In general, endurance athletes put strength training on the back burner.
It makes sense at first glance. The SAID principle, Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands, shows that endurance athletes should prioritize their activity over strength training.
Although that may be true to some extent, any runner which has have you been injured due to an overuse injury knows the importance of strength training to avoid muscle imbalances. With that said, lifting heavy seems a little counter intuitive for an optimal strength training approach.
Misconceptions of lifting heavy
Lifting heavy can’t improve endurance
Although lifting heavy doesn’t explicitly try to improve endurance performance, something will be said to increase the burden your musculoskeletal system can take.
Similar to how a hard interval trains our body to deal with low intensity running easier, lifting heavy trains our body to simply handle the muscle tension from endurance training.
On the flip side, lifting lightweight for high reps does concentrate on muscular endurance. The only issue with that is your regular training is making the muscles you utilize for running fatigue resistant. Lifting for high reps doesn’t do much of diversifying your training.
Like mentioned above, focusing on strength allows your muscles to build up the opportunity to handle more acute stress, thus making the stress of endurance training much easier to handle.
Lifting heavy will make me too big
It is essential to distinguish lifting for strength vs. lifting for size. Strength training won’t necessarily cause you to bigger assuming you’re lifting like a cross-training regimen to supplement your endurance race training.
Muscular hypertrophy isn’t as easy health magazines make us believe. It takes a focused approach and a science proven regimen of breaking down muscle and allowing for recovery. A quick, twice a week weight training program probably won’t cause you to build unwanted muscle bulk.
Although lifting heavy weight needs a skills that running doesn’t, it is important to supplment your tool belt if you are looking to optimize your stamina training.
Keep in your mind that you ought to ask for the use of spotters and/or trainers and employ a lot of caution when starting a new strength training program.
References:
- http://running.competitor.com/2019/03/training/heavy-lifting-for-better-running_67162
- https://www.acefitness.org/blog/5463/7-benefits-of-heavy-resistance-training