Maximum Overload offers all-day Maximum Sustainable Power (MSP) on reduced training time by taking cyclists to a place they never imagined they’d go: the weight room.
In March 2013, in the steep Pyrenees Mountains that separate Spain and France, pro bike racer Dave “DZ” Zabriskie was ecstatic. Although not a top-10 finisher at any stage of the 7-day Volta a Catalunya (Tour of Catalonia), which included 2 days of tough summit finishes above 6,500 feet, the 34-year-old had raced far above his early-season expectations. A champion time trialist and the first American to win stages at all three of the biggest European tours (France, Italy, and Spain), DZ was never in great shape early in the season, was not a great natural climber, and was coming off a 6-month suspension for doping a decade earlier on one of Lance Armstrong’s teams. But when he got on the phone, he was beyond happy.
“I kept up on the climbs!” he raved. “I wasn’t gassing out on the hills. I’m sustaining my power. I’ll be ready for the Tour of California [an upcoming race he’d previously finished second in four times]. The weight lifting is working.”
What? Weight lifting?
Yes, you read that correctly. Zabriskie had been pumping iron—something competitive cyclists simply don’t do, and cycling coaches have expressly warned against for a century. “Riders ride. Weights make a cyclist heavy and slow,” they say, advising riders to stay away from weights at all costs (except maybe a little “core work” in the off-season). But Zabriskie, at the tail end of an impressive career with little to lose by trying something new, took a leap of faith—and something crazy happened: His power in watts on the bike jumped up—way up, a whopping 15 percent in just 4 months—while his body weight went down. Not surprisingly, his climbing was way better. On hilly training rides in the Santa Monica Mountains, he wore out Christian Vande Velde, one of his Garmin-Sharp teammates, normally a much better climber. At an age when improvement simply does not happen to the normal pro cyclist, DZ was getting better, all because he was doing two or three workouts a week of weight lifting—while riding less!
But he wasn’t doing just any old three sets of 10 reps in the gym. Trying to improve his ability to sustain power longer, Zabriskie was using Maximum Overload, the world’s first weight-lifting program designed specifically for cyclists.
Maximum Overload establishes a new paradigm that promises to revolutionize how people train for cycling. Using heavy weights to fire and harden the key mover muscles of cycling in short, taxing, and methodical workouts that increase the rider’s ability to sustain power longer, it offers the Holy Grail of training: better performance in less workout time. And the benefits don’t end there.
Specifically, Maximum Overload gives you:
•Improved power—so you get more out of each pedal stroke.
•Sustained power from start to finish—known here as Maximum Sustainable Power (MSP). By building more powerful muscle fibers, you stay fresher all day. More MSP means you are able to work less in the first half of the race and keep your speed on second-half hills and surges without gassing out in the last miles.
•Less total workout time. A 40-minute Maximum Overload workout can replace hours of saddle time—and improve upon it. You can cut your total training time dramatically.
•Quick results (often within a month or two), which keep motivation high. Grinding it out in the gym for hours is no one’s idea of fun. Between massage and physical therapy, who has time? Maximum Overload gets you in and out in an hour—and in as little as 40 minutes once you’re fully trained.
•Faster recovery than typical weight workouts. The unique combination of heavy weight and small clusters of reps is less taxing on your muscles than traditional high-intensity, high-volume programs.
•Better form. Fresher muscles maintain a more efficient body position and pedal stroke.
•Fewer injuries. The Maximum Overload protocol reduces the risks of traditional heavy weight lifting. It focuses not just on the weights, but on straightening out and protecting the whole infrastructure from overuse injuries through a step-by-step warm-up and injury-prevention movements before the big lifts.
•An antiaging effect. Heavy weight lifting is known to stave off the decline in muscle and bone mass associated with both aging and cycling—issues of special concern to those approaching or past age 50.
Granted, those are big, sexy promises that sound almost too good to be true—especially since they claim to apply to cyclists across the board—racer and century rider, young and old. But Los Angeles–based Jacques DeVore, Maximum Overload’s inventor and the coach at the other end of Zabriskie’s phone call, says they are nothing new. Other sports have been using the performance-enhancing power of weight training for years.
“Cycling is actually way behind the curve,” says DeVore, a cycling coach, masters racer, strength and conditioning coach, and owner of the prestigious Sirens and Titans Fitness gym in West LA. “Basketball players, soccer players, baseball players, golfers, rowers, skiers—you name it—they all engage in vigorous weight-lifting programs today.
“Ever wonder why today’s high-flying NBA players look like bodybuilders next to old videos of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird? Because they are doing serious lifting. And you can bet they wouldn’t be doing it if it slowed them down. Weights are taking them to new levels,” he says. “Every athlete who comes to me knows that if he was fresher in the fourth quarter, he’d win. That freshness is the result of raising what I call your Maximum Sustainable Power (MSP). And the best way to do that is with weights.”
