Copy This Strength Workout, It’ll Blow Up Your FTP

0:00 This is the exact strength workout that I'm doing right now to boost my cycling performance as a personal trainer and coach with over 10 years experience. It also helped me build up to a 330 W FTP. Today, I'm going to take you through the full routine so you can either copy it to give a try or just apply some of the key principles to your own training. Besides riding itself, strength training is the best way to improve your power on the bike. If scheduled correctly, it's also super easy to fit around your cycling. And do stay tuned as at the end I'll show you exactly how to best integrate your strength work into your week. so it doesn't negatively impact your riding. So, this workout's obviously specifically built around me. And I'm not saying that everybody should be copying this workout exercise for exercise because everybody's different and well, you shouldn't just copy everything you see online. But the key principles, exercises, and movement patterns that I'll walk you through are

0:46 going to apply to anybody looking to improve their power on the bike using strength work. The workout will take about 45 minutes and contains six exercises. Why six exercises? Well, it will cover all the key movement patterns we need whilst riding. So, we've got squatting, we've got hinging, we've got twisting, we've also got pushing and pulling in terms of our upper body as well. So, those six exercises helps to create a nice balance between all of those, making sure we've got a well-rounded routine, especially if you're doing this one session twice a week. So, I don't have to keep saying it as well. Every exercise is going to have a twominut rest between sets. We're not trying to do cardio here. That's what we do on the bike. This is a strength session. We need to make sure we're fully rested between each and every single set. Each set, we need to be pushing as hard as we possibly can. We

1:32 need to make sure we're fully recovered. We need to make sure we're fully rested. And we can only do that if we have at least two minutes rest, maybe three if you have a little bit of spare time. The first exercise and the king of all lower body exercises is going to be the squat. Now, of course, you can do whatever variation of the squat that works best for you or that you have the kit available for. The most standard variation is going to be the barbell back squat. This is the one that's used in most sort of cycling specific strength studies that look at improving performance on the bike. The barbell back squat means you can really load up the movement. It's really going to hit your quads, your glutes, and your core as well. There are of course many other variations of the one I'm actually currently doing in my current program is called the cyclist squat where you hold something in a goblet position out the front. I've got my heels elevated on a

2:18 wedge. That just places the emphasis all onto my quads because I have underdeveloped quads. That's something I'm working on at the moment. The normal back squat is going to be great. Going down to around about parallel, although there's lots of studies out there showing big improvements in power just by going halfway down. That means you can load the movement up even more. Actually did the a video on this a little while ago and got lambasted in the comments with people saying, you know, you need to go parallel to the floor. And I agree, that's going to hit your glutes that a little bit more. It's going to help you load eccentrically on the way down a little bit further. But there is some research that shows even just doing a half squat is going to provide some good benefit. We're going to do four sets of six reps. Because this is our main movement for the day, we want a good number of sets. Four is a good number of sets as a rule of thumb to start off with. Three is fine, but four is just going to give us enough

3:03 volume if we're only training, strength training twice per week. The six reps is a good happy medium between not too much that we're just focusing on hypertrophy and just building muscle, but not too low that we're only just kind of focusing on strength. Although the two are never mutually exclusive. And in terms of tempo, as with a lot of the exercises today, we're looking to drop down over three seconds, nice and steady, slow on the eentric. That's going to really help to build that strength and control and own the movement. And then we're wanting to drive up quickly from the bottom as quickly as we possibly can, usually over around about 1 second. This is going to help translate best over to the back. Next up, we've got the RDL or Romanian deadlift or stiff-legged deadlift, which is slightly different, whatever you want to call it. You can use dumbbells for this or you could use a barbell. Barbell is going to help you lift a little bit

3:49 more weight whereas dumbbells a little bit easier depending on what kit you have available. The RDL is going to hit the glutes and hit the hamstrings and also the upper back and lower back a little bit as well. What we call a posterior chain. All those muscles down the back of it can really help to provide us with that power whilst we're riding. Help with core stability as well. Similarly to the squat, this is a brilliant movement to hit some of those muscles which are maybe just slightly neglected, such as the hamstrings with our squat. This is going to provide us with our hinge pattern for the day as opposed to that squat movement pattern which we've already hit. Similarly to the squat, we're going to do four sets of six reps. You could move this down to three sets since we've already tax the lower body a little bit with our squats, but four sets will go nicely if we're doing this twice per week. Six reps.

