Strength Training for Triathletes
How many of you have been told you need to include strength training if you want to be a well rounded endurance athlete? While this is for the most part true, there's very little good information out there for where to start (as a triathlete).
The goal of this week's newsletter is to give a starting point and lay out the things that are actually important when it comes to strength training to save you time and maximize your results.
1. Common Mistakes of Lifting for the Endurance Athlete
One of the most common misconceptions with strength training as a triathlete is that you should be primarily focused on muscle endurance. This makes sense at first, after all, you're an endurance athlete. Shouldn't you be working on endurance in the gym too?
In reality most of your endurance work should be saved for swimming, biking, or running. Whereas the gym should be used for building strength and power which typically looks like low reps and lots of rest.
Along with that is either training your sets to failure (where you couldn't possibly do one more rep) or not training intensely enough to come anywhere near failure.
You want to find a happy medium, giving a good, strong effort for every set without burning yourself out too much and ruining yourself for tomorrow's run (as an example). We'll go over this in the next section.
The other common fault I see is that triathletes don't include plyometrics into their training programs. Explosive plyometrics (box jumps, broad jumps, pogo hops, depth jumps, etc.) are crucial for increasing the amount of power and resilience your body has when running. Running is one of the highest loads we can place on our bodies (and this isn't a bad thing). As you continue to run over time your body adapts to that load and is able to handle more. I'm guessing your first run wasn't 10 miles after lacing up your shoes and heading out the door. There's a good chance you had to build up to that.
But, many of us have experienced hitting a wall with our runs where either we can't move any faster, or, we can't move any further. Plyometrics will help with both of those aspects because they load the body more than running does. If you want your body to adapt and push past the ability to handle a certain amount of stress, you need to introduce it to something more stressful.
With that said, trade your banded sidelying clamshells for some plyometric training in the gym!
2. The Basic Components of an Effective Strength Training Program
The barebones of a strength program can be broken down into a very simple rule: The 3 to 5 rule. Pick 3-5 exercises, do 3-5 reps, for 3-5 sets, training 3-5 days per week, and take enough rest to give full effort on the next set. The effort you are shooting for is about an 8/10. Now, this can be difficult to gauge, especially as a beginner but you can think about getting to the point where you could only do 2 more reps before you would completely fail the lift.
I would also mention that, with the amount of training being done for triathlon already, you can typically get away with training 2x/week instead of 3.
Now I know adding on more training sessions with the amount of time triathlon already takes isn't exactly desirable. If you email cganzer@retriperformance.com and request our 12 week strength training template we have a plan that has you lifting 2 days per week. If you're efficient, these workouts should take you 30 minutes or less. You also don't have to do 5 accessory (or extra) exercises every workout but the template has them there if you feel the need.