That’s because, done right, weight lifting does a lot more than make you stronger. It gives you the ultimate tools for survival in a competitive world: quickness, speed, and power (the ultimate metric because it combines strength and speed). And even though skinny endurance athletes and their clueless coaches might disagree, weight training is particularly beneficial for endurance activities, because it can help to develop the MSP necessary to fight what DeVore calls “second-half deterioration”—the typical slowdown on the last miles and last hills of the day. And, done right, weight training can help you fight it even better than riding itself.
Whether you’re a century rider or stage racer, you know about second-half deterioration. On a course with six major climbs, it’s the flagging attempts to get up the fifth and sixth climbs as fast as you did the first—and to keep up with surges in the pack. In a criterium race, it’s the increasingly desperate efforts required to bridge to the break and keep up in the final sprint. Technically, the deterioration is due to a marked decline in sustainable power—which DeVore believes can be addressed by strengthening the muscles.
“In a long event, it’s typically the muscles that give out, not the heart and lungs,” he says. “It’s a double whammy. With your muscles fatigued on the last hills of the day, they not only can’t produce the same power they did earlier in the race but can’t hold form. Your knees splay out; your pedal stroke goes from a rigid piston to a noodle. Unable to fire fully or accurately, your power drops off the table.” As the hours and hill climbs and hard efforts go by, you slow down. You poop out.
DeVore emphasizes that although you may get a little faster through Maximum Overload training, raw absolute speed is NOT the main issue here.
“The key to going faster on a bike is not necessarily going faster, but simply not slowing down,” he says. “It isn’t how fast you are, but how much of that speed you can hold throughout the day.
“If your legs have what I call Maximum Sustainable Power (MSP), you will hold more of your speed than a faster guy—and in the end, you will beat him.” In other words, as the speed demons of the first half slow down in the second, those with steady, fatigue-resistant power will keep on truckin’.
That’s why Zabriskie was so excited. In Catalonia, early in his training cycle and unsure of his fitness, he was keeping his speed from the beginning to the end of the race.
Counterintuitively, DeVore found that the best place to build this wondrous MSP, which deeply hardens and strengthens the muscles against fatigue and deterioration, is not on the bike but in the weight room. The reason why weights are so effective is one word: OVERLOAD.
In a nutshell, weights work by concentrating an extreme stress—i.e., an overload—on your muscles that is far beyond what normal movements of life and sport can do. In a process known as supercompensation, the overload actually temporarily damages the muscles with microtears, sending alarm signals to the brain to rebuild them to be stronger, faster, and more resilient for the next go-round. The body is an amazing self-improving machine; you just need to give it the right stimulus. As you increase the overload, the muscles are stressed more and rebuilt even stronger and faster. If you can figure out a way to safely “maximize” the overload—i.e., push yourself to the limit without getting injured—you’ll get the best increases in sustainable power. Hence the title and ultimate goal of this book: Maximum Overload training, which builds the Golden Ticket of endurance, MSP.
Sounds logical, right? However, all of this begs the question: If weight training has been commonly used for years in all manner of sports, even among true endurance athletes like rowers and cross-country skiers, and now is even being begrudgingly tolerated by some in the cycling world, why hasn’t anyone stepped forward with a definitive plan until now? In other words, why has cycling been in the dark—and why should you listen to Jacques DeVore?
Two reasons: fear of weight gain and something DeVore calls “the Gap.” First, there is legitimate fear of putting on weight, whether it be fat or muscle. Since power-to-weight ratio is everything in cycling (the gold standard for a top pro is 5-plus watts per kilogram of weight), a few extra pounds without additional power will definitely make you slower on a hill climb. Cyclists, looking at bodybuilders and CrossFitters, see big bulky muscles and assume that weight training and more muscle will make them slower. They also note that big muscles don’t appear to speed them up. When do you ever see a bodybuilder hammering a bike at 27 mph?
Second, there’s the Gap. “Cycling coaches usually know next to nothing about strength training, and strength coaches know little about cycling,” says DeVore. “No one knows both, and therefore they don’t know how to ideally tailor weights and power training to the needs of the sport.”
Well, it turns out that DeVore knows both.
A former collegiate wrestler and power lifter, a credentialed National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) strength and conditioning coach, longtime masters bike racer, and elite-level cycling coach, DeVore was a successful commodities trader in the 1980s and 1990s who had a passion for cycling and strength training. He began experimenting with weight training to fight his own age-related cycling slowdown, borrowing some principles from power lifting, a weight-class sport in which competitors try to gain strength without size—which is exactly what cyclists need. Impressed by the fatigue resistance and hill-climbing prowess he appeared to gain as a result of a couple months of weight training, DeVore opened a gym and began working with cyclists, runners, and triathletes, including a national team cyclist who a decade later would go on to medal in the London Olympics. When Zabriskie came along in late 2012, DeVore had a name and a structure for his training plan and a willing world-class guinea pig to try it out on.
