How many days a week should I do strength training
during the race season?
The answer is like.
Work, I get you strength and off-season work.
What's up, Trainiacs?
Off-season is underway and that means
that strength training begins.
That also means that I'm gonna be
giving these Halo Neuroscience head primers,
motor cortex primers a go
because helps with strength training.
Before I go further, check this out.
That is a Winnipeg snowbank.
It's about three feet taller than I am.
So I would say probably top five most common questions
that I get is hey, Taren,
can you help me out with strength training?
Well, it's not as simple as that.
I'm gonna help you now,
and if you wanna just completely skip this video,
go to triathlontaren.com/strengthroutine,
and that's actually a new resource that I put together
with some information that you can download
that is going to give you the routine
that I'm about to do now and a whole bunch of other info.
Alright, cars.
Okay, we'll see you in there.
(metal clangs)
Alright, so let me scooch in here.
Apparently, now that I'm all primed up, I'm ready.
So the reason that I don't just simply answer,
oh, yeah, hey, here's how you do strength training
for triathlon is because it's not quite as straightforward
as here's how you do strength training for a triathlon.
Now strength training, specifically weightlifting,
is a huge load on the body.
The entire purpose of it is to break down your muscles
so that you can then rebuild them and get stronger.
The goal of it is to be anabolic, as in build muscle.
However, massive endurance training is catabolic,
it uses up muscle at its deepest points.
So when people say, well, hey, how many days a week
should I do strength training during the race season?
The answer is like zero.
Because doing both of them at the same time
is like you're trying to push your body
into opposite directions.
So now that it's the off-season
and I'm not really so concerned about endurance training
because my next race isn't even figured out yet,
it's the time to be focused on strength training.
And what a really good rule of thumb is,
is boy, number one, don't fall if you're a camera,
is if you're gonna really push a triathlon season,
look at say, a nine-month race season.
In my case, I did my first race in March in Campeche,
did my last race at the end of October.
But what I'm gonna do now is do a three-month off-season
where I'm not so worried about every single workout
being really purposeful for that next race.
And what that allows me to do is take a step back
and focus on some strength,
and that's what we're gonna do up here.
And I've got a really specific strength routine
and a strength program buildup that you can incorporate
for 11, 12 weeks of really purposeful,
well-thought-out by other people, not by me,
strength movements, okay?
So I'm gonna go do them, and we'll talk our way through it.
Oh, my God.
I am gonna be walking funny for two weeks.
That was a legs-travaganza that I did not expect.
I guess that's what happens
when you don't do strength work for six months.
It's my fault.
Okay, so the big purpose function of this routine
is number one, it's entirely sequential.
So this routine is step by step.
It's not intended to be bounced around back and forth,
mixed up, and it's done in this specific way for a reason.
Now it's also done in this specific way
to accomplish the things that we want
as triathletes and endurance athletes.
We wanna get stronger without adding bulk.
We wanna activate the sides of our body,
which typically aren't activated
in just day-to-day modern life.
We're very linear as desk workers,
as runners, as cyclists.
We move in a straight line.
And when we start breaking down,
it's because those little micro movements side to side
that are place on our body throughout the course
of a sprint distance race, an Olympic distance race,
and especially getting into the ultra long distance races
of Ironmans, that's why you see the stronger, bulkier
athletes that aren't wispy little things like in ITU
doing better in long distance Ironman events.
I'm gonna gloss over all of these
because like I said go to triathlontaren.com/strengthroutine
to get all of the details of this.
But I'll explain the purpose of this.
Number one is you wanna do this one to two times a week.
You wanna warm up with things
like walking lunges with no weight,
walking lunges with a twist, toe touches, your ABC skips,
things like that to wake up your body.
Little bit of foam rolling.
I didn't have it here, so I used a pull buoy.
And once you've got that, you want your glutes
and your quads activated, so we use hip bridges
and no-weighted step-ups for that.
Now this is where you get into the meat of the strength.
And the single, best strength movement
that you can do that's been found
to affect everything from sprinters to marathon runners
to cyclists to endurance athletes,
all of us are, is a hex bar deadlift.
Look it up if you don't know what it is.
If you don't have a hex bar deadlift,
just use a regular Olympic bar.
And what you do is warm up
with some lighter deadlift movements,
and eventually, what we're looking to do 11 to 12 weeks
from now is do max hex bar deadlifts, just the up,
and then drop the weight and not do the down.
And the purpose of that max weight,
like absolute max eyeballs popping out of your socket,
struggling to do it is to recruit
as many muscle fibers as you possibly can.
Once you start getting to those max lift,
you gotta start recruiting muscle fibers
that you don't recruit just doing light weights, or running
because it's light weights over, and over, and over.
But recruiting all those extra muscle fibers
create neuromuscular connections that we can then rely on
over, and over, and over when we're taking tens
of thousands of steps in a run or a ride.
Next is you wanna isolate a single side.
And once we're all tired out by all those heavy deadlifts,
that's where we can start isolating all those little muscles
that are tough to do when you're fresh.
So we do Bulgarian dumbbell split squats,
single leg plyometrics, and we get into stability movement
with a single leg step-down off the side of a bench.
Slow downs, slow ups,
and we alternate between seven-way hips
and a closed-chain glute med.
And that seven-way hips,
oh, there is pain in my hip that I did not know existed.
Okay, it's all complicated.
There's a sequential build week by week.
Just go to triathlontaren.com/strengthroutine.
It's all there.
Are you a vlogger?
I am.
Woo-woo.
What's your YouTube channel?
It's called Triathlon Taren.
What YouTube channels do you guys like?
Roman Atwood?
Do you like Casey Neistat?
You know who's really good?
Roy Purdy, best dance movies
on YouTube. Oh, this guy.
You guys wanna be in the vlog?
Sure, sure. Yeah.
Camera's going right now. What's up?
Hi. What's up?
Alright, there you go, Trainiacs.
You've been asking for strength and off-season work.
I get you strength and off-season work.
Fun fact, if you didn't know it,
the very first daily vlog that I ever did
was ended off right.
Hi.
There you go.
Man, put a puffy camera out there and kids go nuts.
Go check out the very first vlog I did.
I'll link it right up to the side.
It's nasty.
Later, Trainiacs.