Welcome to the Ask the Cycling Coach podcast presented by Trainer Road. Today we have dialed

health's Derek Teal with us. Derek, the last time we did a strength training episode, it got like

hundreds of thousands of views. It was one of the most popular podcast episodes of the year,

probably since then, even, or even overall, one of the most popular episodes. Stoke to have you back.

Thanks for having me. It's crazy. It's been a couple years now already, but I got some awesome feedback from that episode. And most importantly, I think it helped a lot of people. Yep, we're going to talk about strength training for cyclists. That's what Derek does. Derek's background, you can go find him at Dial Health on Instagram. Derek is a cyclist just like you listening to this who's also been through years of strength

training within gym environments and then also was a professional downhill mountain biker

has also raced endurance events all around the world.

Incredible human, great story and somebody that you should follow if you're listening to

this podcast.

And today we're going to go full into your recommendations for cyclists, for strength training. It's the off season. It's when a lot of cyclists think about this. But on that specific topic, we're going to kind of talk about maybe some ways that athletes are doing it wrong and ways that your knowledge has evolved over the years. Before we do any of that, I want to go into an interesting study. There's kind of like three studies that have really caught my eye over the past six months to a year on strength training. We'll kind of reference them throughout this. And I'll link them down below. But here's the first study. It's really interesting. It says strength training among professional UCI road cyclists, practices, challenges, and rationales.

And this is by, pardon the pronunciation, Vikashtad et al, 2025.

This is a situation where it's an observational study.

Or basically, like, they send out a questionnaire.

They get information back and then they break down that data.

So this isn't something where they actually had some sort of like control experiment or

anything else.

This is just them publishing this data, then using statistics to be able to draw conclusions

from the data.

They sent a questionnaire to 624 pro road cyclists.

Interestingly, they said they did it through Instagram DM.

I saw that, which I thought was hilarious.

Me too. yeah, yeah.

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