The difference between a good cyclist and a great cyclist is explosive power. This ability to harness energy, strength, and power into a burst of effort is not only a competitive advantage for racers; it’s a way to increase your overall strength, skill, and endurance as a rider. No matter what cycling discipline you participate in, explosive power is a secret weapon for advancing in the sport.
Why building explosive power should be a priority for cyclists
Explosive power is all about building strength in your fast-twitch muscle fibers. While slow-twitch fibers focus on muscle endurance, fast-twitch fibers enable you to exert maximum energy in a short period. Though we might like to have access to these fast-twitch fibers for the entirety of our ride or race, these muscles also, unsurprisingly, fatigue quicker. Focusing your training on these fibers not only increases your competitive edge—it also builds your overall strength and endurance as a rider.
Here are some key reasons to focus on explosive power in your training:
1. Sprint Finishes
In racing scenarios, explosive power fuels the end-of-race sprint, and a rider’s ability to channel all energy reserves into a strong finish can be the difference between medaling or not. Bragging rights are reserved for the friend who can turn it on at the end, sprinting the final stretch on competitive group rides. However, this extra boost or raw power isn’t unlimited, and it can be tough to muster at the end of a ride or race.
Powerful sprinting relies on the phosphocreatine energy system of the body’s neuromuscular system. This system uses the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and creatine phosphate (CrP) stored inside the body to produce the maximum output effort. However, the average cyclist can only remain at this output level for less than 15 seconds, and each repeated sprint will reduce power output.
Refilling the phosphocreatine energy system tanks requires rest and low-intensity training. For this reason, many cyclists will “protect their sprint,” only using it at the most pivotal time of the race or ride, such as a sprint to the finish. This is a strategic use of explosive power.
2. Attacking and Breaking Away
When things are neck-in-neck, launching into a burst of power is exactly what you need to break away from the peloton or chase down a breakaway. Explosive power is crucial for these short, intense bursts of speed that can create—or close—a gap between you and the others on the course.
In a race, every pedal revolution, every second, and every decision matters. Whether you're making a decisive move on a climb, surging ahead on a flat stretch, or responding to an attack, explosive power gives you the edge to take control of the race and dictate its outcome.
3. Quick Acceleration After Turns or Obstacles
Carrying speed into, through, and out of corners requires proper cornering techniques and skills that can be developed through repetition and practice. In criteriums, cyclocross, or mountain biking, you frequently need to accelerate after sharp turns, technical sections, or obstacles. The addition of explosive power when exiting turns or after getting around an obstacle can mean the difference between staying with or pulling ahead of competitors.
Explosive power allows you to regain speed quickly, making you faster and more efficient. Your ability to quickly increase speed also means wasting less energy trying to catch up after a corner or obstacle. Knowing you can rely on your explosive power to get out of tight spots or respond to changes in pace, you consciously conserve energy during less intense periods. Ultimately, this ability to use explosive power to regain speed quickly enhances your abilities as a cyclist, allowing for more efficient use of energy reserves and sustaining higher cycling output over longer periods.
4. Hill Climbing Power
For short, steep hills, explosive power helps you maintain a high speed and ride efficiently. These climbs often require quick, out-of-the-saddle acceleration, where raw power enables you to push through the steepest sections without losing momentum. Once the steepest part of the climb is over, you can settle back down into the saddle, continuing the climb efficiently.
Increasing your ability to unleash explosive power allows you to sustain an aggressive pace for a short duration to quickly power over steep hills without diminishing energy reserves and burning out. Ultimately, tackling these short, steep climbs powerfully helps avoid fatigue, conserve energy, and gain time and position on competitors without significant negative impacts on performance later in the race.
5. Group Ride Dynamics
On group rides, explosive power helps you keep up with pace changes, such as when the group accelerates suddenly or sprints. Group dynamics can involve unpredictable fluctuations in speed, whether it’s a surge to bridge a gap, a sprint for a town sign, or a quick attack to test the group’s strength. Instead of struggling to keep up with the pace, exercising explosive power enables you to react instantaneously without spiking your heart rate or wasting energy. Having the explosive power reserves, and the ability to tap into them when needed, helps you respond more effectively to speed variations, maintain your place, and conserve energy by avoiding excessive efforts.
6. Improved Muscle Endurance and Fatigue Resistance
It may seem counterintuitive, but building your capacity for explosive power also significantly benefits your muscular endurance and overall fatigue resistance. This is because building explosive power enhances general muscle efficiency, which also extends into moderate efforts. When riding at a steady pace or climbing a mild gradient, more efficient muscle use translates to the ability to sustain pace for longer.
7. Better Overall Speed and Agility
Even if you’re not competing, explosive power adds agility and versatility to your riding. Tapping into explosive power helps enhance cycling performance, making climbs, flats, and descents more dynamic and engaging. It also improves speed, responsiveness, control, and overall cycling performance.
