Do you like your legs? Yes? That's good. In a sport that relies so much on the performance of your legs, you should have a good relationship with them. Whether you wish your legs were thicker or thinner, shorter or longer, you should like them for what they are and be proud of the fact that road cycling has moulded your legs into what they are. What hard work! Thousands and thousands of kilometres of cycling have gone into your muscles, and you can usually see this hard work in the legs of road cyclists.
If you shave, you can show off your cycling legs better
No competitive athlete competes on a racing bike with hairy legs. If you shave, your muscles are better emphasised. Only when the legs are shaved does the light model the fine nuances in the muscles, drawing the eye to the living sculpture. Too narcissistic, do you think? A matter of taste. For many, the bare leg is above all a statement: I belong to the "speed caste". Shaving is a ritual act, a way of setting yourself apart from non-cyclists and all those who take the sport less seriously. Besides, hairless legs are of course easier to massage and easier to care for in the event of an injury - all correct and often repeated arguments.
"Cycling makes you fat." You often hear this preconception. The opposite is true: the higher the racing class, the thinner the legs, at least in road cycling. Professional road cyclists train and starve themselves of any unnecessary ballast in order to optimise their muscles for endurance cycling. The legs become thin because endurance muscles tend to be lean muscles that can be supplied with nutrients and oxygen particularly well
The power of the genes determines the legs
What happens to the muscles during training? In very simple terms, muscles consist of two different types of fibres: the enduring red fibres (type I) and the fast-twitch white fibres (type II). The white fibres are thicker, stronger and twitch faster - good for sprinting. The red fibres are more enduring and store more energy - good for long distances. There is also a type of mixed fibres that are stronger than the red ones and have more endurance than the white ones. Whether your muscles have more red or white fibres is essentially genetically determined. Extensive endurance training promotes the development and performance of the red, endurance type I fibres. Although there are indications that specific training can completely convert muscle fibres of one type into the other type, there is no consensus among scientists. What is certain, however, is that the proportion of red muscle fibres can be increased significantly better through training than that of the white, fast-twitch fibres.
What counts for racing cyclists: Class instead of quantity
Road cyclists' legs therefore generally have a high proportion of red fibres. In contrast to office workers, however, the athlete's muscle also has a much denser "pipework network", which takes over the blood supply right into the finely branched capillaries and ensures the supply of oxygen to the muscle power plants. The number of mitochondria, the cellular power plants in the muscle fibres, is particularly high in cyclists' legs and muscles. The ability to store "fuel" in the form of glycogen and fat in the muscles is much more pronounced in highly trained red fibres than in untrained ones. All in all, this means that the endurance capacity of a trained cyclist's leg can be up to four times as high with similar dimensions to an "office leg".
However, the thickness of the leg says nothing about the cyclist's maximum strength - it only gives an initial indication. How much power the legs ultimately develop also depends on how many fibres can be mobilised for a desired movement. A bodybuilder with thick legs would probably not stand a chance against a much slimmer cyclist on the bike, not even in a sprint. However, high maximum strength definitely goes hand in hand with a larger leg circumference, which can be seen in Track sprinters, the most explosive cyclists on two wheelscan be observed well. Road sprinters, on the other hand, who have to tackle long distances and hills before they can compete in a sprint, have much slimmer legs in comparison. Like all road cyclists, they have to find a compromise between endurance and strength. The individual mix of these competing characteristics makes a cyclist what he can and is - at least from a muscular point of view.
Can you see the shape of the cyclist's legs?
Only if you know the rider and know which poles the athlete moves between in their form cycle. With increasing (endurance) form, the legs generally become slimmer and leaner. Jan Ullrich, for example, was able to achieve Tour de France regularly has the most impressive legs. Then his huge thigh muscles stand out razor-sharp under paper-thin skin. Everything superfluous has melted away during the three-week chase through France. But there are exceptions to this rule. Stephen Roche, the great Irishman who in 1987, within one season Giro d'ItaliaThe cyclist who won the Tour de France and the World Championships stormed to his successes with completely unspectacular, thin and barely defined "baby legs". And if you can recognise one of the little ones, lightweight Spanish climbing specialists you're tempted to shout: "To the youth race on the right!" - that's how thin the legs of the specialists are. It is therefore very, very difficult to draw conclusions about form from the leg. And I'm sure every cyclist knows an example of a pair of legs where they have made a huge mistake.
