In episode 72 of The Knowledge by Wahoo, you will gain a deeper understanding of how your muscles work and how to optimize your strength training routines for maximum results. From the anatomy of a lift to the role of nutrition, this podcast provides in-depth analysis and practical tips to help listeners take their strength training to the next level.
The Mechanics of Muscle: A Deep Dive into Strength Training" is part 1 of a 3-part series that explores the science behind strength training and the mechanisms that drive muscle growth. Coach Jeff Hoobler and Dr. Jinger Gottschall explore the science and mechanics behind strength training, delving into topics such as muscle physiology, exercise biochemistry, and the latest research in the field. Whether you're a seasoned endurance athlete or just starting to build your strength, this series will give you a deeper understanding of the mechanics of muscle and help you optimize your strength training routine for maximum results. So, come along for the ride as we take a scientific journey into the world of strength training and discover the secrets to unlocking your full athletic potential.
Taking you beyond the borders of Sufferlandria into the world of Wahoo X, this 7-day event will see you ride over 8 hours indoors testing your mental toughness and physical limits — all to benefit the @davisphinneyfnd and their quest to help people with Parkinson’s live well today.
Formerly the Tour of Sufferlandria, the expanded Wahooligan Tour features stages across Wahoo SYSTM and Wahoo RGT, welcoming more riders to take on the challenge and raise more money for the Davis Phinney Foundation than ever before. Participants have raised over one and a half million dollars since the first Tour began in 2013! 👏
Donate now through link
**Learn more:**
https://www.wahoofitness.com/blog/strength-training-triathletes/https://www.wahoofitness.com/blog/strength-training-triathletes/
**Try the SYSTM Training App free for 14 days.**
https://www.wahoofitness.com/systm/getting-started
Have questions? Please ask us here!
Jinger Gottschall 0:00
Tell our listeners what it means and what it could mean to them. What would you say?
Jeff Hoobler 0:04
I'd say strength is producing force often maximal force to overcome a resistance
Jinger Gottschall 0:10
For endurance athletes, then what should we be doing?
Jeff Hoobler 0:13
Well, I'm going to steal this phrase from MAC.
Jinger Gottschall 0:16
Okay?
Jeff Hoobler 0:17
It depends.
Jinger Gottschall 0:18
Oh, so true. It really does.
Jeff Hoobler 0:21
But in general, we need to overload right body.
Jinger Gottschall 0:28
Welcome back to another episode of The Knowledge podcast by Wahoo. I'm Dr. Ginger Gottschall, Director of Sports Science Research.
Jeff Hoobler 0:37
I'm Jeff Cooper, senior strength research scientist.
Jinger Gottschall 0:40
Today we are going to chat about strength training, which is probably if I had to guess one of Jeff's most favorite topics.
Jeff Hoobler 0:48
It's my fav.
Jinger Gottschall 0:49
I knew it. I knew it.
Jeff Hoobler 0:51
Been doing it for a long time.
Jinger Gottschall 0:52
Now one of my favorite things and how I used to always start a lecture at the university is fun facts.
Jeff Hoobler 0:59
ooh and I love that about you. You always have fun facts. So I bet you have some about strength.
Jinger Gottschall 1:03
I do a couple of tidbits in there historical and true. Well, as far as we know, we have documentation of some of the very first strength training from Egyptian tomb drawings.
Jeff Hoobler 1:16
Whoa,
Jinger Gottschall 1:17
yes. Which show that these folks were actually having fun with physical activity by lifting and swinging and throwing sandbags and our bags filled with stone. So they were actually appreciating the novelty of lifting heavy objects for physical activity.
Jeff Hoobler 1:33
Yeah, so strength training is not a new concept.
Jinger Gottschall 1:36
Exactly. That was point number one. Now, dumbbells. Any idea where that name came from? Jeff?
Jeff Hoobler 1:43
Well, I'm not gonna spoil it because I heard the story. But it is. It's interesting.
Jinger Gottschall 1:49
So there are records that demonstrate the word dumbbells and barbells come from when a rod was placed between two church bells. And they would be lifting the bells and putting multiple bells on either side of the rod. And they would remove the clappers from the bells, because they didn't want them to ring. So hence the term dumbbells, dumbbells.