Explosive power helps you push through and over difficult and steep portions of climbs, getting over them more efficiently. You can push and maintain a higher average speed over hilly terrain without significant drops in energy or momentum. When it comes to flat terrain, this reserve allows you to handle obstacles that affect speed more efficiently. Aggressive acceleration out of a corner or around an obstacle without becoming gassed translates to a faster pace overall.
When pointing your bike downhill, explosive power increases already-established bike handling skills. Whether on the road or on the trail, extra power helps you maintain control over your bike when the descending becomes more technical. With increased power comes increased control and agility, allowing you to go faster on the downs with a much higher confidence level and increased engagement level on the bike, whether you’re a racer or just a recreational rider.
8. Injury Prevention and Functional Strength
By focusing on explosive power, especially through off-the-bike strength training, you strengthen muscles and tendons, which can reduce the risk of injury. Cycling is hard on the body—muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints are all affected, let alone the impact a crash can have. Explosive, powerful training off the bike helps build and strengthen the parts of the body most affected by time on the bike. It not only aids in the growth and development of muscle mass but also increases the strength of tendons and ligaments, helping to prevent serious injuries.
Training off the bike also improves functional strength, your body’s performance of everyday activities and necessary movements. This transfers to cycling by making you more stable on the bike and better able to handle challenging terrain or conditions. Committing to a consistent strength training routine will significantly affect simple but critical aspects of cycling, such as how you transfer weight from your legs to the pedals, remain stable, and respond to unexpected variables. Working on building explosive power greatly increases the connection between your muscles and brain (also known as neuromuscular training), making the body’s response to brain signals much quicker.
How to build explosive power
It’s clear that explosive power is key to becoming a great cyclist (or great athlete of any kind, for that matter), but to reap the benefits of added explosive power, you need to know how to integrate explosive power training into your weekly routine. Here are some habits and activities to consider incorporating into your training:
1. High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
A great way to gain explosive power as a cyclist is through high-intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT zeros in on both strength and cardiovascular gains by mirroring the outputs of intense cycling demands of the rider, especially during all-out efforts like climbs, sprints, and sudden speed surges. For cyclists, HIIT increases anaerobic capacity and maximum power output while enhancing the anaerobic threshold and reducing recovery time. Cyclists have seen strength and power increase by 12% or more by incorporating HIIT into their training routine.
Simply put, HIIT is short, all-out efforts followed by periods of rest before repeating. This could look like 30 seconds of full-push, max sprinting followed by four minutes of regular spinning, allowing your body to rest. Another 30-second sprint follows the rest period, and the entire process repeats four to six times. There are many options for HIIT workouts, with the Fuji, McDuffie, and Dorr +4 being among the most popular.
You can incorporate HIIT on a daily outdoor ride or on an indoor trainer, but be sure to start and finish your HIIT with a five-minute warmup and wrap up with a cooldown spin. As you continue to grow in strength and stamina as a cyclist, consider increasing the number of repetitions.
2. Strength Training (Off the Bike)
While cycling is likely the preferred method for most of your training, getting off the bike and heading to the gym will take your capabilities to the next level. While cycling provides a lot of dynamic body movement, building explosive power means building explosive muscles—something that is easier done in the weight room.
However, there are a few things to keep in mind when you hit the gym. Don’t overdo it—you’re likely already getting quite a bit of exercise and strength-building from your weekly rides, so 3-5 weekly sessions with weights are more than enough. If you’re doing intense cycling, try to give yourself 8-10 hours of rest between a ride and a gym session.
There is no magic bullet for strength training; there are many ways to approach building a routine, and it doesn’t hurt to try a few training programs to see which one works for you. Consider the major muscle groups you use while cycling and try to focus on those. Quads, glutes, hamstrings, and calves—in that order—is a good place to start. Squats, deadlifts, and lunges are great exercises to strengthen those muscles, but consider erring on the side of exercises that allow a fuller range of motion. A deep squat or lunge provides more muscle hypertrophy (increasing muscle size and mass through resistance training) and crossover gains than a quarter squat. Also, consider incorporating plyometric exercises like box jumps, side hops, jump squats, split jumps, and blastoffs into your strength training. These and other plyometric exercises allow muscle groups to work together, improving power, balance, and coordination.
3. Hill Repeats
One of the easiest ways to build strength on the bike is by riding hill repeats. Hill repeats are exactly like they sound: find a steep hill, sprint up, and repeat. Hill repeats improve leg strength and muscular endurance, allowing a rider to maintain a moderate cadence for extended periods despite pedaling a relatively large gear, replicating the resistance faced in race scenarios.
