View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
CTS Coaches Sarah Scozzaro and Nicole Rasmussen go over how to set up a strength program for ultrarunners. We discuss strength training for injury resiliency, performance goals, and health, and discuss tools that you can use to set up your season.
Episode highlights:
(32:01) Programming for performance goals: experience in the gym, addressing weaknesses in strength and power, utilizing gym time while running volume is low, heavier lifts early in the season
(41:59) Scheduling your week: strength training is not rest, hard days hard, easy days easy, stacking strength workouts with high-intensity runs, the most important focus comes first, protect what matters the most.
(1:21:14) General exercises for running: consider the demands of trail and ultra, strengthening relevant muscles, the challenge of addressing this on a podcast, resources in the show notes
Additional resources:
Sarah on Instagram
Successful Physical Therapy for Ultrarunners with Nat Collins DPT CSCS | Koopcast Episode 101
The American Academy of Orthopaedic Manual Physical Therapists
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible
Information on coaching-
www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
CTS Coaches Sarah Scozzaro and Nicole Rasmussen go over how to set up a strength program for ultrarunners. We discuss strength training for injury resiliency, performance goals, and health, and discuss tools that you can use to set up your season.
Episode highlights:
(32:01) Programming for performance goals: experience in the gym, addressing weaknesses in strength and power, utilizing gym time while running volume is low, heavier lifts early in the season
(41:59) Scheduling your week: strength training is not rest, hard days hard, easy days easy, stacking strength workouts with high-intensity runs, the most important focus comes first, protect what matters the most.
(1:21:14) General exercises for running: consider the demands of trail and ultra, strengthening relevant muscles, the challenge of addressing this on a podcast, resources in the show notes
Additional resources:
Sarah on Instagram
Successful Physical Therapy for Ultrarunners with Nat Collins DPT CSCS | Koopcast Episode 101
The American Academy of Orthopaedic Manual Physical Therapists
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible
Information on coaching-
www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Coupecast. As always, I am your humble host, Coach Jason Coupe, and ladies and gentlemen, listeners out there, get ready to get swole after you consume the content on this podcast and put it to good use, because I have a treat for you today. On the podcast, we have our coaches, sarah Scazzaro and Nicole Rasmussen, who work with Ultra Marathon athletes and also have a robust strength training background, and we dive into the weeds and take you through it all. At the end of this podcast, you will have a blueprint for how to arrange your strength training, starting right now in January, and going all the way through your goal event.
Speaker 1:So take out a pen and paper, be sure you are paying attention, and I hope each and every one of you are inspired by this particular conversation that we have with Sarah and Nicole. I'm going to get right out of the way because it is a long one, clocking in at nearly two hours. So here we go. This is my conversation with coaches Sarah Scazzaro and Nicole Rasmussen, all about how to set up your strength training program for the coming year. Let's really get into it now. Enough chit chat about Taylor Swift. Cool, we're going to start about. We're going to talk about strength training. Jesus, I can't even start. Is that okay with you two? We talk about strength training instead of Taylor Swift.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm already going to cut you off Coop. I wanted. I feel like the last time I came on and talked about strength training, you shared this goal about like a deadlift with everyone and I feel like I wouldn't be a good coach. I wasn't holding you accountable and coming back two years later and asking how that goal is going to get.
Speaker 1:Two years seriously it's been a while To repine the listeners and to increase the level of embarrassment. I made Rob Sanders, who was one of the medical physical therapy types of people that we brought into Tim Olsen's Pacific Crest Trail FKT. I made him a bed. That or we made a bet of who would do this thing first. He had to run 50K first. He's not a he's not a runner, he's not an ultra runner, he's a powerlifter. Or I had a deadlift 500 pounds and I definitely got the short end of that stick, but neither of us is I get the more difficult end of that stick. Neither one of us have made good on the bet. However, I'm still making progress. I'm still.
Speaker 1:I don't know, man, we're both, I'd say, equidistant from the finish line. I'm still going strong two days per week like days. Probably need to up it to one more to really do it.
Speaker 2:Proud of you, I had to follow up.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Nicole. Thank you, Nicole, for wasting the listeners' first two minutes on that piece of batter?
Speaker 1:Oh, I don't think that was wasting at all. Okay, so we're at the beginning of the year and I've kind of been I very intentionally scripted the last several podcasts to themes that commonly come up at the early part of the year. So I think, unbeknownst to you two, I recorded with Stephanie Howe just yesterday that'll come out the week before this podcast comes out about weight loss in the early season and kind of throughout the season, something that always comes up. I recorded with a couple of other coaches about how to set your season up. I recorded with Neil about failure, because everybody's processing their previous year and where they did well and where they did poorly, and one of the things that comes up at the beginning of the year you guys all know where I'm going with this is strength training.
Speaker 1:It's the beginning of the year. This is like all the ads for the gyms are in full force right now new year's resolutions, people want to kind of get in there, and then ultra runners and trail runners similarly follow suit where they want to reinvigorate or reincorporate or maybe even go into the gym for the very first time, and so I want to take this podcast kind of with that tact of this is something that somebody might be initially starting to want to plug back into their training. But I kind of asked both of you first, because both of you are in this world to a much greater extent than I am. And, nicole, we can kind of start with you Like maybe you can help describe like how pervasive or maybe even some stories about why this happens or to the extent that it actually happens this time every single year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's definitely something we see every year, but as a strength coach, it's I'm thrilled when this happens right. I feel like I'm seeing an enthusiasm and a curiosity and a willingness for athletes to just be open and excited about strength training that maybe just even a few years ago you didn't see. And you know, when I like first came into the strength and conditioning world 15 years ago, I feel like I spent a quarter of my time trying to convince people that there was value, right, that right, like we would have female athletes tennis players, golfers, cheerleaders, whatever like endurance athletes just, it wasn't as like from their minds like this was for meatheads or this was for you know, it wasn't like something for everyone, it wasn't something for endurance athletes. And I feel like I had to spend so much time like selling it and I don't like get that anymore.
Speaker 2:I feel like athletes come kind of excited, enthusiastic and willing to want to strength train and maybe they don't know what they're doing, maybe they don't know how or why, but they. There's almost like this universal truth that exists out there now that strength training is good for you, right, it's almost like you know, we make the comment, we know now, smoking is bad for your health, when that wasn't the case before. And I think we've had this onslaught of data and research and information of just all the benefits of strength training that didn't exist even a few years ago, and even like our influencers now, right like the availability of data, even though our influencers might give you like a million different ways to do it, they at least agree that strength training is good. We're all in agreement of that, and so I don't know. I've just really appreciated that people are so willing to try, and people are so willing to be excited to get into the gym and to like experiment with something new that might be a little bit different and scary, that they've never done before.
Speaker 1:Sarah, do you want to ping on that?
Speaker 3:I was going to say I agree. I think you know, 10 years ago coaching, you had to try to convince or talk people into like let's try this. And now athletes are coming Like I want to do strength, or when can we start doing strength? Or how do I set strength up in my season? It's not a having to lead them to water. They're already like, have decided it's something they want to do and they already have found some value in it through social media or doing their own research or listening to podcasts, and so I don't find I have to do much convincing. I don't know about Nicole. It's more of like channeling it appropriately with their training.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about the convincing piece in just a second, but before we get into that, my just final input, along the same lines of both what both of you have mentioned in terms of people just want to come to the table. You don't have to create a compelling argument or you don't have to present the value proposition, even though they might not even know it is that, first off, especially the elite athletes are more transparent about their training across the board, 100%, like. They're more transparent about the mind, if we can just like hone in on the endurance side of it. They're more transparent about the mileage they run, where they're running, what workouts they're doing Strava is kind of enabled that and then, as a feature of that, as a feature of that transparency, they're more transparent about the strength training that they're doing, and so that you wouldn't even know, like you wouldn't know, if meb Klip Flasky or somebody you know, some famous marathoner, was doing strength training, unless he, like, gave an interview with the New York Times and they asked him about it. Now, a lot of this stuff is just so publicly available that you see it and other people look at that and they're like, hey, maybe I, if this is good enough for this person that's, you know, winning an Olympic medal or whatever. It might be good enough for me.
Speaker 1:And the other thing and this is where strength training has a leg up on endurance training it's just sexier to watch. And when you have all of these video applications YouTube and Instagram, and TikTok and Nicole, you mentioned the influencer earlier that's really sexy, consumable content for people to like, look at. And so when your eyeballs are being inundated with it and I can open up Instagram right now and half of it is going to be Taylor Swift and the other half is going to be strength training stuff that's pretty even split right there. They've got big. Instagram has got me pegged, but they know that it's catchy content. I guess is what I'm saying. And I think the confluence of both of those the fact that people are just more transparent, especially the elite athletes are more transparent about their training, and we have a lot of apps that are bringing it to the, bringing it to the forefront has kind of reduced this barrier of I don't know what really the barrier is, but people are just more willing to undertake it.
Speaker 1:So the second thing I want to talk about is directly to related to what Nicole just mentioned and this is the value proposition right.
Speaker 1:You mentioned that you had to sell it to people you know, maybe a few years ago or now you don't really have to sell it, but I do think that it's important.