4:34 Again, good balance between strength, but also building that little bit of muscle. Really important thing for the RDL's is that we go down super slow. Again, three seconds down. Similarly to the squat, that's going to really help provide us with sort of strength under length. That's going to really help us improve our hamstring mobility and flexibility as well. Especially if you're riding a TT bike or you're trying to ride in the drops, we need a good amount of hamstring flexibility to be able to reach over. So the RDL's a brilliant movement, not only to build strength, but also help us to build that flexibility needed whilst we're on the bike. And I'm just quickly coming to you from the future. Whilst I'm editing this video, I thought I might as well put the session together in a PDF along with a nice warm-up and a cool down so you can use it next time you're in the gym. So find this completely free of charge in the description below. Let me know how

5:20 you find it. The next exercise and the final lower body exercise you'll be glad to hear in this workout is going to be the split squat but with our heel elevated. It's really important to do some single leg work and integrate that within our training because at the end of the day, cycling is a single leg squat. We're only using one leg at a time. So, that's going to help to undo any imbalances we might have and focus on one side at a time. The split squat's going to really help to target our glutes, our hamstrings, our quads, also our core as well. But just having the heel elevated means we have to create tension through the bottom of the foot. Again, similarly to when we are cycling, we don't have our heels supported on something. So this just kind of mimic cycling that little bit more than a normal split squat. You can of course do this body weight if that's going to be

6:05 heavy enough for you. Or you can use some dumbbells or hold the kettle bell or just hold whatever you want to in front of you in this kind of goblet position. Or you can even have a bar on your back. We're going to go for two sets of eight on each leg for this one. Again, a little bit more taxing because we've got to do one side at a time, but we're only utilizing two sets for this one because we've already hammered our lower body. So, only just two sets needed for this just to kind of finish things off and just get that single leg work in before we move on to some upper body work. Again, 3 seconds down, nice controlled, and then driving up over one second. But we want to make sure that heel stays in line with our toes. Do hang around because I'll go through exactly how to fit this workout in and around your riding so that it doesn't impact things negatively. But exercise number four is actually two exercises. We're going to be going for a press up

6:51 followed by a row, hitting the upper body. Cyclists commonly miss out upper body exercises because, well, why do I need to build upper body muscle when the legs are the things that powering it? Upper body muscle is still really important. It's going to help protect us from injury and it generally just helps to balance out the whole body. Nobody wants huge strong legs and absolutely nothing at the top. Everyone knows how to do a push-up or press up. Hopefully, it's going to be about choosing the best variation for you. Again, that allows you to get fairly close to failure at the end of every set. So, I'm currently doing press ups on some parallettes. That just enables me to get that a little bit deeper. Makes the movement a little bit tougher. And I'm also raising my feet on a box as well. Again, just making the movement tougher. If you can only manage the sets and reps I'll mention in a second on the floor or even on your knees or even up against the

7:37 wall, then that's completely fine as well. For this, we're going to be doing three sets of eight. going to be building a little bit of upper body muscle. Three sets is a good rule of thumb. It's not going to sort of be too much volume so that it's tiring us out for the rest of the session, but it means it's going to be enough volume in there to really help build some strength and potentially build that little bit of muscle, too. And again, 3 seconds down, 1 second up. We're going to be pairing this though with a bent over row. We're going to use or I'm using dumbbells for this. Of course, you can use a barbell or there's plenty of machines which mimic a row as well. You can even do a cable row if you're exercising at the gym. Again, we're going to go three sets of eight for this as well. Squeezing those shoulder blades. This is going to pair nicely with the press up because we don't have to rest between them. We can go straight from the press up straight into the row. However you are doing your

