Does strength training negatively affect anaerobic training?
I ask because I just did San Joaquin +3 today and it totally destroyed me. I went through Ansel Adams -2 last week and it wasn’t nearly as bad. I realize there is less rest in San Joaquin, but it felt like my legs just couldn’t keep up with the pace.
As far as my routine goes, the only difference I could think of is that I slightly bumped up the weight on my strength training routine this past week. I do squats on Saturdays and noticed my quads were a bit more sore the following day Sunday.
How old are you and how many years have you been strength training? I spend most of my time at an indoor velodrome with other sprinters. My own personal experience, since every workout is anaerobic, is that a heavy strength based weightlifting workout will take two rest days to recover well enough to get maximal benefit or performance from the next anaerobic bike workout. (Weights on Monday, Anaerobic ride on Thursday.). Once your gym strength peaks, you can maintain it easily with one leg gym workout per week. You can get away with doing an anaerobic workout on your bike on the same day as leg weights, as long as the volume of each workout is slightly reduced and neither workout exhausts your glycogen. A couple meals between workouts helps much. As the season builds toward competition, I find I can tolerate 3 anaerobic cycle workouts a week with one leg weight day sharing one of those days as above, but only for about a month to 6 weeks. Then, I start to get tendinitis and overtrained. I can handle two anaerobic cycling days as long as the weight lifting day shares one of those cycling days for three months at a time. By anaerobic, I am talking about Tabata intervals, standing start 250 M sprints, 60 second intervals, flying 200M sprints, etc. I have learned that in the final two months before competition, my speed goes way up if I change my strength training in the gym to power training. This is less weight, more explosive. I taper it off to nothing about two weeks before the big race. This is pretty typical of many of the sprinters I train with. The big NO-no’s are doing weights the day before or after an anaerobic cycling workout, or doing leg weights twice a week when you are also trying to do a high cycling volume of anaerobic workouts. You simply overtrain. What happens when you cut out weights entirely or only do lighter weight power workouts ? You lose sprint acceleration power. 0 to 90 rpm power is achieved in the gym. It would be expected that you would see a decline in power one day after squats. In our track racing, we typically have 3 days of races in a row. Everyone declines a bit each day in the anaerobic type races.
I’m just over 40 and I’ve lifted all my adult life, however I spent the last 10 years focusing on strength training. I only started cycling about 2 years ago and didn’t start training seriously until 11 months ago.
For reference, this is what my week usually looks like during GBLV:
I’m just over 40 and I’ve lifted all my adult life, however I spent the last 10 years focusing on strength training. I only started cycling about 2 years ago and didn’t start training seriously until 11 months ago.
For reference, this is what my week usually looks like during GBLV:
Saturday: 1 hour endurance ride in the morning / 30-45 min squat, bench press, and pull-up strength routine
Thanks!
I like your number of rest days. If I did your workout, the Friday threshold workout would start to make me overtrain on my Saturday squat workout. I would be forced to do a short endurance ride on Friday, then do the threshold ride on Saturday a couple meals after my weight routine. But that is just me. I am older and need a full days rest after a threshold ride to get a good weight workout. There is a lot of knowledge out there on periodization of workouts, altering volume and intensity throughout the year. Check out “Periodization “ by Tudor Bompa, a great book. They would suggest you do three week cycles where first week might have only one anaerobic workout, second week would have two, third week would have three, then back to week one. When I was as a speed skater the National Short track speed skating team used a book call “ Training Designs for Short Track Speed Skating”. I can no longer find the book. It was my bible for adjusting volume and intensity throughout the year to prevent overtraining. Its principles were as follows:
Assign a score of 1 thru 5 to all workouts . 1 was aerobic, 2: tempo, 3: threshold, 4: anaerobic intervals, 5: race or sprint repeats or weights. The average intensity a world class speed skater or cyclist could maintain off season was 2.5. Before a race in competition season, it was 3.6. This would cycle up and down by a specific schedule and would also change volume. As volume went up, intensity went down and vice versa. Two or three workouts on the same day would each get their own score. But combine endurance with anaerobic in the same workout would only use the higher score for anaerobic. I still refer back to this when I find I am overtraining. It has great value. Upper body weights do not count as they do not affect recovery of cycling muscles. Using this system, your average intensity is now a 3.6, which is the absolute limit for world class athletes to maintain during the peak of their season. If you keep this intensity up for more than about 3 months, I think you would get overtrained. It sounds from your weightlifting regimen that you adhere to Starting Strength by Rippetoe. I love the guy and the workouts. You also sound like you would be a good track rider from your selected workouts.
Since my race is 200M match sprint and 500M TT, I have a very similar workout schedule as you as I get close to racing. I just do more SS sprints, flying 200’s, flying 500’s , and motorpacing 350 M windups where I can no longer hold on.I am starting to do a bit longer stuff for more anaerobic capacity because I am sagging too much at the end of a 500M TT.
if you are training hard on strength, then endurance on the bike and call it “early base” phase of training. The more you ride, and the more intensity on the bike, the more gym becomes maintenance.
Reading this and a few other things has led me to focus on pairing maximal 20-30 second sprint intervals immediately following my leg workouts. This approach has helped me increase my sprint endurance, and these types of intervals alone also have a decent salutary effect on your aerobic conditioning as well–i.e., solid results for the minimal time input.
Thanks. I’ve been doing heavy lifting twice a week, I carried it into the build phase as well. However I cut it out of the final week before the test week, because the workouts were becoming unbearable difficult (San Joaquin +3, Kaiser +2, and Galena +2 ).
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