Speaker 1:When we start to talk about strength training for endurance athletes and people who might be coming into strength training either brand new or after a six months of not doing it, which are kind of really common scenarios, I do think that we'd be remiss to not talk about what the general value propositions of them are, because, as both of you kind of realize, as practitioners you can kind of arrange the programming differently based on what the goals of the athlete are. Is it just like any sort of endurance scenario? Somebody training for a 50 K is going to their training is going to look markedly different than somebody training for a 100 mile or a 200 mile. So when you I guess maybe the best frame of reference, nicole, is when you had to create the value proposition, right, what were your talking points? And then maybe you can merge that with now, like what are the value propositions now that you try to get people oriented around that may have different goals?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'll start and Sarah, just interject when you need to. I think with a lot of athletes, it comes down to like three major things right, and we're ultra runners, we put our body through an onslaught day after day, right, like recovery is important, but I think the biggest value proposition that's been well established is that strength training can decrease your chance of injury right, that you're going to be a more durable athlete, that you're going to have more injury resistance. And, when you look at performance, that decreased risk of injury will increase your performance because you have less mistraining days. Right, if you're healthy, you're able to get out and train more days, hence more volume, hence increased performance. I think there's plenty of evidence now that running, or that strength training, can increase running economy. Right, that's one of the.
Speaker 2:Those are like the two big two that I feel like are referenced all the time.
Speaker 2:If you don't know what running economy is, you know we talk about running economy is like your oxygen, your VO2 input, at a given speed that's submaximal.
Speaker 2:So if I'm running on the treadmill seven miles per hour and I'm consuming 25 milliliters of oxygen, and after training and straight training, they've found that I can run at that same speed, and now I'm consuming 20 milliliters of oxygen per minute. Right, and so the idea is that you become more efficient at given submaximal speeds and I heard this once described, where you know, like if running at marathon pace or at 50k pace represents maybe 20% of what your muscles capacity is for force production, and you spend some time increasing your one rep max or increasing your total capacity for force production, now running at marathon pace and now running at 50k pace is like requiring a smaller percentage of what you're capable of, and so you become more efficient. Obviously, that's only true to a certain point, otherwise, the best dead lifters in the world would be the best runners. Right, and so it's true to a point. Right, there's an application there, but it's not like the solve everything for runners. But I don't know.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say, if I could hop in for just a second, I loved how you phrase that injury, not prevention, but like resiliency of what was the term you use there, nicole, it was, I think I said durable, no, yeah, but because I use that a lot too, but it's like we're not worried.
Speaker 3:We can't prevent certain injuries, but just making somebody more resilient to certain injuries that happen with overuse or you know just the demands that are placed on ultra runners, trail and ultra runners, is, I think, a really good component of strength training, because all the squats in the world aren't going to save you from that really funky ankle roll you do. You know, at mile 25 that like you slide off a hit, you know I think that's uncontrollable. But there's a lot you can do for balance and proprioception and strengthening, you know, synergistic muscles that can help with certain movement patterns and imbalances we just see with athletes, and strength training can really kind of shore up those weak points. I guess I should say and I like to use the term durable as well I think of durability as just a human in general, because if you're a more durable human, you're going to be a more durable runner.
Speaker 1:I want to kind of put a little bit of clarity around some of the a few of these things. First off, on the injury prevention side, sarah is trying to count, sarah's trying to couch it a little bit, but I'll take a little bit of a stronger stance. It is really hard when you actually look at the research data and find some sort of correlate Sarah's nodding if you guys aren't watching the YouTube version of this and find a correlation between endurance athletes that strength train and endurance athletes that don't strengthen, in any sort of difference in their injury susceptibility or injury rate, regardless of you're looking at it in terms of the injury rate per thousand hours of training, which is a common way to benchmark it, or days missed per year. And one of the reasons for that is because runners are all runners are injured. You know the stats will go all the way up into the seventies in terms of the percentage of runners that miss a day of training due to some sort of injury. And because of that kind of like proliferation, you it's hard to pinpoint what actually makes a difference. And when we're talking about most running injuries, they tend to be multifactorial, meaning there tends to be a training load error, there tends to be some sort of biomechanics error. There tends to be any, even a nutrition error. Sometimes it's the really random thing. So when you look at it through that lens, it's not. I don't want to present it like it's a hope or a prayer, but you have to understand that just because you strength training doesn't mean that you're bulletproof. We hope that there is some sort of improvement across that entire injury resiliency, continuum and logically that makes sense, right. But if you want to backtrack it to the data, I'm because I know there's going to be people who are listening to this podcast that are going to do that it's a. It is a little bit of a heart, it is a little bit of a hard case to make.
Speaker 1:The similar story is true with running economy, particularly with trail and ultranet. So if you take the road running side, very clear that if you do particularly heavy strength training or plyometric strength training, you get an improvement and running economy, as Nicole mentioned earlier, which is the oxygen consumption at a given at a given speed, which normally translates to an improvement in performance almost on the order of one to one. Maybe it's on the order of like 0.7 to one or 0.75 to one, but it's a tight correlation. You improve running economy. You're typically going to improve performance in the traditional endurance events. That correlation of an improvement in running economy to an improvement in performance is not quite as tightly correlated once you move to the trails and once you go up in distance.
Speaker 1:So the way that I've always the value proposition that I've always put in front of trail and ultra runners with is that if I were coaching an elite marathon runner, I would go to the ends of the earth to improve their running economy through whatever means I could, because it's such a tight correlation between the improvement and running economy and the improvement and performance. And you can improve running economy through nutrition right. Really high carbohydrate diets will improve, will improve running economy. You can do it through strength training, you can do through a whole host of mechanisms and I would take an all of the above approach. Even just regular training will improve running economy.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't go to the ends of the earth with a trail and ultra runner. So we recognize it is important in trail and ultra running but it's not as important as it is in the marathon world. So with those two caveats for the people that want to throw eggs, maybe we've satiated them to a certain extent. But you have these kind of like two what I would call performance goals that really end up in the same. They end up in the same bucket in terms of they actually improve performance. Right, you can somehow improve your training availability and let's just make that the end goal. Right, you're improving trail training availability by some doing something in the strength training room that is going to enable you to run more days.
Speaker 1:Or you're improved and or you're improving your performance by specifically kind of targeting an improvement in running economy. That's not to say that there can't be other goals to go and lift weights. You can have lifestyle goals to go and lift weights If you want to re comp your body, you want to build muscle, you want to build your beach pecs or whatever it is, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely. If you have a vanity goal, right, not to make it sound too bad. But if you have a vanity goal for being in the weight room, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you make that a parrot, that is your goal.
Speaker 1:So my question to you guys first and then we'll break it down kind of by category is when you ultimately sift through the value proposition for the athlete and where they sit in this matrix of improving performance, maybe improving lifestyle or whatever, is the programming actually different based on those goals? And it seems like like a simple question, but I think we need to get that out of the way first, because we're going to talk about programming a little bit later and, sarah, we'll start with you on this one Is that programming actually different for somebody like me, who I'm just worried about my beach pecs versus an elite athlete who you're doing the strength training program for a lot of my elite athletes Like. Is that programming going to be different?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. If Coop wants to get his beach body on, and there's going to be the programming, we're going to be going for hypertrophy, what we're going to be doing and how we design that, it's going to look different for someone who's going to be maybe going for a strength and power goal. Sometimes they overlap the exercise selection may not very much, but the actual reps and sets and rest will. So you can be doing a squat if you've got aesthetic goals and you can be doing a squat if you've got more durable goals or just increasing power. But how we set that up, where we coach the other exercises around that, how often we do that, what we do in support of that, will look different.
Speaker 1:Sarah, do you want to? I mean, this is really your wheelhouse. As the injury side of things, I'm trying to steer away from saying injury prevention because Resiliency We'll use that, we'll use resiliency. Does that even look different from a more power performance goal? I want to just try to improve running economy, or want to try to improve my running speed or whatever. If somebody comes and says, listen, I'm always having ITBM problems, I'm always having Achilles tendinopathy or something like that, does that add a wrinkle into the programming side of it as well?
Speaker 3:I don't look at it as a wrinkle, I look at it as a fun challenge. Yes, it does. So if somebody's been cleared to train and they've maybe seen physical therapy and they're the physical therapist is like off, you go into the wilderness. But they know they have this history of a certain injury that comes up when they hit a certain mileage or a certain duration or a certain point in their training. I'm going to load that person's training, I'm going to program so that I'm doing things in the weight room that I know will address typical imbalances or typical weaknesses that are associated with those problems.
Speaker 3:I'm not diagnosing it, I'm not treating it, but I can say, hey, we know that typically if someone has a lot of ITBM problems, here are some of the causation, here are some of the things that attribute to that. What can we do in the weight room to address that? If I'm say, someone's going for just a hypertrophy goal, we're not looking at performance, we're not looking at how well you move, we're looking at how well you look. I'm not going to be as concerned about is your right hip as strong as your left hip. I'm saying, if we're going for straight aesthetics, like you said earlier, you can what I like to train for aesthetics. I like my body.
