The strength and recovery system for cyclistsby Roadman
The ride is only half the story.
You can measure every watt, every interval and every hour. None of it matters unless your body can turn the work into performance.
Where Good Legs sits
Whoever plans your riding keeps that job. We do the gym and the recovery.
Your bike plan is written where it already is, by whoever writes it: a coach, TrainingPeaks, or you. Good Legs never touches it. What it reads is your riding and your recovery. What it writes back is two things only, and it writes both of them properly.
What goes in
- Tue · Intervals 5×51 h 12
- Thu · Threshold 4×81 h 30
- Sun · Long ride3 h 40
The riding you are actually doing, and how hard it was for you.
How recovery is actually going: sleep, heart-rate variability, resting heart rate. Or a two-question check-in on the mornings nothing is connected.
The recovery engine
70peer-reviewed studies behind it
Fifty-nine rules, each naming the evidence it rests on and the limit of what that evidence can support. The reference list is checked against PubMed before every release, and a Roadman coach signs a rule before it can reach a phone.
We don't guess.
What comes back
The gym session, written
Good Legs puts your gym session on the day that costs your riding least, and when your gym days are fixed it shapes the session instead of moving it. Every set and every load is ours to write.
The recovery, prescribed
Ten minutes of breathwork. Hips and ankles before Sunday. Sauna, cold, yoga or mobility, placed where each earns the most, with the reason attached.
Most days, nothing
Do the session as written. That is not the product failing to have an opinion. It is the product having checked, so that the day it speaks, you believe it.
Your ride is an input, never an output. Good Legs needs to know what you rode, and it will never tell you what to ride.
What training apps miss
Most training apps tell you what happened. Good Legs is concerned with what happens next.
Your workout is only the stimulus. The gain comes later, and it depends on the work that follows the work: how you recover, how you fuel, how you build strength, how your fatigue accumulates and how one session affects the next. Those decisions are usually scattered across different apps, different numbers and, too often, guesswork. Good Legs puts them back in one place.
Work completed
- 305 Wnormalised
- 118TSS
- 5 / 5efforts held
The next thirty-six hours
- Tonight · eight minutes of breathingYou rode longer and harder than you usually do.
- Wednesday · lower body, support volume downThe key lifts stay. Two accessory sets come out.
- Thursday · threshold, untouchedIt is the session that matters this week.
What has been building
- −52minsleep vs baseline
- +6resting heart rate
- 4days running
What Good Legs changes
- Working sets come out. The loads stay.The cheapest rung that answers the signal. Your top set is the stimulus, so it is the last thing to go.
- Ten minutes of breathwork, tonightPlaced against sleep, which is the signal that actually moved.
- Your riding: nothingNot a shorter session, not an easier one, not a suggestion to skip it. That is not ours to write.
On a low-recovery day Good Legs takes working sets out of the gym session and keeps the loads. It never touches your ride. One bad night would not have been enough; four days against your own baseline is. The burden of proof sits on the change, never on the plan.
A week with good legs
Seven days, two lines.
The hours you can give the bike are fixed by the life around them. What those hours produce is not.
Long ride, 3 h 40.
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Tue 1 · Intervals 5×5 · from Strava
Your ride arrives exactly as you rode it.
Seventy-two minutes, five efforts of five, and a training stress score that says you held them. Good Legs reads what Strava recorded and what you said the ride was for, then starts your week from there. It has no opinion about your ride. It has opinions about the days on either side of it.
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Wed 2 · Strength · 42 min
Strength, placed where it transfers.
A squat, a hinge, then single-leg work: three working sets of five, always with a rep or two left in hand. It sits the day after your intervals and the day before your threshold session, the one place in your week where it can be heavy enough to matter and still cost you nothing on Thursday. You can read that reason on the card.
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Wed 2 · Back squat · 82.5 kg
Every set is measured against your last one.
Last time you did eighty for five, so today reads 82.5, and the smallest plate in your gym decides the step, not a percentage. One tap logs a set. If the rack is taken, your swap is a coached alternative in the same role, not whatever happens to be free. Hold to finish, and your session posts to Strava as your own.
Try it yourself. Tick a set, change a load, hold to finish.
