If you are a serious cycler then you have got to have a smart leg strengthening exercise plan in place to be successful. As a matter of fact, you better have a superior total body strength and conditioning plan in place if you want to truly make any progress up against today’s competition. I have included a tremendous body weight exercise here for you to perform in order to assist you in drastically improving your leg strength and will help you beat up on your competitors my friend! Read on if I have your attention.
The Pistol Squat: Great Leg Strength For Cycling
If you are wanting to climb those hills harder without the worry of your legs turning into spaghetti noodles then you have got to implement this exercise into your training routine my friend. The pistol squat is a tremendous body weight drill that you can perform on your own without the need of a gym or free weights. So what is the pistol squat? The pistol squat is basically a single legged squat that you perform by lifting one leg off of the ground and ideally squatting all the way to the ground and back up with the other leg. This is one gruesome strength drill that will drastically improve your leg workouts for cycling.
For starters, I don’t expect you to do this at first try unless you have done it before or if you happen to be a freak of nature. Nevertheless, I want to explain how you can begin practicing this drill on your own. To start, you can modify this exercise by utilizing the sophisticated tool of a chair or bench. This shouldn’t be too hard of piece of equipment to find, right? Anyway, stand in front of the chair or bench and sit on it to start. From here lift one leg up and firmly place the leg thats on the ground into the ground by pushing through your heel. Keep the other leg up and tense your body by making fists with both hands as you attempt to stand up. Don’t allow the other leg to touch the ground.
As you get better at standing up off of the chair then intensify the drill further by starting from a standing position and lowering yourself down so that your rear touches the chair and then stand back up. You can see how the progression is working from here. Once you get really good at the chair or bench level then try to find a lower level surface to practice on until you no longer need it and can go execute your range of motion all the way to the floor. This is building leg strength for cycling at it’s best my friend.
If you haven’t already started to implement the pistol squat into your cycling resistance training program then you are missing out. Take the time to learn more about this and other hard hitting drills by accessing the rest of my articles on the issue for free. Remember that most anyone can train hard, but only the champions train smart!