Speaker 1:There's nothing wrong with that, like, just admit it. Just admit it, I'm very open about that.
Speaker 3:I like my butt and back better when I live, and no shame. But at certain points in my training year, what I'm addressing and what I'm focusing on is going to look different, based on what I'm targeting, where our focus lies. If someone is in the early season, they're like I don't have a race for 10 months, I have got a high school reunion coming up. I want to look amazing, like I want to put on some muscle. Ok, we're going to work on certain things and then, as we get more into a season, we'll be addressing other things. Potentially, if it's a time issue, I'd love to address it all.
Speaker 1:Nicole jump in here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I want to expand upon a couple of things you said there, because I think that this conversation lays the foundation for kind of where we're going next, which is how do I train? Right, like, and before you can say, how do I train, how many sets and reps, and exercise selection, what should that look like? You have to come down to and understand that, like Sarah said, there's all these different elements of performance that kind of all fall underneath strength, right, or all of these elements of performance that we are going to work on in the weight room. And if you're new and you walk into the weight room and you're confused because people are doing all kinds of different things, like this is kind of why, right. So I kind of want to like set the table in this way and that Sarah mentioned hypertrophy, right, if hypertrophy is the cross-sectional area of a muscle fiber or the cross-sectional area of the muscle, and so right, it's like all about size, it's all about your muscle mass. It's also there's a component of leanness and if we were to look at these different elements of performance, hypertrophy being the first that we're doing here, there's a model out there for how to optimally train that element, and the model for hypertrophy are bodybuilding athletes, right, these are the best athletes in the world at muscle mass, and so if hypertrophy is the goal and we're looking at bodybuilders as our model, there is a certain number of sets, reps and exercise selection that these athletes are focused on. Right, and these are probably the biggest athletes in the weight room, but they're not necessarily the strongest. There's no consideration for function. It is all about physique and shape and leanness, right, and so if that's your goal, that's fine. But realize that, like when you ask the question, how do I train? Bodybuilders are kind of our A standard for hypertrophy.
Speaker 2:If our element of performance that we're interested in is strength, remember, strength is like your one rep max is kind of the measure of strength. It's how much total force production can you produce one time. Now, our model for the strongest athletes in the world are really our power lifters, which, if I know that's confusing we're calling it power, but there's really no power element to what they're doing, right. So power lifters are in there. They're focused on three lifts the deadlift, the bench, the squat. It's very controlled movement. It's minimal rate. They set themselves up in like these positions, so that's a minimal range of motion. There's really no power involved, even though we call it power lifting, but like this, these power lifters are our model for how to train. One rep max right? Like this is kind of in terms of sets, reps, exercise selection, within the same umbrella of elements of performance. If we talk about power, remember power is a combination of your force, production, times, velocity, so it's how much can you move and how quickly can you move it? We'll give us the greatest number of power or the greatest amount of power, right? So power requires explosive velocity.
Speaker 2:Our model of how to train in this is our Olympic lifters or weight lifters, right? So these are the athletes. The best in the world, the most powerful athletes in the world are doing Olympic lifts like a snatch and a clean and jerk right, and those type of athletes operate under a certain number of sets, reps and exercise selection. And I'm sorry this is sounding repetitive, but I'm trying to make a point to lay the table that you know, as we said, we have speed and power and hypertrophy. We also have, sorry, strength, power, hypertrophy. We also have speed, right, and this is the highest velocity at which you can propel your body through space.
Speaker 2:Right, it's your locomotive optimization and our model of excellence or our best athletes in the world at doing that are like track and field sprinters right, and they train in a certain way certain sets, reps and exercise selection right. And so you know, when we look at performance and we think about what our goals are, and it doesn't really matter if we're an elite runner who's trying to become great at ultra running at a mountain endurance event, or if you're someone who is in your 50s and you're looking down the barrel of your life and you know you have 40 more years to live and you're trying to optimize your longevity like. None of us are going to be half as good as these models of excellence in each of these categories right. But that doesn't mean that we want a little bit of each of those things, right.
Speaker 2:To use Coop's analogy, if you put them all on a string and you lift one, it's going to lift the others, right. If you work on hypertrophy, you're going to get a little stronger. You work on power, it's going to increase your right. They all are connected and working on one will raise them all. But you have to come back to and look at the demands of your event as a runner and be like which of these things matters and which of these things has the most impact. If I'm going to spend time in the weight room and I only have two to three hours a week, how do I utilize my time in the best way and make sure that I'm training within the sets, reps and exercise selection? For what matters to me the one I didn't mention in there that is also a big element of performance for ultra runners is muscle endurance, and I'm specifically not including it in this conversation because maybe this is my own argument, but I don't think you should train muscle endurance in the weight room, right?
Speaker 1:We've talked about this on the podcast. We can talk about that later when we get into the programming side.
Speaker 2:for sure, yeah, we can get into it. But muscle endurance comes down to how long can you sustain a muscle contraction, and this is a really broad right. Muscle endurance for 100K, an event that's going to last 10 hours of continued muscle contractions, is different than muscle endurance for a BK athlete who's going to be out there for an hour at a higher muscle production or force production, but a shorter amount of time. So that muscle endurance category is a little bit broader, it's a little more nuanced and it's trained in a different way in terms of how we do it.
Speaker 2:But I would say that's not something we try to tackle in the weight room. That's something that we would train while running in other ways, but I don't know. So maybe that sets the table as we go into the next thing that when you think about, do I want to be able to lift my grandkids up and play with my grandkids when I'm old? Do I want to be able to chop wood in the backyard? Do I want to look good in my swimsuit this summer? Realize that the answer to how to train for those things you have to come back to that model of excellence and how the athletes work on each of those specific things in terms of power, strength, hypertrophy, because the things get muddled when you and I think runners and endurance athletes do this more than any other population in the weight room is that we're trying to do too many things with one, with one like hammer if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:And you have to really. If you're going to train strength, you do it the right way, and if you're going to train power, you do it the right way.
Speaker 1:So Nicole, your model of excellence is a great flow chart to work with, and I think the way that the listeners can think about it is that Ronnie Coleman, who is a champion bodybuilder, probably one of the most prolific bodybuilders of our time, is a much different athlete than Meb Koflesky, and I'm sorry I'm only using dudes with this, but they were probably one of the more recognizable and polar opposite types of athletes. Their strength training programs are going to obviously be very different, as are the physical outcomes of those strength training programs. And then you can kind of start to slice it even further, which you were, which you're doing very well, nicole where you even take what we would look at as big athletes power lifters versus bodybuilders they're going to have a different programming and a different athletic requirement. Olympic lifters versus power lifters are going to have a different programming and a different athletic requirement. Endurance athletes and sprinters have a different programming and a different requirement. So it all comes down to goals. So I promise the listeners that we're going to get down to like brass tacks here, right, and we're.
Speaker 1:So we're going to take the endurance sphere and specifically the ultramarathon sphere, and we're going to kind of come up with a couple of use cases, right? So our first use case is the athlete that comes in with little or no injury considerations, which we're a few and far in between we're going to start. We're going to start with maybe the most fictitious athletes Little or no injury considerations and I'm doing this intentionally because I'm trying to create a little bit of separation between the programming Little if no injury considerations and they have a performance lens. I want to use strength training in order to improve my performance. That's going to be our initial construct. I want everybody to get that person in their mind if they know somebody that is very rarely, if ever, injured. They don't want to use strength training predominantly for this injury prevention type of proposition. They want to use it purely from a. I'm going to improve my running performance using this as an adjunctive training mode, strength training very specifically as an adjunctive training mode.
Speaker 1:So let's set this up from a high level first, right, when we get down to the very end of the season, after we've gone through all of the strength training, what should that goal of the strength training be Like? What should the outcome be compared to where they started? And then, how do we actually like, logically, get there? I know that's a really loaded question. I'm going to give Sarah, though, the softball here, because, as I mentioned earlier, you do the programming for a number of my elite athletes who are in this exact or similar position. Right, maybe they have a little higher injury prevention requirement to their programming. But my point with that is is it's a little bit more top of mind for you, since you and I've been going through it. So take the listeners through your thought process based on that idealistic situation of an athlete that never gets in your journey. You only want to improve their performance. Like what are you thinking about and how do you start to like work down the programming?
Speaker 3:So you mean this magical unicorn of a human being?
Speaker 1:Hey, come on, they're out there, they're out there.
Speaker 3:So first question would be and this is taking me out of the fact that, yes, I'm programming for your elites If this is another coach who working with an athlete, does this person have weight training experience? Have they ever done any weight training? So a lot of the elites we work with have, whether they did it in college, whether they've done it with another trainer, a lot of them do have more experience in the weight room. Some people are not injury prone, have not had any injury history. They've just run a lot and they've never really gone into the gym. They're about as rare as the magical unicorn have never been injured, but they do exist.
Speaker 3:So first and foremost is like what kind of experience do you have in the gym? Do you already strength train? Have you strength train? Maybe it's been 10 years since college, but do you have a level of being comfortable in the gym?