Hill repeats can be ridden with a HIIT mindset, granted that the hill is long enough and not so steep that you cannot maintain your cadence. Sprint up the hill for 20 to 30 seconds, aiming for near-maximum power output levels while maintaining a high cadence throughout the climb. Recovering by slowly riding back down at a low cadence, allowing your legs to rest a full two minutes before resetting and repeating the process. Start by attempting a handful of intervals, working your way up to 12. If you can easily tackle 12 sprints at 20 or 30 seconds each, consider bumping your sprint time up to 60 seconds.
4. Low-Cadence, High-Resistance Workouts
If where you ride is flatter, with only moderate hills, consider low-cadence, high-resistance workouts. Riding in a higher gear at a lower cadence (50-60 RPM) for 5 to 10 minutes is a great way to build torque and muscular strength. Incorporating low-cadence training encourages muscle fiber recruitment, improving muscle strength and efficiency. It also fatigues your muscles more rapidly, increasing your muscle’s endurance over time.
Lower-cadence training can also work well with off-the-bike strength training in the gym. Muscle fibers trained by gym strength workouts are more easily recruited on the bike when you add low-cadence training to your workout regimen.
5. Standing Starts
Practicing standing starts is a great way to generate explosive power and an excellent tool to measure riders’ peak power—the combination of torque and cadence. Standing starts involve starting from a standstill, pedaling as hard as possible for 10–20 seconds, and focusing on generating as much power as possible in those initial pedal strokes.
Standing starts help immensely in building the explosive power needed to grow your peak power for sprinting. When working on your sprints, standing starts generate 50-70% higher peak power output when compared to sprinting from rolling starts. Working on standing starts builds your ability to unleash short but powerful bursts of energy, translating well into race scenarios, as some race and climb starts may be from a stationary position.
Standing starts are much easier to execute properly if you know how to perform a track stand, which is one of the skills you need to build to become a faster rider.
6. Sprint Drills
While building explosive sprint power off the bike is important, translating that newfound power and strength to the bike is also important. Performing sprint drills is one of the easiest ways to translate the strength you’ve gained through training to cycling.
Sprint drills like high-force stomps are very effective in building explosive sprint capacity. With high-force stomps, you will choose the most difficult gear you can get spinning in from a standstill, without exceeding 90rpm in 12 pedal strokes. Explode from your start, pushing each pedal stroke down as hard as possible while maintaining good form for 10–15 seconds. Keep rest intervals between sprints longer—around 5 minutes—for full recovery and maximum output per sprint.
7. Core and Stability Training
A cyclist may gear toward focusing strength training solely on the legs. However, our core muscles play a pivotal role in keeping us stable on the bike, helping to efficiently and adequately transfer power from our legs and into the bike. Unfortunately, cycling itself doesn’t do much to train our core, so it is important to focus on core training off the bike.
While you are already likely doing some of these lifts to strengthen your legs, incorporating multi-joint, free-weight exercises such as deadlifts and squats work well to strengthen your core. In some studies, people participating in these types of exercises actually saw more core activation than when doing core-specific exercises.
But that doesn’t mean you should leave out core-specific exercises. Aim for exercises that are difficult and really target your abdominals, like planks, Russian twists, ab rollouts, and bird dogs.
Sample training plan for building explosive power
Here's a straightforward 4-week training plan to build explosive power on the bike. It combines both on-bike and off-bike workouts and includes ample recovery time to allow you to maintain high intensity during power sessions. Adjust the days as needed to fit your schedule.
Week 1
Goal: Build foundational strength and short bursts of power.
- Monday: HIIT Intervals
- Warm-up: 15 minutes easy spinning
- Intervals: 6 x 30-second all-out sprints with 4 minutes rest between each interval
- Cool-down: 10 minutes easy spinning
- Tuesday: Strength Training (Off the Bike)
- Squats (3 sets of 6–8 reps)
- Deadlifts (3 sets of 6–8 reps)
- Lunges (3 sets of 8 reps per leg)
- Core Work: Planks (3 sets of 30 seconds)
- Wednesday: Active Recovery Ride
- 45 minutes easy pace (low-intensity spinning)
- Thursday: Hill Repeats
- Warm-up: 15 minutes easy spinning
- 6 x 30-second uphill sprints with a slow ride back down for recovery
- Cool-down: 10 minutes easy spinning
- Friday: Rest or Gentle Yoga/Stretching
- Saturday: Low-Cadence Power Ride
- 4 x 5 minutes at a low cadence (50–60 RPM) in a high gear with 3 minutes of easy spinning between sets
- Sunday: Recovery Ride or Rest Day
- 45 minutes easy pace
Week 2
Goal: Increase intensity and duration of intervals.
