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The Science of Performance |
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Muscle Contractility Part 3 – Strength By Richard Gibbens We have identified the three primary muscle characteristics that ultimately determine your running performance (or for that matter, your performance in any form of endurance exercise). Those characteristics are contraction speed, strength, and fatigue resistance. We’ve already discussed contraction speed, so this time we will focus our attention on strength and the role it plays in performance. If running is an endurance sport, why would strength play a vital role in performance? To answer that question we have to turn to physics. Running is really all about force production. Your muscles generate the force for you to move. This force is used to start, stop, accelerate, decelerate, and turn. Without force there is no movement. To increase your running pace, you must generate more force. If you decrease the amount of force you are producing, you will slow down. In order to improve your performance at some set distance, say a 5k, you must increase the amount of force you can sustain for that distance. It is as simple and straightforward as that. Our discussion of force production may seem too elementary, but please don’t gloss over this point lightly. If you want to improve your performance, you must increase the amount of force your muscles are capable of producing and sustaining. That is the key element. What does force production have to do with strength? The amount of force you can produce is determined by the strength of your muscles. Stronger muscles are capable of producing more force and are also capable of sustaining a set amount of force for a longer period of time. Each time you increase the strength of your running muscles, your performance will improve. For example, a research study was conducted at the US Military Academy at West Point on 18 varsity football players.1 This group strength trained three times per week for 16 weeks. As would be expected, the subjects gained significant amounts of strength during the 16 week study. What was surprising, however, was the 11% average improvement in their 2 mile run time. On average, the subjects decreased their 2 mile run time by 88 seconds, from 13:18 to 11:50. Why is this result so surprising? The answer is that the subjects improved their running performance by strength training, not running. Remember, this was a strength training study – the subjects trained by lifting weights, not by running. This study illustrates my point that an increase in strength results in an improvement in performance. This is not the only study to have found an improvement in running performance from weight training. Other studies have examined the effect strength training has on running performance. Recently Alan Jung, a Ph.D. exercise physiologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, reviewed all the available research on the effects strength training had on running performance. His conclusion was that strength training benefited distance runners of all levels by improving running economy and reducing the risk of injury.2 Here is another example for you to ponder. Chris Lear, in his book Sub 4:00, Alan Webb and the Quest for the Fastest Mile, describes one of the first post-injury workouts conducted by University of Michigan runner Nate Brannen. Nate, with a 3:59 PR in the mile, had suffered a stress facture and had been unable to run for 7 weeks while waiting for his injury to heal. His workouts had been limited to pool running and weight training. A week and half after getting his doctor’s okay to start running again, Nate stepped onto the track at Michigan and ran his fastest 600 meter ever – a blazing 1:18.5. Imagine for a moment that you took 7 weeks off from running. What kind of shape would you be in? Even with cross training, would you be in better running shape or worse? Assuming cross training helped you maintain fitness, could you resume running after a 7 week layoff and run your’ fastest ever, like Nate did? I think it’s safe to say that most of us would not expect to set a PR after an extended layoff. Yet that is exactly what Nate Brannen did. How is this possible? The answer is found in the strength Nate gained from weight training. During his 7 week forced layoff Nate began weight training for the first time. The author noted that Nate had never seriously lifted weights before and that the strength gains from his new weight lifting program were noticeable in increased mass in his legs and arms. Lear attributed Nate’s 600 meter performance to natural ability, but I submit that the increased leg strength he gained from weight training translated directly into an increase in power, leading to improved performance on the track. The pool workouts maintained Nate’s metabolic fitness, but the weight training is what enabled him to run his fastest ever. Weight training made his running muscles stronger and enabled him to improve his performance. As important as strength is, it can’t overcome the limitation of muscle contraction speed though. Once you are strong enough to run at a pace that causes your muscles to contract at their maximum pace, increases in strength will not result in a faster maximum pace. This explains why the strongest guy in the gym is not necessarily the fastest runner; slow muscle contraction speed would prevent him from using all his available strength while running. Strength training won’t improve your 50 meter or 100 meter performance much. However, strength training can play a vital role in your performance at distances from 400 meters to the marathon and beyond, especially on hilly courses. The bottom line is that when a distance runner increases the strength of his running muscles, his performance will improve. This naturally leads us to the question of what is the best method for increasing strength. The proven way to increase muscular strength is through progressive resistance and overload. Simply put, when a muscle is trained with sufficient intensity and with high levels of force production, it responds by getting stronger. Weight training obviously fits the bill here – it requires high levels of force production and it is hard. However, speed work also meets the criteria too. Speed work is the running equivalent of lifting weights. Think about it this way; running 400 meters all out is very similar in intensity and force production to one hard set of leg presses. In either case you are training your muscles hard while producing relatively high levels of force, resulting in an increase in strength. You probably already know that basically every running program ever invented, even the 100 mile per week programs, includes speed work. Until now you’ve been taught that speed work improved your VO2max and lactate threshold, thus causing improved running performance. I’ve previously suggested that VO2max and lactate threshold are not the primary factors limiting performance. If my assertion is true, then something else about speed work is causing an improvement in performance. Now you know what that something is. Speed work works because it overloads the muscles and causes them to get stronger. Stronger muscles enable an improvement in performance. One last point; muscles get stronger when they are trained hard – not long, not often, just hard. Conversely, muscles do not get stronger from easy workouts. Easy workouts do not build strength, nor do they “consolidate” the strength gained from a hard workout. And they certainly don’t cause your muscles to recover faster. All easy workouts do is contribute to overall fatigue and prevent your muscles from reaching their peak strength levels. Weight lifters have known for years that easy workouts are not just a waste of time, but can actually impede performance, and hence they do not perform easy workouts. Weight lifters either train hard or they don’t train; there is no easy day in the gym. Runners should follow that same principle. If you want to improve your performance, here’s what I recommend. Conduct one weekly session of strength training, one weekly session of speed work, and one weekly long run. If your personal rate of recovery is fast enough, you can add in one or two days of power running. Do away with easy runs; instead cross train or take the day off. Follow these suggestions and watch your performance soar. Till next time, keep on running. References: 1. Brzycki, M (2000), Maximize Your Training, 271 - 273 2. Hanc, J, Runner’s World, Vol 38, Number 11, 6
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