How to Combine Strength and Endurance Training
Can you get fit and strong at the same time?
Any endurance athlete who has undertaken a strength training program understands the accompanying anxiety. Should you lift first? Ride first? Is running or riding less okay since you’re also lifting? These are tough, anxiety inducing questions. Core work, weightlifting, and plyometric exercises are important additions to a training plan, but they bring about massive, new complications. Let’s answer some of these questions with a science-based approach as we seek to answer the essential question: Can you combine strength and endurance training without sacrificing fitness? And, if so, how should you do it?
You Can Get Fast and Strong at the Same Time
It is possible to become faster and stronger simultaneously. A 2017 systematic review makes this quite clear. The study assessed other reports that tested eight week or longer strength and endurance training plans and found a benefit in both aerobic capacity and one rep max (1-RM) values for the athletes. They included 13 studies in their meta-analysis and the overall effect was quite positive, all across the age spectrum. In short, training plans that combined strength and endurance training together increased both strength and endurance in all athletes: male and female, young and old, trained and untrained.
Endurance and strength training can clearly go hand in hand when you’re working on becoming a better endurance athlete. Often, long distance runners and cyclists live under the false impression that these types of exercise don’t apply to them and lack value, but that’s certainly not true. Not only can strength exercise increase aerobic capacity, it also helps synchronize muscular firing patterns, makes muscle force couples more efficient, and changes neuromuscular control, allowing you to recruit more muscle fibers when needed. All of these will help with aerobic exercise, especially as the aerobic sessions cross beyond an hour or so, as muscles will need to start recruiting less exhausted fibers at that point. Strength training will make this recruitment process more seamless, improving exercise performance.
So, it’s clear that strength and endurance training can and should be combined, but how should you do it?
How to Plan Strength Sessions for Max Benefit
Fortunately, there has been significant research in this topic area as well. Our study above, as well as a 2014 study from the Scandinavian Journal of Sports Medicine have given us some clues on how to fit these types of workouts together. Both studies agree that order of exercise does not matter. Neither showed a difference between athletes who workout before running or cycling and those who workout afterward. This is great news since it allows you to work by feel or based on your schedule. If you can only get to the gym in the mornings, that’s fine, you can still run effectively in the afternoons. However, these studies did show a difference in the type of lifting one should do, although it’s not a surprising one.
How to Lift
The research has recommended that athletes lift according to the demands of their sports. While this seems intuitive, you’d be amazed at how many athletes fail to do so. Cyclists should be working their core and lower body, with heavy, slow lower body lifts being most beneficial. This calculation changes for sprinters, who should incorporate heavy lifts while also keeping room in their schedules for plyometrics explosive training. When power is important, train for it.
As a cyclist, your most important zones are the deep core and the upper leg, and they require different types of work. The deep core needs low, slow, stability work, especially early in the season. Isometric exercises should be pursued here, developing a stable base from which to move. Proximal stability breeds distal mobility. It’s a popular saying in physical therapy because it’s true and essential for sports. Use your core as the proximal portion, stabilizing it and preparing it for the demands of extremely mobile lower limbs. Conversely, the upper leg lifts should be mobile, simulating the demands that cycling places on the limb. Slow, controlled lifts are key, taking the limb through full range of motion to maximize exercise effectiveness.
For runners, medium weight lower body lifting and plyometrics are recommended by the research. These types of exercises increase runners’ aerobic capacity, VO2 max, and time to exhaustion when running. These medium-weight exercises more closely parallel a runner’s regular stresses, allowing them to become better adapted to the stresses of running while lifting in the gym.
Running is even less a power based sport than cycling, and so demands a different exercise protocol. Just like cyclists, runners should focus on controlled lifts through the full range of motion, but should be lifting with a different style. Using medium weights for their skill level, runner should complete relatively high amounts of lifts, in the 15–25 range for squats (while cyclists should be around 6–10). This will help their bodies adapt to the longer, less powerful efforts required in their sport. Just like in cycling though, sprinters would benefit from higher weights with a lower repetition count.
Lift and Ride! Or Lift and Run!
The key takeaway is that endurance sports can be combined with lifting effectively, without losing aerobic ability, even if the lifting takes time away from your main sport. You should lift to help build up bones and joints, increase whole-body stability, and improve within your sport. The guidelines above are extremely general, and a more detailed breakdown will be given in future, but this should be good advice to get you started on the right path.
Luke is a cycling coach and physiologist from Richmond, VA who rides and races bikes all over the country. He’s an expert on the body in motion and its response to exercise and loves to share his knowledge with others. Find him @LukeHollomon everywhere.
