redneck47441 said:
....we train at the gym together I'm much strong!... I'd say fitness wise except when we ride he's always pulling away from me ...What am I doing wrong?
You're probably not doing anything wrong, you just need more time on the bike out riding and training. What you see in the gym is strength, and the ability to ride a bike faster isn't all that closely related to strength. From an endurance sport or at least cycling standpoint your friend has more fitness regardless of what you see in the gym.
As the posters above said, your friend has higher power to weight, power to frontal area and drag (CdA) or both and from that standpoint has more cycling specific fitness. Your friend could simply have the right genetic makeup for better endurance performance with limited training or have previous experience in another endurance sport like running, cross country skiing or rowing that gives him a bit of a leg up without much training but either way you can both improve with continued training on the bike and no one can predict which of you will improve more with time.
In the extreme, lifting heavier weights in the gym requires muscles with higher peak contractile forces which means muscles with larger cross sectional area or 'thick' muscles. Individual muscle fibers can only hold so many mitochondria which means 'thick' strong muscles are at a disadvantage during endurance events. Endurance sports favor muscles with high mitochondrial density which means 'thin' individual muscle fibers but a lot of them, they don't have to be very strong from a peak force standpoint since riding along at even pro race speeds and powers only requires an average force of about 50 pounds per pedal stroke which isn't a lot of force.
If you're an average sized adult male and you can walk up a flight of stairs then you can repeatedly lift way more than 50 pounds with each leg no problem, the trick is doing it 80 to 110 times per minute for hours on end and that requires: heart stroke volume, reb blood cell count, capillary density to working muscles, mitochondrial density in the working muscles, a good ratio of slow twitch to fast twitch muscle fiber and a bunch of other things that you get by riding a bike, not by lifting weights in the gym. Keep riding and those things will develop, keep training smart and they'll develop faster and to a higher level.
Yeah, it's not about the bike, but it's also not about who's stronger in the gym. As someone said above it's about the rider with the best balance of 'engine' to weight and aero drag. So work on the 'engine' and work on the weight and drag if those are issues for you.
Good luck,
-Dave
