[Closed] Do other athletes work as hard as cyclists?

Do other athletes work as hard as cyclists?

No other sport has as long a competitive season except maybe tennis. Though if you lose at a grand slam in the first round you don't have to keep competing.

Hidding in the pack all day =/= working hard. No other sport offers this advantage.

Hidding in the pack all day =/= working hard. No other sport offers this advantage.

Have you tried riding behind someone else at 45kph? It's easier than being on the front but it's not like it's a walk in the park!

They do compete an awful lot. Worth remeber though that for most, it is relatively low impact. By that I mean that cyclists are not really prone to injury through repitive impact as is the case in ma

Yes of course they do, to get to the top in virtually every sport means pushing the body to the limit of its capability. In fact the hardest thing for most of them is treading the line between taking the maximum benefit from how hard they push themselves without going into causing damage.

The mechanics of cycling enable riders to participate for 4+ hours day after day, something that just would not be possible with other sports which take a greater toll on the body.

to get to the top in virtually every sport means pushing the body to the limit of its capability.

Had an argument in the pub a few weekends ago wi the usual football bores bout this subject, well i say i had an argument but in reality i merely mentioned once in a bar wide discussion that top level cyclists are heads and shoulders above wendyballers when it comes to fitness and vo2 rates/sustainable effort/recovery etc and their response was to call me a **** poof and ask if i was gay for watching men in lycra ride bikes, then they tried to say that footballers must be fitter coz they have to play two or three times a week. Needless to say i declined to argue back as i doubt there is any sense in arguing wi folk who really should have been neutered from birth.

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Seeing the articles about the Olympic parade and how athletes are starting to arrive for it and I chuckled to myself that this would be all except the cycling squad, who were still busy working.
But it's a serious point. Look at Chris Froome; TDF, Olympics, Vuelta, then off to the World Champs. Wiggins, Paris Nice, Tour du Romandie, Criterium Du Dauphine, TDF, Olympics, Tour of Britain then off to the Worlds next week.
They all work incredibly hard. [b]Do other sports just spend their spare time training a lot or do they have competitive schedules like the pro-peleton?[/b]

Looks like the other posters have completely missed the OPs point.

Andy Murray missed the closing ceremony as he had to fly to Canada for a tournament and is currently attempting to win the US Open. The footballers will currently be engaged in normal squad duties. I'm sure there are other examples of athletes who are still participating in other events.

Volleyball, shotput, discus, shooting/archery, etc - yes they require skill but do they really push the human body to it's limit?

Shotput and discus have much higher injury rates than cycling, they put a hell of a lot of explosive power through the shoulder and arm joints and walk a tightrope of maximising power and breaking the body far more than the act of cycling.

i laugh when footballers get cramp after 90mins. if their training was good enough it wouldn't be an issue, cramp doesn't effect pro cyclists that much because they are used to pushing hard for 3-6hrs at a time and train accordingly.

Shotput and discus have much higher injury rates than cycling, they put a hell of a lot of explosive power through the shoulder and arm joints and walk a tightrope of maximising power and breaking the body far more than the act of cycling.

Road biking = easy and boring, no wonder you can do it day in day out

I laugh when footballers get cramp after 90mins

Totally agree, for example tennis players amaze me with their fitness levels. to work like they do, for up to 4 hours is insane IMO

i laugh when footballers get cramp after 90mins. if their training was good enough it wouldn't be an issue, cramp doesn't effect pro cyclists that much because they are used to pushing hard for 3-6hrs at a time and train accordingly.

Whilst not defending them per se, getting cramp within 90 minutes is totally possible, irrespective of training. An XC race is barely any longer and they have the opportunity to drink several litres of fluid in that time.

That's a stupid comparison.

Isn't this the argument that started triathlons all those years ago?

Thing about football is that it doesnt just require fitness, it needs skill too, you can be the fittest person on the planet but still be crap at football. Conversely, you can be not quite fit but still make it as a pro footballer. Different sports have different requirements, daft to try and compare based solely on fitness.

Do other sports just spend their spare time training a lot or do they have competitive schedules like the pro-peleton?

