Secrets of the Stationary Bike: Unconventional Training Protocols for Added Strength, Power, Endurance & Joint Rehab
A stationary bike is more than a cardio tool - but no one knows how to set it up for a strength/power athlete. Here is how…
Contents covered:
Underrated benefits & uses of the stationary bike for explosive athletes and the average person
Movement preparation & prehab/rehab
Developing a more explosive leg drive for sprinting, jumping, tackling etc.
Work capacity & Recovery
Lower body “strength boost”
Power Endurance (Important for Combat athletes)
Frequency and added notes + takeaways
The stationary bike is among the most underutilized tools in any commercial gym. When I say “underutilized“ I mean it’s utility is far higher than 90% plus of the population realizes.
I am not talking about just using the bike for cardio. And many of you probably noticed the other day that I also believe in using it as “movement preparation“ in a little Twitter drama with Ben Patrick a.k.a. “knees over toes guy“ and I yesterday.
However this is not the maximum extent to which stationary bikes possess tremendous utility for both general fitness and athletic development.
Properly programmed and set up, a resistance bike of the right kind can improve strength and power outputs. It can also improve tissue health and resiliency which allows you to remain athletic and useful where more common exercises can be limited by other factors.
Below we will go over my favorite uses and benefits of resistance bikes followed by the best set ups, protocols and programming opportunities for you to use.
Benefits/Uses:
> Foot, knee, hip health
> Movement prep
> Aerobic or anaerobic cardio
> EXPLOSIVE POWER OR STRENGTH development (I will explain and you will wish you thought of it earlier)
*all of this can be done while addressing factors in an overall program that lets you get MORE stimulating work in while still recovering.
This will give you a huge edge over everyone else not using this properly.
Read the methods and explanations below.
What makes a stationary bike unique?
A stationary bike with high resistance capability is a machine with loading properties.
Stop thinking of a stationary bike as only a piece of cardio equipment since that’s where it’s placed in the gym. Instead begin to see its potential as more of an exercise machine like the leg press or a weighted sled.
Let’s consider the movement factors when performing “handling exercise“.
The movement is a partial range of motion
It is concentric only – there is no eccentric/lowering component to the resistance. You only “push the way” each rep.
The Glute, quad, hamstring, and all the major muscles of the lower leg/foot are involved in peddling (provided adequate technique for our purposes)
If you have a bike that allows this… we can perform pedaling exercise in forward and reverse motion - this allows us to work the opposing musculature or emphasize different “tension ranges”
Can be loaded with almost zero weight or to a high degree of difficulty in order to challenge the rate of speed or force that we want to produce depending on our training intentions.
We can load our legs with resistance without stressing the rest of the body with a load on our torso/arms/back which allows us to leave the legs as the only thing that will be fatigued and the limiting factor in our performance. This prevents the upper body from limiting us from the best legwork out produce.
The nature of it set up also makes it extremely safe to take to failure which makes it a great choice for those rehabbing or working around injuries or older populations with a lower capacity. As well as any athlete looking to push hard while reducing risk of injury/overtraining.
Most bikes also have a fairly smooth resistance curve (much like a cable machine) and angles and tension ranges can even be manipulated if the seat is adjustable in height (underrated technique we will cover)
Simultaneously it also is low impact compared to other gait cycling exercises like running. (Impact isn’t bad per-se but one benefit of low impact is that you can do more high collision forms of other training if what you’re training for is absorbing impact itself - i.e. plyometrics)
Under these conditions we can perform a variety of exercise protocols from warm-ups, joint health rehabilitation, cardiovascular or muscular conditioning of all types, strength and power outputs, or a combination of repeated power outputs.
It’s also extremely accessible as almost any commercial gym will have some form of high resistance stationary bike – the assault bike in particular is my favorite.
All these factors together make a resistance bike a highly variable “short to mid range” strength and power/conditioning machine that can be used – like many other “short range” exercises (see here for “range” explaination) – or high repetitions and easily recoverable volume of work to add to our weekly programming to get a stronger stimulus then our competitors are without exceeding our recovery ability.
Remember the goal of effective training is to provide the strongest stimulus possible without increasing body fatigue beyond what we can recover from. Exercises that are:
> concentric only
> “close or mid-range”
> and minimize global stress on the tissues beyond what we are focusing on
…all make it exercise easy to perform extra training with to enhance our gains without exceeding our recovery.
And yet resistance stationary bikes are usually left alone in the middle of a cardio section of a commercial gym.
By utilizing any of the protocols we provide below you can add powerful strength and explosive training volume for efficient and productive energy system work without risking breaking the body down too much.
Movement Preparation and Tissue Health
This protocol operates as both prehab, rehab, cardio, a warm up, and potentiating activity all in one.
“Movement preparation” refers to increasing your readiness to use your body for whatever physical task you are preparing for. This includes “warming up“ but I have begun to use the term “movement prep” as it’s a more accurate term that helps the user remember what the goal/intention is.
Movement prep “Warm-ups“ only need to satisfy 4 conditions:
Raise core body temperature
Activate the sympathetic nervous system
Prepare the targeted tissues for impact or strain
Elevated heart rate to ~60% of your heart rate max
A stationary bike with appropriate resistance & intent does an excellent job of all of these goals within ~5 minutes of work.
With that small bit of resistance and proper technique - a bike will also provide high repetitions of effort to the legs from the foot to the knee and hip. This is both good for preparing you for higher impact activity as well as actually being a productive stimulus for the joints to adapt - as they respond well to *super* high reps as well. Knee & other joint pains frequently dissipate over time with this method.
This is why this protocol is recommended because the most optimal “warmups” are more than warm ups but actually just productive exercises themselves (this adds another 5-10 minutes of cardio as well).
Perform the following protocol at the very beginning of any lower body session: