Strength before endurance: should you push the boundary?

As we have explained in numerous SPB articles, the benefits of regular strength training for endurance athletes are immense. Adding strength training to an endurance program can dramatically improve levels of muscular power and strength, providing an advantage in sprint situations or where good levels of strength and power are also needed in that sport – for example rowing⁽¹⁾.

Even more importantly perhaps, studies on runners and cyclists have shown that the use of lower-body, heavy-weight strength training can improve muscle economy⁽²⁾. This means that muscles become more efficient, thereby requiring less energy and oxygen to perform, which in turn equates to less fatigue for a given pace. Yet another benefit of strength training is increased muscle and tendon resilience, and a reduced risk of injury⁽³⁾.

Structuring a strength program

Strength training takes time and energy so it makes sense to strength train in a way that produces the greatest benefits for the lowest reasonable amount of time and effort. In particular, endurance athletes who are training hard for their sport do not have the luxury of performing strength sessions, only to find themselves exhausted and making inconsequential gains!

Many endurance athletes are also time limited; rather than performing separate and additional strength sessions, they will need or prefer to do some strength training as part of a mixed training session that also includes endurance work. This explains why in more recent years, researchers have devoted much attention to investigating the best and most efficient approaches to strength training structure.

What kind of strength training?

In this article, we are going to focus on mixed strength-endurance sessions, but first of all, we need to talk about strength training type. The ‘traditional’ resistance training approach for athletes uses a structure based on a fixed number of repetitions per sets performed at a percentage of the athlete’s ‘1-rep max’ (the highest weight that can be lifted using excellent form and technique for that exercise). – for example, 8 reps per set with the loading set at 80% of 1-rep max. This traditional approach has stood the test of time because it works, even when different percentages of 1RM loadings and reps per set are used⁽⁴⁾.

However, an alternative and increasingly popular approach to structuring strength sessions is ‘velocity based training’⁽⁵⁾. With a velocity-loss approach, training sets are not performed with a pre-determined number of repetitions. Instead, the velocity loss (ie slowing of the exercise movement during the lifting phase) over the course of a set will determine when the set is finished. Once a certain percentage of the initial speed is lost, the set is over. For example, if the initial reps are performed at 1.0 meters/second and the goal is to limit velocity loss to 20%, the set will continue until the athlete can no longer maintain a minimum velocity of 0.8 meters/second.

Velocity loss is essentially a measure of how much fatigue has been generated over the course of the set. Limiting velocity loss means limiting fatigue during strength training sessions, which enables the quality and the speed of the movement to be maintained. This should in theory have benefits for athletes where the power and speed of the movement is important. For an in-depth discussion on velocity loss training and its potential benefits, readers are directed to this excellent article by Andrew Sheaff.

Strength-endurance workout recipes

Rather than performing a totally separate workout, many endurance athletes who are tight for time perform strength training in a combined session with their endurance training. As for whether strength or endurance training should come first in the session, this was another topic covered by Andrew Sheaff in a recent SPB article. In a nutshell, the research clearly indicates that when improving aerobic endurance is the primary goal, athletes can perform endurance training prior to strength training, or strength training prior to endurance training, without any negative impact on performance⁽⁶⁾. However, where strength maximization is also required, performing strength training prior to endurance training gives the best outcome.

High-intensity endurance training

The research above suggesting that prior strength training has no negative effects on endurance performance drew its conclusions by looking at long-term gains in aerobic capacity (maximum oxygen uptake, or VO2max). However, there’s more to endurance performance than just VO2max. What also matters is what % of your VO2max you can sustain for long periods of time (ie when racing), and also how efficiently your muscle can process oxygen to produce movement – so-called ‘muscle economy’^(7-9). To develop these aspects of endurance performance requires more intense training, which in turn requires greater muscle strength. So a valid question to ask is whether prior strength training negatively impacts a high-intensity endurance training session? If so, this would mean that athletes might have to rethink how they structure mixed sessions.