Joe Friel's Blog, page 5

High-Fat Diet Questions

Today I received an email from a rower who had read my book, Fast After 50. In it I comment on the high-fat diet as one alternative to eating for high performance. I also mentioned it in this week's blog on How to Recover (Follow Up). The reader had a couple of good questions. I've posted the email below along with his questions and my answers. This topic is a hot one right now for endurance athletes. His questions get at two of the key issues to be considered. Here's the email reply I sent to him.

Hi CZ,

Thanks for your note.  I coached a rower for a few years back in the ‘90s so have a bit of experience with the sport. I know enough to understand your concerns. My answers follow…
 
Q: "For a race less than an hour, does burning fat provide the same intensity as burning glucose?  One of the most interesting parts of your book is the suggestion that fat may be a more generous source of energy, but it sounds best for really long-duration efforts.  Maybe carbs are better for higher intensity and short duration."  
 
A: The research is not very robust on the topic of intensity and performance for high-fat vs high-carb diets. Nearly all of it has been done with the event intensity being quite low - around 65% of VO2max. The general thinking is that high-fat doesn’t work as well for providing energy in events that are either very short and therefore high intensity like your 1k rowing races, or events that are long and quite variably based like bike road racing. But that is yet to be tested thoroughly in the research. My guess is that the general thinking is probably right. There's still a lot to be learned about this, however. (See here, here and here.)  
 
Q: "As a subset of this question, do gel packs help for a body that’s trained to burn fat? (I use “GU”, following instructions on the packet.)"
 
A: There’s actually been some research that may help to answer that question. There have been a few studies in which the subjects were "adapted" to a high-fat diet, then carb loaded in the last couple of days prior to a test and ingested carbs during the test. Intensity of the test becomes the key question again, however. (See here and here.)

 
One of the other variables that is pretty much left unanswered in the literature is, what is a high-fat diet? Many of the studies used ~60% of calories from fat or less in the diet and called that high fat. Those who propose a high fat diet for athletes believe it should be more on the order of at least 70% with fewer than 50g (200 calories) of carbs per day. Another research issue has to do with when one is “fat-adapted.” Some assume that happens in a few days. Others say a few weeks. My experience has been the latter. Yet another topic has to do with the subjects in the tests. Perhaps some receive a greater benefit from eating a high-fat diet while others respond better to high-carb. And the list of such research matters goes on and on. There’s a lot to be learned on this topic.
 
Hope this helps a bit.



Joe Friel

How To Recover (Follow-Up)

I originally posted on this topic back in 2010 (here). But I’ve seen a need to revise it  given some of the questions I’ve gotten from athletes who eat a high-fat diet. Along the course of revising those portions I saw the need to revise a few other things so here’s the entire post updated.

-----------------------------------------------

Training as if you are trying to become overtrained is necessary for high performance in sport regardless of age. You can’t get there by taking it easy. The process of becoming fit requires that you do workouts that stress the body to a level for which it is not currently adapted. You become tired. This upsets the body and so it manages the situation by adapting and becoming “stronger.” You can’t do such a workout only one time and expect to reap great benefits, however. High fitness requires that you do it repeatedly for some period of time, over and over for several days or a couple of weeks. The key to doing this successfully is building in recovery days when you back off between the hard sessions to let your body catch up. It’s during rest and recovery that the body adapts.

So what is a stressful workout? Essentially, this is a hard workout, one that is either longer than you are used to, highly intense, or both. Such a session should typically require around 48 to 72 hours in order to recover before doing the next hard one. During those two or three days you should do an easy, active-recovery workout or completely rest. Young athletes can often do 3 or 4 such sessions in a week. Most over-50 athletes can generally manage two or three such hard workouts in a week. Both need active recovery or rest days between challenging workouts.

Quick recovery after a hard workout is one of the keys to success in endurance sport. The sooner you are recovered the sooner you can do another such workout. The more hard workouts you can do in a given period of time the more fit you become. The more fit you are the faster you race. So the key is quick recovery.

What can you do to recover quickly after a hard session? The following is what I've told the athletes I've coached to do and in the order they should do them. Not everyone can do each of the following after every hard workout because things like a career and other responsibilities that demand your time may get in the way. Just do the best job you can realizing that some days it will be easier to plug in more of these than on other days.