Jeff Hoobler 2:12
And the rumor is that that was monks.
Jinger Gottschall 2:15
Yes,
Jeff Hoobler 2:16
they were doing this
Jinger Gottschall 2:17
Exactly. Which is another cool, fun fact. And lastly, is where we first started getting some of the competitive games with respect to strength training and weightlifting. And there's evidence that this was going on in Germany, Scotland, Spain, even before the very first Olympics in 1896. And that's when the first events for weightlifting was happening. So we know that strength training was part of people's activities for sport and competition in the 1800s. Now, another fun fact, that's uncomfortable in the side right here. So that folks at 96 with men, the first weightlifting in the Olympics for women did not happen till 2000.
Jeff Hoobler 3:03
That is really sad, really sad was.
Jinger Gottschall 3:06
And on a personal note, I was actually a participant in one of the very first women in strength training research studies in the 1990s. That combined cardio activity for endurance athletes with strength training, and women, it had never been done before. And we would do things like swim bike run, and incorporate weight training into two or three days a week of our activity. And then that paper was published a saying it's a good thing it helps.
Even in women,
Jeff Hoobler 3:37
wow, even in women, you know, and it's strength training has been around for a long time. But this some of these tidbits kind of show us that we're we're still in the evolution of what strength training can be and should be for, you know, a variety of activities
Jinger Gottschall 3:54
True and what we talk about a lot endurance training, and this method of strength training is very new. So where did it start?
Jeff Hoobler 4:04
What is strength training? There's, there's a lot of terms or phrases that are associated with strength training, but I think if you mentioned that to most people, at least when I started into strength training back in the late 80s, early 90s. You know, most people were really familiar with bodybuilding, isolating muscles to increase physique. There were late weightlifting competitions, acrobatic demonstrations, that kind of thing. powerlifting, like you mentioned in the Olympics is been a thing for quite a long time. Then we get into Nautilus machines with variable resistance and what was the prescription on Nautilus,
Jinger Gottschall 4:41
it was eight to 12 reps of each body part two to three times a week. So that probably sounds familiar to some of you folks like that as a common prescription in terms of weight training that started in the 70s and has made its way through still people do that. 50 years later.
Jeff Hoobler 5:00
In the 90s, functional training became really popular and just looking at more integration rather than isolation. You know, that was great, and it is great. But sometimes it gets taken too far like, oh look, I can do this and jump on a BOSU ball. And I can do dumbbells on a BOSU ball. And, yeah, just because you can doesn't mean you should,
Jinger Gottschall 5:20
right, because then it becomes an issue of taking some of the creativity and cool factor away from the why,
Jeff Hoobler 5:28
yeah, and the risk reward gets upside down. But then we see Body Pump come along. And that was one of the first group fitness strength trainings out there and targeted towards endurance, strength training for endurance,
Jinger Gottschall 5:45
exactly low weight, high repetition, 55 minutes full body exercise. And you can do this with a group with just a barbell, and some plates
Jeff Hoobler 5:55
structured in a class with various progressions. So that was great. And then I just still say that there's not much out there until lately focusing on strength training for endurance sports, right? Specifically cycling, multi sport, swimming, cross country skiing, it's there in isolated areas. But mainstream information isn't quite clear, we're going to dive into this. And we're going to talk about some some terms or keywords that are often associated with strength training. And some of these may be familiar to you, some of them not so much.
Jinger Gottschall 6:31
All right, let's start. And we're going to go first with definitions. And then we'll take some time to describe how these specific components would fit into an actual workout.
Jeff Hoobler 6:42
Perfect. Sounds great.
Jinger Gottschall 6:44
Awesome. Let's begin with and I hear these words from you. So I'm excited to hear what you would give us your definition. Let's start with activation and proper preparation.
Jeff Hoobler 6:53
activation is essentially just getting the nervous system, the neuromuscular connections to fire, right prep to preparing your body for a load that is coming getting ready. And this could be, it could be some breathing exercises, it could be, you know, some stability exercises, it could be some corrective movements. But it's a transition from a rested state into a readiness state lot.
