Ok, so lets assume i've gone for a big ride and tired my legs out. If I do upper body weight training the next day, will it affect how quickly my legs recover or will it make no difference?

I eat a fairly healthy diet and i'm not a protein junkie.

Sorry if it seems a stupid question.

Yep – stupid question 😉

As long as you take in enough carbs for your glycogen stores to recover and you're not depleting your already depleted reserves then upper body weight training won't affect your recovery.

Please line up to shoot me down in flames…

I think it is an interesting question but I have no idea the answer.

Waits to be enlightened

I'm not qualified in any way other than personal experience but I think it'll be fine as long as you (i) ate properly after your exercise, ii) got a good nights sleep and iii) feel ok other than your legs being a bit tired.

if anything I think it might help. Isn't the purpose of a recovery ride to raise the heart rate a bit, and got the blood flowing to flush waste products out of your tired legs. But obviously you don't want to over exert the same muscles otherwise you're just damaging them more.

Getting heart rate up by other means that don't exert the legs would help then?

Is there such a thing as a recovery w@nk?

As pure unmitigated conjecture, if you work out your upper body so hard it fills your bloodstream with waste products all over again, it might slightly retard the 'recovery' of your leg muscles. I can't imaging the effect would be noticeable at all, and any lactate etc would get scrubbed pretty quickly anyway. I can't think how it would do any harm and as has been said, the bringing your heart rate up without overworking your recovering leg muscle tissue is probably a good thing.

Recovery does not only require involvement of the tired muscles – your whole body is working.

Seems to me that you will hamper your recovery overall and your leg recovery as part of this.

This is assuming that these are hard workouts that properly tire you out etc and mean tht recovery is an issue – if you're just farting about then you'll be fine.

First let me say that my understanding of the physiology of recovery is poor…

Now, when I do weight training it is usually fairly intense. My crude thinking was that having to repair my upper body muscles might detract from having to repair my leg muscles, i.e. perhaps my body can only repair a finite amount of tissue in a day, and maybe this will be 'spread about a bit' between my legs and my upper body.

I think the thing about excercising different muscle groups on different days is more a muscle building thing. Lots of work, low reps. I don't think it applies to cardio and similar excercise as (as above) it's a whole body thing. If I do a long hard ride on Sunday then my swimming performance on Tuesday is affected even though swimming is predominantly arms compared to biking. Equally a hard swim and I can feel it on the Thursday night ride.

You might get away with it if you did it the other way round? But you still don't solve the problem that biking uses your arms and a long offroad ride can be tiring for your upper body too.