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Comment by donretag | Hacker News Reader

"The average American flat-out loathes strength training. While about half of people do the recommended amount of aerobic activity each week, only 20% also do the muscle-strengthening moves that work major muscle groups."

That definitely sums up myself. I am a cyclist. My totals for this week are 147.1 miles with 15,497 feet of climbing (I do nothing but mountains, flat is boring!), but if you ask me to do 10 push ups, I will complain! For me aerobic activity engages my mind. There is a destination. The environment moves and is changing. When climbing up a hill, I have no choice to push myself if I am ever going to get to the top. Push ups? I simply stop when my body resists.

Despite my complaints, I do some strength training. Core strength is important in cycling and it is my upper body that fails during long rides, not my legs. My legs can keep going, but my shoulders give out due to constant vibrations.

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That quote from the article isn't at all surprising.

The aerobic recommendation is 2.5hrs of brisk walking (i.e. 7 to 8 miles, e.g just over a mile a day). You'd have to be pretty dedictated to a sedentary lifestyle not to manage that.

On the other hand, you have to think about doing the equivalent of 1 set of 12 reps to exhaustion on each major muscle group twice a week.

I manage twice as much going to home/work walking. It's a luxury I get and I understand not everyone will get it, but I've been surprised by how many people tell me to take the bus.

For the record, I live about 20 (~100m) blocks from work, and it takes me 20-30 minutes. Since everyday I go with a backpack full of stuff (notebook, paper notebooks, a few books and a table), I'm also carrying 5 to 7kg of extra weight. And I try to never use the elevator, since it's just 3 floors up and down (on rare ocassions do it 2 or 3x in the day, but over a span of hours).

While all this seems exceedingly little, in the end it adds up so that I "don't do excercise" but I still keep a baseline shape. And I'm totally amazed at how many people will frown upon even doing as little as I do on a daily basis.

Exactly. Without trying you get double the recommended minimum cardio. I can't imagine how people can go about their daily business and not cover it.

Strength is trickier. Nothing in my day to day life requires me to pull something 12 times in succession in such a way that my lats will refuse to do a 13th pull.

That's why I do strength at home. I manage to pull about 30 minutes a day (not much yet), and I interleave upper body/legs every day. Been pulling that for a few months and managed to get fitter, not loosing weight (weight has always been extremely difficult to get for me, so that's a plus).

You'd probably see nice returns in your cycling if you started doing heavy barbell squats too.

It's not really very useful. Most serious but recreational cyclists are limited in terms of available training time and recovery. When faced with the option of spending their limited time on the bike or in the weight room with the objective of going faster, the bike is almost invariably the right answer. The reason for that is that watts/kg and watts/cda are the 2 basic determinants of how quickly a cyclist can get anywhere. Weight lifting will increase the watts but only on a very, very short time scale (ie, sprinting). Weights will increase the kg and cda for cyclists who eat in surplus. Thus, the cyclist will be no faster and most probably actually get slower.

The obvious exception to this is track and road sprinters who benefit considerably from doing weight work. Everyone else serious about riding should just ride.

there is hardly a sport where strength training and conditioning is not useful.

That is a true statement, however when the objective is getting from point A to point B and those 2 points are >1km apart strength is rarely a limiting factor for cyclists. Available training time and recovery rate are however. Many of the benefits of gym based strength training can be achieved on the bike by performing on bike sprints all the while maintaining specificity. The modern, generally accepted principle is that weight training for cyclists is not the best use of training time.

Maybe.

afaik, most elite cyclists do not squat. I'm guessing endurance and low body weight are more advantageous to the sport.

I'm sure there are studies. Can anyone else chime in?

Elite track cyclists--i.e., the ones who ride at 40+ kmph on velodromes--definitely do squat. I wouldn't be surprised if they also incorporated power cleans and deadlifts.

Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aOImvJOaGiY

Yes, track cyclists do indeed lift, but it seems OP is an endurance cyclist.

I can see how fast-twitch fibers are less important for endurance athletes. For cyclists, only climbs and sprints would benefit much.

Have you tried changing up your strength training? There's no fun to doing more push ups, crunches, etc. but my goal is to beat my high score at deadlifting, etc. each week which keeps me motivated. Or flipping a tractor tire from X to Y; there's a destination.

There's a lot of different ways to strength train, it's not all seemingly pointless tasks.

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