Jinger Gottschall 7:21
That's awesome. You mentioned the word stability. And this comes up in the conversations that we have with the Wahoo sports science team a lot, which is stability, mobility, flexibility. And you mentioned stability can be a component of this activation or prep phase. And let's just talk about it independently, and then how it relates to those other two terms. Disability is a lot about balance. And it is creating a activation of these small muscles that are going to help stabilize you. And I also think stabilization of the core from shoulder to head.
Mobility is kind of the range of motion of the joints themselves and flexibility than being more the range or change in length of the muscles themselves.
Jeff Hoobler 8:11
The other thing that I add with stability is generally was stability were these are small moments. And oftentimes what we're doing is trying to counter movement, so holding a position under a small or light load or an asymmetrical load, and keeping your body from breaking down. And that happens at each joint throughout the body. And you mentioned it's mostly to engage the small muscles that are stabilizers and assist with prime movers. So we want to get them in the game.
Jinger Gottschall 8:45
Absolutely. Another little tidbit about that is the stabilizers that have to do the most work are distal, meaning the furthest away from your trunk or the core. So in lower body movements, we're thinking about the ankles and the muscles surrounding them. Now, that's not to say we don't have stabilizers surrounding the knee or the hip, but in terms of the work done. And if you're thinking of upper body movements, or even think a handstand or some yoga postures like frog position, or you're going to do the stabilizing then mostly at the wrist, and we have over 20 tendons crossing that joint that are going to help us stabilize
Jeff Hoobler 9:24
Yeah, and these are the things that often get overlooked. Just moving forward, come back with a little more on stability later. Another phrase or key term that we often hear associated with strength is power. And this is producing a maximum force over a minimum amount of time generally with some type of load. So if we increase the load and keep the speed, same or high, that's more power.
Jinger Gottschall 9:48
And we can talk about components of power and ways to develop it with some bodyweight things like plyometric exercises, which are going to think like a counter movement and then an explosive of jumping type of exercise. So we're thinking again, in terms of high recruitment after a shortened lengthen. And with this comes the talk of elastic components. And interestingly, one of the most capable elastic components in our body is the Achilles tendon. It can shorten and lengthen like a spring, which is how it works in running. And in all jumping movements. And the muscles attached to it, then are your ankle extensors the gastrocnemius and soleus. So pretty cool.
Jeff Hoobler 10:34
Yeah, and I wanted to just touch on a couple of things that you brought up there that I think that are key, one of them was recruitment, your body don't just this goes back to an episode that we had about fiber types, your body's set up in a way that it will recruit the least amount of fibers needed, until the load exceeds what those fibers can do. And then it will recruit more. So when you want to recruit more fibers, you have to either move a heavier load, or move faster. So we start out with slow twitch, and then we go to fast twitch, and so on. The other thing that I wanted to draw out is this term elastic. And I use this a lot. But I don't know that it's necessarily a common term. And one of the things that I like to think about with elastic is this goes back to the activation or the prep and the neuromuscular recruitment, is imagine if you go to your freezer, and you pull out a rubber band that's been in the freezer. Now, naturally, rubber bands are rubber, and they stretch, but it's been in the freezer, it's really cold, when you start moving that thing, you've got to be really gentle. And as it warms up, that elasticity will grow. And so that's one key of elasticity. But the other thing that I think is really important to note is that not only muscles have elasticity, but fascial tissue as elasticity,
Jinger Gottschall 11:57
right? And even more so the tendons that attach to those muscles and the fascia that's surrounding them. So all three of these types of tissue have elasticity.
Jeff Hoobler 12:08
Yeah, we could go down that rabbit hole. But we're note that there are we're affecting more than just a muscle.
Jinger Gottschall 12:14
Let's finish this little definition phase with probably the biggest one, which is just the term strength if you had to define strength, or you wanted to tell our listeners what it means what it could mean to them, what would you say?
Jeff Hoobler 12:29
I'd say strength is producing force, often maximal force to overcome a resistance
Jinger Gottschall 12:35
it for endurance athletes, then what should we be doing?
Jeff Hoobler 12:38
Well, I'm going to steal this phrase from MAC. Okay, it depends.
