One Strength Session a Week Is All Your Cycling Season Needs

There's a guy in the club ride I sometimes catch on Saturday mornings who spent all of last winter in the gym. He'd squat twice a week with the people I lift with — clean depth, a slow eccentric, working up to honest fives at 130. By March his TT power was the best it had been in five years and he was talking about the gym like it had unlocked something. Then April came, the race calendar opened, and the squat rack disappeared from his week entirely. "Season's started," he said, the last Saturday I saw him in the gym. "Back to bike training." By late July he sent a screenshot of his 40-minute test to the group chat and asked, with a kind of confused honesty, what had happened. It was down nine watts from March. His five-minute power was down twenty. He'd lost most of what the winter had built, and he was riding more hours than ever.

He'd done the part of cycling-strength research that everyone does — the four-month block in winter, the heavy squat, the deadlift, the careful periodization through anatomical adaptation, hypertrophy, max strength — and then he'd skipped the part of the research that is by far the cheapest thing in the literature. He'd put the barbell down on April 1st as if maintenance and building cost the same. They don't. They're not even in the same order of magnitude.

What the In-Season Trial Actually Showed

The cleanest piece of evidence here is Rønnestad, Hansen, and Raastad's 2010 paper in the European Journal of Applied Physiology — the in-season trial, not the better-known off-season one from the same group. They took well-trained cyclists who had completed a 12-week heavy strength block and split them for the season. One group did one heavy strength session per week through 13 weeks of competition. The other dropped the gym entirely and rode.

The maintenance group held everything from winter. The cycling-only group lost it. That part is the headline most people would expect. What's less expected is the second finding: the maintenance group kept improving. Their 40-minute time trial power continued to rise. Their five-minute power rose. Their maximal aerobic power, Wmax, rose. The cycling-only group, on identical bike training, didn't. The strength stimulus from one session a week wasn't just holding the line. It was still contributing.

The dose in that trial was small. Two to three sets per exercise, four to six reps, around 80 to 85 percent of one-rep max, on three or four compound lifts. Half-squat, one-leg leg press, one-leg hip flexion, standing calf raise — the same Rønnestad template the group uses in every paper. Total session time, including warm-up: a little under half an hour.

For the cost of one half-hour gym visit per week, the riders kept four months of winter work and added on top of it. The control group, who'd done the same four months in winter and were riding more hours than the maintenance group through the season, came out of summer worse than they came in.

Building Costs Are Not Maintenance Costs

The deeper finding in this body of work isn't really about cycling. It's about a category error that runs through how people think about training.

Building strength is expensive. Two to three sessions a week for twelve weeks, heavy loads, full ramp-ups, the long warm-ups, the recovery cost stacked on top of bike training, the protein the kitchen has to push through. It's a real budget. People feel that budget all winter, which is why they put it down when something else needs the time.

Maintaining strength is cheap. The same neural patterns, tendon stiffness, motor-unit recruitment, and type IIA-shifted fiber population that took four months to build don't decay at the rate they were built. They decay at the rate they're neglected. And the neglect threshold for trained tissue is much lower than people assume. One session a week of the right kind of stimulus — heavy load, the patterns the lift was built around, full range of motion — turns out to be above the decay threshold for most riders for most of a season.

The intuition that misleads people is the assumption that dose-response is roughly linear. If two sessions a week built it, then one session a week ought to half-maintain it. The literature says no. One session a week fully maintains it, and in many riders continues to drive it forward. The math is asymmetric because the underlying biology is asymmetric. The hard part isn't holding the adaptation. The hard part is producing it.

This is the cleanest dose-response in the cycling-strength literature, and it's the one people consistently violate.

Why Riders Drop It Anyway

The reasons people put the barbell down on April 1st are not really about the data. The data is unambiguous and has been since 2010. The reasons are practical and emotional.

The practical reason is that race season feels full. The interval days are scheduled, the weekend rides are long, recovery is tighter because intensity is higher, and the gym session looks like the optional one. It looks discretionary. It looks like a winter habit you can return to in November. The mistake is treating the maintenance session as the same thing as the off-season block. They look similar on a calendar — they both involve walking into a gym — but they don't cost the same and they don't do the same thing.

The emotional reason is that the maintenance session feels too small to matter. Two sets of squat, two sets of RDL, a Bulgarian split squat, a Pallof press. You walk out of the gym in twenty-five minutes feeling like you barely trained. The brain's reward signal for "I trained today" is poorly calibrated to maintenance volume. People want the session to feel like winter. When it doesn't, they reach the conclusion that it isn't doing anything.