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Thu 3 · Threshold 4×8 · your ride
Your hard ride stays hard.
Four by eight at threshold is the session your week is built around, so nothing heavy goes in the day before it. Afterwards, eight minutes of slow breathing with a longer exhale to bring you down from the effort, so Friday's work lands on someone who has actually stopped.
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Fri 4 · Hips and ankles · 18 min
Recovery with a job to do.
Eighteen minutes on the mat for your hips and ankles, chosen for Sunday's long ride and for nothing else. The job comes from three things, in this order: what you have just done, what you have coming, and how you slept. There is no recovery score to chase.
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Sun 6 · Long ride · 3 h 40
Long ride. Good legs.
Three hours forty, on legs that lifted twice, moved once, and were never asked for anything the day before it counted. Your week files itself: two sessions to Strava, and next week's loads set from what you actually did rather than from what was planned.
One athlete
The body never separated training, strength, nutrition and recovery. Software did.
The cyclist doing Tuesday's intervals is the same person lifting on Wednesday, sleeping badly on Thursday and trying to fuel Friday's long ride. Five pillars hold up a performance, and each one changes the meaning of the others. Good Legs writes two of them and reads the rest, which is the whole reason the two it writes are any good.
- Trainingread
- Strengthwritten by us
- Nutritionread
- Recoverywritten by us
- Communityread
Today
Placed after Tuesday's intervals and clear of Thursday. One athlete. One week. One outcome.
Strength that serves the bike
Strength training is not a second sport.
Good Legs knows what you rode, what is coming next and what happened the last time you lifted. It progresses the work when you have room to progress, and tapers the gym when it is time for a priority event.
Protect the work that matters
If tomorrow matters, today should know about it.
You should not arrive at a key session or a priority race fatigued because your gym plan did not understand your cycling priorities. Good Legs is built for adaptation: it can shorten a strength session, reduce the volume, or move it. The point is not to squeeze everything in. The point is to arrive at the work that matters ready to perform.
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What came in
Recovery compromised.
- Sleep 5 h 40Apple Health
- HRV below your baselineWhoop
- Resting heart rate up 6Whoop
What changed
Strength · 34 minShapedWorking sets out. Loads held.Two working sets come off the squat and the hinge, and the weight on the bar is the weight you earned last week. Thursday's ride is not touched.
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What came in
Your ride went harder than you meant it to.
- 1 h 24 at 305 W normalisedStrava
- Your hardest session in three weeksGood Legs
- You rated it nine out of tenYou, afterwards
What changed
Strength · 34 minChangedWednesday becomes a technique day.The same six lifts, two working sets fewer. Your riding is not our business; what it costs you is.
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What came in
Your biggest day of the week is Sunday.
- Sunday: four hours, the one that mattersYour week, as you set it
- Twelve hours ridden in the last seven daysStrava
- Sleep short three nights runningWhoop
What changed
Breathwork · 10 minTonightTen minutes of breathwork before bed.Nothing is added to your training week and nothing is taken out of it. Ten quiet minutes are placed on the night your sleep needs the most help, two days out from the ride you actually care about.
Most days, Good Legs will tell you to do exactly the session it wrote you.
That is not a lack of intelligence. It is the point. Your training creates fatigue. Your sleep will occasionally be poor. Your HRV will move. Your legs will feel heavy. None of those things, on its own, is a reason for you to abandon good training.
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Do the gym session as written
Your current signals are consistent with normal training fatigue.
- Sleep and resting heart rate inside your normal range
- Seven-day riding load where your block expects it
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Do it, but let the warm-up sets decide the load
Sleep and energy are below your normal range.
- Two poor nights of sleep against your own baseline
- Morning energy reported low for a second day
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Working sets out, loads held
Several independent signals remain outside your normal range.
- Four days of sleep below your baseline
- Resting heart rate raised across the same period
- Last week's load well above the four-week average
Recovery
You already train hard. Recovery decides what those hours become.
The pillar most riders neglect, and the one with the most left in it. Sauna, cold exposure, meditation, yoga, mobility: each has a job, and each has a wrong moment. Cold on the evening of a strength session works against the adaptation you just paid for. Good Legs puts each one where it returns the most.
