Why Mountain Bikers Should Be Strength Training - Part 3

Injury!

If you’re like most mountain bikers, especially those like us who live in a climate where we only get to ride about 50% of the year, being injured sucks. If there’s anything we know mountain bikers truly despise, it’s sitting on the sidelines for most of the riding season because you got hurt taking a spill.

Injuries are inevitable, they’re part of any sport, activity, having fun, etc.. Sometimes they’re more at the fault of the individual, taking too big of a “leap” for their abilities, other times, shit happens and a silly little spill can result in a big injury. Regardless of how it happens, we know it will happen at some point, so why not do everything you can to mitigate the chances of something bad happening.

When we look at mountain biking and injuries we generally like to think about 3 camps that they fall into…

• Blunt Impact. Generally not really considered an injury technically speaking as there is no real damage done, and one’s pain tolerance often dictates how long you’ll be out, but anybody who has hit the deck hard enough or landed on something to get a deep bone bruise or something similar knows that, while you might not be “injured’ in the classical sense, there is enough going on to keep you from riding, even if it’s for a short period of time.

• Fractures. Hopefully in this boat if it happens, you’re lucky enough to get a “Closed Fracture” but if you’re unlucky you might end up with something more serious in either a “Non-Displaced” or “Displaced” Fracture. Regardless of what happens the one good thing with bone breaks is that technically you should be able to heal back to 100% if all goes well.

• Ligament/Tissue Damage. This is generally the worst, because unlike bones, when we talk about torn tissue and such, we generally are never going to be able to get back to 100%. Yes you may be able to develop equal strength by making what you have stronger and muscle/tissue around the injury stronger, but generally this where we see, once damage is done, it will never come back 100% and is more likely to happen again in the future. These are your torn ACL/MCL/PCL and Rotator Cuffs which are probably the two most common on the bike.

When it comes to strength training and injury prevention there is an old saying in the strength world, “stronger people are harder to kill.” And while this might be a little oversimplified, in the most basic sense it’s true, if you’re stronger than you were last year it’s going to take more to injure you. This is becoming ever more evident in so many contexts, whether it be in something like sport where someone falls, or how we are finding now for instance, a direct correlation between things like longevity and grip strength.

Regular strength training helps to keep all of these injury types above at bay. Does it completely prevent them, of course not, that’s impossible, but you can think about regular strength training as not only helping provide increased performance, but also in helping provide an armor for lack of better words.

A little more muscle on your body, stronger ligaments, denser bones, means those blunt impacts are not going to hit quite as deep and your body will be able to handle them better. Broken bones. We know the surest way to increased bone density is regular strength training (we had a female doctor in her 60’s who trained with us for a number of years come in one day and she was flabbergasted. At 5’2” and all of 100lbs or so, after a few years at our gym her bone density had gone up. She had never seen this happen in her medical career, especially for a petite woman in her 60’s). And while many people think of mountain biking as having some impact and helping on this front, the reality is that it pales in comparison to what lifting weights regularly can do. And finally with regular strength training, focusing on the broad range of stimuli like we do in our program, from tempo’ed movements, to isometrics, to exposing things like your shoulder to a variety of positions and angles, all help build stronger, denser, ligaments and muscles which are harder to tear, and even if injured in a fall, having more surrounding musculature to help keep things together which helps that much more with the recovery process.

For many outdoor enthusiasts the idea of spending time in the gym is like nails on a chalkboard. Ultimately it’s about finding the why, why should I do it. If there was ever a better reason, aside from all of the general health and lifestyle benefits you get out of regular strength training, it would be so that you aren’t sitting on the sidelines in the middle of summer while your friends are out ripping trails!

The season is right around the corner, it’s never too late to start a new journey, take the step now and start prepping yourself for a great season ahead.