Cycling versus bodybuilding
Having worked off his belly and sculpted abs of steel, Marcus Leach grew tired of the gym and its image-fixated goals. He wanted a pastime with broader horizons and grander challenges — he wanted a bike
“Having achieved my goals in the gym, now came my chance to live out my childhood cycling dreams”
My story begins in January 2014, heading home after a month of eating my way around India. Every day for the whole trip, I’d gorged on every bit of food in sight, ballooning to 110kg. I remember sitting on the plane stuffing sugary Indian sweets into my mouth, feeling utterly despondent about who, or what, I’d become. Suddenly something clicked. ‘Enough. Enough of this negativity. This can’t go on. You got yourself into this situation, so you can get yourself out of it.’
What began as a snap decision swiftly evolved into a serious project to transform my physique: I not only wanted rid of my flabby belly, I yearned to look good with my top off. Not just lean, but really ripped — worthy of a Men’s Health cover. Sure, it might sound vain, but how many of us are really immune to such thoughts? I had a clear vision of how I wanted to look and a detailed plan of action: four vigorous weights session a week and a strict eating regime. I set to work.
For 11 months I pushed my body to its limit time and again in the gym, and my body obligingly adapted, shedding fat and gaining muscle. I learnt that I had the ability not only to commit to a long-term goal, but also to dig deep and regularly do that little bit extra.
The problem was, once I’d realised my goal — I had the six-pack and the single-figure body fat — what was left to achieve? I could try to get even leaner or bigger, but you can only get so lean without risking ill health, and beyond a certain point, muscle hypertrophy is no longer even aesthetically pleasing. I needed a new challenge.
Cycling had always fascinated me. I developed a love for the Tour de France as a young boy, and had always admired the sport’s greatest names, wondering what it would take to emulate such Herculean feats of endurance. Deep down, I’d always wanted to follow in their footsteps. Having achieved my goals in the gym, now came my chance to live out my childhood dream.
Endless goals
Unlike in weight lifting and bodybuilding, in cycling you never run out of goals. It’s a world of endless roads, climbs and challenges, many of which revolve around our desire to explore our limits. For me, that’s the essence of cycling, and the essence of life too: to be the best I can possibly be. It was the only motivation I needed.
Finally I had accepted it: there’s more to life than looking good with your top off. My ambition to gain muscle converted overnight into a battle to become lighter, stronger and faster. Little did I know that my decision to swap dumbbells and a six-pack for bikes and mountains would be the start of an all-encompassing passion. At the heart of this passion lay my love of suffering, as well as an unexpected
fascination with data. It was only after having made this dramatic change that I began to realise just how much more rewarding cycling was than simply going to the gym.
Swapping the gym for the bike wasn’t as hard as I’d first imagined, not least because to achieve success required the same basic thing: embracing pain. My time in the gym had laid the foundations not just for physical strength, but mental strength too. In making my muscles scream for mercy as I’d urged myself ‘just one more rep’,
I’d forged a resilience that I now employed during tough sessions on the bike. I’d already learnt to hush the negative, nagging voice within — whereas once I might have quit.
Over the subsequent months, I completed many long, challenging rides, including London to Brighton and back in a day, and several organised events including Paris-roubaix, Etape du Tour, La Marmotte, Tour du Mont Blanc, and Haute Route Alps.
Cycling has become many things, but above all, it’s a test of my will. I once thought that this love was to do with a sense of delayed gratification, the reward that comes after the pain, but over time I’ve realised it’s not that at all. There is no delay: the gratification is now, in the moment. Too often in life, we are living for the future, not focused on the here and now. While pushing hard on a climb or in a TT, I am wholly present in the moment, my mind is clear.
It’s in this moment that the world around sharpens and our senses heighten; every breath, every heartbeat, is accentuated as we focus on making it to the next switchback, tree, or road sign. At the end of the day’s riding, those minor goals no longer matter; the pleasure is accumulative, it’s something far bigger. In the moment, it felt like suffering but now all we want to do is go back and experience it again. There’s always that nagging voice that says we could have gone harder; we analyse the data for the proof. It’s this continual quest for improvement that’s at the heart of what we do.
