Muscle mass reduction

ric/rstsport

Kerrmit1992 wrote:

Will strength training not increase my fast twitch fibres? This means that I would continue to fatigue faster would it not?

i'm not sure what you want to do? you have said you want to lose your muscle 'bulk' but also said that you go to the gym and do some sort of gym training with weights? or similar.

anyway, if you want to lose the muscle that is slowing you down as a cyclist, the *only* way to lose them is to stop exercising those muscles and they will eventually waste away (imagine what happens if say you break a leg and have a cast put on it - the muscle will waste through lack of activity).

to improve your (endurance) cycling all you *need* to do is cycle. you do not need to do supplemental exercises, unless you want to for other reasons.

if you want to fatigue less (on the bike) you need to do some sort of endurance based cycle training (which could involve at one end of the spectrum doing something like 10 x 30-sec with 30-sec recovery as hard as you can, through to riding steady for 6 hours). You will need a mix from both ends of the spectrum depending on a variety of things (everything from your goals, to how much training time and volume you have available to you, etc).

talking about fast and slow twitch fibres (etc) is probably not helpful to the discussion. you don't need to know about it for training purposes, you can't measure it (unless you want to go and have a biopsy, which i'm not recommending) and we're talking about it in very general terms. (of course, if you want to find out about fibre typing, or any other physiological adaptation then there's some good books, courses, and some of here can help a little)

ric