After a period of physical inactivity while recovering from Covid, British racing cyclist James Lowsley-Williams, also known as Hank, decides he needed to start his training routine with a physical challenge and commits to doing squats every day for one month. In a new video about the World Cycling Network channel, he measures whether the experiment has any impact on his cycling performance by tracking his heart rate variability (HRV) as well as his cycling power in 10- and 20-second sprints.
Each day, Hank must do 100 goblet squats with a 10kg dumbbell (which is equivalent to 22lbs). He immediately finds the full range of motion required in this move quite challenging. “That’s a long way off,” he says after the fifth iteration of him. “I’m already regretting this.”
Hank has some real soreness in his muscles to overcome for the first few days, but he stays on track with his 100 reps each day. “My legs don’t hurt as much as they did in the first four days,” he says a week after the challenge, “but they’re still sore and stiff.”
After two weeks, that pain has subsided slightly, but he notices that his legs still feel stiff and heavy when he bikes because of the continual stress he puts on them during his strength training sessions. “I haven’t had a day yet where my legs haven’t hurt,” she says.
30 days and 3,000 squats later, Hank performs another test and finds that there has been a significant improvement in his power output on the bike: 1,323 watts output compared to 1,019 watts on day 1. However, his threshold running power ( FTP) has decreased as I wasn’t doing much actual cycling during the 30 days.
“I think it just shows that if you focus primarily on strength training, then you’re going to improve that peak power,” he says. “But that resistance is going to go down if you don’t spend time on the bike.”
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