This new study blew my mind. Okay, you're over 40 years of age. Maybe you train four or five days a week.
You watch your power meter numbers. You follow a plan. You ride with your mates on a Saturday.
Maybe even bought a lighter set of wheels, thinking that that would be the thing that finally made the difference. But I have one question. Why is almost none of your weekly available training time spent in the gym?
Because a brand new meta analysis published in 2025 in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, and I'll leave the link below, just reviewed 17 studies covering 262 cyclists. And what they found should change the way that every cyclist, especially those that are over 40, think about training. Heavy strength training, and I'll get on to what heavy actually means in a minute, the kind that most of us avoid, significantly improves cycling performance.
It makes you more efficient on the bike and more powerful when it counts. And the craziest part of this whole thing is because of how aging affects your muscles, the relative benefits of this may actually be greater for older athletes than younger athletes. So, in the next few minutes, I'm going to walk you through step by step exactly what this foot study found and why it matters more for you than it does for a 25year-old athlete.
And I'm going to give you the exact protocol you can start this week. Okay, it's a bold promise. I'm going to deliver.
Let's get into it. Getting older on the bike. It's not just that you slow down.
We need to understand why you slow down. And most cyclists get this understanding completely wrong. After the age of 40, you lose roughly 8% of your muscle mass per decade.
This isn't my opinion. That's published research. It's fact.
And after 70 years of age, the rate nearly doubles to 15% per decade. That's not insignificant. And it's not that all muscle fades away equally.
The fibers you lose fastest are your type two fibers, your fast twitch fibers, the ones responsible for being like an effective road racer, for explosive power, for surges, for closing those gaps, for pulling your best conidor impression when you stand up on a climb when it gets super steep. Research shows that type 2 fibers can be 10 to 40% smaller in older adults compared to younger ones. They actually shrink.
They fade away. And if you're not doing anything to stimulate them, they just keep going that way. Now, on top of that, your V2 max, we all know this, it declines with age.
For sedentary people, it drops roughly 10 to 12% for decade per decade from age 40. And if you're training and training well, you can maybe cut that in half down to about 5 to 6% decline per decade. What most riders miss is that even at the reduced rate, you are actually still declining every single decade.
And if you reduce your training to moderate intensity, which is what a lot of riders do as life gets busier, the drop accelerates dramatically. So you've got on one hand, you've got muscle disappearing, fast twitch fibers actually shrinking and your aerobic ceiling is slowly coming down. This is a pretty potent cocktail.
And what most cyclists actually do in response to this, they start to ride a little bit more. They don't change up the intensity. They don't change up the same type of sessions.
they just do more of it, especially as you had head into these summer months. And that's precisely the wrong response to this situation. Because that meta study, the 2025 analysis, it just answered the question.
It showed that more time on the bike isn't the problem here. It's how you spend your time off the bike. That's where the solution lies.
So, let me break this down. In 202025, a team of researchers, they published a systematic review. We call this a metaanalysis in the European Journal of Applied Physiology.
They pulled together 17 studies involving 262 trained cyclists. There were 60 women in this study group. The interventions lasted between five and 25 weeks with one to three strength training sessions per week.
And they looked at the effect of heavy strength training on key physiological markers that determine cycling performance. And here's what they found. Heavy strength training produced a significant improvement in cycling efficiency.
That means the amount of power you produce for a given oxygen cost went up. You became more economical in a sense. You use less energy at the same pace.
It produced a significant improvement also in anorobic power. That's your ability to produce force above threshold. The efforts that actually really matter in road races on clims when you're trying to punch it into a headwind when you need to respond to an attack or close a gap.
And it produced a significant improvement in overall cycling performance, specifically time trials and time to exhaustion tests. And this is the part that surprises quite a lot of people. I know it surprised me.
It had no significant negative effect on V2 max. None. That's important because we didn't think this for a long time.