1. Athletes who eat a high-carbohydrate diet should take in carbs within 30 minutes of finishing a hard workout. Most prefer this in a liquid form. It could be fruit juice, chocolate milk, a blender homebrew you make, or a commercial recovery drink. Something you like the taste of. Depending on body size, your experience, and how hard the workout was you’ll probably need between 200 and 400 calories. You’ll know when you’ve had enough. Don’t take in more than what feels comfortable. According to the latest recovery research, it may also be a good idea to include some protein either as a powder added to your drink or from real food (which is preferable). About 10 grams (40 Calories) is probably adequate. Protein and carbs at this time don’t have to be expensive, exotic, or designed by a “scientist.” If you eat a high-fat diet instead of high-carb, just have your typical snack after the workout such as nuts, nut butter, cheese, avocado, coconut milk, or whatever you like. Again, include some protein, such as a boiled egg or tuna salad.

2. As soon as possible after the workout elevate your legs. For example, lay on the floor with your feet and legs on a chair or against the wall. This will take the load off of your heart and encourage the redistribution of fluids that have pooled in your legs. A few minutes of this is usually enough.

3. Take a nap. This is one that most "normal" people can’t fit in. Pro athletes seem to nap regularly. But then they don’t usually have to rush off to work or to some other appointment. It’s during sleep that the body adapts as anabolic (rebuilding) hormones are released then. Thirty to sixty minutes is probably enough to help speed recovery.

4. Drink fluids to completely satisfy thirst the remainder of the day (there is no “schedule” or precise amount you must drink). Water is the No. 1 choice. Sports drinks are okay immediately post-workout, but as the day wears on these increasingly become poor choices for fluids. Your cells don’t need to saturated with sugar, sodium, and other “stuff” for the remainder of the day.

5. Again, if you eat a high-carb diet, in the first “real” meal after the hard workout include some dietary starch. The best options here are potato, sweet potato and yam. But it may also be okay to eat some grains (bread, bagels, cereal, corn, rice, etc). Some prefer vegetables to grains at this time as veggies are richer in micronutrients than are grains. After that meal return to eating primarily veggies, fruits, and protein while reducing your starch intake. This, again, is because starches are less rich in vitamins and minerals. My concern at this time is long-range recovery. Micronutrients are needed for that. If you’ve done a good job of taking in sugar immediately post-workout and adequate starch in the first post-workout meal then you shouldn’t need any more starch or sugar for the remainder of the day. If you eat a high-fat diet instead of high-carb, eat what you normally have for meals the remainder of the day.

6. The most important form of recovery comes in sleep the night immediately after your hard session. This, again, is when adaptation takes place and you actually become more fit. A full night of sleep is the key. In other words, it’s best to sleep until you awake naturally—not to an alarm clock. That often means going to bed early. Again, a lot of people simply can’t fit an early bedtime into their lifestyles due to so many other commitments. But realize that this is the recovery method that will give you the greatest return on investment.

While this is what I what I have advised those I’ve coached to do in order to recover quickly from a stressful workout, we usually wind up modifying things to better fit their unique situations. This often has to do with the time of day they do certain types of workouts. For example, when doing two sessions in a day they may need to be arranged so that the one that will be more convenient to recover after in terms of meals, sleep, and rest is the harder one.

Supercompensation

I read a tweet a few days ago from @BenDrury1 that read:

Wouldn’t it be great if we changed the terminology of ‘Recovery Strategies’ to ‘Adaptation Strategies’. Goal is to improve not maintain.

He’s right. Recovery days just don’t seem important enough to do them. Knowing instead that a recovery day is actually the day that adaptation—and therefore greater fitness—is achieved gives such days more credibility. Let’s take a brief look at the undervalued recovery day.

Your training load should be great at times. As a result you will often be tired. That’s why we include rest and recovery days between hard workouts in the first place. As mentioned, it’s during these easy days when the body actually becomes more fit. That’s because a high-dose workout only produces the potential for fitness. It’s realized in the subsequent low-dose (“easy”) day, which may be either a day off from exercise or a short and low-intensity session. This process of alternating stress and rest is necessary to become more fit. If you only apply high-dose and high-density (“frequent”) workout stress and not recover often you will likely experience overtraining. This is not just a little fatigue. It’s much more serious than that. Overtraining is very much like having a severe illness such as mononucleosis or chronic fatigue syndrome. You must avoid it. I’ve seen it end racing careers. On the other hand, if you only rest by doing low-dose workouts and frequently take days off from training you will not produce a positive change in fitness. The principle of progressive overload is violated and race performance will suffer.

