When some people wish to construct muscle, they begin cycling. No, we’re not talking about using performance enhancing drugs — those construct a very good little bit of muscle with an entire host of unintended effects. We’re talking about actually cycling as in, riding a motorcycle.
Various types of biking are gaining popularity, either outdoors in the true world or on a stationary bike within the gym, so why not experiment with cycling your solution to more muscular legs?
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Spin instructors have nice legs and the muscle burn you are feeling from cycling might be comparable, or much more intense, than some traditional strength-training leg workouts. So let’s breakdown this unconventional approach to see how, or if, you’ll be able to pedal your way toward thicker legs.
Does Cycling Construct Muscle
Cycling For Muscle
Fundamentally, cycling is a type of cardio. It taxes your endurance and it doesn’t have the standard advantages of strength training exercises like squats and lunges. Cycling also doesn’t have coordinated “lifting and lowering” phases of movement (i.e. the involved muscles don’t undergo a contraction phase against resistance followed by a muscle-lengthening phase against resistance).
Nonetheless, the pedaling required to cycle forces multiple concentric muscle contractions — working against resistance — along many major leg muscles. There’s hip flexion, knee extension, and a few knee flexion happening with each stroke of the pedal, so it’s valid to wonder if muscle growth can occur. That is all a elaborate way of claiming that, when cycling, your muscles still produce force to contract, fundamentally just like strength training.
Muscular Contractions and Tension
Technically speaking, all you wish for muscle growth is mechanical tension. (1) That is energetic force along muscle fibers until they reach involuntarily slow contraction speeds. It’s why the previous few reps of a set of squats are the toughest and, generally, the slowest moving.
It’s also why training near, as much as, or beyond failure builds muscle. Those final, highly difficult reps are what triggers hypertrophy.
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So whilst you don’t calculate training volume or count reps on a motorcycle similar to with a weight training exercise — no person jumps on a motorcycle for “650 pedals” — mechanically speaking, there’s potential for cycling to trigger growth in case your muscles are sufficiently challenged.
We’ll talk more about optimizing this later, but let’s go over some cardio myths first. Cycling is, in spite of everything, still primarily an endurance-based exercise which is usually a conflict of interest for getting jacked.
Low Intensity vs. High Intensity Cardio
Much like strength training, cardio might be performed at various intensities. For simplicity’s sakes, let’s concentrate on low intensity, steady-state cardio (LISS) and high-intensity interval training (HIIT). While there are other cardio training methods, comparing these ends of the spectrum will make it easier to understand the important thing differences.
You may sustain relatively lower intensity cardio for longer periods of time, hence the “regular state” designation. Examples include walking, jogging, slowly swimming laps, casual biking, or anything done at a comparatively sustainable pace.
Higher intensity cardio is often broken up into intervals of labor alternated with periods of lower intensity cardio or complete rest. (2) You may’t sustain a near-maximum sprinting speed for too long, or else it wouldn’t really be a sprint.
The Right Cardio for Muscle Growth
While each methods have cardiovascular components like improving your resting heart rate and VO2 max (the quantity of oxygen your body uses during exercise), high intensity interval training can potentially stimulate some muscle growth. HIIT requires you to perform for durations and intensities closer to traditional strength training.
Subsequently, if the goal is using cycling to construct muscle, it’s essential to crank up the bike’s resistance. If you happen to’re cycling for 20 minutes or more, the resistance is probably going too low to attain a real muscle-building stimulus even in case your legs “burn” rather a lot. Similarly, for those who were to twist three-pound dumbbells for 20 minutes without stopping, sure that may feel the burn, however it’s not efficient or effective at constructing muscle.
Does Cardio Eat Muscle?
If you happen to’ve heard tales about cardio dwindling your muscle away, there’s some truth to this, however it’s not what you’re thinking that.
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Cardio, whether LISS or HIIT, is providing your body a stimulus to adapt to. Outside of undereating and never exercising in any respect, your body doesn’t “lose muscle.” Nonetheless, while cardio doesn’t eat away your precious glutes and biceps, the stimulus that you just are imposing is a bit conflicted.
Give it some thought. If you lift heavy weights and check out to get stronger, you’re telling your body it should grow muscle to lift heavier weights. But if you cycle or run, you’re telling your body to get more efficient at moving longer distances, and one solution to be more efficient is to stop constructing significant muscular body weight.
This is the reason endurance athletes, like marathon runners, are typically slimmer and strength athletes, like powerlifters, are reliably more muscular. If you attempt to concentrate on excelling in each during a training routine, there’s a compromise called the interference effect. (3)
The interference effect doesn’t necessarily cause muscle loss, but it will probably compromise the adaptations and positive results made on each ends — muscle growth and constructing endurance — unless you are taking care to design the plan with very targeted programming.
