Dear Athletes! Race results and feedback from my athletes show a huge positive impact from implementing heavy lifting in their endurance plans. Five key issues always pop up! Let's go through them! Yours, Coach Katharina 🌺
Question one is very obvious, which is 'WHY SHOULD I IMPLEMENT HEAVY LIFTING IN MY ENDURANCE TRAINING?'. Answers range from injury prevention to performance boost and you find most of them in one of my earlier articles (including a 2 week plan).
Issue two is all about the NUMBER OF REPS. Decades long endurance athletes worked on their strength endurance (reps > 12) and some on hypertrophy (reps 8-12). Don't waste your time in the gym when you can train strength endurance on the bike (hills) or in the water (paddles) anyways. Hypertrophy is not anything you want as an endurance athlete, as this would grow the size of your muscles. [Exception: if athletes have never been in the gym before, I start with 4-6 weeks of hypertrophy for various reasons]. But in o-season and going into race season, we're only working on Maximum Strength (reps up to 5). We increase the weight from week to week while reducing the reps. The key is increasing the weight while keeping the technique, which is a huge challenge for athletes in the beginning. Pull through - increase the weight steadily, even minimally, and work consistently on your technique. Results will show!
WHEN TO PERFORM STRENGTH IN A FULLY PACKED ENDURANCE WEEK is the third issue. There's one answer: go to the gym before endurance training, but never directly after endurance. Make sure you have at least 6-8 hours (preferably more) before strength. Strength in the morning and swim in the evening, perfectly fine. Morning jog and strength in the evening works as well. Strength training followed by short bike or run intervals go also hand in hand. Running as a warm up followed by strength - no no no. Understood the pattern?
Question four IS ABOUT FOOD. This answer is simple as well: eat before and after! Don't do heavy lifting fasted. Bring a decent protein bar to the gym and eat it right after the training. Women should take their proteins even faster than men (preferably within a 30 minute slot).
A fifth issue is very common and highly underestimated: if you feel PAIN DURING OR AFTER A SPECIFIC EXERCISE OR SESSION, analyze where the pain is coming from, work on those issues and not just leave these exercises out. Your body tells you, that this is a weak spot which needs SPECIAL ATTENTION and NOT NO attention just to avoid pain. Yesterday an athlete told me he had lower back pain while doing deadlifts and he'll just focuses now on squats. Nope - this is not what we're gonna do. First, we'll check the deadlifting technique again and the weights he used and second we're working more focused on the mobility and muscles needed for deadlifts: upper & lower back, abs, glutes, hamstrings. Listening to your body is key and gives you the best clues on what to work on.
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