This process of building greater fitness by alternating stress and rest is called “supercompensation.” The human body is an amazing organism that can be molded through consistent training to produce an athlete capable of achieving great things in sport. Supercompensation can’t be forced on the body. You cannot make it happen at a faster rate than nature intends. Nature has endowed some lucky individuals with a fast response time. Others respond slowly. This is just the principle of individuality showing up again. We’re each unique in some small ways when it comes to training. The difference between a slow and a fast responder is likely genetic in origin. This is why in order to avoid overtraining while trying to improve fitness you must pay close attention to how your body is responding and not try to artificially speed it up.

The bottom line is that if your workout is hard enough to produce fatigue then you must include a recovery (“adaptation”) day soon thereafter. Otherwise, there’s no reason to do hard workouts. Strenuous exercise without recovery is play, not training.

ADS Prescription Sports Sunglasses

I’m quite picky when it comes to working closely with companies in the sports industry. I learned to be that way several years ago when a business I supported performed so poorly that it reflected back on me. That’s the reason you see only three sponsors on my blog’s home page. I have great confidence in them.

One I work closely with is ADS Sports Eyewear out of Richardson, Texas. This is my third year working with them and I couldn’t be more pleased. They make great products and also have a very wide selection of frames and lenses from major sports brands such as Oakley, Nike, Smith, Adidas, Bolle, Rudy Project, and more. They make custom prescription lenses to meet the visual demands of your sport whether it’s cycling, running, skiing, golf, baseball, tennis, fishing, or whatever. It is worth noting that ADS sells authentic Oakley prescription sunglasses at the lowest price allowed for an authorized dealer whether online or at a brick and mortar store. 

Several readers of this blog have ordered their glasses (and just lenses for existing frames) from ADS and told me they were very pleased not only with pricing but also with their turnaround time and customer care. If you order from them please let me know how the transaction goes.

I have great confidence in them. This is why ADS makes all of my eyeglasses—including my clear, casual-wear prescription glasses—and why I recommend them to athletes. Here’s a picture of the most recent glasses they made for me.

If you are in the market for new glasses for this coming season I’d highly recommend checking out ADS. 

Train for Duration or Distance?

I received a question from a coach this week which is common. The coach's athlete did a half-Ironman triathlon on a windy day and wasn't able to maintain his planned power and so slowed down a lot in the last several kilometers. Yet he was well-trained. What went wrong? This has to do with the concept of duration versus distance.

Duration is a measure of how long the workout is based on time, not distance. We tend to think in terms of distance because our races are designed that way. What a triathlete typically does when preparing for a race is to determine how much time it will take to do the race. The point I want to make with you here is that it’s the race time, not the race distance, that is critical to  success. So you need to think in terms of duration, not distance in training. I’ll try to explain that.

With rare exceptions, the workouts I suggest athletes do are based on duration, not distance. The reason is that the intensity of a workout is specific to its length in time, but not necessarily to its distance. For example, if there are two runners in a 10-km race and one finishes in 30 minutes while the other, also working as hard as he can, finishes in 60 minutes, their intensities were not the same. The 30-minute finisher was working at a much higher intensity as a percentage of VO2max. If they were to both run as hard as they could for 30 minutes they would likely use almost exactly the same intensity; one would simply cover more ground than the other. But races aren’t designed that way.

Here’s another example to help you understand why I use duration rather than distance. This one goes back to the coach's question.

Let’s say you’re going to do a half-Ironman-distance race. The bike leg is a flat 90 km long, and so you’ve trained to do it at a given intensity. You're fit and ready. But it just so happens that on race day it’s extremely windy. The bike leg will probably take an additional 30 minutes to complete. What should you do about how intensely you’ll ride the bike? Should you keep it as planned? After all, the race is still 90 kilometers long. That hasn’t changed. Or should you reduce the intensity since the duration will be longer?

The answer is to reduce the intensity. Intensity is always directly related to duration, not distance. If you keep the intensity the same but the bike portion takes an additional 30 minutes, you will fade badly in the last few kilometers and have a terrible run as a result.

