The Fundamentals of Strength Training for Endurance

Dumbbells can be used as a key pieces of training equipment

What is Strength training for Endurance?

Strength training in the endurance world is becoming more popular but is still often an afterthought, poorly applied, or simply just avoided. Whilst I don't think its the most important training element, you still have to do the endurance specific work, I think it is a source of simple and easy gains for many endurance athletes who aren't doing any or applying it appropriately into their training.

With this said, I think that many individuals ignore or don't do their strength training justice because they don't know how to best apply it and so don't want to waste valuable training time in the gym for what may be little return. An important first step in addressing strength for endurance is explaining what it is, and what it isn't.

Strength training for endurance performance should be a training tool that allows us to build strong, robust, bodies. The aim is to be capable of producing the necessary forces (or greater ideally), dealing with the demands of training/racing/competing, and improving our energy efficiency in our endurance outputs.

Strength training is the targeted use of resistance to drive and enhance the bodies ability to produce force. In the context of strength training training this is typically against an external object or with your own bodyweight. Taken into an endurance context, we use strength to drive our bodies forward by turning pedals, with our feet into the floor, or in whatever other manner our chosen sports demand.

All movement requires muscularly driven forces, strength training is just an efficient way to increase this demand and produce positive adaptations to allow more force to be produced as we get stronger.

Another important point to note here is that strength training for endurance has 2 main goals: Enhance performance, create resilience. These are separate but in reality they're both serving the same goals, if you can't train because your body cannot handle the loads then you cannot perform. Not only this, but we ideally want our foundation of strength to give us the capacity to go further, faster, and longer in our endurance. I like to think of strength as the facilitator of everything else, because being strong gives you a broader capacity to do more. It compliments your endurance by giving you this platform to build a fit and capable body from, that can then do all of the enduring necessary for your sport.

Strength training for endurance is not a specific method of training. We aren't taking another sports methods or other training methods and just blindly applying them to a different context. Powerlifting, weightlifting, bodybuilding, *Insert any other specific training method* might all have something valuable to offer but we can't just take their exact methods and apply them to an endurance athlete.

Strength for endurance is also not the ideal way to mimic our sports in an effort to do 'sport-specific exercise'. This is a trend an idea that took off but actually doesn't make practical sense. With strength training we are looking to tick all the boxes that are not trained for by just doing the sport. It lends itself very well to developing strength, and resilience. It does not do as well at simulating the sport, our endurance training does that. Strength training that tries to simulates endurance training misses the mark on that because its less effective than the sport at doing that and then misses the mark on developing strength because we aren't adequately applying resistance to the movements in most cases. In practice, this means that we will tend towards avoiding the low resistance, high volume circuit style training in favour of heavier resistance work. These circuits might have a place, but it's not in developing strong and robust endurance athletes.

Core benefits of strength training for endurance:

As mentioned before, strength training has 2 key benefits for endurance: increased performance and building resilience. Here lets briefly outline what some of the core benefits are from each of these.

Performance

• Increasing strength can lead to improvements in exercise economy. Effectively, being stronger means you are more efficient in your endurance outputs, for the same level of output, you expend less energy. This means you can hold a higher pace, endure greater intensities, or hold more watts for less energy spent. This is one of the most well researched benefits of strength training for endurance and can do a lot to improve your performance. A higher ceiling of force producing capacity means that everything below that becomes a lesser percentage of the max, meaning that you work at a lower intensity for the same output. Equally, strength training can lead to greater fatigue resistance and time to exhaustion in endurance training.  Being even marginally stronger can have real positive impacts on your endurance in this way.

• Power is a product of force/strength and speed. Speed is a trainable quality but typically has a more restrictive potential than strength. We can develop speed, but it is hard to significantly increase it without lots of targeted training. Strength is a much more easily developed quality even with relatively small amounts of training, especially in the context of endurance athletes where it is typically underdeveloped. So strength has a greater potential to benefit power output. Peak power and sustained power are integral to endurance performance so again, strength has a huge advantage to endurance performance.

Resilience

• We can't remove injury risks, but we can help to minimise them with strength training and improve rehab following injuries. Injury at a very basic level (there are many other factors) comes down to the lack of tolerance to load in the bodies tissues. Strength training leads to the development of stronger muscles, joints and connective tissues. By strengthening all of these various tissues, we are creating a body that can better handle the repetitive stresses, and muscle damage that can be causes through endurance training. The main benefit of this, as mentioned before, is that being able to keep training means you can keep improving. If you are injured then this can become more difficult.

• In part by the above strengthening of body tissues, and by promoting recovery-related hormones, strength training can help to enhance recovery. Testosterone and growth hormone are two key hormonal components of recovery and strength training helps aid the production of both. Amongst other signalling processes in the body from strength training, we can positively affect our ability to recover from endurance training. Moreover, the repetitive nature of endurance sports can lead to tightnesses and potential imbalances in muscles. Whilst these might be directly beneficial to the endurance activities they are not always conducive to a healthy body. A lack of function can quickly limit performance and leads to decreased performance, strength training can help alleviate these issues.