Cyclists have incredible lower body endurance, can climb mountain roads for hours and convert kilos of bread and pasta to power output in 500M sprints. Like a T rex with leg power to chase down prey, they are remarkably vulnerable to problems that arise outside a narrow spectrum of situations.
What about life off the bike? What about the long term ability to take care of lifting the bike off the rack not to mention yard work, lifting dogs and kids up. And have you been able to carry your partner to bed this decade?
Off the bike many cyclists I help are lacking even basic postural muscle strength to hold the head and shoulder girdle in a neutral position. This places undue strain on the nerve tracts that travel from the neck to the fingers that may contribute to some nerve radiculopathy into the fingers.
There is always more exercise and training and recovery to do. The key is fitting in a few sets of exercise with your training. The principle of habit stacking, learning to incorporate a new task or behavior that may be hard to start with something you are already good at initiating. This can look like doing a set of shoulder and core exercises before a ride and finishing the sets when you get home. Body weight exercise will not take energy away from your ride, and the upside over many years of cycling without balance will take a few weeks to have positive benefit but if you do these routines you will build strength in the crucial supporting muscles around the spine, shoulders, and neck.
Try these routines:
Prone ITV and cobra 12x 3-4 sets when you can do 20 of 3 sets work in a 4th set, work up to 20 reps of 4 sets then we find new exercises
Quadruped rotation: 6-12 x each side
Plank to dd
Plank leg lift
Classic theraband shoulder external rotation, horizontal abduction, pull down
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