So while we established that cycling can construct muscle under certain conditions, you won’t construct as much as someone who prioritizes their training and recovery toward conventional leg exercises like squats and deadlifts. That is the principle of specificity — specific activities will trigger specific adaptations in your body.
How one can Cycle For Muscle Growth
If you happen to’re planning to hop on the spin bike simply because you enjoy it, and also you’re still hoping to construct some muscle, no worries. That’s a suitable trade-off and here’s how you’d go about it.
The pedaling technique is pretty easy. So long as you’re pedaling along with your foot secured, you can be training your quadriceps, glutes, and hamstrings. Since constructing muscle requires progressive overload — a consistently increased challenge from workout to workout — an in-gym stationary bike can be higher than getting outdoors on a road bike. This can allow you to more easily track, monitor, and adjust the vast majority of variables.
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If you happen to insist on cycling out within the wild, attempt to accurately track variables by choosing the identical distance route with the identical elevation changes, and monitoring your pedal output, including cadence and total time.
Switching routes continually is like switching between dumbbells, kettlebells, and cables every week. You’re continually changing things, but actual progressive overload may not be occurring.
Cycling Frequency
Next is the position of your cycling session. Schedule it at the tip of a leg workout or on the training day after working your legs. This ensures that your legs are fresh enough to concentrate on traditional strength training, which can grow essentially the most muscle.
Doing all your cycling the day after may even allow your legs to be barely pre-fatigued, which may make it easier to get relatively more stimulus with relatively less work. After a tough leg session, your legs won’t need as high a level of cycling intensity to achieve fatigue.
In any case, never place your cycling session right before your leg workout. Your leg workout will negatively affected and you’ll not find yourself triggering much muscle growth. Remember, cycling to construct muscle is already a compromised approach. Don’t compromise it further by ruining your regular leg workouts.
Cycling Intensity
It’s essential to cycle with intensity. For cycling to construct muscle, it can’t be preformed at a leisurely, steady-state pace. It’ll should be intense enough to just about resemble a set of strength training.
Intervals of 20-60 seconds of labor against a high resistance is a very good goal. Aim for eight to 10 sets, which must be plenty for those who are doing this hypertrophy-focused cycling session a couple of times per week.
Aim for a consistent resistance setting and time for every set. At the tip of your workout, check to see how much distance you covered. To make sure muscle growth and supply progressive resistance each week, it’s essential to increase that distance in the identical timeframe using the identical resistance.
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Because the weeks go on, keep pushing for more total distance with the identical resistance and time per set. When you get to a cushty distance, increase the resistance barely and begin throughout.
If you happen to’re cycling out in nature, your best approach is to search out a hill and ride up for 10 sets. Use the ride down as a part of your rest between each set. But you’ll still have to progressively overload this routine. This might mean cycling uphill while wearing a weighted vest or backpack, or searching to search out a steeper or longer hill to extend the challenge.
Deloading
Constructing muscle with cardio is, in some ways, just like constructing muscle with strength training. Sure, one method is much more practical for this goal, but the identical general principles apply. Essentially, you apply mechanical tension and also you keep consistently apply more so the body adapts.
If you happen to can’t apply more, which can inevitably occur, it’s essential to plan a deload. This is incredibly essential because cycling at high intensities might be quite fatiguing, especially when performed along with your normal strength training workouts.
You may run right into a plateau or a drop in performance inside a number of weeks depending in your overall plan and your general conditioning. A plateau doesn’t mean it’s essential to push harder, it means it’s essential to take a deload week where entire training is significantly lighter and comparatively lower resistance.
In strength training, this may mean using lighter weights and/or doing fewer reps per set. On the bike, it means dialing back the resistance and taking some relatively easier rides. This enables any collected fatigue to dissipate, so you’ll be able to comeback in every week or so to push for more PRs and construct more muscle within the long-term.
Skip Leg Day, Add Bike Day?
Some people might now be wondering if it’s OK to exclusively cycle to construct their lower body muscles. Technically, you can, however it’s quite inefficient, especially for those who’re more advanced in your overall fitness. But, you’ll be able to definitely do what you would like and train nevertheless you’d like. And it’s still higher than not giving your legs any form of training stimulus. If you happen to’re able to add cycling to your leg-building plans, save this guide as a reference for one of the best solution to pedal a bit closer to thicker thighs.
References
- Schoenfeld B. J. (2010). The mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy and their application to resistance training. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 24(10), 2857–2872. https://doi.org/10.1519/JSC.0b013e3181e840f3
- Atakan, M. M., Li, Y., Koşar, Ş. N., Turnagöl, H. H., & Yan, X. (2021). Evidence-Based Effects of High-Intensity Interval Training on Exercise Capability and Health: A Review with Historical Perspective. International journal of environmental research and public health, 18(13), 7201. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18137201
- Methenitis S. (2018). A Transient Review on Concurrent Training: From Laboratory to the Field. Sports (Basel, Switzerland), 6(4), 127. https://doi.org/10.3390/sports6040127
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