The bottom line here is that intensity is inversely related to time. This means that as one increases, the other decreases. As the time of a race or workout gets longer, the intensity at which you are working is reduced. It’s obvious. You can’t run a marathon at your 5-km pace. You run slower in the marathon because you have to run for a longer time. A 30-minute 10-km racer and a 60-minute 10-km racer are, essentially, not doing the same race, and they shouldn’t train the same way either. In the same way, if the bike race will take longer due to wind then you must race at a lower power.

That’s a long way of simply saying that the intensity of your workouts and races is more closely tied to their durations than to their distances. Workouts need to be thought of the same way. Train for duration, not distance.

What It Takes to be Fast After 50

By now you may be aware of my latest book—Fast After 50—being in print. In February it will also be ready to go as an ebook. This project started out as a birthday present to myself. I was approaching my 70th birthday and that number was scary for some reason. I was afraid of rapidly decreasing athletic performance. So I decided to read all of the research I could find on aging and endurance. There was a ton of it. For the next eight months I read research studies almost daily while taking detailed notes. From that I decided to post what I was learning to this blog (search “aging” here to find the various posts—more than 20 of them!). The blog posts were so well-received that I knew I had to write a book about what I was learning.

The following is an overview to the book. Should you decide to read the book I hope you learn something that proves helpful. I also hope you’ll contact me and let me know how the lessons here are working for you. I’ve gotten several such emails recently and really appreciate them. Thanks!

So here’s what the Fast After 50 is about…

Prologue

Here I start by telling you the answer to the question that is the underlying theme of the book: Why am I getting slower and what can I do about it? And I get into why I used so much research, rather than simply my opinions, to write this book.

Chapter 1 The Aging Myth

The overriding purpose of this chapter is to come face to face with the aging process by understanding exactly what aging is and also by looking at what the best age group athletes in the world have accomplished in their sports. We also take a look at how “normal” aging differs from athletic aging. The big question here is, How much should one expect to slow down with advancing age?

Chapter 2 The Ageless Athlete

This chapter is about exercise as “medicine.” I get into the common and popular theories of aging so you get a historical perspective of how your advanced age has been explained over time. And I examine some of the physiological markers of longevity, such as telomeres and stem cells, and how exercise alters them—for the better.

Chapter 3 Over the Hill

What’s standing between you and being a fast athlete once again? The challenge is by no means small and requires both dedication and discipline. It won’t be easy, especially at first when your training and lifestyle begin to change. And we’ll dig into lifestyle as a determiner of what your future may look like. That brings us to the twin roles of nature and nurture. You’ll probably be surprised at what aging experts are now coming to believe is the more responsible of these two for how one lives out their life. You’ll come to understand why society at large is doing so poorly in this regard—all of them except you, that is, because you stay focused on what makes you faster. As it turns out, it’s also the stuff that gives you a long and healthy life.

Chapter 4 The High-Performance Senior Athlete

Now the tables begin to be turned. We move away from the downsides of aging and begin looking at what it will take to slow the effect of age on performance or, even perhaps, temporarily reverse it. The objective is to become not only fast but also faster. Here we look at how to once again determine your potential as an athlete, only now an older one. And we start digging into training in order to turn the tide of slowing performance. It all starts with the intensity of your workouts. Surprised?

Chapter 5 Training Basics

But intensity has downsides! I don’t want any injuries or overtraining! Calm down. We’re going to talk now about what stress is in training and why it can cause injuries and overtraining—and, more importantly, how to prevent that from happening. It mostly comes down to greed. We try to get too much too fast. Field testing is suggested to determine exactly where you are right now as an endurance athlete and point you toward faster racing in the future.

Chapter 6 Advanced Training

Now we’re into the heart of the book—how to train as an older athlete. We’ll dig into two of the greatest determiners of performance with aging—aerobic capacity and muscle mass. In this chapter you’ll read about how you can reverse the decline you are undoubtedly experiencing in both of these. Here you will come up with a personalized weekly training routine (I suggest one that is rather novel) to get you back to advanced training once again. Workout types, regardless of your endurance sport, and periodization are described.

Chapter 7 Rest and Recovery

In Chapter 6 you learned about how to train—except for one thing: how to recover. This, in many ways, is the critical concern for the aging athlete as we tend to recover slowly. Here I’ll tell you about such stuff as fatigue (what is it?), sleep (how to improve it), hormones (how to produce more) and nutrition (what the research suggests for older athletes). We also go into a whole host of alternative recovery aids.