Data
The problem is no longer getting the data. The problem is knowing what deserves a decision.
Your head unit knows what you rode. Your TrainingPeaks knows what was planned. Your wearable knows how you slept. Good Legs is not another place to admire the numbers. It uses the signals that matter, in context, to answer one question it is actually able to act on: does today's gym session need to change?
Today
Nothing in this morning's signals argues with it.
- In build
TrainingPeaks
Where your bike plan lives, and where it stays. Reading planned sessions from it is being built; nothing Good Legs does will ever write to it.
- Reads · writes
Strava
Completed rides in. Each finished session posted, as your own.
- Reads · writes
Garmin Connect
Completed rides in. Gym sessions out to the watch, so a session runs without the phone.
- Reads
Whoop
Recovery in. Nothing out.
- UHIn build
Ultrahuman
Recovery in. Nothing out.
- Reads
Apple Health
Sleep and heart-rate variability in, when you allow it. A two-question check-in stands in when nothing is connected.
Nothing here writes to your bike plan, and nothing ever will. Where a connection is still being built it says so above; until it lands, you tell Good Legs what riding you have on and it works from that.
Consistency
Fitness is built by the work you can keep putting together.
You are not made by one heroic week. You are made by the months and years in which you keep getting enough good work done. Good Legs is built around that continuity: enough stress for you to improve, enough restraint to protect the sessions that matter to you, and fewer decisions left for you to make alone at six in the morning.
Your block and your week, as the Plan tab shows them.
Bar height is the load Good Legs is asking of you. Every fourth week takes it away rather than adding to it. That is the week riders skip, and it is the reason the other nine land.
Two strength sessions, one meditation, one mobility session, placed around rides you did not have to move.
The ambition is not to make your training easy. It is to make hard training something you can keep doing.
From Roadman Cycling
Good Legs comes from years spent asking one question: what actually makes an athlete better?
Roadman Cycling has spent years around riders, coaches, physiologists and nutritionists, listening to the people who have to make performance work outside the laboratory. More than a million people now listen every month.
How it starts
It asks you properly once. Then it stops asking.
Fifteen questions, about five minutes. What you ride and what you are riding towards. How much you ride in a normal week. When you can lift, for how long, and with what. What your body needs you to work around. Your completed rides arrive from Strava or Garmin, you tell Good Legs what riding you have on, and your first week is built. It keeps rebuilding after that: three weeks that add load, a fourth that absorbs it, for as long as you keep riding.
Questions
The ones riders ask.
Does it plan my rides?
No, and it never will. Good Legs is the strength and recovery system for cyclists: it writes your gym sessions and prescribes your recovery, and that is the whole of what it writes. Your riding is an input to those two decisions and nothing else. Whoever plans your riding — a coach, TrainingPeaks, you — keeps that job untouched.
Do I need a gym?
No. Tell it what you have, from a full gym to a pair of dumbbells to nothing at all, and only the movements you can do with that will appear.
How many sessions a week?
Two is the number most of the evidence was built on, and the number professional road riders use out of season. One holds the gains through a racing block.
What happens when I miss one?
Nothing accumulates. The next session starts from what you last did, and the week is placed again around your rides.
Will it show me a readiness score?
No. Most days it will tell you to do the gym session exactly as written. When several signals, the riding you have done and the session ahead add up to something that deserves attention, it changes the gym session and tells you why. A single bad night is noise, not an instruction.
Is this an AI coach?
No. Roadman coaches write the strength and recovery programmes, and rules you can read personalise them. A language model never writes a session.
What goes to Strava?
The session, its duration and the kilograms lifted, as your own activity. Nothing about sleep, soreness or pain, ever.
Who is the cat?
The coach. He turns up where a person would: at the start, and whenever a decision needs a reason. He does not plan rides.
When can I use it?
It is in build, with beta riders next, on iPhone first.
You already do the work. Make more of it count.
If you care about what your training becomes, and not simply about what it records, Good Legs is being built for you. Be first when the beta opens: one email when it is ready, and none before.
Good Legs. The strength and recovery system for cyclists.
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