If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ll have heard us talk about how all philosophies, strategies, and products are tools. The key question with any project is: “What’s the best tool for the job.” The same way there aren’t good and bad tools, there aren’t good and bad ways to do strength, only ways that are more or less effective at working within your strengths, weaknesses, and training plan to help you reach your goals.
Let’s take a step back a second and talk about some basics. A muscle fiber (of which there are millions in a muscle like your bicep), is a cell that has the ability to contract. When your brain says “contract!” the muscle fiber shortens, bringing whatever is attached to the ends closer to each other. In the case of the bicep, the contraction of millions of these muscle fibers results in your hand moving closer to your shoulder.
In order for your bicep to contract, it needs fuel. Typically we have enough fuel stored in the individual fibers for a few contractions. We can probably pick up something heavy 5-8 times before running out of fuel. When we want to do more than 5-8 contractions, the body’s energy systems have to kick in to refill the energy stores in the muscle. These energy systems (PCR, anaerobic, and aerobic) are what endurance sports are all about.
Therefore, one of the key considerations you need to make when you are writing a strength workout or selecting a workout is: “Do I want to include energy systems in my strength training?” Any energy systems/stores that you use up in your strength session are energy systems/stores that you now have to refill/recover before you can use them in your sport. This means that for the most part we try to separate strength training from energy system training. Energy system training happens outside in our sport, and strength training happens in the home or gym, and we try to REDUCE the energy system demands so that the athlete has more energy to use outside.
In practice this means we as coaches typically bias towards strength workouts with long rests, and avoid circuit workouts where you go straight from exercise to exercise. Crossfit is a perfect example of strength combined with energy systems. Additionally, almost any strength class you can go to at a gym with “strength” in the name is going to be a combination of strength and energy systems. These types of workouts are great for people who only want to work out three hours per week. They want to get in, get some strength, get some “cardio” (read: energy system work), and get out. But for the endurance athlete who is already getting in LOTS of energy system work out on the roads/trails, adding more to strength is counterproductive.
In certain cases we absolutely do add something like Crossfit or circuits to an athlete’s calendars, but this is much more the exception than the rule.
“But coach” you might be asking, “if most of what we care about is energy systems, why do we do strength at all?”
We’ll talk about that answer next week.