- Monday: Sprint Drills
- Warm-up: 15 minutes easy spinning
- 8 x 15-second all-out sprints with 4 minutes rest between
- Cool-down: 10 minutes easy spinning
- Tuesday: Strength Training (Off the Bike)
- Same exercises as Week 1, but increase weights slightly if possible
- Add Box Jumps (3 sets of 8 reps) for more explosiveness
- Wednesday: Active Recovery Ride
- 45 minutes easy pace (low-intensity spinning)
- Thursday: Standing Start Intervals
- Warm-up: 15 minutes easy spinning
- 6 x 20-second standing sprints from a complete stop, with 4 minutes rest between each
- Cool-down: 10 minutes easy spinning
- Friday: Rest or Gentle Yoga/Stretching
- Saturday: Hill Repeats
- 8 x 20-second uphill sprints with recovery ride back down
- Sunday: Recovery Ride or Rest Day
- 45 minutes easy pace
Week 3
Goal: Increase the number of repetitions for more power-building volume.
- Monday: HIIT Intervals
- 8 x 30-second all-out sprints with 4 minutes rest between each
- Tuesday: Strength Training (Off the Bike)
- Same exercises as Week 2, focusing on form and control
- Wednesday: Active Recovery Ride
- 45 minutes easy pace (low-intensity spinning)
- Thursday: Low-Cadence Power Ride
- 6 x 5 minutes at a low cadence (50–60 RPM) in a high gear, with 3 minutes rest between
- Friday: Rest or Gentle Yoga/Stretching
- Saturday: Standing Start Intervals
- 8 x 20-second standing sprints with 4 minutes rest between
- Sunday: Recovery Ride or Rest Day
- 45 minutes easy pace
Week 4
Goal: Consolidate gains, increase intensity in select workouts, and allow for recovery.
- Monday: Sprint Drills
- 10 x 15-second all-out sprints with 4 minutes rest between
- Tuesday: Strength Training (Off the Bike)
- Maintain or slightly increase weights with perfect form
- Add Plyometric Lunges (3 sets of 10 reps per leg)
- Wednesday: Active Recovery Ride
- 45 minutes easy pace (low-intensity spinning)
- Thursday: Hill Repeats
- 10 x 20-second uphill sprints with slow recovery back down
- Friday: Rest or Gentle Yoga/Stretching
- Saturday: Low-Cadence Power Ride
- 6 x 5 minutes at low cadence (50–60 RPM) in a high gear, with 3 minutes rest between
- Sunday: Recovery Ride or Rest Day
- 45 minutes easy pace
By the end of four weeks, you should feel a noticeable increase in your power, both on hills and in sprints.
Nutrition targets for building explosive power
We all know that changing our body composition and increasing strength is about more than exercise—what we put in our body is just as important. The demand of power-building exercises puts additional strain on muscles and joints; fueling it correctly during these intensive periods of your training will greatly aid recovery and allow you to progress faster and injury-free. Ensure you get adequate protein, pre- and post-workout carbohydrates, healthy fats, and sufficient hydration. Consider adding micronutrients such as magnesium, calcium, Vitamin D, iron, and B vitamins to support muscle function and strength.
Hydration is equally as important as nutrition and needs to be adjusted for this new workload. During intense exercise, muscles produce lactic acid, which causes soreness that follows within a few hours of the training session. Water helps maintain optimal blood volume and dilutes lactic acid produced during intense exercise. Dehydrated muscles are less efficient and prone to fatigue and even injury. Proper hydration clears lactate and other byproducts of the cellular process and reduces the risk of muscle cramping and stiffness.
Stretches
If you execute your HIIT sessions right, you’ll be notably more sore than usual. Because of the intensity of movement associated with HIIT exercises, microtears in muscle fibers are a natural part of building stronger muscles. Stretching immediately after a HIIT exercise session should be a part of your cool-down as it will prevent tightness that can develop as your muscles cool down, enhance recovery by improving blood flow and speeding up waste removal, and improve your flexibility over time. The fact that your muscles will still be warm is an added bonus, as it will greatly improve the effectiveness of the stretch. Because power-building exercises target specific lower-body muscle groups such as quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and calves, focus on cycling-specific stretches for optimal results.
Consider bicycle insurance
Building cycling power is a natural step for all serious cyclists, because it allows them to ride faster. The harsh reality is that when going fast, even the most seasoned cyclists make mistakes and inevitably crash. If you’re lucky, you may walk away with cosmetic damage to your bike and some road rash. If you’re not, you may total the bike and suffer injuries. As someone serious about the cycling hobby, bike insurance is something you should consider as it covers almost anything that can happen to you and your bike.
A bike insurance policy protects your bike for theft and accidental damage, including crashes. The bike is also covered when it travels, with or without you, on the back of a car, in the hands of an airline or a postal carrier. The policy can be extended by adding optional coverages like medical, liability, and uninsured motorist to create a comprehensive layer of protection. It takes less than 5 minutes to get a quote and purchase a policy and the coverage is effective on the same day.