How much time are people putting between leg day at the gym and riding? For the sake of the question, assume it’s the kind of leg day that leaves you sore for the next day or two (the kind of sore you feel when you’re just walking). I’m concerned that riding the next day (or maybe even the day after) would amount to overtraining the muscles / not allowing recovery and rebuild (the whole never work the same muscles two days in a row rule). I’m also worried that, if I do ride, I’ll need to adjust FTP down to compensate and make sure I can get through the ride.
I do legday right after my harder intervals (threshold or VO2max).
I highly recommend as this means that your hard days are hard and your easy days are easy. If you put them in other places your easy days may end up hard
Do you worry that this is compromising your gym workout benefits?
Right now, for me, leg day happens twice a week. One of those days is high rep / low weight and the other is low rep / high weight. I would think a tough ride right before would compromise both but especially the second day. Would I be losing the benefits of the low rep / high weight day by cycling just before?
I’ll second the concept of doing them within the same day (sufficient rest in between). I’ve done the heavy squat day followed by a hard ride,rinse repeat… your legs never get a chance to rest. If you’re gonna push the legs, push them hard… then let them recover harder.
Because I have enough leg size (trust me, the goal is not to gain more muscle size) I only do low reps ( 3x5 at the moment, but I might move to 5 3 1 ).
Compromised for sure. But by how much I’m not sure because I completely stopped leg strength training when I started cycling (The cycling was killing my legs enough). That being said, my numbers are up. Yesterday I was squatting 120KG and pulled 160KG both for reps… and I’m adding 5kg each session to both just fine at the moment. We will see when I cap out.
I had been considering completely replacing leg days in the gym with cycling. A trainer at my gym thought that would be a bad idea. He said it would result in a pretty big muscle imbalance in my legs (quads / hamstrings / glutes).
Right now, my workout is some combination of squats (front and back), deadlifts (varied versions), extensions, and curls. Maybe I could ease off the quad heavy exercises and let cycling get those.
I’ve heard horror stories about muscle imbalance. Trying to avoid that.
There’s more to it than just the muscle imbalance. You also have to consider the bone density, testosterone, etc. that happens between the two disciplines.
I follow 531 Traditional BBB regularly and used to struggle with this exact issue. I went a whopping 4 or 6 months following both a TR MV program and Wendler. Then fell into a deficit in pain and overtrained. I tried to continually work the volume in TR with the strength of 531. Ideally, you should pick what’s more important to you and move on that for emphasis.
For myself, I’ve registered for a powerlifting meet (trying to make the 1000# club in a meet) and use TR in SSBLV as a method to control my weight. SSBLV could still possibly be too much… but in the off days I REALLY let the body rest.
Learning to listen to your body is critical if you’re going to go down this rabbit hole.
