How’s your core? Tristar Athletes who do strength training are…. faster, healthier and remain injury free over the course of their careers. While strength training is unique to the athlete, plan level and season; fundamentally it is omnipresent. If you are in the “red” and missing sessions it’s time you learned why our Tristar coaches put these key sessions each day and week into your plan.
10 minutes
Time crunched? Even 10minutes can have a huge impact on core base strength
Top 5 reasons why you can’t afford to miss key strength training sessions
Prevent injuries
While it may not be as “sexy” as swimming, biking or running, strength training is the fruit and vegetables that keep your body intact during a long training session, training block or season. If you are only doing swim, bike, run.. that’s akin to eating dessert for breakfast, lunch and dinner…. not healthy!Improved training output
In all sports we see improvements in muscle firing and recruitment when it comes to strength training. In swimming, increased pull effort on the power phase of the stroke, in cycling increased leg mass helps to raise ones FTP (Functional Threshold Power). For our athletes we are also NOT afraid of heavy weights and when appropriately planned by your coach it can have significant value to your season.
Faster race times
This circles back to points one and two above and your speed on raceday is predicted by how consistent you are in training. If you are injury free chances are your consistency will be higher throughout a training block and over the season.
Muscular Endurance
Lighter loads (20-50% of maximum efforts) for 15-30 repetitions per set with 30-90 seconds rest (or even no rest if doing circuit training or supersets) will stimulate “muscular endurance” adaptations. (Perfect for the strong finish at any endurance event.)
Leaning Out
Developing strength and muscle will aid in a leaner body composition. In order to maintain muscles, the body needs to raise its burn rate to support them. Meaning, this increased metabolism and energy demand from lifting weights will help reduce body fat percentage as you workout. Below we provide a chart of VO2 Max ranges and typical run performances that match these VO2’s. Simply put, the higher the VO2 the better the projected performance.
V02 Max relationship to cycling output by athlete category.
Our coaches believe that you need to reserve the right to do swim, bike and runs with your strength training first. To move the dial in this key area it does not take much and even if you have ten minutes in your day to dedicate to strength that can help maintain and even build on the foundations you have established.
Train hard.. and SMART! The Tristar Athletes Coaches, 👨🏻💻
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