Heavy strength training did not reduce aerobic capacity. That all fear that lifting weights will make you slow down, that'll add bulk, that'll hurt your power to your power to weight ratio. The data just doesn't support this.
Not at all. Not in trained cyclists. So, you've got better efficiency, you've got more power, you've got better performance, and no loss of aerobic fitness.
And you're telling me that most cyclists over the age of 40 aren't doing this? It's like, why? So, stick with me here.
This next part I'm going to get into is where this starts to really click and comes together. Remember those type two muscle fibers I mentioned earlier, the fast twitch ones that shrink as you age? This is where it all connects.
Heavy strength training is one of the only ways to preserve and rebuild type two muscle fibers. Endurance riding, it won't do it. Your zone 2 rides won't cut the mustard here.
Even threshold intervals don't fully address this situation. The only way to maintain the fibers responsible for power, for force production, for the ability to respond when the road kicks up, it's to load them and to load them heavily. And that means time in the gym.
That means squats, deadlifts, leg press, heavy compound movements. The research shows three reasons why this translates directly into better cycling. First, cycling efficiency improves because your muscles become better at producing force.
Each pedal stroke requires less metabolic cost. You're doing the same work with less effort. Over a 2-hour ride, over a 4-hour road race, this adds up enormously.
Second, rate of force development improves. That's how quickly your muscles can generate power. It's what allows you to respond to surges, to accelerate out of corners, to push and punch it over the top of a climb instead of just slowly getting gapped over the top of that riser.
And this is one of the first things to decline with age. Excuse the brief interruption, folks. This episode is brought to you by Bickmo Cycle Insurance.
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Check the terms in your policy docs. Third, fatigue resistance improves. Durability has become such a buzzword in the last couple of years.
When your muscles are stronger, every pedal stroke represents a smaller percentage of your maximum capacity. You fatigue slower. The last hour of a ride feels different when your legs have reserves they didn't have before.
And this is the part that should matter to almost anybody that's over 40. The benefits of heavy strength training appear to be equal or even greater for older athletes because you're fighting a battle that young riders don't have to face yet. You're losing muscle.
You're losing muscle fibers. You're losing force production. Strength training isn't just an add-on for you.
It's a direct counter measure to the things that are slowing you down. So, if you've watched this far, I hope you're convinced. The science says it works.
The logic makes sense. The question you probably care about at this point is, how do you actually do this? Well, I'm going to walk you through the exact protocol in a second, but first, I've gotten lit up over the past couple of months with messages about our not done yet cycling coaching community.
We launched this in January. We promoted it for 7 days. We capped it at 100 athletes and it sold out so fast.
Now, I'm finally announcing that we are opening back up our coaching program. Not done yet, but only for 20 athletes. And this is where we're going to bring 20 athletes in.
There is a charge, but we're going to bring 20 athletes in and are going to work through like our other athletes have the five pillars of performance. We're going to build your training plan. We're going to build your strength and conditioning plan.
We're going to build your recovery protocols, your nutrition, and we're going to surround you with like-minded people, coaches, and athletes who run a similar track for you. I can't guarantee your success, but the results so far with the 100 people we've had through the program have been incredible. So, if you do want to be a part of this, it takes you about 20 seconds to apply to just vet who we're working with.
If you pop over to roadmandcycling.com/2026, romancecycling.com/2026, the link for that is in the show notes or description.
Please apply. And I know you might think maybe it's not suitable for me. Apply and then we can figure out.
It's one of the most transformative things that I've seen in cycling. The results we're getting have been nothing short of astonishing. Okay, let's get back to the video.
Let me make this really practical. The studies in the meta analysis used one to three heavy strength training sessions per week. The research on trained cyclists specifically shows that two strength training sessions per week seems to be the sweet spot.
That's enough to drive meaningful adaptation without wrecking your recovery on the bike. And here's what a session looks like. You're doing heavy compound movements.
