|
Happy Monday! Thanks to everyone who joined our Zoom call last week. Here’s the recording if you missed it. My apologies, but I forgot to hit record at the beginning so we jump right into it. There is a great discussion on strength on Slack, and for anyone who isn’t hopping on there (no judgment), I posted a couple of additional resources on it. Sam co-wrote a great article about why strength is important for Uphill Athlete. We also did a podcast for UA on the topic, if audio is more your style. There were a couple of things that I didn’t explain very well during the call, that I wanted to elaborate on. 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
If either of those apply to you, strength will help a lot! We also talked about how strength helps posture, but how? Being efficient for sport means you’re efficient for simple activities of daily living (ADLs). There’s a PT named Kelly Starett in the bay area who has a great YouTube channel called The Ready State. He used to have something called Mobility WOD for all the Crossfit athletes he treated, so they could also learn about proper movement, among other things. He talks about “energy leaks” which I really like. If you’re not 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 that they aren’t intended). You can do a quick experiment by slouching 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. Try it again, but take a minute to stand tall, with your ribcage in line with your pelvis, and your center of gravity over your arches. Engage your core, lightly push through your feet while lifting through your midline, and you’ll find that it’s much harder to be pushed down. Out in the wilds of the internet, there are people who either love strength or hate it. We favor having strength workouts, but we also recognize that some people might not need to do as much. If you have a history of a lot of strength training, or you did a power based sport, you might have all the strength you need, and will get more out of focused aerobic training. But for many endurance athletes, it’s easy to get lulled into the idea that you can get strong by only doing the sport you want to do. It’s a nice thought, and true up to a point, but especially when talking about mechanics and proper movement, it’s very challenging and takes a lot of body awareness to move the exact right way so that your body stays aligned. Performing strength exercises, however, load the muscles in a way that recruits muscle fibers and creates proper movement patterns. Ultimately, we want to increase your strength (just as we want to increase your aerobic) ceiling so you can DO MORE. Let us know how it’s going for you! Alison and Sam
|