Maximum Overload, which maximizes the overload in a cycling-specific way that leads to improvements in MSP without adding weight, was ready for prime time.
Taking Maximum Overload public, the plan in this book not only shows cyclists the benefits of weight training but also takes the randomness out of it for all athletes. It lays out a step-by-step training plan, with tutorials on all the exercises and a critical do-it-yourself assessment that allows you to coach yourself. We can’t overemphasize the importance of the assessment; all people have structural issues that are exacerbated by aging and cycling itself. You cannot lift heavy weight safely with your body out of balance.
We’ll save the details about the Maximum Overload program for Chapter 1, but here’s a brief overview. While the full plan includes unique spins on intervals, recovery, LSD (long slow distance) training, and diet, the magic happens with the 40- to 60-minute Maximum Overload weight-lifting and power-training sessions that give the program its name. They can replace several cycling workouts per week in your off-season training (valuable for people who live in bad weather states and darkness) and even several in season, depending on your competitive level.
The keys to Maximum Overload are the right exercises and a unique overload protocol that utilizes numerous sets in small batches. That allows you to safely and comfortably lift a great quantity of heavy weight and power exercises without hating life, passing out, risking injury, spending all evening in the gym, and destroying your recovery for the next day.
The overload protocol, which we think will rewrite the rules of training for power in the gym as well as supercharge endurance athletes, can be used with any exercises and tailored to any sport. For cyclists, of course, the exercises target the mover muscles of cycling (posterior chain, quads, hamstrings, glutes, and ancillary muscles) and the supporting back and core. DeVore initially experimented with several types of deadlifts and one-legged presses, which became mainstays of the program, and settled on explosive weighted walking lunges as the ultimate transferable leg-centric power exercise. For variety and practicality, the program can work (with varying degrees of effectiveness) with alternatives such as plyo box jumps, thrusters, wall balls, and other familiar exercises, as long as they follow the Maximum Overload protocol.
At his West LA gym, DeVore works his personal clients and pro athletes with several sophisticated, rarely seen machines that allow for unique jumps and posterior chain activation. In addition to deadlifts and walking lunges, Zabriskie trained extensively on an air-resistance isokinetic machine that measured power output in standing jumps. For fun, this book shows these rare machines, but the basic Maximum Overload workout described here is a do-it-yourself version that utilizes standard equipment that you can find at your local gym or even at home.
The key point of the book is that improvements in your maximum weight lifted for certain exercises have a strong correlation to increased power performance on the bike. Zabriskie hadn’t done a great deal of heavy weight training like this before he started working with DeVore, although he had decent upper-body strength and could do five-plus pull-ups—rare for a cyclist. But like all cyclists, he was lower-body–centric. A dedicated worker, he made impressive progress from December to March, raising his deadlift max from 150 pounds to 245, increasing his power on the bike by about 15 percent, and dropping the weight of his 6-foot body from 168 pounds to 154.
“It was unheard of for a guy at his age to make that kind of improvement in such a short period of time,” said DeVore.
Maximum Overload worked for Zabriskie. The increased strength, power, and ability to hold maximum power in his muscles got him up the early Catalonia climbs with less effort, keeping those same muscles relatively fresher for the climbs at the end of the day—the MSP that is Maximum Overload’s goal. Unfortunately, DZ’s dreams went unrealized when he crashed at the Tour of California, broke his collarbone, couldn’t ride the Tour de France, and retired.
Fortunately, DeVore has been busy training many more endurance athletes in his Maximum Overload program. We were thrilled to have the opportunity, as the research and writing of the book commenced, to work with the great three-time Olympian John Howard and his protégé Denise Mueller, 43, a former 15-time junior national champion whom Howard was training to set an astounding 150-plus mph land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats. (Howard had set a record of 152.2 mph riding in the vortex of a rocket car in 1985; under tougher conditions, Mueller almost matched that and attributed some of her success to Maximum Overload, as you’ll see in Chapter 8.) You will find many observations we gleaned from Howard, Mueller, and other DeVore bike-racer clients in these pages.
Thank you for your interest in exploring this new frontier of cycling training. The efficacy of weight training to improve power for all athletes—including endurance athletes—is proven by results and science, which we will cite in the book. And as for the best type of weight and power training, we believe that Maximum Overload is a game changer that will rewrite the rules of endurance, making weight training a must-do for cyclists at all levels who want to ride stronger and longer—and don’t want to be left behind.
Jacques DeVore and Roy M. Wallack
January 2017