The emphasis is on the lower body. You're talking about barbell squats, leg press, Romanian deadlifts, stepups, and potentially calf raises. Three to four exercises, three to four sets, four to six reps at high load.
This isn't bodybuilding, and you're not doing sets of like 15 with really light weights. You're lifting heavy with good form and full recovery between sets. The load matters.
The studies that showed the biggest improvements use loads in the range of four to 10 rep max. That means a weight that's genuinely challenging by the fourth to sixth rep. If you can do 12 reps comfortably at this weight, the weight is too light.
This is a key distinction. Light strength training does not produce the same results. It has to be heavy.
Now, here's something I need to flag because it's important and most people miss it. The draining effect is real and it's fast. Research shows that if you stop strength training for six to eight weeks, some of the key adaptations, specifically your power output and race, rate of force development, return to baseline, like disappear, gone, back to where you started.
And this is why so many cyclists get this wrong. They do a block of gym work in the off season, they feel good, and then they stop when the race season starts, and within two months, they've lost the gains. The research actually shows that you can maintain a lot of these gains and adaptations with as little as one strength training session per week.
One session, that's all it takes to hold on to what you've built. But you have to keep going. You can't take that break.
You can't just bank it in the offseason and then walk away and coast all through a season. And if you're over 40, you need to be smart about where you place these sessions in your week. Don't do a really heavy leg day session the day before a key race or a key workout.
Give yourself at least 48 hours between those really heavy sessions and key workouts. The idea is to keep your easy days on the bike easy and your strength training days. I actually like to sit them on days where I have them blocked other interval sessions on the same day, but you know there's a little bit of preference and we can debate that in the comments below.
We've had to play around with this a little bit inside the not done yet community. Since getting back into training, the biggest thing that's hit me isn't fitness, it's fueling. I used to finish rides totally wrecked.
I'd come through the door, collapse on the couch, scroll through Instagram, and call it recovery. But now that I'm actually fueling properly, and that's anywhere from 80 to 120 grams of carbs an hour, depending on the session, it's a completely different story. I'm coming home from training, feeling fresh, and my power data throughout the ride supports this.
I can actually function when I get off the bike. It's honestly blown me away how big a difference that proper fueling makes. When I started fueling right, I realized just how good I could actually feel on the bike.
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I'm going to put the link in the description down below. So, what do I actually want you to take away from this video, from all of this? If you're over the age of 40 and you're only training on the bike, you're leaving so much performance on the table.
And I don't mean like a marginal gain because so many of us are chasing marginal gains with heat adaptation or breathing techniques. This is a huge gain. The study showed significant improvements in efficiency, power, and time trial performance.
For a writer who's been stuck, who's been doing the same training for years and watching the numbers slowly slide, this could be the thing that reverses that trend for you guys. And I know what some of you are thinking. I don't have time for the gym.
I barely have time to ride as it is. I get it. But two sessions a week, 30 to 40 minutes.
Be efficient with your time. That's an hour and a half in total each week. If you're currently spending 10 hours a week on the bike, trading two of those hours for the gym, it might be the single best swap you ever make on the bike.
Because after years of talking to the best coaches, physiologists, and athletes on the planet on the podcast, one thing that keeps coming back after 40, it's not about doing more. It's about doing the right things. It's about training smarter.
It's about understanding what your body actually needs, not what it needed 10 years ago. Your body's changing and this isn't you waving the white flag of defeat. It's just a reality of your biology.
The science is very clear. You can fight the trend or you can start to adopt these principles and you can slow down the trend. Maybe you can even reverse parts of it.
But only if you change your approach. And the approach isn't more miles. It's not another set of wheels.
It's not a new power meter. It's 40 minutes in the gym twice a week lifting heavy stuff and putting it back back down again. This study proved it works.
The coaches behind some of the best riders in the world have been prescribing it for years. And now you know exactly how to do it. Got this far?
You're not done yet. You might just be getting started. I'll see you on the next one, folks.