Originally Posted by Felt_Rider
But force on a bike even up hill is minimal. We can observe young children that have very little muscular strength development (certainly no specific strength training) can go up a small incline on a single speed child's bike.
It doesn't make sense to me in endurance cycling where most average healthy adults that train endurance can produce enough force especially with gearing to help need additional strength training.
If I were a competitive cyclist I would gladly give up all my strength to have the aerobic fitness of one of my female coworkers who wins her AG in just about every triathlon she enters locally. She is built like a starved super model (and sort of looks like one too) and has little "strength", but has the conditioning to drop most of the guys on her team that I imagine have far greater natural strength than she does.
I am having a hard time agreeing that it takes much force on a geared bike to the point where strength needs to be trained. However, it someone finds it to be a benefit than I say go for it. In your case I honestly believe you got most of your gain from the stair climber.
I will say that for physical rehab for post injury endurance athletes could be a huge bonus to strengthen muscle groups that have suffered atrophy due to time being sedentary.
When I consider my maximal efforts last year and this year, I have to disagree on pedal force. I have one particularly small but very steep incline on the tail end of my 40 mile loop. For now I just want to compare Highest wattage attained and 5 second power from June of 2013 and June of 2014.
I also want to highlight this is not a seated climb rather out of the saddle because the grade is nasty likely 20%+. Last year my max on this climb was 1100 watts highest achieved, this was out of saddle and using my bars as leverage to pull up and push down as hard as possible. My 5 second power was 810w. This year they are 1400w and 940w. I get the strength required to cruise on flat ground with little wind at 18mph is not much.
I'm starting to think the FTP increase was more from the stair machine too at this point, I spent a lot of time on it, I increased the time I could do it threefold from the start of last fall until the spring of this year. But I do still think my climbing and other anaerobic efforts were helped by the weight lifting.
Again not saying I wouldn't have gotten better results from cycling specific work targeting both systems.
Another thing I think for personality types such as mine, being at the gym with other people around I simply push harder, heck being on the bike with other people around I push harder. So I also think my overall seasonal effort is just more than alone in my garage on a trainer.
I'm finding to be the type of cyclist i want to be I need to be training at least 10 hours per week, during fair weather months I can handle this ok because I have a 32 mile round trip commute that double as hard efforts. However from fall through winter when I only have the trainer as an option I struggle to hit 5 or 6 hours. after a month or so, I find i'm looking for excuses, the gym provides me with an alternative.
I know this doesn't cut to the heart of the issue on strength training rather is more reason why ill keep doing it.