Chapter 8 Body Fat

This is the chapter that scares everyone. Nobody likes to talk about body fat—including me. Why do we get more of it, and mostly in certain places, as we get older? Again, the hormone thing! We haven’t got enough and we need more to keep our bellies under control. What can we do about it? Menopause also shows up here. By the end I hope you have a handle (not a “love handle”) on how to combat increasing fat with aging.

Epilogue

Besides summarizing the main lessons of the book, I get into the personal challenges I faced in implementing them. I certainly hope you don’t experience what I did while in the process of writing this book. 2014 turned out to be a doozy of a year and, as a result, I’ve only gotten back on my Fast After 50 training regimen in the last few months. I explain all of this here.

I end the book by thanking the many senior athletes I’ve coached over the past thirty-some years. Amazing people! I remain in awe of how good they are as athletes. The journey for me continues with them as role models.

What’s Better for You: High Volume or High Intensity Training?

Should the primary focus of your training be on volume or intensity?

We get some help answering that question from a study by Gaskill and associates done in 1999. It’s now getting somewhat old, but still has good lessons for us. It’s also a long-term study that is rare in sport science.

Most studies of endurance athletes last a few weeks at most, and for good reasons. It’s difficult to get athletes to agree to drastically change their training (or whatever is being studied) for an extended period of time. Research also costs money, so the longer the study, the more money that is spent. And scientists, like all of us, like to see things happen quickly. So waiting for more than a few weeks to gather data for study and analysis is not common. But this study took two years.

The sport scientists from the University of Montana manipulated the training of 14 amateur, cross-country skiers for those two years. In year 1 the athletes trained similarly with about 600 accumulated annual hours (that’s about 12 hours per week). Of the 600, about 17% was at or above lactate threshold. That’s roughly two hours per week on average. In fact, the “polarized training” studies I’ve recently written about report that to be a fairly good target range for high-intensity training.

At the end of year 1 the 14 skiers pre-tests, post-tests, and race results were compared. The seven athletes who improved the most were assigned to a High-Responders group. The others, who showed little improvement in year 1, were assigned to a Low-Responders group.

Then, in year 2, the High Responders continued with the same training as in year 1 while the Low Responders reduced their volume by 22% doing about 470 annual hours (around 9.5 hours per week). The Low Responders also doubled their total training time above lactate threshold to about 35% (roughly 3 hours per week).

The High Responders, who kept their training the same as in year 1, had no significant changes in test or race results by the end of year 2. The Low Responders following year 2 had significant improvements in their VO2max, lactate thresholds, and race results compared with year 1. They rose to the performance level of the High Responders.

So what are the lessons we can learn from this study? The first is that the response to any training program varies considerably between individuals. In sport science this is referred to as the “principle of individuality.” In this example, some of the athletes responded well to high volume, others to high intensity.

Another lesson is that training the same way year after year produces about the same results. Something needs to change to improve. Should the change be in volume or high intensity? That’s a hard question to answer without knowing more about the individual. But, in general, the newer you are to your sport, the more likely you are to respond better to volume increases. Experienced athletes, those who have been in their sport for several years (perhaps more than 3 years), will usually respond better to increases in the volume of intensity done at or above lactate threshold.

Determining how to train is often a matter of trial and error. If you aren’t responding well to your workout program, it may be that you need more total training volume or more high-intensity efforts. Of course, there could be other issues, such as making your easy days too hard, inconsistent training, significant psychological stress in your life, poor nutrition, inadequate recovery, and so on. But if you can eliminate such training detractors as these, then the biggest remaining variable is the periodization of your volume and intensity. The only way to find out for sure is to try something different from what you’ve done in previous years and see what happens.

Low-Intensity Training

I’ve previously described “polarized training” studies showing that doing workouts above the anaerobic threshold is more beneficial for performance when compared with a similar amount of time spent training between the aerobic (AeT) and anaerobic (AnT) thresholds. But what would happen to performance if the above-AnT time stayed the same while the remaining training time was shifted toward either very low intensity (less than AeT) or the more moderate-effort range between the two thresholds (AeT to AnT)?

The latter is what self-coached athletes commonly do, especially if they have a limited amount of time to train. It seems to makes sense: Spending more of one’s remaining workout time at a moderately high intensity rather than just slogging along at a slow speed would seem to be the way to go. If it feels harder then it must be better for performance. After all, you can’t make all of your training very hard. So it makes sense to use your remaining available training time doing moderately hard workouts. Right?

