aboc Guide to weight training for endurance cyclists

There are several schools of thought when it comes to weight training for cyclists, varying from "don't do it at all" (Ric Stern) to "do loads of it"(Eric Schmitz and Ken Doyle, Joe Friel etc). At aboc we believe that weight training is generally not useful to endurance road cyclists but is of use to riders who want to improve their sprinting and to mountainbikers to give them enough upper body strength to deal with the rigours of MTB. This article is an overview of the very basic strength training we recommend. Weight training should never be used as a replacement to on the bike strength training. If it's a choice between a ride and a gym session, go riding!  This advice may not be appropriate for specialist track sprinters however.  At aboc we're working on a guide to training for track sprinters and hope to have some good material in mid to late 2008.

This article is under review as our previous advice was sub-optimal.  Please watch this space for updates.