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Over the past year, I’ve dramatically changed my training methods to address some of the injuries and unhealthy habits I accumulated over the past decade of competing as a professional bodybuilder and powerlifter. It’s been a difficult transition. I enjoy lifting heavy and hard, all the time, but training heavy and hard comes at a cost.
A strong cardiovascular system can help pay that cost, so I’ve been pouring a lot of effort into assault bike training. There’s nothing magic about the assault bike, but I enjoy it, and I do believe that low-impact, high-intensity, full-body cardio has some benefits over other options. In fact, I believe almost every strength athlete can benefit from incorporating at least a little assault bike work into their training.
In the rest of this article, I’ll explain a few of those benefits, and share a few assault bike workouts I use with myself and some of the athletes I coach.
Four Benefits of Assault Bike Training
Mental toughness.
I’m listing this first because in my opinion, it’s the most important. Many lifters have the grit to push through a ball-busting triple on squats, but fewer will be able to sustain that level of effort over a ten-rep set. Grit is a skill that can be learned, but if you’re trying to learn it by doing sets of high-rep squats, you’re going to run yourself into the ground in short order. Those sets demand so many recovery resources that they cannot be used with the sort of frequency necessary for skill development.
In contrast, an athlete can recover from an all-out assault bike sprint in a matter of minutes, not days. That allows for a higher “grit training” frequency and ultimately faster progress. And while an 800-meter sprint might seem much less intimidating than a 500-pound squat at first glance, I promise that if you give 100% effort, they’re both extremely demanding.
Lactic acid tolerance.
You can think of lactic acid tolerance sort of like the physiological equivalent of mental toughness. For example, let’s say that you can squat 495x5, but you struggle with 405x15. That’s probably due to a relatively low lactic acid tolerance: you can’t maintain a near-maximal power output for extended periods of time.
Even though you’ll never be squatting for 15 reps in a competition, lactic acid tolerance is still important for strength athletes. That’s because limit training in higher rep ranges helps to set the stage for maximal lifts later on in a (well-designed) training cycle. If you’re always skipping out on the hardest reps of higher-rep work, you’re selling yourself — and your total — short.
Just as with mental toughness, it’s technically possible to build lactic acid tolerance with squats (or any other lift) alone. It’s not very efficient or practical, though. Hard assault bike training will develop the same energy system faster and at a lower cost.
Metabolic output.
This is pretty obvious: when you’re doing cardiovascular work, you’re burning a lot of calories. When you’re doing the sort of high-intensity cardiovascular work I’m describing in this article, you can actually reshape your metabolism. In other words, hard assault bike training can teach your body to burn more fat and build more muscle all of the time, not just while you’re in the gym.
Cardiovascular health.
This one is also obvious, but it’s important enough to offer a reminder. Your heart is your most important muscle, and if you want to be a lifelong strength athlete, you need to put in the work to maintain it. Trust me, I’d have scoffed at the idea ten years ago, but now I’m in my 30s and I have friends in their 40s and 50s. I’ve seen firsthand how quickly a cardiovascular issue can derail progress, and it’s not something you want to have to experience yourself.
Three Assault Bike Training Sessions for Strength Athletes
During the offseason, I’d recommend three assault bike training sessions per week:
Session 1
2000 meters, easy pace
Rest 2 minutes
800 meters, max effort (aim for sub 1:00)
Rest 5 minutes
800 meters, max effort (aim for sub 1:00)
Session 2
2000 meters, easy pace
10 intervals:
10 seconds max effort (aim for 150 meters)
60 seconds rest
Session 3
8000 meters, steady pace (aim for sub 14 minutes)
These times are just baselines. I’ve found that different brands of assault bikes measure distance differently (the Rogue bike is the easiest, and the Schwinn is the hardest). Leverages also matter: taller athletes will generally put up better times than shorter ones.
If you’d like help incorporating assault bike work into your own training, you can click here to contact me for coaching.
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