Serious Chris
I am not sure what your goals are, but if I may add my opinion on your routine. It is just a thought and if you desire to keep it arranged like you do that is fine.
You train back, dead lifts and squats all in the same work out and then was able to ride home.
If your goal is gaining strength in dead lifts or squats consider not doing them on the same day. That is typical of many powerlifters to not put two major movements on the same day. They focus on squats one day and deadlifts on another day.
It is kind of like the concept of burning matches in cycling where an individual has only "x" amount of matches in their book. Once they burn all their matches they cannot be reproduced and will not be available again during that event.
To gain strength is also very similar to improving one's functional threshold. So in order to gain strength you have to train with progressive overload or heavy weight, low reps. In lifting that may be >80% of 1 rep max just as in cycling one may train >80% of FT.
If you train to improve strength in squats you would want to be efficient in coming off the street cold and warming up to hit those "training" sets, which for many power lifters you will hear them say, "triples." That is a common term. Weight heavy enough to attempt a 3 rep set and to safely do this you will need spotters on lifts like squats and bench.
If you have done this for squats you will have burned matches (using cycling terms since we are on a cycling forum
) and more than likely, unless you are super human, you will not have anything left to properly work on the dead lifts. That is why true strength athletes typically do not put the two on the same day.
But if you are just a lifter and you are just trying to improve your general leg strength than it perfectly fine to have both on the same day if you understand that one of those movements are not going to improve. But just to let you know that the true competitive lifters will not classify you as a strength athlete. Instead they would just see you as a guy that lifts weights. In similar fashion many people ride bikes as a recreational hobby, but fewer actually train to improve their functional threshold.
Like fergie stated if you were to properly train for strength in lifting you would really struggle to walk out to the car, much less, be able to ride home on a bike. Back in the day when I was competitive in lifting that would be the case. If I trained to improve my squats I had to put dead lifts several days away in order to train properly or to hit those sets requiring >80% max. I have to admit these days I am a "has been" as my old training partner used to tease me. All I can do is reflect back to my glory days of hitting those heavy squats so I admittedly fall into the category of just a guy lifting weights present day. Some street lingo calls that "maintenance lifting," but the I like the phrase, "you are either training or detraining." I am unfortunately detraining in strength and my strength is going down each year because I am not training that aspect as hard as I used to.
So to be training in cycling requires a progressive stress load and so does strength training and there lies the problem, IMO, for the argument that one can do both. Most normal humans cannot recover from both training activities and do well so I am always skeptical when someone says they do both and they could potentially raise their 1 rep max threshold and at the same time raise their functional threshold. When I hear that my experience has me thinking they are not really training as hard in one or the other.
Believe me I would be in a blissful state of mind if lifting improved my cycling performance, but it has not. If anything I fully realize that I would have more time to focus on improving my functional threshold if I dropped lifting and focused on cycling, but I do not intend to compete in cycling so I am one of those "cross fit" people as the new trendy label applies.