Speaker 1:You're meeting them where they're at. You're meeting them where they're at. You're meeting them where they're at.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like do you know how to squat, deadlift, lunges, those movements like kind of just getting an assessment of someone's kind of movement pattern history, where they're at From there, what I'm liking to do is please stop following me, but it's hard when you say no injury history.
Speaker 1:I know we'll get into that in a second.
Speaker 3:Because a lot of that we work on early but if someone does an injury and it's early, we'll say late post season, early season.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got nine or 12 months to work with.
Speaker 3:Big races over with. Where were they lacking? Where were their holes from the previous season in terms of strength and power? Do we have any areas we know we can try to shore up that they were feeling. Maybe they didn't feel like they had a certain area here. Also, this is when they're going to be the least amount of taxation from their running programming, meaning they're going to have less volume. Most likely at this point you might be having them do some intensity, but their volume is not going to be as high as it will be middle to end of season Near their big races. So we have a lot more time we can utilize in the gym. That's going to have less of a cost at their running, which means we can focus on the heavier lifts. We can focus on the power and the strength. The longer rests, the fewer reps and sets. We can do that well more sets, less reps than we'd want to do a month out from Western States or UTMB.
Speaker 1:So it's heavier early is kind of what you're getting out from a set of recommendations, with a lot of these athletes with their prime moves that's what we're doing, and then we're doing the kind of supportive accessory moves as you've seen.
Speaker 3:So again, this is someone that has gym literacy and no injury and can you give the listeners a little bit of a sense of the exercise selection yeah, so this case, like Nicole was talking about earlier, if we're going for like strength and power, I'm not doing ideal coach powerlifting. I'm not a powerlifting coach, so I don't program anything like that. It's really hard, it's really hard and I feel like most coaches, if you're going to be good at it, you're doing it in person.
Speaker 3:There are so many things that need to be done in person 3D eyes on an athlete, so I am not the coach that's going to be doing those types of programming moves. I would recommend, if an athlete, if they have an interest in that work with a coach, one-on-one, or if they have an extensive history of that type of Olympic lifting not powerlifting, olympic lifting In terms of a lot of the other movements. We're doing squats, we're doing deadlifts, we're doing rows, we're doing lunges, but we're doing them heavier weight and I'm just like I'm setting the season. I want them strong in the beginning. What's the set?
Speaker 1:rep combination for a heavier weight and like, if you want to calibrate it to like percentage of one rep, max or a rep and reserve like, give that kind of contact as well. I always like to leave one or two reps.
Speaker 3:I'm not going to failure with this rep set. It's usually, unless you're doing a one rep, one rep max testing. I'm usually looking at three to five reps, three to five sets. So you might be doing a five by five, occasionally do a four, occasionally do a four by six. You might be doing a three by five when we're starting up and building and rest is going to be at least 90 seconds to two minutes, sometimes longer, upwards of three minutes, depending on the where we're at in the programming and you are super setting those in most cases. So I'm not going to be having someone do a five by five squat, I'm going to be doing something right next to that. That's we're focusing on that. You'll see there are super sets within the programming but I'm not having them do like five by five squats and immediately hit their five by five deadlift in the same session.
Speaker 1:What about doing a super set where it's legs, arms or arms legs?
Speaker 3:I do that, but I generally keep the primary exercise. In most, not all, cases We'll focus on the warmup, the pre movement kind of getting everything online, getting the kind of movement patterns going, do the big lift and then we start separate super setting down the line the rest of the session.
Speaker 1:And how long is that type of strength training session going to take? What's the time cost so people can internalize the, the part of the value proposition, as we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it depends on how most people 45 to 60 minutes it depends on how much those other sets you get at the bottom Cause sometimes you know we work with some elites where they're like I have all the time in the world. Just because you have the time doesn't mean you just throw work at them just to fill time. It has to have a purpose. You know we're not like great. You can spend four hours in the gym, excellent, and it's why are we picking the exercises. But in most of those cases I'd say closer to 60 minute with a proper warmup and getting into the exercises. 45 to 60 minutes is in general what most of my athletes are doing.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's if they're actually taking the rest. Yeah, let's reorient. Well, endurance athletes are notorious for up to 90 seconds rest. I'm going to do it on 60 seconds 30 seconds.
Speaker 3:30 seconds, yeah, I'm the best.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's reorient really quick. And then I want Nicole to add any context that she can cut, that she can come in with. So we're still working with the athlete prototype with little if any injury consideration. That has a performance lens early in the season. It's big compound movements from an exercise selection squats, deadlifts, lunges, reverse lunges, Bulgarian split squats, that kind of stuff. Right Five by five heavy weights on 90 seconds rest. You want to add any context?
Speaker 3:to that, sarah. Minimum 90 seconds rest.
Speaker 1:Minimum 90 seconds.
Speaker 3:Okay, so I'm going to add a little bit of you know, three by threes and three by you know, such like that, like the lower, the heavier weight you're lifting, the longer the rest are going to want to take. In this case, I will also say this is not a lever eye pull in terms of heavy strength only in the off season?
Speaker 3:Yep, okay, so we do it in the off season, but it can happen in the season as well, depending on the athlete, where their race is, where we are this is not something that I touch 10 months out.
Speaker 1:Okay, we'll talk about how it goes throughout the season, but this is still, once again, to have everybody have the right orientation. This is still what we're calling the early season, and people can divide early, mid late however they want to, based on their prep time. But this is it's kind of the first thing, right? First thing that you're doing early, far enough away from the race and things like that. I neglected one critical component.
Speaker 3:Days per week.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Nicole I knew. I was the way. Why don't you expound on the frequency?
Speaker 2:Oh, did you ask me?
Speaker 1:Sorry, I couldn't hear. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so early season three days a week is great. Two to three days a week early season. I was just going to expand a little bit on what Sarah said.
Speaker 1:Before you get there. Before you get there since you already got the two to three days per week, why not one and why not five?
Speaker 2:So with a runner who's trying to increase a little speed and power, we don't need to be the most powerful, we don't need to be the strongest, but we're trying to optimize speed and power for a runner without impacting too much of their running. Three days a week seems to be a good sweet spot in the early season to get enough of a robust result and adaptation and also not push us into too much volume, to where it's turning into a hypertrophy type of a program.
Speaker 3:Also, I will add to that Nicole, who, as most of my programming, is full body. You know that three days a week, full body some people will look to a pitch pull or upper, lower split, and that's when you start to get into those more hypertrophic four days a week plus five days a week, but most of the work is gonna be full body.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I that's the part, too, that I just wanted to explain for people is that you know there's a way to set up your week. You could do upper, lower, upper lower. You could do back, shoulders, legs, like I like, and it sounds like we have the same philosophy that, like a full body split, a full body either one, two or three days a week works well for runners because it keeps us from doing too much volume. But it also, like most of our athletes, have jobs and hobbies and if you end up missing one session a week, right, like maybe something happened, sit kid, they miss one. It doesn't throw off the whole week, right, they don't end up having too much upper body work or it just keeps things balanced. So I love that for our busy athletes. If you end up missing one, you still got those two in that week and you still hit your full body two times.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you answered the why not five, so let's go back to the other one why not one?
Speaker 2:It seems like one is a like minimal dose. Okay, Maintain what you've done. You can't really make a lot of gains on one day per week and so if I have an athlete doing one day per week it's because now we've progressed into the very late season in those final weeks and that peak volume of running and they just are completely taxed. The running is taking up so much time and we're just trying to maintain the strength that we've done at that point in the late season. So it's just not enough to get a robust adaptation and to be progressing.
Speaker 1:Okay, I've got one more point of clarification on the frequency side of thing and then you get to your point, Nicole, if you can actually remember it after all of this interruption by your humble host. So the next part of it, Sarah, and I throw it back to you so Nicole can recombobulate here. Is there any consideration for when those two to three days per week in the weight room actually happen? Can they happen on consecutive days? Do you want to do them on a rest day? Do you want to do them on long run? Do you want to do them after a run? Before the run? What are the rules of thumb there that you want to deploy?
Speaker 3:My rules of thumb and the rules of thumb that I see that are most successful is, I like, not on rest day. Strength training is not rest. It can be a non-running day, but we don't call a rest day. A strength day is not a rest day, just gonna say it Correct, correct.
Speaker 3:I prefer your hard days hard and your easy days easy Meaning. If we can, I prefer your strength days to be on the more if you're gonna be in intensity, if you're, if it's early enough season. They might not be doing any intensity at this point, they might be like I'm just cruising with my friends, I'm skiing a lot, I'm just having a ball. But if they're in specific programming, if you're already starting that work and we're in an intensity phase, I would like your strength days, as much as possible, to be on those intensity things so that your easy days are truly easy.
Speaker 1:Before the intensity run or before the intensity. You're after the intensity.
Speaker 3:Which do we do, lifting before or after?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So if it's early season, my golden rule is you always do first the thing that you're trying to improve. So if somebody is in the off season and they're like I want to get stronger and more powerful in the gym or I have an aesthetic goal and the strength is my focus for these next two or three months, your strength will be first.
Speaker 1:So you give me permission to deadlift before I go run.
