You spent the whole off-season in the gym. You built a proper foundation — squats, deadlifts, single-leg work, core stability. Your numbers went up, you felt stronger on the bike, and the early season rides felt noticeably different. Then racing started and the gym sessions quietly disappeared. By July, all that work had evaporated.
This is the pattern I see with almost every cyclist who takes strength training seriously in winter. The off-season block goes well. Then the season starts and the gym becomes the first casualty. The thinking is understandable — you do not want leg soreness before a race, the training plan is already full, and the bike is the priority. But the cost of completely stopping is higher than most riders realise.
When I spoke to Derek Teel about strength training for cyclists, he was clear on the maintenance dose: two sessions per week, 20 to 30 minutes each, and you can hold the vast majority of what you built. Drop to zero for six weeks and you are starting over. That is the trade-off.
The key shift from off-season to in-season is simple. You reduce volume but maintain intensity. In the off-season, you might do four sets of eight reps at a moderate load with multiple exercises. In-season, you cut to two or three sets of four to six reps at a heavy load with a stripped-back exercise list. You are not trying to get stronger. You are reminding your neuromuscular system to keep firing at the level you trained it to.
Exercise selection gets ruthless. Keep the movements that transfer most directly to the bike: a squat variation, a hip hinge like a Romanian deadlift, one single-leg exercise, and a core stability movement. That is four exercises. Drop the bicep curls. Drop the accessory work. Drop anything that creates the kind of soreness that lingers for three days.
Timing is something most riders get wrong. The instinct is to put the gym on a rest day so it does not interfere with riding. But that means you no longer have a true rest day — you have just moved the stress around. The smarter approach is to consolidate: put your gym session on the same day as a hard bike session, after the ride. That way your hard days are hard, your easy days are easy, and your body has clear recovery windows.
During heavy race blocks, dropping to one session per week is fine. One session maintains more than you would think. It is the difference between holding 85 percent of your strength and losing it all.
Do not let winter's work go to waste.
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