Here is the thing nobody tells you about cycling and strength training: the generic advice — the one that says do some core work and maybe a few leg exercises in winter — was built almost entirely on research done on men. And for years it worked well enough, because the adaptations it targets are real. But it misses the single biggest reason women cyclists need the gym, and it is not power output.
It is bone.
The bone density reality
Cycling is a non-weight-bearing sport. Your bodyweight is parked on a saddle, your feet are clipped to pedals, and the gravitational loading that walking and running provide by default is almost entirely absent. For bone health, this is a problem, because bone remodels in response to mechanical stress. Remove the stress, and bone density quietly declines.
For men, this is concerning. For women, it is urgent.
Women can lose up to 20 per cent of bone density in the five to seven years following menopause, according to NIH data. That is not a gentle decline. That is a cliff. And if you are spending ten or fifteen hours a week on a bike — a sport that provides no osteogenic stimulus whatsoever — you are doing nothing to counteract it.
Dr Vicky Macfarlane's work on bone density and loading has reinforced what the clinical data shows: bone needs to be loaded, progressively and repeatedly, through high-force impacts and resistance work. Cycling provides neither. The combination of a non-loading sport and accelerating hormonal bone loss puts women cyclists in a uniquely exposed position.
This is fixable. But only if you understand what is actually happening.
The oestrogen cliff
The mechanism matters here.
Oestrogen is not just a reproductive hormone. It plays a direct role in bone metabolism, regulating the balance between osteoblasts (the cells that build bone) and osteoclasts (the cells that break it down). While oestrogen levels are healthy, that balance tips in favour of maintenance and formation. When oestrogen declines through perimenopause and into menopause, the balance shifts hard toward resorption. Bone breaks down faster than it builds. The protective brake is gone.
The timeline is not gradual. Most women enter perimenopause in their early to mid-forties, and the most aggressive bone loss happens in the five to seven years surrounding menopause itself. If you are a cyclist in that window and your only exercise is riding, you are losing bone at an accelerated rate with no countermeasure in place.
Here is where it gets really interesting, and where the research from Professor Belinda Beck at Griffith University matters. Her LIFTMOR trial took postmenopausal women with low bone density and put them through a high-intensity resistance training programme. Not light dumbbells. Not resistance bands. Heavy, progressive, loaded work. The results showed measurable improvements in bone mineral density at the lumbar spine and femoral neck — the exact sites most vulnerable to fracture.
The takeaway from LIFTMOR is direct: for bone density, the load has to be meaningful. Light circuits do not cut it. The bone needs a signal loud enough to trigger formation, and that signal requires intensity.
What Dr Stacy Sims says about women over 40
Dr Stacy Sims has been saying this for years, and her books ROAR and Next Level lay it out plainly: women over 40 need to lift heavy and include impact loading. Not optional. Not a nice-to-have for the off-season. A non-negotiable part of your training if you want to ride strong into your fifties, sixties and beyond.
Sims' argument is that the standard endurance-sport advice — more easy aerobic volume, keep the gym light, do some yoga — is the opposite of what the female body needs as oestrogen declines. The declining hormonal environment means women become more resistant to the anabolic signals from exercise. The response to light loads diminishes. To get the same adaptive stimulus, the load has to go up, not down.
She is also clear on impact loading: jumping, bounding, plyometric work. These provide the high-force, high-rate loading events that stimulate bone formation in a way that slow, controlled lifting alone does not. A combination of heavy resistance work and impact loading is her recommendation for any woman over 40 who wants to protect her skeleton.
For cyclists, this is doubly important. You are already in a non-impact sport. If your gym work is also low-impact and low-load, you have eliminated every bone-building stimulus from your training week.
How strength transfers to the bike
Bone density is the headline for women, but the performance case for strength training is strong on its own.
Strength training improves neuromuscular recruitment — your nervous system's ability to activate muscle fibres quickly and in the right sequence. This directly affects how much force you can put through the pedals per stroke, how efficiently you sustain that force over hours, and how much power you can produce when the road kicks up or you need to close a gap.
The research on concurrent strength and endurance training in cyclists consistently shows improvements in cycling economy, peak power output and time to exhaustion when structured gym work is added to a riding programme. You do not need to gain significant muscle mass to get faster. What changes is how effectively you recruit the muscle you already have.
For women specifically, maintaining lean mass through perimenopause directly protects the power output that oestrogen decline would otherwise erode. Every kilogram of muscle you keep is functional power on the bike. Strength training is not a separate project from your cycling. It is what allows your cycling to hold up as your hormonal environment changes.
The programme
Here is a concrete two-to-three sessions per week structure built around movements that load bone, build cycling-specific force and develop power. Every exercise here has been chosen because it transfers to the pedal stroke, provides meaningful skeletal loading, or both.
Session A — Force and bone loading
Weighted step-ups: 3 sets of 8 per leg. Use a box height that puts your thigh at or just above parallel. Hold dumbbells or kettlebells. This is your primary bone-loading and single-leg strength movement. Progress the load over weeks.