Whether you consider the players athletic or not, baseball I think probably has possibly the biggest schedule. 190 days of regular season play, 168 games. If you make it into the post-season there could be another 10-15 games over a month. Before the season starts there's a month and a bit of training camp and practice games with other teams. By my count, an every-day baseball player could be playing from February to the end of October playing over 200 games if it all works out. It's not as high impact as a lot of sports but it does seem like a hell of a schedule for a player.

Working for a long time is not the same as working hard.

As for football, it is the most popular sport in the world, if they were all just lazy slackers, there would be a million people lining up to take the place of any and every player who doesn't do everything to be in peak shape.

Does that mean you have an idea for an event that includes cycling, football and the shotput?

That's a stupid comparison.

not really it's 45 minutes of activity (not all of that is moving) and the opportunity to take on fluids before and usually during if theres a stoppage or you are near the goal or touchline. and at half time and then before and at half way of extra time.

training can and should allow you to condition yourself to not get cramp towards the end of a game of football. fair enough when the temperatures/humidity are very high as in the summer tournements but not in conditions you are used to.

Mackem - Member
Thing about football is that it doesnt just require fitness, it needs skill too, you can be the fittest person on the planet but still be crap at football. Conversely, you can be not quite fit but still make it as a pro footballer. Different sports have different requirements, daft to try and compare based solely on fitness.

That explains why were so shite at it then..

Back to the OP's question, of course they do. To even hint that someone could come to the top of the elite of their sport without putting a huge amount of training hours shows a lack of understanding of how hard they work. OK they don't have the grand Tours to participate in but they will still be training 4-6 hours a day every day.

Interesting debate this.

The nature of cycling is a long season and continuous hours/days in the saddle. Therefor the top performers in the sport will spend long hours in the saddle, days on end. However, it is relatively low impact so injuries are less common.

Shot putt is arguably the polar opposite, they need no strength endurance so don’t train for it. What they do need is to be able to put a huge force through the shot in a split second. To do this they need explosive power, speed and perfectly honed technique, this is what they will spend their time worked on. However, impact sports need to incorporate more rest into their programmes hence them perhaps appearing to have more spare time. The 100m is a similar event in terms of training in that it is all short, fast and intense.

Football is somewhere in the middle in that they work at a high intensity for 90 minutes and rarely more. So no, they are not as great endurance athletes as cyclists or as powerful as shot putter. But they are still very, very fit. The reason they will cramp towards the end of the game is they train for 90 minutes, any time on top of this somewhat confuses their body.

It is important remember that those who train/compete for the longest don’t necessarily work the hardest.

training can and should allow you to condition yourself to not get cramp towards the end of a game of football.

So because some get cramp they're not trained? 🙄

Chris Froome blew up in the Vuelta. He knew he was gonna have to ride those climbs, was he not trained? Why didn't Shanaze Reade win the BMX Gold at the Olympics? It's less than a minute of riding, surely she could have been trained to make sure she was the best. Plenty of cyclists struggle in their events, it's not simply a sign of a lack of training!

Comments like yours just show quite a bit of naivety IMO.

Chris Froome blew up in the Vuelta

That would be hard to train for. And messy.

Comments like yours just show quite a bit of naivety IMO.

not really, i asked my friend who's a BC qualified cycling coach what he though, basically he said they ( (footballers) train for short term muscle endurance but lack the fitness levels to sustain that. get fit first then condition yourself. they probably do not train for any peaks or prepare well with proper nutrition/liquid intake the previous day or the couple of hours before their game. basically you shouldn't get cramp towards the end of 90 or 120mins

remind me how many days/hours Froome had been riding in the Vuelta? i think it was for more than 90mins with 2-3 days rest/light training in-between?

as for Reade i think she lost because she only has a good gate and lacks the ability at the highest level.
she is the best in the U.K. but a couple of other people were better.

Footballers suffer cramp due to spending most of the recovery time between matches engaged in intercourse with glamour models.

Cycling is a pretty easy sport to train for because you pretty much just need to cycle. Yes there will be gym sessions etc but the nature of the sport means you can just cycle for hours on end with a low risk of injury.

Rowing, running, swimming etc all all similar and all need just as much hard work.