8:23 row, because they're working opposing muscle groups. One's working the chest, shoulders, tricep with a pushing with a press up. And then we're going to be working our lats, our back, our rhomboids, and our biceps with the row. So, we can do one straight into the other. And then we're going to rest for the two minutes between. Both these movements are hitting a horizontal pushing and pulling movement pattern. If you were to do this session two times a week, you'd want to replace this horizontal pushing and pulling with some kind of vertical pushing and pulling, maybe like a lat pull down or a pull-up or a shoulder press. Just making sure you're hitting all movement patterns over the course of the week. Then the final exercise, we've got the paloff press. I've mentioned this in another video where I went through how to effectively train your core as a cyclist. This exercise is really brilliant at developing some anti-rotation strength. So allowing us

9:09 to prevent movement through the core whilst our legs are kind of doing something on the bike, for example. So all you're going to do for this one is attach a band or a strap or you can use a cable machine if you're at the gym. Make sure it's around about at shoulder level. Then you're going to place your arms out front, pull into the chest, push out. Again, we're going to go three seconds in, three seconds out for this one. So three seconds both ways. We're wanting to keep our core nice and tight. Make sure our hands go in a nice straight line. When your hands are further out, the band or cable's going to want to pull you out or pull you back that little bit more quickly. So, it's going to be quite tough to keep still. Three sets of six. This is a strength move. We're looking to build strength with this one. So, slightly lower on the reps, but three sets is going to give us enough volume to build some good core strength. So, that's the workout. Hopefully, you can see how and why it's

9:55 put together in the way that it is. But one of the most important things is that we fit it into our week of training efficiently and effectively because we don't want it to be negatively impacting our riding. Our strength should be complementing our riding, making sure it helps to improve our performance on the bike. But if you implement it in the wrong way, it can negatively impact your riding. So, let's go through exactly how you program it into your week. So, of course, everybody's weeks are going to look different, but I'll show you how you can plug and play depending on how many rides you do per week. So, let's say, let's start with three rides per week. That's what most people are going to be doing most likely. So let's say we've got an easy ride on the Sunday. Most people will be doing a longer ride on the Sunday potentially. So R is going to denote an easy ride. Then let's put two hard rides during the week spread apart. If you've watched some of my

10:41 other videos, you'll know you probably can't recover from any more than two hard rides per week anyway. So let's say this is somebody doing three cycle sessions per week. Where are we going to fit our strength workouts, which are going to be denoted by W. Well, what I'm going to try and get out here is ideally we want them close to our hard sessions. So, we're keep kind of keeping hard parts of the week hard and easy parts of the week easy, but we want them to be after those sessions so they're not impacting them. So, in this example, our strength work denoted by W is going to be on the Wednesday and the Saturday. That means we can attack our hard rides, V2 intervals, threshold intervals on the Tuesday and Friday and then work hard in the gym on the Wednesday or the Saturday or from home, wherever you're training. and then still have periods of the week where you're resting and recovering. So, that would be a super simple way to

11:27 manage that. If you're somebody who has a little bit more time and maybe you're retired or something like that or have a job that allows it and you could train twice per day, I would say do your hard rides and your workouts on the same day. That means you really are keeping your hard days hard and then it allows you to fully recover and take your easy days easy. Most people can't do that though. Um, so I'll put them back on Wednesday and a Saturday. Um, if you're looking to do more rides, then all you would do then is just plug and play them wherever you wanted. You could do um an easy ride on a Monday or on a Thursday. It doesn't necessarily matter. We're keeping our hard days hard, hard sections of the week hard, easy sections of the week easy. That's going to be your best port. That's essentially the best way to program workouts, strength workouts into your week around your riding. I'd recommend everybody do two strength

12:14 workouts if possible per week. If you're just going to do one, the results you get from that one session are going to be dwindling by the time you train again the following week. So twice a week is a really nice number to be able to fit around your riding, whether you're doing two, three, four, five cycles per week, but it's going to allow you enough time for recovery as well. Future me again, don't forget to download the workout for free in the description below if you fancy giving it a go alongside a warm-up and cool down. If you want to find out a little bit more about effectively training your core as a cyclist, do check out this video here. But ride strong and I'll catch you in the next