Hip thrusts: 3 sets of 10. Barbell or heavy dumbbell across the hips. This drives glute force production, which is where your power on the bike comes from in sustained efforts and climbs.
Walking lunges: 3 sets of 10 per leg with dumbbells. Unilateral, hip-dominant, with an impact component as you step and decelerate. Strong transfer to the pedal stroke.
Nordic hamstring curls: 3 sets of 5-8. Eccentric hamstring strength that protects the knee and builds posterior chain resilience. Use a partner or anchor your feet.
Calf raises: 3 sets of 15. Standing, loaded. Calf strength matters for pedalling efficiency and ankle stability, and the loaded standing position provides bone stimulus through the tibia.
Session B — Power and reactive strength
Plyometric step-ups: 3 sets of 6 per leg. Explosive drive off the box, land softly, reset. This is your impact loading for bone combined with rate-of-force development for the bike.
Single-leg press: 3 sets of 8 per leg. Heavy. This builds the single-leg force capacity that underpins every pedal stroke at threshold and above.
Bulgarian split stance work: 3 sets of 8 per leg. Rear foot elevated, front leg loaded. Develops hip stability, single-leg strength and addresses the asymmetries that every cyclist carries.
Kettlebell swings: 3 sets of 12. Hip-hinge power, glute activation, posterior chain endurance. A swing done properly is a rapid force-production movement that translates directly to out-of-the-saddle efforts.
Banded lateral walks: 2 sets of 15 per direction. Glute medius activation and hip stability. Not a glamorous movement, but the lateral stability it builds protects your knees and keeps your pelvis stable on the saddle.
Core work — add to either session
Pallof press: 3 sets of 10 per side. Anti-rotation core strength that keeps your torso stable when you are producing high force through the pedals.
Dead bugs: 3 sets of 10 per side. Teaches your core to stabilise while your limbs move independently — which is precisely what cycling demands.
Planks: 3 sets of 30-45 seconds. Anterior chain endurance. Nothing fancy, but the time-under-tension builds the trunk stability that lets you hold an aero position without your lower back collapsing.
Periodising with your riding
Dr Tim Gabbett's work on training load and injury prevention applies here: the biggest risk factor is not training hard, but sudden spikes in load. The worst thing you can do is ignore the gym for six months and then hammer three heavy sessions in week one of January.
In the off-season and base phase, prioritise the gym. Three sessions per week, progressive overload, building toward meaningful loads in the six to ten rep range. This is when you earn your bone density and neuromuscular adaptations.
As your event season approaches, reduce to two sessions and shift Session B toward more power-oriented work — lighter loads, faster movements, plyometrics. You are maintaining what you built and expressing it as speed.
During peak event weeks or heavy training blocks, one maintenance session is enough to hold your adaptations without adding fatigue. Do not drop the gym entirely. Bone density gains and neuromuscular adaptations start reversing within weeks of stopping, and the re-introduction spike when you restart creates injury risk. Keep a baseline. Always.
For weekly scheduling, separate your hard gym sessions from your hard cycling intervals by at least 24 hours. A common pattern: hard ride Tuesday, gym Wednesday, hard ride Thursday, gym Friday, long ride Saturday, rest Sunday. Adjust to your life, but protect the recovery gaps.
The mistakes women make
The most common mistake is going too light. The fear of getting bulky — which the research does not support in a concurrent endurance and strength training context — leads women to spend months doing sets of 20 with light weights, which is below the loading threshold for bone density and below the intensity needed for meaningful neuromuscular adaptation. If you can do 20 reps comfortably, the load is not doing what you need it to do.
The second mistake is doing only bodyweight work. Planks, lunges with no weight, resistance band circuits. These have their place as warm-up and activation tools, but they do not provide the progressive overload that bone and muscle require. Professor Beck's LIFTMOR trial was not a bodyweight programme. It was heavy resistance training. The stimulus has to match the demand.
The third mistake is treating gym work as seasonal. Strength training in November, then nothing from March to October. This pattern means you spend seven months losing what you spent five months building, and your skeleton never accumulates the sustained loading it needs. Year-round consistency at varying volumes beats the annual boom-and-bust cycle every time.
Where to go from here
If you are a woman cyclist over 35, strength training is not a bonus. It is the missing piece that the rest of your training cannot provide. Your bike builds your aerobic engine. Your gym sessions build the force, the bone density and the neuromuscular capacity that let you use that engine for decades.
The good news is that this is completely fixable. You do not need to live in the gym. Two to three sessions a week, loaded progressively, with the right movements, will change your riding and protect your long-term health in ways that more miles on the bike simply cannot.
If you want to work through this alongside other riders who are figuring out the same things, the Roadman Cycling community on Skool is where that conversation happens. Women riders in their forties and fifties sharing what is actually working, what the research says, and how to fit it all into a real life with a real schedule. Come and stop guessing.
Your body is not declining. It is asking for a different stimulus. Give it one.