Stronger Endurance

Can you really boost your endurance by doing a couple of reps in the gym. The answer is yes, if you know what to do.

- Tristan Baker

EVENTS SUCH AS marathons and triathlons are feats of human endurance, performance which requires a high aerobic capacity and the ability to maintain speed at a high percentage of VO2max. There are many ways to train for these events but an area that is often overlooked or even ignored by endurance athletes is strength training.

Endurance athletes may have fears about adding muscle size that they believe will slow them down, or think that the cyclical nature of endurance events does not allow for performance improvements through the use of acyclic strength training exercises. Either way it is often rare for an endurance athlete to focus on strength development. However, strength training for endurance is something that should not be overlooked, it has numerous potential performance benefits.

First and foremost it is important to remember that the purpose of strength training for the endurance athlete is not to increase muscle size but to improve athletic performance. Adding mass to an endurance athlete’s frame will not have a beneficial effect on their performance as it will reduce their power to weight ratio and hinder their running economy. Strength training on the other hand increases the amount of force an athlete’s muscles can produce. In order to achieve this resistance exercise is used to provide an external load stimulus greater than that which the body would otherwise experience in the sport in order to bring about an adaptation that will benefit performance. The primary aim of this type of training is to make the central nervous system more efficient at recruiting the relevant muscles needed to increase stability, become more resistant to injury, and improve the energy efficiency of the running or cycling action, for example.