Speaker 3:Yeah, running is not the focus. Yeah, I'll give you full permission.
Speaker 1:The point is is what's the focus?
Speaker 3:The focus should be first, what's the focus You're trying to maximize? What do you want to be freshest for? What are you trying to improve? And in most runners it's going to be their running. Especially when we start to get into the season, or if it's technically early season and there are structure and workouts and you are working on improving some aspect of your running, then I want your strength to come after you're running. I want the most primary exercise or modality to come first.
Speaker 1:All right, nicole, that's enough Go ahead, nicole, your chop with the bid here so.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna come up by saying do the thing that is the most important when you are the most fresh. So, following a rest day, the most critical run session, followed by strength, right and separate your strength training as far away from the next hard thing that you deem the most important, which, for most runners, will be the next hard intensity session.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Programmatically, I like explaining that, I like using that explanation. Better is, you're trying to protect the thing that matters the most. So if the thing that is the most important is whatever interval workout, you wanna protect that by giving as much recovery in advance of that as possible and then you can set up the programming after that. Now I'm gonna add the purely pragmatic point of view here. For all the normal athletes out there that are taking their kids to school and soccer practice and they're on the PTA board and all this other stuff Like sometimes this picture perfect program that was a hard alliteration. Picture perfect programming.
Speaker 1:You just can't make it work in reality.
Speaker 1:You got a strength training when you can get to the gym and maybe it's on your route home from work or school or whatever errands you're running and things like that.
Speaker 1:That's not to say that it's bad or counterproductive, but you might have load considerations when you're thinking about how much you're lifting, how much you're running and all of these other things. You can make it work in an unideal situation and I think what Nicole and Sarah were trying to say is start with this ideal framework of protecting the thing that matters the most and then, if you can't get into the picture perfect, ideal scenario, move it away and then realize that maybe you just run a little bit easier, Maybe your intervals are compromised a little bit, Maybe you take off 10% of the weight that you're doing because of whatever fatigue. That's kind of like going on that's. I don't wanna scare people off that they have to have this perfect timing and things like that to get these things done. Nothing is ever perfect. Training is never perfect, and we just try to get it as close to perfect as possible as coaches by creating the right patterning a lot of times.
Speaker 3:And I think that's a lot of the benefit of working with a coach, though that understands this is that helping? Or if somebody doesn't have research and listening to this podcast is it's never gonna be perfect, but how can we fit it as ideally in your situation as in an individual situation as possible, what will work for you? Because the best program in the world it doesn't work for someone isn't the best program If they can't make it work.
Speaker 1:Yep, 100% Yep. A program is better than no program.
Speaker 2:Okay, good.
Speaker 1:Something's better than nothing. All right, cliches aside. So we're done with the early season programming. We gotta move this along a little bit. Let's get into you guys can call it whatever you want to, your own vocabulary can rule here the next part.
Speaker 1:After the early season, we've gone through this five by five heavy lifting type of phase. What is after that and I'm gonna add a little bit of the context on the running side of things that in some way, shape or form, the running starts to take a little bit more priority. So if we work it back from a very pragmatic, a practical scenario, you have an athlete that is training for an event that's in July or August and they just start strength training in January, which is when this podcast will come out into January. They've gone through this initial part of the process of January, february, maybe the early part of March, where they're just kind of gathering their senses, so to speak. From a run perspective, april and May are gonna be pretty important training months for a race that's in July or August.
Speaker 1:I put gold stars next to those when I'm doing my long range planning with athletes, that those become a higher priority. So with that as a backdrop, what is the next part of the phase, and I'm gonna once again pick on Sarah to go first this time, because Nicole mentioned the last part in the earlier part of the dialogue. So we'll go back to Nicole to start for the last part. So, sarah, you get to start on this part of it.
Speaker 3:We need little buzzers. This is when, if someone is doing something that you consider, if somebody is doing three days a week, this is when we might start going down to two days a week because the running is taking. So that's just something to keep in mind. Maybe you've been rocking and rolling and doing three days a week with no problem. Everything is getting along fine. But now the running is getting a little more hot and heavy, a little more serious. So this might be the time that you start having that. Your strength training is starting to have an impact on your quality of your run sessions and how can we adjust that accordingly? So that's something to consider. If you've been doing three days, if you've been doing two days, hopefully the programming is such that you can continue to do that, because that would be great.
Speaker 3:I don't think going down to one day in most cases is appropriate at this point, but every individual is unique. I'd like to keep with two full body days At this stage personally. There might still be one or two lifts where we can go a little bit more heavy, but I tend to get not. I agree with Nicole 100% that we don't really train endurance in the weight room. It doesn't transfer that specificity. I look at more endurance of, like the time under tension with the loading and the percentage of the max that we're doing. So maybe like that 70 to 75 one max At this point in the season if let's say previously been working on more of that five by five or four by six or heavier weights, fewer sets, longer rest At this point I'd be getting closer to introducing more of that six to 12 rep, closer to that eight to 12 rep for most of my athletes.
Speaker 3:Three to four sets is what I'm looking at and usually about 45 to 60 seconds of rest. In most cases I'm still doing squats. In most cases I'm still doing a variation of a deadlift and again, there are variations. So maybe we're not doing a heavy back squat or a heavy barbell deadlift but maybe we're transitioning to heavier kettlebell work or a single leg work, things like that, and we weren't just focusing on as much in the beginning, but we're still focusing on strength and some more I like to think of like world strength and power. That's gonna transfer onto the trail. So it's not powerlifting, it's not Olympic lifting, nothing about what I use, the term strength and power that's not what I'm referring to, but just that being able to have that time under tension with multiple reps without getting into that endurance range.
Speaker 1:Do you change any of the like the speed cues when you're changing the set rep combinations? Because you remember in the first part I kind of asked you to define the intensity as a percentage of one rep maximum, or a rep and reserve or kind of the two kind of common ways to do it. But you can also give a speed cue to it, either to slow the movement down or to speed it up. So are you manipulating that at all during this phase as well?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I refer to that as tempo. In the strength world it's the tempo If we're not talking about like speed, velocity, but in terms of like, is it a three second lower, two second pause, one second return to start, things like that? Yes, that is something you can manipulate as well and pull that lever on utilize.
Speaker 1:And what's the manipulation? Is it faster, slower, faster on the eccentric piece, lower on the eccentric piece? Like I'm gonna pin you down for specificity here, I like to do early.
Speaker 3:I like to do less. I'm not focusing as much on the speed right now. I want, I'm under tension, I like to really get that eccentric loading. I like in that concentric loading and that pause, and then when I progress, that's when I'm gonna focus a little bit more speed. So I do more like the three, two, one tempos.
Speaker 1:So three seconds in the eccentric phase and then three seconds in the concentric phase.
Speaker 3:And then like a three second. So we're talking about a Bulgarian split squat for a big example three second lower, two second pause, one second return.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, got it, so it's quicker. On the concentric phase.
Speaker 3:Quicker on the concentric, slower on the eccentric, which could well. We'll talk about how that can be used later.
Speaker 1:Nicole wait, summarize the set rep combination and then any variations in the exercise selection for our mid season. That's what I'm gonna.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna incorporate the vocabulary for the mid season, part In general, my approach is getting more into that six to 12, but generally, technically, six to 12 is in this range, but I focus more on eight to 12. Six is getting kind of early season to me. 45 to 60 seconds rep rest the more reps this is a very broad rule the shorter the rest. So if you're doing eight reps, you're gonna have 60 seconds rest. If you're doing 12 reps, you're doing 45 seconds.
Speaker 1:How many sets?
Speaker 3:Three to four. Three to four okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool, Nicole. Do you have any caveats?
Speaker 2:In general from the early season to the mid season. In the early season the intensity is high, meaning the weight, but the volume is low, yes, and if you move towards the mid season it sounds like it's becoming more moderate volume and moderate intensity, kind of like a sweet spot Right, exactly, exactly, yeah, I would do the same In terms of volume and intensity.
Speaker 2:Good, I wanted to make a comment on the exercise selection, because I think we have really similar philosophies. Right, full body split, couple days a week, multi-joint compound movements. So you mentioned and this is great right, you want a squat movement, you want a hinge movement, you want to push, you want to pull. I think sometimes it's helpful to think about two within those movements. If you're programming this for yourself or for another athlete, is that thinking about that? We want to be moving within three different planes? Right, we have our frontal plane, our sagittal plane, our transverse plane and be thinking, okay, we have our push, pull, hinge and squat. We have our four primary movements that we're going to hit each day. But then think, am I moving within a plane where I'm going up and down? Am I moving in a plane where I'm pushing something away from me and towards me, like a bench or a row, and am I moving laterally in some way? Right, because I think that's just part of a well-rounded exercise selection. When you think about which exercises you want to do.