Jinger Gottschall 12:44
So true, it really does.
Jeff Hoobler 12:46
But in general, we need to overload right body periodically, progressively. And there's different ways to do it. Right, we could do it with bodyweight exercises, right? Time under tension, we can adjust the speed, we could do with isometric exercises, where we're holding a position and we can do it with concentric, where we're shortening the muscle, we can do it with eccentric where we're lengthen your muscle under tension, there's a lot of different ways that we can do it,
Jinger Gottschall 13:14
which is the cool thing, too, in terms of, we have multiple different machines, devices, your own bodyweight a bench. So you're really not limited in terms of the methodology, which is another cool thing. All right, I think now it's time to dig a little bit deeper with respect to a strength training session. And when you go through one of the system workouts in the strength category, you'll notice that it includes these components in order to make it kind of a full from start to finish. So from activation to cooldown workout, let's start with that prep and activation. How are you going to warm us up?
Jeff Hoobler 13:59
As we said, the goal with activation is to prepare for what's coming. One of the ways to do this is to move through the patterns that you're going to use slowly. And with intent to get the nervous system ready, you're gonna go with slow controlled movements, and then gradually speed them up. Generally with the prep for activation, it's a pretty low effort, it's not to failure, you get plenty of recovery time. And essentially, we're just we're, we're pulling that we're pulling that rubber band out of the freezer, and we're just giving it a little time to get warm.
Jinger Gottschall 14:30
I also liked what you said in terms of it's a preview of what is to come at a much lower effort. So utilizing the exercises that you will be doing in the next hour is really helpful in terms of the connection between the brain and this voluntary movement into what you will be doing in the future.
Jeff Hoobler 14:52
Yeah, so next, we mentioned stability as we move through these components of workout. Sometimes they all have these components. We'll be hearing some of them, sometimes not all of them will be here. But in the anatomy of the workout, the next thing would be some stability, right? And these can be part of that prep phase. And they could include corrective movements. Say for instance, you're recovering from an injury. And you have a set
Jinger Gottschall 15:18
where it's asymmetrical, maybe one Yeah, one leg at a time unilateral.
Jeff Hoobler 15:23
There's a lot of different things that you can you can do here, but we want to ingrain good movement patterns.
Jinger Gottschall 15:31
Excellent. I love thinking about quality in this phase, in the stability portion of your training session, it's really important that you have a focus on the moment, and you are paying attention to these little movements, and how you feel during them noticing any asymmetries noticing what muscles are firing, and what you may want to target or improve on later.
Jeff Hoobler 15:59
Yeah, absolutely, that intent is key. And if you're starting to wobble or you're losing stop quality, quality, quality,
Jinger Gottschall 16:06
absolutely.The next phase involves terms that we have defined earlier of explosive, elastic plyometric. And the goal of this is really to amp up the nervous system. And it this will help you improve timing and coordination, we're going to be using that stretch, lengthen our stretch recoil cycle that we talked about. And these sets are shorter, we're talking five to 15 seconds with some full recovery. And it can be weighted, you could be using some light med ball kettlebells, it could be just bodyweight where you're doing plyometrics of any sort with or without a bench. But I just loved the fact that, in my mind, I'm just kind of thinking of these bursts of activity, and it's basically setting the nervous system up for some action,
Jeff Hoobler 17:05
we go back to endurance sports, a lot of times, people think, Oh, I don't need to do anything really fast. Well, that's not true.
Jinger Gottschall 17:13
It's let's think about some instances when this is true, I come from a triathlon background, when you start the swim, and you are literally in a washing machine with hundreds of others around you, you are doing some explosive movements and some using some reaction, when you are sprinting to the finish or in endurance cycling, we see it in tour stages,
Jeff Hoobler 17:36
you come to the end, and somebody has been doing their sprint work or their their pliers or or you know, the explosive movement, and they can spread at the end.
Jinger Gottschall 17:46
Exactly. And it is critical that that first burst, you have the capability to do that fast recruitment,
Jeff Hoobler 17:53
just as you mentioned, gender, there's several ways to do this, you know, whether it's med ball throws against the wall doing rebounds, whether it's using kettlebells, whether it's doing Plyometrics, there's a lot of different ways that you can put this in your program.
