Yes. VeloCoach includes a gym programme. Seven sessions, scheduled into your week by the same coach that plans your riding. Not a separate app you have to fit in around it yourself. Every lift tells you why you are doing it.
Not a generic lifting plan with a bike sticker on it. Each session has a job, and the coach picks the one that fits where you are in your season.
Four lifts that teach the two patterns everything else is built on: sitting into a squat to a fixed depth, and hinging at the hip. Loads stay moderate on purpose. You are learning the movement before you load it.
Pressing, pulling and one piece of trunk work. Nothing here makes you faster on its own. It is what keeps your shoulders and back able to hold a riding position for hours.
The heavy squat session. Three sets of five on the bar with two reps left in the tank, then the hamstring and single-leg work the pedal stroke never covers. Rests are long on purpose: the strength is in the effort, not the sweat.
The heavy pulling session. One big lift from the floor, then glutes, hamstrings and lower back. Those three are what hold your position together when a ride gets long.
Press, pull, and carry something heavy. This is the durability session. It will not raise your FTP and it is not meant to.
The same work with the load taken off your spine. Use this if your back is complaining, or in a heavy riding block where you want the leg strength without the extra load on your back. It is a real session, not a soft option.
Short, heavy-ish, and once a week. The point is to keep what the strength block built without taking anything from your riding. Two sets, not three, and you stop well short of failing.
This is the part most training apps leave out. Each movement carries a plain-English reason for being there, written for a cyclist rather than a lifter. Not a form cue, a reason.
“Loads the hamstrings at full length, which pedalling never does. This is the most under-trained tissue in a cyclist's leg.”
You get one of those for every movement in the session, warm-up included.
Before you start a session, it tells you how much it is likely to take out of your legs: low, moderate or high. That is a coaching judgement attached to the session, not a guess from how long it lasts.
It is why In-Season Maintenance is nineteen minutes and rated low, and why Squat Day is rated high even though it is only a minute longer than the upper-body session. The rating is about what it does to tomorrow's ride.
Every working set is prescribed as reps with a number left in the tank, “5 reps @ 2 RIR”, rather than a percentage of a one-rep max.
That is deliberate. Percentage-based loading needs you to have tested a true maximum, which means going to a genuine limit under a heavy bar. Nobody is asked to do that here, and nothing in the app asks you for a number you have not got.
There is no loaded spinal flexion or rotation anywhere in these sessions: no weighted crunches, no Russian twists, no loaded side bends. Those movements exist in the wider exercise library; they are kept out of the cyclist gym work on purpose.
The trunk work you do get is bracing rather than bending: anti-rotation presses and loaded carries. And if your back is the thing that complains, Low Spinal Load is a full session built to give you the same leg strength with the load off your spine.
Rest is set per lift, because it is part of the prescription rather than a gap between the real work:
Be clear on this before you sign up: these seven sessions assume gym access. Between them they use 33 movements, and 18 of those need equipment you would normally find in a gym: 11 barbell lifts, 5 machine movements and 2 cable movements. The app assumes you have a barbell, a rack, cables and machines available rather than asking you to inventory your kit, so it will prescribe a back squat whether or not you own a rack.
If you train at home, this is not the part of the app for you. The wider exercise library carries bodyweight and kettlebell work that does not need a gym, and that is what a rider without one should be doing instead.
VeloCoach is in closed testing while we get it right. Join the early list and we will be in touch as places open up.
Join the early list →Free during the test phase