Strength train for Strength not Endurance

I often hear athletes say "I am lifting more for endurance" or "I am doing an endurance building strength program."  What is lifting for endurance? I assume they are describing a workout with high reps and less weight. My question is: "Can you really compare the 30reps you do in a strength training session to the 2000-reps you do in a minute during a 20-minute bike or a run?"  Instead I suggest lifting for maximum strength.  This will make the muscle tension required for movements in your sport (i.e. a push on the pedals) further from your maximum capacity and allow more work to be done aerobically and allow for a greater margin for improvement.  The end result is improved economy.

Progressing towards maximum strength.

I recommend starting a strength program with a few weeks of muscle conditioning involving 2 sets of around 12-15 reps.  In this initial stage of training you are not lifting to failure; instead you should finish your last rep with a sense of fatigue but could complete about 3 or 4 more without a lot of discomfort.  After about 3 weeks of slowly adding resistance to his format, your muscles should be ready to handle a higher amount of stress.  At this time you can add more weight, drop your reps down to 6-10, and increase your sets to 3-4 per exercise.  You should be just one or two reps from failure at the end of the last set on each exercise.  This goes for abdominal exercises to; so you are going to have to get creative!

Be Sports Specific

Now if an endurance athlete explained that he or she is strength training for endurance by doing exercises that mimic what they are doing in their sport, I would buy it.  Sports specificity is the key ingredient in a successful strength program.  You can do bench press, leg extensions or bicep curls until the cows come home and still fail to improve your 500yard swim, 20K bike TT, or 5K run times. 

However, sports specific exercises like squats are great for the power phase in cycling and can improve the efficiency of our foot strike in running.   Adapting to a single leg squat is even better because they make sure you equally strong on both legs and requires the stability and coordination necessary in our sports.  To make this movement even more specific to running you would make the exercise plyometric which incorporates a stretch reflex mechanism allowing us to get more out of our muscles with less physiologic costs.  A plyometric exercise could be a double leg box jump progressing to a single leg box jump. What I have just explaind is the approach you should take for each movement in order to make it most applicable to your specific sports. 

To get the most out of your strength training I suggest meeting with a qualified trainer for a few sessions.  In your first meeting you should explain your goals and strength training expectations and then begin working on your program together.

Date modified: 11/18/2004