Speaker 2:I think there's a component to, if you're lifting two days a week, of trying to make sure there's balance between a bilateral movement and a unilateral movement. So if on Monday you're doing a deadlift, which is a bilateral, two-legged movement, and that's your primary squat exercise, then on day two you might want to think about how could I make this a single leg more of like a lunge or a split squat, right? It's just thinking through that, like everything, the whole block doesn't have to be a barbell variation, right? If I'm doing a bench press one day for my primary push, then on the other day I might think about doing a dumbbell overhead or a dumbbell incline, right? So it's a different variation. It requires more single arm or single leg strength. I don't know, and that's maybe I'm overcomplicating it, but I think that's like a well-rounded athlete is that we're paying attention to. If my hinge was an RDL, then maybe on day two it's a single leg RDL, right. And so, like, make sure you're doing single leg, unilateral, mixed in with some of those big primary movements.
Speaker 3:I don't think you're over thinking it. I don't think you're overthinking it at all. We look at like hinge squat, push, pull or anti-rotation, if you wanna look at that, and I agree with you 100%, it's exactly what I do. We might do a heavier squat on, say, a Monday the variation and maybe a heavier deadlift or a deadlift a Wednesday. But I will have a squat component on that Wednesday, but it will be maybe a Bulgarian split squat or some side of front lunge or a step up or something. That's gonna give you that unilateral. And I think that's so important to train posterior and anterior chain and lower body and upper body movements with both bilateral and unilateral work, because bilateral you can focus a lot on the strength. With unilateral you're getting its own set of benefits from that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's true for your exercise selection. Whether it's early, mid or late season, it's thinking about your exercise selection in that way. So if you got it and I like to think about, oh, go ahead.
Speaker 1:So if you have, let's just say you're setting up your programming to be Monday, Wednesday, friday, right, and you have a set of five exercises on Monday. You're keeping those same five, the categories of each, to go to Wednesday, but the individual exercises might change across three or four, maybe even all five of them to be something similar.
Speaker 3:Yes, the variation, absolutely. So the movement patterns don't change. If you're doing full body, the variation within the exercise of that movement pattern will.
Speaker 1:What do you find, sarah, when people move from the previous phase to this phase, is the difference in weight when they're comparing the same movement. So let's just say they're doing a prototypical back squat or prototypical deadlift. They're moving from this five by five construction to something where they're doing eight to 12 reps, like how much weight do they need to take off?
Speaker 3:So that's an interesting question. They will need to decrease the weights in order to not go to failure and leave one or two good reps in the tank, but hopefully we've gotten stronger off the last set.
Speaker 3:So they might be starting with a weight for this new round that was their heavy weight at the start of their first round. Right, I mean, that's our hope is that we've gotten stronger. So it might involve doing I don't advise many people doing a one rep max. There's a lot of other ways you can figure that out the functionality of it, the time, the cost involved of recovery and to do it. Is it necessarily? You know the return on investment in terms of the time. Make sure you're it's like a good kind of like when we do functional for any threshold tests. Sometimes you just get good data from the workouts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. The workout data always comes, the test really well under a certain controlled environment.
Speaker 3:The metrics and data you get back aren't the best anyways.
Speaker 1:OK. So now we've got the first two components set up and, nicole this is where I'm going to put you on the spot we're getting into the last part of training. So remember our prototype We've got an athlete. That's training. That's starting in January. That's training for a race. It's in July and August. The early part of the season January, february, march is what Sarah had initially described. What we now just described is like March and April and May of strength training. March and April. Sarah is at an accurate encapsulation of this mid, what I'm going to call mid season. If you want to give it a different timeframe, please feel free to. Now, before we move on to the next piece.
Speaker 3:No, I think that's fairly appropriate. We're going with like a July race.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly that would be appropriate. So now we move into like the last eight weeks and I know that there's tapering considerations and things like that let's shove those into the corner right and maybe we have a separate dialogue around what goes on during a taper. But it's certainly people are trying to do training camps, right, they're trying to get on the course and do recon. They might be figuring out what they're.
Speaker 1:Training all of it, all this time in the sauna Time in the sauna. They're figuring out in a. There's much consternation around their longest, long run and all this kind of stuff. Right, this is like a panic type of time for a lot of athletes this last eight weeks. So what is that part of the training? What is that part of the strength training programming? If you have an athlete for this entirety right, this is a good amount of time to have an athlete for eight to nine months. What is that part of the training process look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that we're going to continue to follow the principle in which Sarah was laying out from the start where, in general, as we move from early season to late season, the intensity of the lifting and the frequency of the lifting and maybe the volume of the lifting is trending lower as we get further down into the season and that complements the high volume running that happens in the late season.
Speaker 2:So you know Sarah talked about maybe in the mid season we have moderate volume and we have moderate sets and reps in terms of volume and intensity. So as we move into the late season, that's going to continue to trend towards lower values, right. So this is a good time of year where we're still emphasizing strength, we're still emphasizing a similar exercise selection type, but the frequency might come down to one day a week instead of two, right. If the amount of sets might come down to two sets instead of three to four that we were doing in the mid season, right. The intensity or the amount of load that we're putting into the sets might come from 70% to 80%, and it's going to be different for every athlete. But you do have to think about what matters most at this point in the season and what's the most important, and make sure that you're putting your time and emphasis into those things.
Speaker 1:Okay, I have a challenge question slash point of vocabulary for you that I've always had an issue with in my coaching career. Is this maintenance from a strength perspective meaning are you actually gaining something functional that would improve the outcome of the race during these last eight weeks? Or is the proposition you're just trying to hold on to everything that you just did for dear life so that it's not deteriorating, and sometimes that's a reasonable the lack of deterioration is kind of a reasonable training proposition. You don't want to get into that from an endurance perspective, but sometimes this just is what it is. And I'm going to tag on to this question after the answer. That will make the articulation of the question a little bit more crystal clear. So I wanted to get your perspective on that first, Nicole. Like, is this a true strength maintenance phase or is there still some gains to be gleaned?
Speaker 2:I think at this point in the season, if we've come down to this frequency and we come down to this low of a volume, then like, yeah, it is a little bit like holding on to that, right.
Speaker 2:But like, as a coach, I want my athlete to be the strongest at the point of their event, right, like I want them to be at their best fitness and like their best everything at that point.
Speaker 2:And so that, to me, is a reason why you don't completely take it out, right, you don't.
Speaker 2:And really, like we're making an argument that like we bring the volume down, we bring the frequency down and that's enough to maintain, or that, and then maybe there's something to be gleaned there, but it's going to take a lot of work. But you could also structure it the completely other way in terms of maybe this is when an athlete is doing their actually absolutely heaviest loads, but you're doing sets of three or less, because you could do it either way. The point is you're bringing the volume down closest to the event and during your peak volume. And so you could make an argument the complete other way that you know you come in, you warm up and your working sets are two, are singles and doubles, but they're heavy, the intensity is really high and really, from an athlete's standpoint, if you've experienced that type of training, that's not that taxing and that's not going to hurt the running that much. So I think as long as your volume is coming down, you can structure it either way.
Speaker 1:So the orientation of my question and I know both of you have experienced this is a lot of athletes will come to the table and they just don't want to let them go. They don't want to lift during this time for a whole host of reasons, but the primary catalyst is the training volume is just so high and they don't want to kind of like compromise that and I've always been curious to strength training professionals about this aspect of if that is the proposition for whatever reason the coach wants to and I know coaches that actually intentionally programmed this they removed the strength training entirely for the last eight weeks and I'm not saying that I'm advocating for that. Is it do it or the athlete wants to do it? For kind of whatever reason? Do you even started in the first place? You know, like, is that enough of a deterioration? Remember, we're talking eight weeks?
Speaker 1:Is this last part of the phase that if you stop strength training entirely, why go through that? Is there? Is it reasonable to think that? Why would I even go through it in the first place Because that's such a long period of time to detrain? We all know what detraining looks like from a strength training perspective. That's very well studied. So I'm going to come back to you, nicole, again. Like, is one day per week? This like minimum viable proposition that you're putting in front of the athletes? Is this something that, from a efficacy standpoint, when you talk about the entire their strength training program, something that, yeah, you know what, if you want to, if you want to strength train in order to improve performance that was the original proposition that we started to talk about. Do you need to continue it through all of the training process, all the way up until the very last week of your goal event?
Speaker 2:I think you do, cause, even though it's one day a week and it's minimal dose, it's enough, right, like all of our strength training governing boards, right, would agree that like that is enough to still have a measurable adaptation that matters. And so, and I think when you make the argument of like, well, if it's eight weeks with nothing, did what I do in the early and mid season matter? That's like saying, well, I started training, my run training, in January, but does the only thing that matter the last eight weeks? Right, it's this, like it does.
Speaker 1:But, I wouldn't take away the run training in the last eight weeks. Right, nobody would do that, like that. That's the, that's kind of the. I think that's the better analogy is if, like, yeah, you had it, you have a race in August. Yeah, you had a kick ass June, but you know what, july and August you don't need to train, you don't need to do any run, like nobody would do that. That's preposterous. You would only do that if, like, you got injured or you had your back against the wall or whatever.
Speaker 1:But yet people think about doing that from a strength training perspective. That's the analogy that I'm trying to bring up and what I'm trying to, what I'm trying to learn, more than anything else, you guys being the experts in the room. Is that somehow deleterious to the specific work that you are trying to do? Right, we have to have this specific performance outcome in mind. Does that in any way, shape or form, either wholly or partially, unwind some of all of the work that they've carved out their time to do, if you stop strength training for six or eight weeks?
