Stronglifts and cycling

Stronglifts and cycling is a good combination to keep generally fit. Avoid starting both from scratch. Pick whether cardio or strength is more important to you and build a routine for that before latching another regime onto it.

What is your goal

Why are you looking to combine Stronglifts with cycling? Do you want to lose weight? Become the ultimate Crossfit machine? Live a healthy life? There can be many reasons why. There are usually three main areas in fitness in which you and other beginners want to be successful

Looks
Performance
Health

The challenge is that most beginners want everything at once fast and do a little soul searching and prioritization. It’s great that you want to do everything at once and you are pumped to go. What we want to avoid is that you crash and burn.

Looks are highly subjective and depend on your personal preferences. Must likely your ideal is influenced by Hollywood and magazine covers. That is not bad but hard to obtain. To look like Tarzan or the rock takes 24/7 discipline. Your diet and training have to be tightly fitted to you. You will make considerable sacrifices opting out if many food sources, maybe even entire categories. This might come at the price of performance as you can perform to your best when starved.

Performance is all about getting that extra millisecond of your best personal best. That one repetition more in the gym. That one extra mile on your run. To achieve your performance goal your exercises have to be specific to your sport. Your diet might look a bit different as you care more about energy levels than being 10% body fat. Michael Phelps has up to 10000 calories a day. Eddie Hall eats up to 12500. You would not necessarily do that if you want to make the cover of men’s health.

The last point is health. If that is your goal you stay away from extremes. You will not all balls out on your last set. You will not turn away in disgust when someone offers you a cupcake at your nieces birthday party. You’ll enjoy life while doing yoga or other lighter exercises. You will never look the best or be the best at a sport. But you won’t care either.

So before you get into picking your regime to think about which of these areas comes first second and last for you. This will help to make lifestyle and programming choices going forward.

Stronglifts

Stronglifts is one of the best-known beginner programs in lifting. You will train for three times a week and have four days off. Stronglifts uses linear progressive overload to make you stronger. This means that you will increase the weight on each exercise by the same amount from workout to workout. For this, you have to complete five sets by five repetitions. Only the deadlift is programmed with a lower volume of 1x5 repetitions. The exercises in Stronglifts are:

Barbell Squat
Barbell bench press
Barbell deadlift
Barbell overhead press
Barbell row

You will squat each workout. All other exercises are rotated from workout to workout.

The biggest advantages of Stronglifts are its simplicity and low entry point. Beginners can follow the program easily and get direct feedback whether they are doing well. As Stronglifts is mostly easy in the beginning you also have a positive reinforcement effect which is especially important when you start. You also do not have to do a one repetition maximum test like with many other programs.

The biggest disadvantages of Stronglifts are its lack of specificity and marketing. Stronglifts treads everyone the same. This is especially bad when you are an outlier. If you are especially weak and small Stronglifts does not adjust for that. You will overreach. If you are especially strong and big you will be undertrained. The marketing of Stronglifts also suggests that you just do the program and look like Hulk. Without paying more detailed attention to diet that won’t happen. This is why you might want to get a professional assessment before starting your regime.

Cycling

Cycling is a very popular alternative to running for cardio. If you want to use a machine or cycle outdoors aim for 20 minutes. This has been shown to be the sweet spot for return on investment to stay generally fit.

To improve and push the boundaries you can implement Interval training. Go at a very high intensity for one minute and recover for 2 - 4. Aim to make the rest periods shorter over time. This will train your endurance and make you lose weight.

The biggest advantages of cycling are that you can do it outdoors and the very low injury risk. You have no impact on the ground and can still enjoy nature.

The biggest disadvantages of cycling are that it can be very boring, especially indoors and that you have to sit on a saddle for prolonged times. That might lead to nasty rashes.

Can you combine Stonglifts and cycling

Combining Stronglifts with cardio is a smart idea. It might be too much for you for the start. If you are a beginner who is not used to training 5 - 6 times a week you might want to take a step back.

Establish a routine for one of the two first. Time blocked in your calendar that you are not giving up no matter what. Depending on your goals this might be more suitable for cycling or Stronglifts. Once you lift weights or cycle even on the morning of Christmas Day add more complexity in. The key to success in fitness is consistency. Intensity is second on the list.

Ed Coan, considered by many to be the greatest powerlifter of all time, was a big fan of cycling as cardio. In his opinion, it was the best cardio option to make your legs stronger for the squat.