Strength Training for Cyclists: Why Unilateral Work Is the Missing Link
Every cyclist loves talking watts and FTP. But the real measure of a well-trained cyclist isn't what you can do at the beginning of a ride, it's what you can hold onto at hour three when it gets hard.
A key aspect to building that durability and resiliency is strength training.
Yet, most cyclists treat strength training like an afterthought and more like a winter project. Then the warm weather comes, the outdoor riding volume picks up and strength work quietly disappears from the schedule. Strength training is more like “use it or lose it”, so if you completely stop exposing the body to resistance load, the neuromuscular and strength gains start fading quickly.
The Case for Strength Training: It's Not Just About Power
Strength training teaches your brain how to recruit the right muscles more efficiently, so you can produce more force without feeling like you're working harder. Better fatigue resistance is a key benefit from strength training. These gains show up as such: your legs fatigue more slowly, you can hold watts longer and later in your ride, your form stays cleaner, and you can handle more training load without breaking down right away.
Cycling builds specificity. Strength training helps build durability and resiliency.
The goal is to become a stronger and more resilient cyclist, not to become a powerlifter who rides.
The demands of cycling should drive your exercise selection.
Focus on movements that develop force production, stiffness, control and unilateral coordination without burying your legs for the next three days. The gym is not here to mimic cycling, but to train your muscles to sustain the demands of cycling and to build more balanced athletic development. The exercise selection should be driven by a single intention: improve the quality behind cycling.
Why Unilateral Work Is the Missing Piece: Cycling Is a One-Leg-at-a-Time Sport
So, strength training for cyclists should incorporate those movements.
Fundamentally, cycling is a single-leg activity, each pedal stroke is driven by one-leg push. Every climb, every sprint, every grinding gravel effort is simply your left leg and right leg taking turns producing force thousands of times.
When planning strength training for cyclists: your coach should make sure you spend time building strength in the pattern that matches the demands of your riding. And rest assured, single leg work doesn’t mean training less and not lifting as heavy.
Single-leg exercises like split squats, Bulgarian split squats, single-leg RDLs, and step-ups force each leg to carry its own weight, literally. These exercises train the legs and the pelvis/trunk complex to produce and transfer force without having to look like a pedal stroke.
There's a neuro piece worth mentioning here too.
Training one limb drives neural adaptations in the other, even without direct loading. Single-leg work challenges your nervous system in a way bilateral work doesn't. Your brain has to constantly recalibrate position, balance, and force output with only one point of contact. That trains the kind of joint-to-brain communication that keeps your hips, knees and ankles tracking where they should be in space, especially when you're three hours in your ride and starting to feel the fatigue building up.
Sport-specificity matters for strength training for cyclists, especially the height of in-season.
Unilateral work also exposes side-to-side differences that cycling only training can hide.
Most cyclists have a preferred side, a stronger hip, or a leg that consistently takes over when things get hard. You can pedal thousands of miles without noticing it. Then one knee starts getting cranky, one hip tightens up, or your power starts fading earlier on one side.
Single-leg strength work shines a spotlight on those asymmetries before they become problems.
Summer vs Off-Season: Your Plan Should Look Different
Not all strength training phases are created equal, and this is where a lot of cyclists go wrong, they either do the same program year-round, or they drop it entirely once the riding ramps up.
In the off-season and pre-season, it makes sense to be less sport-specific. Higher volume, more variety, broader movement patterns. Build the base, address weaknesses, develop muscle you can call on later. This is the time for heavier loading, bilateral work alongside unilateral, and more recovery time between sessions. This is where we fill in the gaps that the sport leaves behind.
Once you're in your summer season, the approach and intent of your strength training shifts.
This means: lower volume, higher specificity where the focus is to maintain strength and preserve power, more mobility and better recovery. The goal is no longer to build new capacity and new max strength gains; it's to maintain what you built and protect your ability to ride hard. Sessions get shorter, less frequent (1-2x/wk), more targeted and high quality movements and enough load to remind the body to maintain strength.
This is also where exercise selection gets more intentional. Split squats, hinges, trunk stability and single-leg RDLs stay the focus because they directly support pedaling mechanics. Exercises that create excessive muscle damage or spike fatigue get removed from the training regimen during the high riding volume and summer season.
The Science of Stacking Strength With Intervals
For optimal distribution of training load, completing your gym session the same day of a hard workout is the recommendation.
There is research supporting the practice of doing your strength work on the same days as your hard interval sessions, a few hours after a bike workout. Combining endurance and strength in the same training day is more effective when the sessions are stacked rather than separated across different days.
When you do them on different days, you risk interfering with those adaptations.
When you stack them intelligently such as intervals first followed by strength a few hours later, you get the hard physiological stimulus from the bike and then reinforce neuromuscular strength and stability afterward, without fragmenting your recovery.
But keep in mind, done is better than perfect.
If doing a double day workout does not work for someone, due to time constraint, work schedule, etc… it is still better to do your strength training on other days than your interval bike workout, than to completely avoid strength work. Life happens and sometimes your training has to shift and that is ok!
Putting It All Together
This isn't to say that squats, kettlebell swings, and other bilateral movements aren't valuable. They absolutely are and they will always have their place. We're simply highlighting the unique benefits of unilateral training in this blog because of how closely it mirrors the demands of cycling.
If you've been treating strength training as the thing you do when there's nothing else going on, it's time to flip the script. Two focused sessions a week, with an emphasis on unilateral work, adjusted for where you are in the season, stacked intelligently with your hard days, is enough to meaningfully change how you ride.
More power per pedal stroke. Better force transfer on climbs. Better pelvic stability when you're tired or when you’re out of the saddle. Fewer nagging aches or pains. And a body that holds up to the load you want to put through it. That’s what we call resilience and smart training which will lead to better performance on the bike.
We’ve built a structured 12-Week Strength Training Plan specifically for cyclists. A plan that takes all of this into account and removes the guesswork around what to do and when.