It’s not enough to simply ride. The competitive among us want to push our limits, redefine our own personal boundaries. I have developed a fascination with the way my body works and responds to different training techniques and nutrition, changing before my very eyes. Although cycling is so very different from gym work, a common theme remains: weight and body fat. My body fat of eight per cent at the end of my transformation may have been perfect for cycling, but my weight, 102kg, was hardly ideal for long rides in the mountains. As hard as it was to build lean muscle and lose body fat, it has been just as hard losing that muscle.
Crunching numbers
Whereas charting my progress in the gym was rather rudimentary,
“Much of my muscle mass was now just ballast. Biceps don’t help you climb mountains”
my approach to developing into a cyclist has been far more scientific and data-based. Last year, I began working with a professional coach — a decision I’d debated for a while but one which, reviewing its impact, I definitely don’t regret. We can push ourselves only so far; sometimes we need somebody to stretch us. That’s exactly what my coach Matt Green, who’s also a pro cyclist, has done for me. I’ve grown and developed as a cyclist because Matt has continually pushed me out of my comfort zone — in a controlled and structured way.
Structured sessions
Gone were my ‘balls to the wall’ rides of wildly fluctuating efforts; in their place, a series of structured sessions controlled strictly using heart rate zones — with Matt all the while monitoring my levels of fatigue and adaptation. It took about six weeks for me to understand the full impact of Matt’s approach, because at first it felt like I was taking a backward step, switching long hard rides for shorter controlled sessions maintaining a certain heart rate.
Thanks to my year in the gym, my leg strength and core stability needed no additional work; I came to cycling with power in abundance. That said, I soon realised, under Matt’s guidance, that fast cycling is not simply about power — it’s about power-to-weight ratio. Much of my muscle mass was now unnecessary ballast. Biceps don’t help you climb mountains.
I’ve learnt that long, steady rides effectively lay the foundations for a far harder workload later in the programme. These were also the rides that started to eat away at my surplus muscle, bringing my weight down to 90kg — still heavier than I’d like, but are we cyclists ever truly happy with our weight? It wasn’t just my training that changed, but my nutrition too. For phase one of the plan, mostly lower-intensity rides, the focus was on lower carbohydrate intake, eating breakfast only after my early morning training was done, thus allowing my body to burn excess fat preferentially.
My carb intake was raised alongside the introduction of sweet-spot and shorter, higherintensity intervals, giving my body the fuel it needed to handle the higher workload. Throughout my ‘cycling transformation’ there has been a focus on reducing weight while at the same time limiting the loss of power.
Working with Matt has been an eye-opening and enlightening experience, giving me a greater understanding of how my body works in relation to cycling — how it adapts to training loads and, most importantly, to rest (something I hadn’t fully appreciated). Mentally, it has been a different story. The little voices eat away inside, worrying me about what I eat and its impact on my fitness. These are irrational thoughts, I know, but hard to silence. Even so, seeing my improvements has given me the motivation to keep pushing and striving for more.
A grand ambition
With my fitness finally at a decent level, and having completed one of the toughest multi-day amateur events, the Haute Route Alps, the logical progression, to my mind, was to ride the full course of the Tour de France. But then I thought, why stop there? Why not ride all three Grand Tour courses in the same year? I will be writing about this challenge in these pages in a few weeks’ time, so stayed tuned.
Looking back, do I regret relinquishing muscle bulk in favour of cycling fitness? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the look I had created, having worked so hard to build lean muscle. At the same time, I knew that if I wanted to achieve my goals on the bike, I would have to sacrifice aesthetics for functional fitness. I have come to realise that, ultimately, the thrill of the ride gives me far greater satisfaction and sense of enjoyment than working out in the gym ever did. Cycling versus sixpack? It’s no contest.