Jinger Gottschall 18:08
And that's where some of the creativity and diversity can come in to is challenging the system with different methods, power, power.
Jeff Hoobler 18:20
So, power, let's just back up real quick to the explosive part. Right, this is a precursor to that power, we do this elastic movement, these these explosive movements, and we are calling on all fibers get on deck, because you're gonna get used when we talk about power, again, we're looking at maximal force over time, could be several different movements could be a hex bar squat, it could be a deadlift, it could be a squat, it could be a bench press, you know a lot of different ways to do this. But it's short duration, low reps, full gas, rest,
Jinger Gottschall 19:00
this is the part of the workout, I'm going to be honest, that I get anxious about and then feel incredible after you do have to mentally prepare to give it your all in the short bursts.
Jeff Hoobler 19:14
This is something that's new for a lot of folks. And if you haven't been doing it, just doing small chunks and going back to that intent, making sure that the quality of movement is dialed before we start doing something heavy. That's just right.
Jinger Gottschall 19:32
It's a precursor and required as we move into the last phase of this workout. We're going to focus a little bit more on the strength and the strength endurance component. These are slower, they're more controlled. You want to reach that point where you're like, This is really burning, not sure how many more I can do and taking it to that fatigue and failure level there. recoveries going to be smaller. So we're talking under a minute here, 20 to 40 seconds even. And your number of sets can vary depending on the number of reps that you're doing. So you could do as small as two, you could go up to four. And again, that will depend upon the reps of each previous set, but really going to that point where you're reaching failure,
Jeff Hoobler 20:19
you know, having that intent to focus on. So if you're doing a squat, making sure that your movement is, is dialed, chest is up, your butt is back, you're sitting, you're controlled, and you come out of it with intent. And with focus, and something that you mentioned, you're going to feel that burn. And most people, you're going to want to leave a rep or two on the table, don't go until your quality of movement breaks down when you're doing this. And the more frequently you'll do it, you'll you'll understand where you are with a body like I could do two or three more. I'm gonna stop right here. And being aware of where you are is absolutely key.
Jinger Gottschall 21:02
Yes, I'm going to take this on just a really small tangent, but I want the listeners to appreciate to what Jeff said about intent and quality. And every individual has a different way of evaluating this for themselves. So what I mean is, there are folks who see themselves in the gym mirror, and can see their form, and understand where they are in space, there can be those individuals who need to hear somebody, tell them how to do it. And if that's you, then probably training with a friend or getting a coach or some sort of trainer is going to be helpful, there are folks that need to actually be doing it and feel it to get it right. But understand kind of how you can evaluate that quality for you is also critical in each of these phases. So that was a small tangent, but I do feel important too. In this process.
Jeff Hoobler 21:58
I like that little trip.
Jinger Gottschall 21:59
Okay, thank you. And obviously, we're gonna finish this off with some sort of cooldown.
Jeff Hoobler 22:05
Yeah, you know, this is this is often a place where people just leave it out, right because of their, their time crunch or whatever. But essentially, what we want to do is we want to transition back to a resting state, or a normal function state. So you know, you've, you've done a big workout, you've exhausted muscles, let's bring it back down. And this can be done with a little bit of easy stretching, just some gentle movements similar to what you did in that prep phase, moving slowly, and just letting your heart rate come back down. Heck, you could hop on the treadmill and walk for just a few minutes. So you could jump on a bike and pedal for a few minutes. Just let it come back down to that resting state.
