Strength training for endurance athletes

At Espresso Performance Coaching, we believe that strength training has a part to play in the programme of all endurance athletes. It’s an important factor that has benefits for health, general athleticism and sports performance.

• Health – Strength training prevents injury by addressing muscle imbalances created during the repetitive movement of endurance sports.
• Athleticism – All athletes need to have sufficient strength, stability, power and mobility to train for the specifics of their sport. Strength training contributes to all of these.
• Performance – Strength training leads to increased power (rate of force production) and improves running and cycling economy; many studies have shown increased performance, and none show a decrease.

For masters athletes, strength training is even more important. As we age, we lose muscle mass faster than we lose cardiovascular fitness. This leads to long term health issues as well as performance decline. You will slow the inevitable decline in performance by including strength work in your programme.

​How does it improve performance?

The first thing you need to know is that it works. Here are a couple of solid examples from the research literature:

Blagrove (2017) found in a systematic review that strength training improved running economy, time trial performance and anaerobic speed, concluding that “the addition of two to three ST [strength training] sessions per week, which include a variety of ST modalities are likely to provide benefits to the performance of middle- and long-distance runners.”

Ronnestad (2011) found that combining heavy strength training and regular endurance training increased cyclists' mean power output production during a final 5-min all-out sprint after 3 h of submaximal cycling by 7%. Sounds like a race winning strategy to me

If you need any more convincing, then several mechanisms have been suggested:

• Delayed use of less efficient type II (fast twitch) muscle fibres - With strength training, your Type I (slow twitch, endurance) muscle fibres become stronger so are working at a lower relative intensity during sub-maximal exercise. Stronger fibres might also mean than less muscle mass is used in each contraction, increasing the amount of rest each fibre gets. This means the Type I fibres can work for longer before becoming exhausted and forcing type II fibres to step in.
• Conversion of muscle fibre types – Some studies have shown increased proportion of type IIA fibres and reduced proportion of type IIX fibres after strength training. Type IIA are more efficient and fatigue more slowly than Type IIX so are more suited to endurance performance.
• Rate of force development – Increases in neural activation (how your brain activates muscle fibres) improve economy in both runners and cyclists (especially for low cadence work).
• Muscle-tendon stiffness – Elastic storage and return of energy by tendons contributes a large component of the energy needed for running. Stiffer tendons are more effective and reduce the overall energy demands, even at relatively slow speeds.

​Methods of strength training

​This blog post focuses on strength training for performance and the recommendations reflect that. There are many other strength training modalities, like plyometrics, that we can and should use for general athleticism. Some coaches, like Renato Canova, have had huge success combining endurance work with strength circuits in a single workout. However, we’ll save those for another day.

The exercises most likely to benefit endurance athlete’s performance are multi-joint movements biomechanically similar to their event. I’d suggest you start with deadlifts and squats and, if seeking variety or progression, look at variations of these. As you progress, unilateral, single limb options like split squats or single leg deadlifts could be more specific, help to address muscle imbalances and also develop your core stabilisation.

If you’re new to strength training, you should start cautiously and get individual coaching from a qualified professional. Lifting heavy weights with poor technique is a recipe for disaster so please seek advice. You can also develop your technique while gaining the benefits of strength training using low to moderate weights or even just body weight. If you are happy with your technique, select 3-5 exercises and for each complete:

• 2-3 sets of 10-15 repetitions and 2-3 minutes rest between sets

If you are new to strength training, you’ll find you can increase the weight you lift very quickly at first as you gain the neural benefits even before muscle fibres themselves have been trained. This means you are gaining access to the strength you already have!

As you become more experienced, move to heavier lifts. You can change your protocol:

• 2-3 sets of 4-6 repetitions and 3-4 minutes rest between sets

As an endurance athlete, you might be shocked at the rest between sets and wonder why you are spending so much time doing nothing. However, don’t be tempted to turn this into another endurance session. You (hopefully) do enough of those already! This is much more similar to sprint work, where you should start each set fully rested.
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Ideally, you’ll be strength training 2-3 times a week but if you can only manage one session, do that.

​Combining strength and endurance training

​For the novice athlete, including any strength training in your programme is likely to be effective and the single recommendation is simply to do it and not worry too much about the details. You’ll see gains in performance and your volume of endurance training is unlikely to compromise this.

For the more experienced or advanced athlete, we need to pay attention to programming strength training to get the maximum benefit. There’s little evidence that strength training interferes with developing endurance, but endurance training can certainly interfere with strength gains. This is one reason why you are unlikely to get huge from two or three short strength sessions while also running 80km a week. Sorry to break that to you.

To avoid interfering with our strength gains, one simple option is to complete the training on different days. However, advanced athletes might be training around 6 days a week, sometimes twice a day, and may need to complete strength and endurance work on the same day to maintain training volume. In this case, research suggests that signalling from strength training lasts 3-12 hours following a session. Endurance training in this window will blunt your adaptations to strength training. To avoid this, complete the endurance training first and strength training later in the day. To get the most from the strength session, make sure you allow adequate rest and recovery after an endurance session to avoid reducing the quality of your second session.
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Finally, consider when in the week to complete your strength work. At Espresso we believe in keeping easy days easy so hard days can be hard. This means we usually schedule strength training on the same day as a hard run or bike workout, with the endurance work completed first. This isn’t the only viable approach, however. In a recent conversation with an Olympic triathlon coach I learned that the GB Elite Squad completed strength training on an easy endurance day. This programming meant their high intensity endurance sessions, which were the primary focus, were not compromised. As always, the solution depends on the needs of the individual athlete. The self-coached athlete will need to experiment with different strategies to find what works best.