But the other sports eg field events like shot put, javelin etc all require a mixture of training as you cannot just throw something with that much power all day and expect your body to put up with it for long. You need gym for arm, core, legs etc. They probably do training to get the explosive burst - look at the size of some of the athletes and how fast they can move across the throwing enclosure. Have you tried throwing a shotput half as far as they manage? It's technique, power and control. Only difference is they put in hours and hours of training to do something which lasts seconds. They don't have ANY room for error when they compete and they have to nail it.

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(And what about the "sports" like volleyball, shooting, etc?)

Why wouldn't you consider volleyball a sport?

i asked my friend who's a BC qualified cycling coach what he though, basically he said they ( (footballers) train for short term muscle endurance but lack the fitness levels to sustain that. get fit first then condition yourself. they probably do not train for any peaks or prepare well with proper nutrition/liquid intake the previous day or the couple of hours before their game. basically you shouldn't get cramp towards the end of 90 or 120mins

Well he must be a qualified idiot. Do you really believe that football teams leave the players nutrition and preparation to chance? They have backroom teams of doctors, physios and nutritionists planning every aspect of the players preparation, the investment ploughed into this by the top teams would blow any cycling team out of the water.

Footballers suffer cramp due to spending most of the recovery time between matches engaged in [s]intercourse with glamour models[/s] [b]getting drunk, smoking, taking coke and glassing revelers in night clubs[/b].

i asked my friend who's a BC qualified cycling coach

My mates a qualified British cycling coach. He is the last person I would ask about anything to do with Cycling, fitness, nutrition or diet.

the investment ploughed into this by the top teams would blow any cycling team out of the water.

Pretty sure the salaries paid to single players on some teams would blow the whole budget of some cycling teams

i asked my friend who's a BC qualified cycling coach what he though

Well he must be a qualified idiot. Do you really believe that football teams leave the players nutrition and preparation to chance? They have backroom teams of doctors, physios and nutritionists planning every aspect of the players preparation, the investment ploughed into this by the top teams would blow any cycling team out of the water.

I'm going to show this thread to a guy I know who is a physio for a London Premier League football club. I suspect he'll be quite amused by some of the comments here.

Have a look at this bunch of lightweights. NBA Basketball:

[url= http://espn.go.com/nba/team/schedule/_/name/Mia/seasontype/2/miami-heat ]Miami Heat 2013 Schedule[/url]

Competitors in any sport are geared towards their respective disiplines physical requirements, if for instance your chosen sport needs you to pedal 4-5 hours a day, for two weeks with minimal rest, then maybe have a couple of days off before another event requiring similar endurance/rapid recovery then that is what you condition your body to do.

If your sport needs you to run about kicking a ball for 90 minutes each weekend then that is what you train for...

If you need to run 100m in under 10 seconds that is what you train for...

Not all sports are directly comparable though are they; some require very short high intensity bursts, others need sustained, measured performances over a longer period, where a competitor needs to meter how energy is expended in order to remain in contention at the finish.

No matter what the sport I believe the biggest challenge is probably maintaining physical performance/fitness during the off-season, a period of sustained competitiion will enevitably result in a level of baseline fitness, but its the off-season where perhaps the presure to perform subsides for a bit where performances can slip I reckon...

Well he must be a qualified idiot. Do you really believe that football teams leave the players nutrition and preparation to chance? They have backroom teams of doctors, physios and nutritionists planning every aspect of the players preparation, the investment ploughed into this by the top teams would blow any cycling team out of the water.

I'm going to show this thread to a guy I know who is a physio for a London Premier League football club. I suspect he'll be quite amused by some of the comments here.

Can you ask him why footballers get cramp after 90mins (with time to take on fluids after 45min)?
And his view on why a crit cyclist (1hour plus 5 laps) or a tour cyclist will rarely get cramp?

Adam Gemili ran the fastest British 200m in 3 years in competition yesterday.

Johnny Brownlee won a World Series triathlon in Stockholm 2 weeks ago.

I am sure there are other examples. I get a bit annoyed with the 'our sport's 'arder than yours' arguments that some like to revel in (acknowledging that that was not the OP's intention).