Speaker 1:It's an interesting question because you know a lot of athletes are kind of going through that and mainly going through it from the standpoint of let's just take a week, right. If I go through Monday through Saturday and I have a three day training weekend Friday, saturday, sunday I'm not going to want to live to lift hard on Wednesday, right, because that's going to affect or sorry, I'm not going to want to lift hard on Thursday because that's going to affect my training block Friday, saturday and Sunday. I go into the next week and my legs are effed because I just did a really hard, a really hard training or I did a really hard training block. So Monday and Tuesday are probably screwed. I need some quality on Wednesday from a running perspective, and I guess the point that I'm trying to make is the opportunity to actually strength train gets pinched down during these times and that leads a lot of athletes to go. You know what? I just screw it. I did all my freaking deadlifts in March.
Speaker 3:I I look at it as coaches. I know we often don't like to use the word maintaining.
Speaker 3:We're always trying to get better right and we, our coaches, we talk about this, we don't maintain we're improving, but I think having that conversation of if you're improving the running, there's nothing wrong with having a maintenance one day a week. Strength Is it makes sense in the programming. And then that's another topic I think of. If they're so trashed after their strength training, I see that as a programming as well Exercise selection, volume, rest, how much, how many exercises are they doing? Are they? Are you having them do six superset? I mean, are they spending two hours in the gym? Are you brushing them? Are you focusing way too much on areas that they're already hitting and getting really sati with all their running?
Speaker 3:Should we be doing more maintenance, like balance and proprioception and like a smaller, less stressful type movements, versus hitting really heavy weight for the individual?
Speaker 3:You know Nicole mentioned, if we reduce our volume, there's no reason you can't do some heavier weights, some heavier loading, especially for an athlete that's responding well to it throughout the season. But not everybody will, and so we need to look at both our exercise selection and our programming and also give ourselves permission that if one day a week is maintenance and we have built all this strength, I'm willing to maintain it one day a week during this period of time, so that I'm not starting over when my race is over. Air quotes starting over yeah, and I also like to think of it as like the cumulative effect. Just like training, the VO2 max work we do early in the season is not for nothing. At the end of the season that is improving our fitness and we are building off of that. So everything below that rises that tide rises everything because we've gotten fitter. The strength training we do in the early season, the stronger we get in the earlier season, the stronger our tendons and our ligaments and our muscles. That carries throughout the whole season.
Speaker 1:So I guess my point is like all right, let me try to rephrase what both of you two have said. It's okay to bring it down to one day per week. If you had to go zero days per week, it's probably not for not. There's probably a little bit of retention that you're going to get throughout that timeframe, but certainly not as good from a performance perspective If you can just do this minimal dose. Add a caveat to that, Sarah, If you're going to roll your eyes at me, you might as well. I'm not rolling my eyes at you.
Speaker 3:I'm looking up at the ceiling, I'm racking my brain, I'm trying to articulate myself. We know how good at this I am. No, it was not an eye roll. No, I don't think that you can say that there will be zero performance loss over eight weeks if you just full stop strength training at May and your races in August or June in your races in August. If you.
Speaker 1:I meant it would go to zero. Sorry, maybe I didn't say that, like the gains that you made if you made a hundred percent right gains, if you took those eight weeks off at, what I was trying to articulate is it doesn't go to zero at that point. Not that there is zero deterioration.
Speaker 3:Okay, got you. It does not go to zero. Yeah, I think that in most cases, if someone wants to continue strength training, there is a way to make it work, even if it's one day a week. Yeah, but some people don't want to.
Speaker 1:Like I said, I run it.
Speaker 1:I mean pragmatically and from a.
Speaker 1:In my coaching experience, I run into this all the time where everybody in January, their Instagram feed is filled up with people in the gym and they want to jump on the bandwagon, and I make sure I remind them.
Speaker 1:If you want to do this from a performance perspective, let's make sure remember last July when you were doing all this volume and things like that we need to carve out one day per week to do it. That's kind of like my bargaining chip right there, and not that I'll completely squash it if the answer is I don't want to do it, but I just make sure that it's a part of the that. It's kind of a part of the conversation that in an ideal world, from a performance perspective, we want to be able to do something almost 12 months throughout the year, if not 12 months throughout the year. We're going to undulate the volume and intensity, just like with anything else, but in order to really reap all the benefit that you're trying to create, heck, yeah, you want to do it during high volume training period. You're just taking the spotlight off of it.
Speaker 3:I think there's also something to be said about just the health benefits of strength training outside of running as well, especially for women in perimenopausal and postmenopausal women. There's so much value there that I feel like it should be something that is kept year round as best as we can make it. Yes, it has to work around the running goals and our performance there, but I feel like there is a way to make it work because it has so much value and so many health benefits that it just isn't something that should be just left on the cutting floor for like half the population.
Speaker 1:Well, in a lot of ways. Let me ask you this directly, sarah would you take run programming off for the strength training program for that athlete? I mean, obviously they're probably not in like an elite type of context right when the run side of it has to be optimized. You're obviously optimizing for health and you can make the argument that you're always optimizing for health for an athlete. We'll put that aside. But in those cases, because you work with runners and you work with other people's runners, like myself on the strength training capacity, and you work with athletes where you're kind of doing both sides of the programming for that specific population group, where does the push and shove go Like? Are you shoving some of the run training to do more strength training?
Speaker 3:Oh, I'm not shoving. Yeah, no, a good point Early see. I like two to three days a week for most people as we get into the ladder of the season, especially with women. I have a history of osteopenia. I think we've talked about that before. I had bone density issues. Strength training is very important to me. It is not something I will ever sacrifice for me personally, for my running. My goals are not my athlete's goals, but I think we need to look at that lens of how else can we make someone more durable? How can this also translate to other health, that maybe having that second or third day, if someone's goals are to improve their bone density and be healthier, at the expense, potentially at a certain points of their training, of one less run day expense?
Speaker 1:I mean, once again, I think that's a realistic trade off. This is why I was trying to come up with the case scenarios first, because I knew we would go off the rails and start talking about all these other things. No, it's totally fine, all these other things that we can kind of get back at. Let's circle back so that we have a coherent dialogue here. And I'm not dismissing this part of strength training before all the perian post-menopausal women start sending me hate mail. I'm definitely not dismissing that. I'm just trying to create a coherent dialogue here and try to stay on task Focus. Yeah, focus, exactly.
Speaker 1:So we're still in the scenario where it's a performance outcome. We've got eight months to train. We're in these last two months. That's really quickly encapsulate what the last two months look like. And, nicole, I'll let you give the high line view, since you articulated earlier in just a couple of sentences and then we'll move on to how does this programming change when there is an injury consideration? And Sarah, you're going to be on the hot seat for that one. Just to let you kind of orient your thoughts really quick. So, nicole, give a quick encapsulation of the peeking phase of the process. Okay, I feel like I did this.
Speaker 2:You want me to repeat it? Yeah, just really quick.
Speaker 1:two sentences Okay. Set rep, frequency, intensity.
Speaker 2:really quick, late season peeking competition season final eight weeks of the season. Frequency of the lifting can come down to one to two days per week. Your set range is a little bit higher maybe eight to 15, because your intensity is going to be closer to 65 to 75% and you're looking at two to three sets. Perfect, that's all we needed See how easy that was.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you, nicole.
Speaker 3:Now we're going to open the can of worms.
Speaker 1:We might have to breeze through this a little bit, at the risk of accuracy and thoroughness maybe not at accuracy, but maybe thoroughness. Injury considerations there are a lot of people that want to strength train as a way to become more durable. They're in their mind what their frame of reference is going to be. I can somehow prevent either injury globally or an injury specifically. I always have something going on with my pithelotendant right or some other very specific injury, and this is your wheelhouse, sarah. Like you hear this all the time. I've got, you know, an athlete.
Speaker 1:Maybe there's a little bit of a performance context, but we're going to get more performance Just by not having to sit on the sidelines for a week. Right, that's the lowest hanging fruit, right there. We're going to do something from a programming perspective to address that. This is hard to stylize. I'm going to help you out with this a little bit, sarah, because every injury, especially with the exercise selection, is going to be different and it's hard to provide that prescription in a podcast format. It's hard enough to do it virtually, but it's even really hard to do. I can't believe you're asking her this question.
Speaker 1:She can handle it, she's a big girl. She's a big girl. I like her asking.
Speaker 2:Sarah.
Speaker 3:Oh, you're next. You guys are good.
Speaker 1:You can handle it, but I want to. I at least want to leave the listeners with some sort of toolkit to come away with. Hey, listen, if I have this side of the strength training goals that I want to deploy throughout the year, how do I even go about and start? And you don't even like, if the programming piece of it is later, go ahead and put the programming piece of it later, like how it? When the athletes come to you just take it from your own practitioner perspective, sarah when they come to you and say I always have injury, x, y, z, what are the steps that you start to go through in your mind? That will then dictate the, the, the, the will then dictate the programming, and then we'll get into what the programming might actually look like. So, first and foremost, again, we're operating within scope of practice.
