Reviewed for accuracy: This block assumes prior gym experience and clean technique on the patterns it uses. The progression draws on periodisation principles discussed on the podcast with Joe Friel and Derek Teel. Riders with cardiac, orthopaedic or other clinical conditions should consult a sports physician before starting a maximum-strength phase.
There's a version of this article for cyclists who've never set foot in a gym. This isn't it.
If you already lift — if the split squat and the hip hinge are second nature, if you've been through a strength block before and your technique holds under load — then doing the beginner routine again is wasting the best twelve weeks of your year. The off-season is the one window where strength gets to lead instead of fit around the edges of your riding. The bike volume is down, the intensity is off, the racing is months away. This is when real strength gets built. And building it properly means a sequence, not a single routine repeated until spring.
Most intermediate cyclists get this wrong in the same way: they pick a handful of movements, do three sets of ten, and keep doing exactly that for the whole winter. They get a bit stronger in the first month and then plateau, because they never change the stimulus. The body adapts to what you ask of it and then stops. Asking the same thing for twelve weeks is asking for one month of progress and two of maintenance.
The fix is periodisation — the same logic Joe Friel built the modern training year around, applied in the gym. Build the quality, then the strength, then convert it. Three phases, four weeks each, each one setting up the next.
The shape of the block
Before the detail, here's the whole thing in one breath:
- Weeks 1-4 — Anatomical adaptation and hypertrophy. Higher reps (8-12), moderate load, shorter rest. You're building muscle, work capacity, and tendon resilience — the raw material the next phase makes strong.
- Weeks 5-8 — Maximum strength. Lower reps (4-6), heavy load, full rest. This is the neural phase. You're teaching the muscle you just built to recruit hard and produce real force.
- Weeks 9-12 — Conversion to power. Low reps (3-6), explosive intent, full rest. You're taking that strength and teaching the nervous system to apply it fast — which is the only version of strength the bike cares about.
Two sessions a week throughout. A squat-pattern session and a hinge-pattern session, each built around cycling-specific movements. No barbell back squats. No conventional deadlifts. No bent-over barbell rows. Everything here loads through patterns an experienced amateur can own without a spotter and without the injury exposure those three carry for a rider with a cyclist's body.
Derek Teel's framing is worth keeping in your head the whole way through: the gym work isn't a separate sport. It's there to make you a more durable, more powerful cyclist. Every choice in this block serves that, not a number on a leaderboard.
Phase 1 — Build (Weeks 1-4)
The goal here is muscle and capacity. You're laying down the tissue the strength phase will load and conditioning the tendons to tolerate it. Reps are 8-12, load is moderate — challenging for the last two reps — and rest is 60-90 seconds. The shorter rest is deliberate: this phase carries a metabolic cost that drives the muscle-building response.
Session A — squat-pattern emphasis
| Movement | Sets | Reps | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | Bulgarian split squat | 4 | 10 each leg | Controlled, full depth | | Single-leg Romanian deadlift | 3 | 10 each leg | Slow eccentric, full hinge | | Hip thrust | 3 | 12 | Squeeze and pause at the top | | Dumbbell row | 3 | 10 each side | Strict, no torso swing | | Pallof press | 3 | 12 each side | Slow, anti-rotation |
Session B — hinge-pattern emphasis
| Movement | Sets | Reps | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | Kettlebell deadlift | 4 | 12 | Hips back, flat back | | Goblet squat | 3 | 10 | Elbows tucked, full depth | | Step-up | 3 | 10 each leg | Drive through the lead heel | | Dumbbell press | 3 | 10 | Controlled overhead | | Copenhagen plank | 3 | 20-30s each side | Build the adductors |
Add a little load each week if technique holds. By week four the movements should feel grooved and the loads heavier than where you started. That's the platform. Now we make it strong.
Phase 2 — Maximum strength (Weeks 5-8)
This is the phase most cyclists never reach, because it asks for things that feel counterintuitive: fewer reps, more weight, much longer rest. Reps drop to 4-6. Load is heavy — genuinely hard at six, with two reps in reserve. Rest stretches to two or three minutes between the main movements.
