Strength training for cyclists: sets, reps and when in the season
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The case for cyclists lifting weights is fairly well settled, and we have covered it elsewhere. This article is the harder half of the question: how much, how heavy, how often, and where in the season. That is where most riders come unstuck — they start in November, get strong, then quietly stop in March and lose most of it by July.
One caveat that should sit at the top rather than be buried. The cycling-specific strength literature is built on small studies — often six to twenty riders, frequently male, frequently from the same few Scandinavian research groups. The direction of the findings is consistent and physiologically plausible. The precise numbers are not something to bet a season on.
The interference effect, properly stated
The worry that lifting blunts endurance adaptation — or the reverse — dates to a 1980 study in which subjects training for both saw their strength gains plateau after around seven weeks while their aerobic gains proceeded normally. That finding launched forty years of argument, and modern evidence has narrowed it considerably.
A 2023 meta-analysis of 59 studies and over 1,300 participants found that the interference effect on lower-body strength was real in men (standardised mean difference −0.43) but not detectable in women (+0.08, with the sex difference reaching significance). For VO2max the picture was reassuring in the direction cyclists care about: impairment appeared in untrained participants (−0.35), but not in trained (+0.18) or highly trained (+0.01) ones.
If you are a trained cyclist, adding strength work is very unlikely to cost you aerobic fitness. What you may sacrifice is some of the strength you could have built if lifting were your only pursuit — and since you are a cyclist, that is a trade you should be happy to make. The interference runs mostly in the direction you do not care about.
Four rules that decide most of the programme
The mechanisms proposed for why lifting helps cycling — delayed recruitment of less efficient fast fibres, improved neuromuscular efficiency, a shift in fibre type towards IIA, stiffer tendons — are associated with heavy loading rather than high-repetition endurance-style work. Reviews of strength training for endurance athletes consistently point at heavy loads.
Plyometric and explosive loading has a place, particularly for sprinters and for riders who need to produce power very quickly. But it is generally layered on top of a heavy strength base rather than used instead of it.
Squat or leg press, a hip hinge, a single-leg movement, and something for the trunk. That is a complete cycling strength session. Programme complexity is not where the adaptation comes from.
If they must land on the same day, put the priority session first and leave as many hours as you can between them. Better still, put lifting on an easy or rest-adjacent day rather than the day before your key interval session.
The season, phase by phase
This is the part worth pinning somewhere. The dosing below reflects what the intervention studies actually used, adjusted for the fact that you are an amateur with a job rather than a subject in a Norwegian laboratory.
Re-learn the movements. Tissue tolerance, range of motion, technique. Nothing heavy yet.
Expect soreness. This is the phase to get it out of the way.
The phase that does the actual work. Progressive heavy loading on a small number of big lower-body movements.
This is the block the cycling research is built on — most studies run 11–12 weeks at roughly this dose.
Hold the strength while cycling intensity rises. Volume comes down, load stays up.
Strength volume must give way as bike intensity climbs — not the other way round.
Maintenance. One session a week has been enough to hold gains through a competitive season in trained cyclists.
Drop it entirely and the gains drift away over the season — this is the mistake most riders make.
Stay fresh. There is no strength to be gained here and plenty of freshness to lose.
Leave at least 72 hours between the last lifting session and the event.
A template, not a prescription. Shift the whole thing to fit your calendar — the sequence matters far more than the months.
The in-season session is the one that matters
If you take one thing from this article, take this. In a study of well-trained cyclists, a 12-week preparatory block of heavy strength training twice a week, followed by maintenance at one session per week, held the gains in maximal strength and muscle cross-sectional area through 13 weeks of competition season — while an endurance-only group showed no such gains. That study had six riders per group, so treat the effect size with appropriate caution, but the qualitative point is the reference figure the field works from.
The practical reading: one honest, heavy, low-volume session a week is enough to keep what you built over winter. Two are unnecessary in season. Zero is the default, and zero is why so many riders repeat the same November-to-March cycle every year without ever accumulating anything.
What the outcomes actually look like
Worth being specific, and worth noting the samples. In 19 well-trained female cyclists, 11 weeks of heavy strength training added to endurance training improved 40-minute all-out mean power, cycling economy and fractional utilisation of VO2max relative to endurance training alone. A related study in well-trained female athletes found roughly a 45% increase in half-squat one-rep max and about a 7% improvement in five-minute all-out cycling power after prolonged submaximal work — with no equivalent change in a small endurance-only control group.
That last detail is the interesting one and is easy to miss. Several of the benefits show up specifically when you are already tired — at the end of a long ride, on the last climb, in the fourth hour. Fresh-state tests often show less. If your events are short and fresh, the case is weaker than the headline suggests; if they are long, it is stronger.
Common programming mistakes
- Lifting to failure, in season. The point of the in-season session is to preserve an adaptation, not to chase a new one. Leave reps in reserve.
- Doing it the day before your key session. You will ride the intervals worse and get less from both. Put it after the hard bike day or on an easy one.
- High-rep "muscular endurance" circuits. Popular, comfortable, and not what the supporting evidence used. Cycling already provides more repetitions than any circuit can.
- Adding gym on top of an unchanged bike week. Strength training is load. Something on the bike has to come down when it goes in, especially in the first three weeks.
- Stopping in March. Covered above, and still the most common error in amateur cycling.
If you are managing this alongside a structured plan, the scheduling problem is real: two hard stimuli competing for the same recovery. Moveee's adaptive plans ease the next hard day when you clearly have not absorbed the last one, which is exactly the situation a heavy leg session creates — and the Fitness & Form page makes the extra fatigue visible rather than mysterious. For the movements themselves, and the case for doing any of this at all, see strength training for cyclists.
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 Hickson RC Interference of strength development by simultaneously training for strength and endurance · European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology · 1980
- 3 Huiberts RO, Wüst RCI, van der Zwaard S Concurrent strength and endurance training: a systematic review and meta-analysis on the impact of sex and training status · Sports Medicine · 2023
- 4 Rønnestad BR, Hansen EA, Raastad T In-season strength maintenance training increases well-trained cyclists' performance · European Journal of Applied Physiology · 2010
- 5 Vikmoen O, Ellefsen S, Trøen Ø, Hollan I, Hanestadhaugen M, Raastad T, Rønnestad BR Strength training improves cycling performance, fractional utilization of VO2max and cycling economy in female cyclists · Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports · 2016
- 6 Vikmoen O, Rønnestad BR, Ellefsen S, Raastad T Heavy strength training improves running and cycling performance following prolonged submaximal work in well-trained female athletes · Physiological Reports · 2017
- 7 American College of Sports Medicine Position stand: progression models in resistance training for healthy adults · Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise · 2009
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