In December we talked about why we typically want to separate strength from energy system work. But this raises an interesting question: “If most of what we care about is energy systems, and we’re taking the energy systems OUT of strength, why do we do strength at all?”
Simply put, we do strength training to 1) improve health (which over time improves performance by reducing training time lost to injuries), and 2) directly improve performance.
In order to have performance at all, it must be built upon a base of health. If some part of your engine or transmission isn’t working well, it’s really hard to improve your capabilities in your sport.
Performing the same motion over and over again (kinda the definition of endurance sports) causes your body to adapt in VERY specific ways. Some of your muscles get very strong. Some of your muscles don’t get strong at all. Some muscles get really tight and short. Some of your muscles get long. The result of this is that you end up with imbalances. An athlete might have a really strong or tight muscle on one side of a joint and a really weak or loose muscle on the other side of that joint. As a result, that joint probably isn’t healthy, and the ability to move well might be compromised. Thus, in order to make that joint healthy, you need to attempt to bring that joint somewhere closer to balance by loosening the tight muscles and strengthening the weak muscles. Much of the strength work that we as coaches prescribe is about fixing those imbalances.
Once you have a base of health, you can start working on improving your performance. In particular, what we’re working on with strength is recruitment and strength/speed.
You may recall from Part One that a muscle contracts because the brain tells it to. The brain sends out a mass text to the fibers in the muscle and says “yippeeekiyaamotherfucker, it’s ON!” However, like a world before cell phones, the brain forgets the phone numbers of fibers it hasn’t texted in a while.
Let’s step back a second: when you want to lift something really heavy, you can’t lift it many times. When you want to lift something many times, it has to be a lighter weight. Endurance sports, then, by definition, are thousands of repeated “submaximal” contractions. Since you’re only using a small portion of your strength on each stride, there are fibers in your muscle that you aren’t using, and your brain is forgetting their numbers. This is important to performance because when a fiber gets tired, the brain needs to call on another fiber to do the job. If the brain has forgotten that fiber’s number, then that fiber can’t help, and you have to slow down. This is one of the biggest reasons to strength train. For the first 6-8 weeks of a strength program, you will get stronger, but your muscles won’t get bigger. Why? Because your brain is going out and finding those cell phone numbers of the fibers that it forgot. Then, the next time you do a workout, you’ll be able to last longer because as fibers get tired, the brain has more to call up.
Additionally, your top speed matters. All athletes are less efficient at speeds close to their top speed. So if your top speed isn’t much faster than your race pace, then increasing your top speed will likely increase your race speed! And for most of us, one of the best ways to increase our top speed is to get stronger. Endurance exercise naturally reduces muscle mass and volume, so spending time in the gym making sure we’re strong enough to be FAST is critical.
The moral of the story is that strength training is IMPORTANT! If you don’t do it at all, you’re at the very least decreasing your performance, and at most setting yourself up for missing training from injuries later.