The bike training in the same week does feel like training. Intervals hurt. The long ride empties you. So the budget for "training that matters" goes to those, and the half-hour that's actually preserving the most expensive asset on the spreadsheet gets cut. When we model in-season decisions in Dorsi, this is the cleanest dose-response on our literature shelf, and it's also the one with the largest gap between what the data says and what riders actually do.

The funny thing is that doubling the maintenance dose doesn't help much. Two sessions a week in-season doesn't preserve appreciably more than one — it just adds fatigue. The dose is genuinely small. The trap is believing that something this small can't be real.

The Maintenance Session Itself

The practical version of one-a-week, for a rider racing or doing meaningful summer events, looks like this in most weeks.

Warm-up: three or four minutes on the bike or rower at conversational pace, then a few bodyweight squats, a few bodyweight RDLs, a couple of Pallof presses each side. Five minutes total. Don't make it a routine.

Main work: two sets of five at around 80 percent of one-rep max on back squat or trap-bar deadlift, with two minutes between sets. Two sets of six at 75 percent on Romanian deadlift or hip thrust. Two sets of eight per side on a Bulgarian split squat or step-up. Two sets of ten per side on a Pallof press or side plank. Twenty minutes.

A few minutes at the end on calves, mobility, whatever needs it. Twenty-five to thirty minutes from walking in to walking out.

The session lives on the same day as a hard ride — Rønnestad's lab and most coaching practice favor stacking hard days, on the principle that the easy days then get to be truly easy. Lift in the morning, ride in the afternoon, with at least six hours between. Or ride first if the interval session is the priority that day. Either order works for maintenance; the cleanest interference signal is when both sessions land in the same workout block, which is the one thing to avoid.

The session goes away in the week of a key race — last heavy work no later than 72 hours before the event, and ideally five days out for the riders who feel CNS fatigue. Outside of race week, it runs every week.

What the 3.5-Year Picture Looks Like

The other Rønnestad paper worth knowing about is the 2022 case report in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, which followed elite riders through 3.5 continuous years of heavy strength training, in-season and off-season, without the long summer drop-off that's normal in the sport. Six-second sprint power across that window was up 25 percent. That's a compounding number. It's not a winter block result. It's what happens when the savings account never gets emptied each April.

Most riders don't see compounding because they reset every season. The winter block builds, the summer drop loses most of it, the next winter rebuilds from a lower base than it would have started from, and the year-over-year graph looks flat. The maintenance dose, when it's actually held all summer, lets each winter start from where the last winter ended. Five years of that and the rider looks like a different athlete. Twenty-five percent on a sprint, in a fully matured competitive cyclist, is the kind of number that doesn't show up in single-block training studies.

For masters riders, the case for holding it gets stronger, not weaker. Vikestad and Dalen's 2024 survey of 555 male masters cyclists showed about 80 percent strength training in the off-season and only 60 percent through the season — a drop that runs directly into the population that loses type II muscle fibers fastest, loses bone density fastest on a bike-only training diet, and benefits most from a year-round heavy stimulus. The masters rider who keeps two sessions a week through summer is doing both performance work and what amounts to a medical intervention. The one who only lifts in winter is doing half of one thing.

What's Actually Being Traded

The frame that helps me most when I think about it: a winter strength block isn't a season of training. It's a deposit. The riders I know who treat it as a season — earn the deposit in winter, withdraw it in spring, repeat — are running an account that never compounds. The riders who treat it as a deposit they intend to keep are running a different account entirely.

Putting the bar down on April 1st felt to my friend like reclaiming time for the real season. What it actually was, mechanically, was a transfer of value from the asset he'd just built into the convenience of not driving to the gym one morning a week. The convenience is real. The trade is real. He just had the numbers backwards. Twenty-five minutes a week, on the day he was already lifting four hours of intervals anyway, is the cheapest thing in the entire training plan. It was being treated like the most expensive.

The strange consolation, when he sent the screenshot in late July, is that the math works going the other way too. He started maintenance in early August and held his squat at 85 percent of his March top set inside two months. By the next March he'd built past where he'd been before. The savings account, once he stopped emptying it every spring, started compounding the way the long-term studies say it should.

The pretending the spring drop was free was the part that didn't work. The drop wasn't free. It was the most expensive line item in his year, and it was hidden in the budget because it looked like rest.