Strength Training
Why strength train? Strength training is a huge topic to tackle in one blog post, so we’ll likely come back to it from different angles and highlight different aspects of the benefits of strength training, but at its simplest, strength training allows you to move well. When you move well, you can add load or power safely leading to faster paces, easier climbs, and lower your chance of injury. You might even feel more confident which sets off a chain of events that changes your entire life, but that’s a different post for sure.
How do you know if you need strength training?
Your heart rate goes way up when you get to a hill and you need to walk
If, after speeding up for a minute, you can’t maintain the pace
You have nagging injuries and/or injuries that move around the body (ex. an ankle injury followed by a knee thing, followed by a soft tissue injury on the other side…)
You have chronic tightness somewhere (low back or hamstrings are very common)
If any of those apply to you, strength will help!
If we start at the most basic level before even thinking about movement, strength helps create good posture. Being efficient for sport means you’re first functional for simple activities of daily living (ADLs). A bay area PT named Kelly Starett has a great YouTube channel called The Ready State that I highly recommend. I had a business crush on his Mobility WOD website back in 2010 (back before everyone like us had online training videos) that he created for Crossfit athletes to learn proper movement, among other things. He talks about “energy leaks” which really resonates with the bodywork lens through which I see movement and training. If you aren’t strong, you can’t provide a solid foundation to do anything, really. Then when you’re moving, you lose potential energy and have to work harder (and often in a weirder movement pattern where muscles have to move in a way they aren’t intended to). If you move with a heavy pack, then you’re really setting yourself up for an injury, or at least a lot of work. Creating strength in a good standing posture is your first step. Try a quick experiment by standing how you normally stand and have a person stand behind you and weight your shoulders to try to push you down. If you’re slumped, it’s relatively easy to collapse your low back, or compensate in another way and stumble. Next, take a minute to reset: stand tall with your ribcage in line with your pelvis (you might need to bring your ribcage forward), and your center of gravity over your arches. Engage your core by imagining you’re putting on a tight jacket, lightly push through your feet while also lifting through your midline, and have your partner try again: you’ll find that it’s much harder to be pushed down. Once you can maintain good posture, building strength on top of that will start you on the path toward to moving better, faster, and farther.
Strength out in the world presents itself as running fast, climbing or skinning up a mountain effortlessly, or making one long ski run. While it’s easy to think you can build strength by simply doing the thing, and it’s true up to a point, lifting in the gym is a more efficient use of time for most of us. Especially when talking about mechanics and proper movement, it’s very challenging and takes a lot of body awareness (not to mention focus) to move the exact right way so that your body stays aligned, over and over again, for the duration of your activity. Performing strength exercises, however, load the muscles to recruit new muscle fibers and create proper movement patterns that you take with you to the mountains.
Out in the wilds of the internet, people either love strength or hate it. We favor having strength workouts but also recognize that some people might not need to do as much. If you have a history of a lot of strength training or did a power based sport in the past, you might have all the strength you need, and will get more out of focused aerobic training. If you’re like me and hate doing anything in a gym, but know it’s good for you, even a little bit goes a long way and if you can stick with it through a training cycle, you’ll have much more strength to apply to the sport specific workouts like hill repeats.
So what do you do to start a strength program? First, start with your posture. Feel what gets tired first when maintaining good posture; chances are those are the muscles that are compensating for your core. We periodize the training based on the athlete, but there’s a certain amount of strength that everyone should be able to lift just to be durable and strong for sport. Depending on the person, someone may do more basic strength to increase their strength capacity/ceiling using a progression of general strength (ex. 3x10 reps) to adapt to the movements safely and build general strength, then move more to a max phase (we generally do 4x5 or 4x4-anything lower than that isn’t really applicable to sports), then do muscular endurance (6x10 on the minute, so something like that). Muscular endurance is like the speed work with aerobic training. It’s great but isn’t as effective without a base of the other stuff. CrossFit and most strength programs you see are muscular endurance: it tunes up quickly but you also lose it quickly, just like the top end speed if you don’t keep doing it. Since base strength lasts longer, we try to get the most out of general and max before moving to ME. Then, after building muscular endurance in the gym, we want to transfer it to the real world in the form of hill intervals or weighted intervals.
Ultimately, increase your strength (just as we encourage you to increase your aerobic) ceiling so you can DO MORE.
Want more? Sam and I did a podcast for Uphill Athlete discussing the topic over a cocktail. Or, Sam co-wrote a tome on UA.
