, no smart trainer — just a heart-rate strap? You can still train properly. How to find your threshold heart rate with one honest 30-minute test, set five zones from it, structure a week around what HR measures well, and work around what it doesn't (lag, drift and hot rooms).
Zone 2 training on a smart trainer: how to actually stay in zone
Everyone agrees Zone 2 builds the engine — and almost nobody actually rides it, because outdoors every junction, hill and ego bump pulls you out of zone. On a smart trainer with ERG mode the discipline problem disappears. How to set the right watts, manage drift, and make 90 steady minutes genuinely bearable.
Altitude training for amateur cyclists: what actually transfers to sea level
The hypoxic dose that moves haemoglobin mass is bigger and longer than most riders imagine, a third of people barely respond at all, and low iron makes the whole exercise pointless. What a two-week mountain holiday can and cannot do for you.
Rollers vs turbo trainer: which should you ride this winter?
One teaches you to ride; the other makes you fitter. Rollers build balance, souplesse and bike handling that a locked-in turbo never will — but the turbo owns structure, ERG and every hard interval you'll do all winter. An honest comparison, who should pick which, and why the real answer might be both.