Shotput and discus have much higher injury rates than cycling, they put a hell of a lot of explosive power through the shoulder and arm joints and walk a tightrope of maximising power and breaking the body far more than the act of cycling.

That may be true, but you can't tell me shot putters train even half as hard as cyclists, the big belly on most of them being a big give away 😐 .

Whether you consider the players athletic or not, baseball I think probably has possibly the biggest schedule. 190 days of regular season play, 168 games. If you make it into the post-season there could be another 10-15 games over a month. Before the season starts there's a month and a bit of training camp and practice games with other teams. By my count, an every-day baseball player could be playing from February to the end of October playing over 200 games if it all works out. It's not as high impact as a lot of sports but it does seem like a hell of a schedule for a player.

Yeah but its not a sport that requires a high level of cardiovascular fitness. When have you ever seen a baseball playing in a world of pain about to bonk? I think we can both safely say never. Whenever I flick past baseball on the telly, half the players just seem to be standing around twiddling their thumbs.

The grueling nature of cycling is that its a tough sport and always will be, I guess all the pro's love it though or they wouldn't do it!

And I doubt many footballers train as hard, or work as hard as cyclists.

Great discussion. I figured that even if not competing, anyone making a living from their sport would still be putting in a lot of effort with training.

But the schedule that cyclists seem to undergo seems particularly punishing. Witness the interview with Wiggo on the signing on sheet at the start of the Tour of Britain - he said he'd arrived last night at midnight having been at a dinner party engagement and hadn't the faintest idea who was here or what the plan was!

'I'm just going to ride my bike' he said!

Distance runners dont have an off season as such. When I was racing it was track from April to September then road races and indoor track right through to the next track season. The breaks in competition are only geared towards peaking for specific races. Any of these individual sports based almost entirely on pure fitness require the same dedication and pain in order to succeed.

Cyclists mustn't push themselves that hard if they never cramp up in a race. And to be honest cycling up all them hills without a beer belly is just cheating, they are just taking the easy option, the big girls blouses.

But the schedule that cyclists seem to undergo seems particularly punishing. Witness the interview with Wiggo on the signing on sheet at the start of the Tour of Britain - he said he'd arrived last night at midnight having been at a dinner party engagement and hadn't the faintest idea who was here or what the plan was!

Not many professional sports where a competitor wouldn't get a good rollicking from his manager/boss/team mates, for being out late the night before competition.

When have you ever seen a baseball playing in a world of pain...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schilling_Tendon_Procedure

Just because it's not a cardiovascular sport doesn't mean they're not pushing the limits of human ability. The number of baseball players on the DL at any one time is enormous.

Here's a question (kind of in context) - would you consider F1 drivers to be sportsmen/athletes? Given the physical strength and endurance training they go through, I certainly would..

F1 drivers to be sportsmen/athletes

Don't a lot cycle as a form of cross training? In fact is cycling not used as a form of cross training for a whole heap of sports? However isn't the only cross training cyclist do cyclocross?

In the biography book Sky say they raced 250-odd days/365 in 2009/10. That's mental. Remember that's just racing, so training fits round that...

Funny how most of you here are raving about the hardness of professional cyclism. Builders work more than 300 days a year, through all sorts of weather, 8 hours a day of physical labour and yet none of you seems to think it's hard.

But in fairness if you were to break down the hours per day working then look at it you would probably be more like 25 days of the year working (this is not my real opinion).

Not many professional sports where a competitor wouldn't get a good rollicking from his manager/boss/team mates, for being out late the night before competition.

I got the impression it was a promotional/professional engagement.

To the OP, the big difference for say pro cycling and tennis and many other Olympic sports is that the Olympics is the be all and end all so once it's over there's nothing else to train for that season. That's not the case for pro cycling.

To the OP, the big difference for say pro cycling and tennis and many other Olympic sports is that the Olympics is the be all and end all so once it's over there's nothing else to train for that season. That's not the case for pro cycling.

Is that why team GB men's football team forgot to actually turn up to the Olympics?

LOL@ this thread.

Pathetic replies too. Sorry but I wouldn't be suprised by pro's shaking their heads at this thread and some of the replies without logic or experience of racing/training/critical thought and comparing like for like.

😈