Habits = Success

Over the last five years or so, late fall finds a mounting wave of cyclists and triathletes beginning to look toward strength training for the winter, but the path to long-term strength training success is not as easy as recent research has made it seem; it is not simply, "Hit the weights, pick up heavy things, and BAM, 8-12 weeks later you're faster on the bike!"

There are three major things that are crucial for success from working with weights;

if we want improvements and success now and for the coming decade (or six), we need to take the time to master these three things and turn them into habits.

Show up 2-3 days a week, consistently

This is the unsexy side of sports performance, but it's a keystone (THE keystone, in fact). Ya gotta show up 2-3 days a week and do the work.

Showing up and applying a regular and consistent training stress is what causes the adaptations. Go out too hard, and we'll flame out faster than a newly founded hair band in the 2000s when NSYNC and Backstreet Boys were storming the scene. If we don't show up consistently, we'll never build enough training stress to actually allow any meaningful improvements, and we'll wind up burning time (and, more importantly, energy) in the gym.

We don't need to go all out or hard in our strength sessions. In fact, a perceived exertion of 7-8 (medium to medium-hard) has been shown to be the sweet spot for most sports athletes (outside of American football, rugby, powerlifting, and Olympic weightlifting).

Do we need heavy weights? Absolutely.

But if we do heavy and then are too sore and tired to show up for our strength training or ride with quality and consistency, no real, meaningful gains will be made.

Which leads us to habit number two.

Focus on how we move set to set

One of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around when I was competitively powerlifting was how much the "strong guys" critiqued what looked to me to be spectacular form. Week after week I would listen to their conversations between sets and training sessions, swimming in the vast depths of knowledge they had about the human body and how they focused on the exact details that matter.

Now, you don’t need to go quite that far, but you do need to put the focus on how well you're executing each movement. As the avant-garde Sports Illustrated edition showed a few years ago with top athletes across a number of sports in their birthday suits, not all athletes look like the ripped, low-bodyfat, big-muscle guys and super-toned, trimmed gals we've been taught to desire. The sports athletes in the magazine looked…about average. Sure, some had more muscle mass, but none of them were super lean.

What makes an athlete is how they move.

One of the best habits we can build for any strength exercise is finding an example video recording of the exercise and recording a video of ourselves performing a set or two of the exercise at a similar camera angle to the example video, then working to look and move a little more like the example video.

Will we all move and look like the example video? No. But by putting our focus on getting movement from where we need and want it, moving well, and showing up consistently in this fashion, the results are guaranteed to follow.

Now let's move on to a lynchpin habit that can be the bane of our existence if we ignore or neglect it.

Get nutrition, sleep, and rest time on point

This is so often overlooked by endurance athletes, as we tend to have the "more is more" mentality, but not only does this mentality undercut our strength training and in-sport training, it can also lead us to the spiral of "flushing the toilet," where we keep putting energy and effort into strength and training but slowly see results decrease.

Many endurance athletes have begun to write off this decline as due to getting older, and this may be true in some cases, but for a high number of clients I've worked with over the age of 35, much of it is due to their doing too much training and not enough of the things that allow the body to adapt and improve from the training.

Sleep (quality and consistent sleep) is the wonder drug of the body. When we set a regular bedtime and stick with it, we are quite literally setting our bodies up to have a rhythm and flow to the hormones and other processes it needs to repair damage done via training and build new tissues and neuromuscular connections.

And without regular, consistent nutrition giving the body the building blocks it needs to do that work....well, good luck, Chuck. Because real life doesn't work like MacGyver. The body cannot magically build new muscles, tendons, ligaments, bone tissue, and blood cells or maintain its immune system with a toothpick, a piece of Wrigley spearmint gum, a paper clip, and a rubber band.

The same goes for downtime and rest.

There are a lot of benefits that strength training alongside riding can offer us, but in order to maximize the benefits and returns, we must build the habits that will allow us to see success by showing up consistently in a well-fed, usually well-rested state, while also giving our bodies the offline time they need to actually do the work and rebuild themselves to match the demands we've been placing on them so they can go out and perform.

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At BaseCamp, we believe that every cyclist has the potential to achieve greatness, no matter where they start. Our mission is to create a community-driven training environment where cyclists and triathletes of all levels can train together, support each other, and grow stronger, faster, and more confident in their abilities. Our cycling training programs are expert driven and tailored to your needs. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, BaseCamp is where you belong.