The point is neural, not metabolic. You're not chasing a burn or a pump. You're teaching your nervous system to recruit more muscle fibres and fire them harder — the adaptation that actually transfers to producing force on the bike. Rushing the rest sabotages it: a fatigued nervous system can't express maximum strength, so short rest here just turns a strength session into a tiring conditioning session.
Session A
| Movement | Sets | Reps | Rest | |---|---|---|---| | Bulgarian split squat (loaded) | 4 | 5 each leg | 2-3 min | | Single-leg Romanian deadlift | 3 | 6 each leg | 2 min | | Hip thrust | 4 | 6 | 2 min | | Weighted pull-up or heavy lat pull-down | 3 | 5 | 2 min |
Session B
| Movement | Sets | Reps | Rest | |---|---|---|---| | Heavy kettlebell or trap-bar hinge | 4 | 5 | 2-3 min | | Goblet or front-loaded squat | 4 | 6 | 2 min | | Single-leg hip thrust | 3 | 6 each leg | 90s | | Heavy dumbbell press | 3 | 5 | 2 min |
A note on the trap-bar hinge: held with a neutral grip and the load at your sides rather than against your shins, it keeps the spine far more upright than a conventional deadlift and is the one heavy bilateral hinge we'll allow an experienced lifter in this phase. If it isn't a movement you already own, stay on the heavy kettlebell hinge — the stimulus is the same and the setup is simpler.
Warm up thoroughly before every heavy set. This phase has the highest load and therefore the highest demand on technique. Five minutes on the bike, then a ramp of progressively heavier sets into your working weight. Never walk up to a heavy first set cold.
Phase 3 — Conversion to power (Weeks 9-12)
You've built muscle. You've made it strong. Now you make it fast — because maximum strength that you can only express slowly does almost nothing for a sprint, a surge, or the jump to close a gap. This phase converts the strength into cycling-relevant power, and it's the bridge back to the bike.
Reps are low (3-6), the load is moderate, and the intent is everything: every concentric rep moved as explosively as you can produce it. Full recovery between sets, because power is a neural quality and fatigue kills it.
Both sessions draw from:
- Jump split squat — 4 x 5 each leg, explosive up, soft landing. Regress to a fast concentric split squat if the landing is unstable.
- Trap-bar jump or kettlebell swing — 4 x 5, violent hip extension, the bike's exact movement pattern at speed.
- Dumbbell push press — 4 x 4, drive overhead with full intent.
- Lateral bound — 3 x 5 each side, stick the landing for two seconds. Reactive strength in the frontal plane the bike never trains.
- Step-up with knee drive — 3 x 5 each leg, explode the trailing knee to the chest.
Keep one heavier strength movement from Phase 2 in each session at 3 x 4 to hold the strength you built — power work alone will let maximum strength bleed away. As the weeks pass and your bike volume starts climbing toward spring, this gym work naturally steps back into a maintenance role, and the power you've built starts showing up where it counts: on the road.
Programming around the block
Two rules carry the whole thing. Strength leads, the bike supports — through these twelve weeks, keep riding to two endurance sessions and at most one short intensity session a week, and never put a hard gym session the day before a quality ride. Respect the recovery — heavy lower-body work needs 48-72 hours between sessions, so a Tuesday/Friday or Monday/Thursday split, not back-to-back days. Sleep seven and a half to nine hours and eat your protein — 1.6 to 2.0g per kilo of bodyweight — because the maximum strength phase in particular won't produce its adaptation on an empty tank.
Run a deload in week eight if the heavy phase has taken a toll — drop the volume by a third for a few days and let the nervous system clear. You'll come into the power phase sharper for it.
Twelve weeks done properly and you arrive at the start of the season with more muscle, more strength, and — because you finished with the conversion phase — more of it expressed as power on the bike. That's the difference between a winter of gym work that stays in the gym and a winter that turns up on your power meter in March.
If you want this block written out session by session, with the load targets and the deload built in around your actual race calendar, that's exactly what we run inside the Roadman community — periodised strength sequenced into your bike training so the two pull together instead of fighting for your recovery. Bring your off-season here and build the rider you're not done becoming.
For context around the block, the beginner 12-week plan is the on-ramp if you're not ready for this yet, the over-40 strength guide explains the adaptations you're chasing, and the pro off-season playbook shows how the riders at the top spend their winter.