This way of thinking means that if you train 10 hours per week with a total of 2 hours at or above AnT then you should get as many of the remaining 8 hours as possible at least close to AnT. The higher the average intensity of training, the faster you become and the better the race performance. So that translates to a lot of zone 3 time (between the thresholds). Makes sense.

Interestingly, some research on this way of thinking shows just the opposite. The more of the remaining training time (aside from the >AnT time) that is spent at a very easy intensity—below AeT—the greater the performance gains (Esteve-Lanao 2007, Munoz 2014). Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot research on this specific topic so there’s certainly room for a counter argument here.

Assuming that we accept this train-easy-rather-than-moderate concept, there may be several reasons that it’s more beneficial. An obvious one is that you are likely to be more rested when doing a subsequent hard (>AnT) session. There may also be benefits of going slow such as improving fat metabolism and capillary density in the slow twitch muscles. There could even be psychological benefits having to do with burnout.

The bottom line of this research is that training should be either hard or easy—most of the time. As soon as we start looking at training in terms of an entire season, periodization must be considered. Depending on the type of event for which you are training, there are times in the year when it may be appropriate to do a considerable amount of training at a moderate effort between the thresholds. For example, if you are training for a long-distance event lasting several hours that will be raced in zone 3, then a good deal of time in the last few weeks before the race should be spent training in zone 3. Also, very early in the season, such as in Base 1 and 2, it’s probably beneficial for most athletes following a classic, linear periodization program to do a considerable amount of training between the thresholds with very little time above AnT.

The bottom line here is that it is often beneficial to do very easy workouts rather than entirely avoiding them in favor of a moderate effort as many do. In my opinion, perhaps the biggest mistake athletes make in training is to make their easy workouts too hard.

Order of Triathlon Workouts

A triathlete asked me today what the best order of workouts is for swimming, biking and running if one does two or three in a day. Here's my answer...

If all 3 workouts are of similar importance and must be done within a few hours then the order is probably best as swim > run > bike. That will have the least negative impact on swim technique and the risk of injury for running. If they are spread out over the course of a day allowing for recovery, then the order becomes much less important. If one of the workouts is a very challenging, key session for the week then it is best done earlier n the day. But there are other issues to consider. Athletes often have an order which is dictated by weather, amount of time available, work or other scheduled activities, prearranged group workouts and facility availability. So it’s really hard to say there is an order which is best for everyone. It’s really quite individualized.

Should You Lift Weights?

Well, it’s December and time for the annual debate about whether endurance athletes (especially runners and cyclists) should do strength training, usually referred to as “lifting weights.” I’ve already started receiving emails from athletes pointing out that other coaches are adamantly opposed to it.

As you probably know if you’ve read one of my Training Bibles, that I suggest many if not most athletes will benefit from lifting weights. But the science goes both ways on this. Some research has shown no benefit while others have found significant endurance performance. I’ve written about this before and you can find a more complete discussion of the pros and cons here. 

In that piece I commented that those who are relatively new to an endurance sport (let’s say that means less than 3 years of experience) will likely benefit from strength training. Others that I’ve found also seem to make respectable performance gains from lifting are older athletes, women, and “ectomorphs” (skinny). Of course, this implies that the strength exercises being done are appropriate for the sport the athlete participates in. A runner can’t just do biceps curls and expect his or her 10-km time to improve.

The reason for this blog post is point out the most recent research on the topic that is a review of several previous studies and describes the many benefits found by them. You can read that short abstract here. 

Have I had all of the athletes I’ve ever coached lift weights? No, I haven’t. Some just didn’t have enough time to fit it in. Given the choice of lifting or working out in one’s primary sport—either/or—I’ll take the primary sport every time. I’ve also coached a few athletes, all men, who gained muscle mass very quickly who were already muscular enough, or perhaps even overly muscled (“mesomorphs”). There was no reason for them to be lifting. More muscle would only hinder their endurance performance.

A side benefit of lifting weights for cyclists especially, is that research has shown that they are much more likely to experience osteopenia (reduced bone density) than athletes doing weight-bearing sports such as running. Lifting weights has been shown to be one of the best ways to counter this trend.

Strength-building programs for triathletes and road cyclists may be found in my Training Bible books and on this site (scroll to near the bottom for the download links).

Feel free to comment on your personal experience with strength training.