Words by Rachel Nawrocki, RD, CSCS

When we think about summer, we think of long days, post work sunlight, and the opportunity to spend more hours on our bikes. The season is short, so we find ourselves wanting to maximize our time outside. Which often translates to only exercising on the bike and we drop going to the gym all together.

It makes sense! You only have so much time and energy, and riding is way more fun than squats. If this is you, you’re not alone! Other than the fun factor, one of the biggest reasons bikers stop strength training during the riding season is the fear that it will leave them sore or too fatigued for the rides they actually care about. While that concern is understandable, eliminating strength training altogether can be a costly mistake. When we drop strength training, our risk for injury goes up.

But here's the good news: maintaining your strength during bike season doesn't require grinding through long winter gym sessions. Rather than viewing strength training as something that competes with riding, think of it as the maintenance work that allows you to keep benefiting from all the hard work you put in during the off-season.

Preserve Muscle and Connective Tissue

Long rides and big training weeks place your body under a lot of stress. And it doesn't even have to be that you're training for a big race. Evening rides after work add up, too. Throw in a long weekend ride or a bike park day, and suddenly your body is handling a pretty hefty workload.

While endurance training is fantastic for your cardiovascular system and riding bikes is super fun, it doesn't provide much stimulus to maintain muscle mass, bone health, or the strength of your tendons and ligaments. Because biking is relatively low impact, your skeleton and connective tissues simply aren't exposed to the same loading they'd get from resistance training.

That's where the gym fills the gap. One or two strength sessions each week are often enough to preserve the muscle and strength you built during the off-season. You're not trying to build a bigger engine in the middle of riding season, you’re maintaining the one you've already worked hard to build.

Stay More Durable

As riding volume increases, so does the repetitive stress placed on your body. More climbing, descending, and hours in the saddle all accumulate over weeks and months. Even if individual rides feel manageable, the total training load can eventually catch up with you.

Strength training improves your body's capacity to tolerate that workload. Stronger glutes, hips, trunk, and legs help you produce force more efficiently while maintaining control when fatigue sets in. Exercises like split squats, deadlifts, step-ups, and single-leg work strengthen the muscles responsible for producing power and stabilizing your bike on technical terrain.

No training program can guarantee you'll avoid injury, but athletes who continue strength training are generally better equipped to handle long riding seasons, recover between back-to-back rides, and reduce the likelihood that preventable overuse injuries interrupt their training. A 4,000-foot climbing day or a weekend of bike park laps may still leave you tired, but you'll often bounce back better for the next ride.

Maintain Power on the Bike

As your riding volume increases, it's often beneficial to shift your gym sessions away from high-volume hypertrophy work and toward lower-volume, high-quality strength and power exercises. Think heavy lifts with fewer repetitions, explosive movements like kettlebell swings, jump squats, or medicine ball throws, and plenty of recovery between sets.

Power is your ability to produce force quickly, and it's incredibly valuable on the bike. Whether you're accelerating out of a corner, clearing a technical feature, powering up a punchy climb, or popping over a rock garden, higher power output translates to better performance. Because these workouts emphasize quality over fatigue, they're also easier to recover from than long, high-repetition lifting sessions.

Lift 1-2 Days Per Week

If you're riding almost every day, don't feel like you need to squeeze in three or four gym sessions. A little goes a long way when the goal is maintenance rather than building. So, shoot for 1-2 sessions per week while in bike season

Reduce Volume, Not Intensity

Instead of doing four sets of 10-12 reps until your legs feel like Jell-O, keep the weights relatively heavy while cutting back on the total amount of work. We want to lower training volume while maintaining intensity to preserve strength and power. Heavy doesn't mean grinding to failure, it means choosing a weight that feels challenging while leaving one or two good repetitions in the tank.

A good target is...

• 2-4 sets
• 3-6 repetitions
• 2-4 minutes of rest between heavy sets
  

Start with Power Work

One or two explosive exercises at the beginning of your workout can help maintain your ability to produce force quickly. Keep these low volume! Think 3-5 reps per set and focus on moving as explosively as possible. Stop the set when your speed slows down. Power training should leave you feeling fast, not fatigued. Examples include...

• Kettlebell swings
• Box jumps
• Broad jumps
• Medicine ball slams
• Jump squats

Add Big Movements

You don't need fifteen different exercises. A couple core movements, along with some accessory work. Focus on movements that give you the biggest return on your time:

• Squats or split squats
• Deadlift variations
• Step-ups
• Hip thrusts
• Pull-ups or rows
• Push-ups or presses
• Trunk stability work like Russian twists, Pallof presses, and planks

Biking is a full-body sport. Strong legs help you climb, but a strong trunk and upper body help you stay stable through rough descents and control the bike when the trail or road gets rowdy.

Time Your Workouts Appropriately

If possible, schedule strength sessions on or before an easier ride, not the night before a hard one. For example, lift earlier in the week instead of a Friday afternoon before a big Saturday ride. It mostly just takes thinking about when your harder or more demanding rides are, and allowing your body appropriate rest to recover from your strength session.

And if you're feeling especially fatigued from several big riding days in a row, don't be afraid to cut a few sets or reduce the weight. Consistency beats perfection every time.

The best in-season strength program is the one you can stick with. One quality session each week throughout the summer is far more effective than crushing yourself in the gym for two weeks and then skipping it for the next month.