More and more scientific studies show the benefits of doing leg strength training for cyclists. But what do you do when you do not have proper indoor facilities available because you are traveling? Or you simply don’t want to sign-up for expensive gym memberships, or sometimes you’re on the road and you don’t have a bike nor a gym available to do a work-out. Both applied to me when I was in India for 3 weeks last January. I had no bike, there were no good gyms around that offered value for money, and to make it worse, from carrying travel bags around I developed a minor muscle injury in my bum which made running or jumping not an option. Although I scheduled January as my month away from the bike and planned training, I still wanted to do a small work-out every now and then to avoid my shape from going down to zero. One option is doing circuit training or freeletics. This a great work-out for the upper-body and although freeletics has some leg work-outs, most involved jumping which was out of the question. As I still wanted to train my legs I had to be creative. That is how I developed a circuit training which can be done in 20 minutes, and it will totally kill your legs guaranteed. The best thing about it, the work-out can be at every random place, from hotel room to outdoors.
Text: Brian Megens
Header Image: Shivani Achrekar
Here’s how the circuit looks like:
One set:
– 1 minute 90 degrees squat sit
– 15 reps deep squat*
– rest until 2 minutes of set are done (for me this was around 20 to 25 seconds)
total time 1 set: 2min
total sets: 10
total time: just under 20 min
Check the videos to get an idea of the work-out
Of course you can simply copy this training. However, I recommend to customise to your level. You can do so by determining what is a hard but doable amount of time that you can do a squat sit. What I basically did is a squat sit when I was ‘fresh’. I waited until it started to hurt and I counted 10 seconds on top of it. So do not try to do a maximum amount of time in the squat sit as you won’t be able to directly do the deep squats after, nor to complete the 10 sets. The key in this training is in the set repeats. From set 7 and up you will feel your legs burn!
*Before doing this routine it is very important to master the squat technique first.
