- I feel funny just walking around with it.
Focusing on strength right now, why it's important
to all of us.
It's about swimming 20% faster, but--
Morning trainiacs, bit of a backwards day here.
We've got a technique session with Coach Pat
later this evening in the pool,
so that means that this morning,
I'm gonna get my swell on.
I still have my old weightlifting belt
from when I thought I was gonna be body building.
Got lifting chalk all over it, straps,
feel funny just walking around with it.
So, if you were to look at a lot of pro-triathletes,
some, not all, do strength work.
However, what we find is that as they go on
longer in their career, they look back and they say,
"Oh my God, I should have done more strength work,"
because it would've eliminated even just a little
injuries and a lot of the maintenance work
and any of the down time that they had to take
over the course of their career.
People like Dave Scott, Craig Alexander,
the best of the best are saying that they should have
spent more time on strength work.
By the way, go to triathlontaren.com/strengthroutine
if you want this strength routine.
So, here's five reasons that I came up with this morning
over tea in my PJs about why I'm focusing on
strength right now, why it's important to all of us.
The first reason is because in a race,
it can be even as short as a sprint race,
if our bodies are repeating anything 10, 15,
20,000 times with steps, with paddle strokes,
with strokes, there's a lot of small little turbulence
every time we land on the ground.
There's a little bit of turbulence that our body
has to take that shock.
If our body isn't strong enough to keep that
turbulence under control, keep that load under control,
towards the end of a race, our bodies are gonna break down.
Now, let's go get jacked up!
Well, the next reason is very much related
to that last reason to do strength training
and that's to avoid injury.
Now, all those little instabilities, as you're training,
they cause a lot of side to side movement.
So, as we're running, as we're swimming,
as we're cycling in a forward plain,
even though we're going forward, all that load
on an unstable, not strong structure is gonna cause
little bits of side movement, particularly I tend to get
a fair bit of instability in my back, which early on
caused back pain and doing a little bit of strength work
allowed my body to keep it upright,
keep it moving forward and avoiding those little
micro movements side to side.
Those are often what creates injury.
(cheery music)
The next reason that strength training is important
is for range of motion.
What we try to do in this strength routine
is load up our muscles with as much weight as possible
and getting our body in a situation where it has to
recruit all these muscle fibers that it doesn't recruit
just walking because that's easy for it
but we're going to deep muscle fibers,
teaching them how to activate.
Because we have more muscle fibers activated,
there's gonna be a bigger range of motion.
So, what that's gonna result in is
we're gonna, let's say running for instance,
instead of having hip impingement and being able to
get to there with a running stride,
you can all of a sudden lift our leg up much higher.
We can kick it back further.
We can stay in the air longer, less drag,
we run faster.
Do away with this now that I am not pretending to be
Ronnie Coleman anymore.
Light weight maybe.
The next reason is basically along the same lines
as the last one, but different purpose.
So, the more muscle fibers that we can recruit,
the better we're gonna be in a race.
We're gonna perform better while we're training.
Just think about it.
If you have to run whatever, doesn't matter what distance,
5K and you're using 70% of the muscle fibers
in your legs, do ya think you'd do better
if you had to run that same 5K and you're able to use
95% of the muscle fibers in your legs?
Just by nature, if we're loading our body up,
teaching all the muscle fibers to fire,
creating those neuromuscular connections that we can use
as much of our structure, our body as possible,
we're probably gonna be a fair bit faster, right?
Right, 15s, steppin' up.
(upbeat music)
The last reason that strength training is really beneficial
is for balance, body awareness.
The more different situations that we can put
our bodies and particularly with this routine
where a lot of it is single leg or balance
focused or stability focused, we are going to
build the body awareness to make those tiny little
instant micro adjustments throughout the course
of a race that are gonna keep us more upright,
keep us safer, keep us faster.
Oh, give you a bonus because I was like,
those were all really related.
Four and a 16th tips there.
An actual one is as we get older, especially men
but all of us, our testosterone production ends up
ramping down.
Loading really heavy weights onto your body,
that ends up kinda stimulating testosterone production,
which has uncountable benefits to your body.
So, think that gets us to a total of five, roundabout.
And seven hours later, we are back
at the pool.
(upbeat music)
That was an excellent technique session there
with the Patster.
There's a video that I did that I'll link to
up here, it's about swimming 20% faster but by
having 20% longer stroke where I analyze Trout
from our swim group's stroke because he's just
so far out there and he comes so far back.
Pat gave me a little bit of tips to keep in mind
for how to lengthen out that stroke.
Smart man, that Pat, smart man.
Alright, later trainiacs, let's go.