Jinger Gottschall 22:48
Yes, it is your transition from that focus of the workout and going through these various phases to regrouping, letting the breath come back to normal, letting your mind relax a little bit too before you completely end the workout and go back into the world. So that takes us through the phases of a strength training session. Now we're going to talk a little bit more about the considerations and objectives for specifically the endurance athlete, we just went through the components of a strength training session, the various phases, so we went through prep activation, stability, moving into explosive and plyometric followed by power, strength and strength, endurance, and then the cooldown. Now let's move into the considerations and objectives of this session specific to endurance sport,
Jeff Hoobler 23:41
big picture, we want to look at structural integrity, okay, the robustness sort of fatigue resistance, especially for the endurance athlete, because there's just a lot of repetitive motion pattern overload. I think one of the things to keep in mind is that we don't need to do more of the same pattern. So if you're a cyclist, and you go to the gym and you focus on your legs, probably that's not your best spent time. Great point and looking at what keeps your body in position, the postural muscles, that kind of thing is really key. And we know that posture position, affect function, for instance, breathing, right, you're hunched over, you don't breathe properly. So working on the postural muscles, upper back around the ribcage, that kind of thing. A couple other things is that we want to move in multi directional patterns, or remote,
Jinger Gottschall 24:41
which is not the typical movement pattern for an endurance athlete. If you think about running and cycling, this is a sagittal plane extension flexion the entire time so when Jeff was talking about multi directional, it's going laterally also.
Jeff Hoobler 24:59
Oh my god sideways.
Hey, what's that? What's happening. So multi directional multi planar movement is important. Which brings us back to the integration versus isolation. This leads us into low distribution. So what is load distribution, when you go to lift a weight, you put it over your head, how your body handles that load is quite interesting. It spreads that load through the tissue of the body, right, so we do an overhead squat, and your body is going to figure out a way to distribute the load as evenly as possible, so that there is not an overload on one particular area or joint
Jinger Gottschall 25:42
and practice is what helps this. So if you're doing a new movement in the gym, or doing an integrated movement, let's say a squat with an overhead press, which you haven't done before, at first, the slow distribution may not be very efficient, you feel uncoordinated, you may be emphasizing or activating a particular muscle group that's being overloaded. But why you should continue to do that is this load distribution component, and you will actually learn how to distribute it efficiently and get the coordination and the recruitment for it to happen in the most optimal way. And with that, then comes the improvement of the movement patterns. Once we have practiced this load distribution, and become efficient at it, then we have quality movements, and it's always quality over quantity. And we've mentioned this in a couple of different ways throughout this episode, it's not the number of reps that you can do, just do them, it's the number of reps that you can do with quality
Jeff Hoobler 26:50
is more better, no better is better.
Jinger Gottschall 26:52
Thank you. Sometimes I say less is more,
Jeff Hoobler 26:55
less is more.
And then the other thing that, you know, we want to just think about here is that your program needs to be dynamic versus static, we mean this in a couple of different ways. Both in movement, your movement patterns should be dynamic, you should move in multi planes, multi directions, but also you need to be able to pivot and do the correct load intensity
Jinger Gottschall 27:24
in a thoughtful way,
Jeff Hoobler 27:26
in a thoughtful way. So if you can, for instance, if you come in, and you know, you've got this prescribed workout, and you go to do your warmup, and you're just not there today, then you need to be able to make that choice of you know what, I'm just going to do some activation, I'm going to do some stability, and then I'm going to be done. That's it. And that's what I'm talking about being able to expand or contract, the work that you're going to do based on your body's readiness.
Jinger Gottschall 27:53
I love that. So the dynamic portion of what you're talking about in this example, is to be adaptable,
Jeff Hoobler 28:00
adaptable,
Jinger Gottschall 28:01
and I think that is critical. And we bring it up in multiple different ways. And it's being honest with yourself. And being in the moment and realizing what you need at that time.
Jeff Hoobler 28:11
The sessions and phases like that we went through will shrink and expand depending on you know, where you are in your season, your readiness, fatigue, etc. So you may not have all five of those components in a session you might have to and you know, that's totally fine. So be able to self evaluate and make the right call, right.
Jinger Gottschall 28:34
And that basically sums up what we want to tell you about these various phases in the session is be aware of where they can be located within the session, and be flexible in terms of the emphasis of each of the phases depending upon the cycle that you're in for your program. And listen to the body,
Jeff Hoobler 28:58
listen to your body. Brilliant.
So that's going to bring us to the end of this discussion on strength. Next time. In part two of this strength discussion, we'll take a little deeper dive into the details of loaded strength, how to integrate and create an effective program for busy endurance lifestyle.
Jinger Gottschall 29:22
That is it strength training Episode Part One, we hope you're able to take away some useful info on this topic and that will make you a better endurance athlete.