Speaker 3:I always ask have this diagnosis and have they had CTT Work on this before? Because oftentimes they're just like well, I think this is the thing it's like, but is it the thing?
Speaker 3:You know, and or oftentimes, they'd be like yep, I've gone to PT multiple times for patellar tendonitis or IT band or plantar fessiatis or whatever it may be, and I haven't had to go for years. But I know this is something I worry about, how, when I hit X amount of hours per week or this, just tends to happen. So that is a component of it of making sure we're staying within our scope, because we are coaches, not physical therapists. So I have to say that because I think that's important, because physical therapists will listen to this and they'll be like oh wait, you know you can't and we're not.
Speaker 3:But if someone comes to me or they're saying I always have this issue or I've noticed this imbalance or this weakness I know we're going to talk about programming in a second, but I look at it as like, okay, what is their gym experience, their gym literacy? What exercises can we do that we know strengthen or shore up those areas that tend to lead to those issues or imbalance. What can we address? We're going to be having them strength train any ways. So what can we include as part of the package? Is two birds one stone? So, for instance, someone who has a left side weakness or a right, you know when it comes to right or left side. Yes, I will have squats, yes, I will have certain movements, but I'm going to focus a lot on unilateral work, because that's going to be really important. It's important for most of us, anyways, let's be honest but for someone like that's going to be more important for me to kind of create less of an imbalance, to kind of address that.
Speaker 1:And are you substituting the exercise selection that we had talked about earlier push, pull, hinge type of stuff with this, or you're adding it to the entire exercise set?
Speaker 3:Most of these are those movement patterns, just different variations of it. So, whether it's the way we're loading the body, it's the way we're doing unilateral versus bilateral, because a lunge is, of course, unilateral, but there's variations of squats where you can create more balance on one side than the other. There's also how you can hold the weight, how you can load the weight. Then there are certain things we add on. I've got my main bulk of exercises. I will write for somebody and you've seen it. We'll have certain lifts and then, near the end, these are the mobility or the little exercises that are just kind of the icing on the cake for this particular individual with their history of training or injury. These are the things that I think they would benefit. So I've got all these tools, I've got all these crayons in my crayon box and these are gonna paint the prettiest picture for this athlete, these particular colors, because I know that'll fit what they need.
Speaker 1:And so here's what the listeners are going through. I guarantee you is I have X. How do I figure out the exercise that is going to help me with X? What color of crayon?
Speaker 1:do I need for my particular situation. Is there any like you have an eye for this because you've done it for so long and you're skilled and trained in it. But are there resources or is there something that an athlete can go to help them navigate that other than hiring Sarah Scazzaro to do their or somebody local to do their programming? Or is the alternative? Everybody should do clam shells or whatever else. That is the exercise Monster.
Speaker 1:Bandwoks, the exercise digiora on Instagram or whatever you get what I'm going like. How does somebody navigate it if they know what it is? Are there resources that they can go to?
Speaker 3:So that's a great question. Oftentimes, if it's, they know what it is. If it's looking for actual treatment, that is going to be physical therapy, now we're like, yeah, I know I tend to have this issue or I have that issue. I like to think it well. I recommend working with a professional, or do a lot of research and doing a lot of look for NSEA trainers, look for credentialed people that will help you. Follow people that give good information. Ask the questions, but don't try to be your own doctor if you don't know what's going on.
Speaker 3:Work with a professional, especially if they can get eyes on you, or very good with virtual kind of consults, because oftentimes you're thinking it's your left hip, when it really it might be your right shoulder or your right foot, and so you're going to be chasing the tail of a dragon that's not even connected to what you're actually dealing with. And so that's one aspect. For general athletes that are like I want to be more durable. I occasionally get IT band problems, but generally I'm pretty healthy. Think about the demands of running. It's a repetitive single leg sport. Trail and ultra running is going to be making a lot of demands globally, rotationally, posturally, all those things. What can you do in the weight room? It's not the same thing as running, but how can you strengthen all those little muscles and all those things that build up that unit to help offset that?
Speaker 1:It's tricky, I guess. So this is almost impossible to do in a podcast because there's just so many variations of it. I'm going to leave in the show notes to help people that want to learn more. Two resources One are the podcasts that I've done with the physical therapists that I go to in Nat Collins and just Collayman. They're both fantastic. They're located here in Colorado Springs and I've got to. I send my athletes to them because I trust them.
Speaker 1:But the other one since I realize everybody can't come to Colorado Springs is the Find a Fellow website from the American Academy of Orthopedic Manual Physical Therapist. I'm so glad I got that whole acronym out In one take, but basically it's a resource to where you can find a physical therapist that has this certification in your area. Now, not all great physical therapists have this, but it's at least a good initial screening tool to use if you're trying to navigate the entire landscape of who do I go to and where's a good practitioner and things like that. I think with those two we've got a pretty decent basis to move from. Nicole, do you have anything to add to this very specific injury piece? And realizing once again that it's a little bit of an impossible proposition to try to describe this from on a podcast. But do you want to jump in with anything?
Speaker 2:I think sometimes when an athlete comes forward and it's like I always have this issue, I always have A, b or C. Like Sarah said, it's maybe not my job to diagnose, it's maybe not my job to prescribe the corrective exercise is specific to that situation. But that doesn't mean, as a coach, that I can't zoom the lens out and look at an athlete through their movement patterns, through the whole kinetic chain, and see if we can cast a wide net that might help the situation. So, for an example, an optimal performing or moving body our bodies are a kinetic chain and so sometimes if someone's always having a knee issue, it's not really related to the knee. It might be related to the hip above or below it, right, or it might be related to the muscle group above or below it. Or, same thing, if they're having hamstring issue, it might be related to something above or below. And so from a coaching perspective, it's okay to like have a little bit of training with mobility and stability so that you can look at an athlete's overhead squat position or pushup position and you can really easily look at some of these key movements and determine your lumbar stability is really bad, like you can't hold a good postural position through a pushup, or right like your overhead squat, mobility is struggling, like I can see that you're lacking ankle mobility or hip mobility just by looking at an overhead squat and so, even though I don't know why your hamstring is hurting, like sometimes some of those movements, if we can look at the whole kinetic chain, can give us a clue as to like something we might do to help.
Speaker 2:So you know, like, in our body to be functioning well, we have alternating joints that should be mobile and stable, right Like. So if we start at the bottom of the chain, at the ankle, your ankle should have good mobility and if you move up the chain to the knee, the next joint up the chain, we're alternating, remember I said mobile and stable joint. So the knee should be very stable. If we move up the kinetic chain, your hip should be mobile. If you move up the chain, your lumbar spine should be stable. Your thoracic spine should be mobile right, your scapula should be stable, but your glenohumeral joint should be mobile.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, there's alternating pattern of mobile and stable and sometimes and I'm not saying this is like gonna solve everything, but sometimes like we can look at a movement pattern, see where someone is lacking and then work on some of those things through mobility and stability exercises, and it may or may not solve the issue, but it casts a wide net over something, a deficiency that I can clearly see. And it's not easy and it's not guaranteed and it's not even there's not even evidence that the corrective exercises really are gonna help with injury, but like. But it doesn't mean that there's not like benefit there or that you might be able to solve the problem in that way.
Speaker 1:Go ahead sir.
Speaker 3:I agree completely, Nicole. It's like I was saying earlier if you're gonna have them do certain strength movements and you notice certain areas of imbalance or weakness, why wouldn't you program an exercise that can help with that? Anyways, Like, exactly that doesn't mean you can't program. It doesn't mean you can't cast that net to try to give this athlete the tools to work on these things.
Speaker 1:That's what I, that's the issue I've always had with the really narrowly defined small movements that get over prescribed is that you really don't know. One, is there a deficiency there and are you targeting the right thing? And then two, is the exercise actually doing what you say it is? And I just brought up clamshells, so I'll pick on clamshells again. Just go do a squat.
Speaker 3:My biggest. I don't know if you guys Just activate your glutes, it'll solve everything.
Speaker 1:Activate your glutes, it'll solve everything.
Speaker 3:The biggest pet peeve I have I don't know if you guys have seen and listeners have seen on Instagram or social media right now is those posts of you started doing X and now you no longer have back pain or knee pain. They're like selling it as like same thing, though that Brenner's will say it's like that was the monster band forever and you know, in the rightest situations you're like a good monster band, but that's not gonna solve your problems. Create world peace and end famine.
Speaker 1:Okay we're gonna give. I promise you guys, I give you 10 minutes for a rant at the end of this, or what not to do. Nicole and I had a whole podcast on this. I'll leave Lincoln to show notes to that one. We'll give 10 minutes for that, but I wanna reserve five minutes for another practical element, since we already kind of touched on.
Speaker 1:This is so, sarah, one of the things that you mentioned that you size up right from the onset is are they gym literate, right? There are a lot of athletes out there that want their form checked. They don't know if they're doing a squat correctly. They don't know if they're doing a deadlift correctly. They don't know if you know, should they have their knee go over their toe, or should it be two inches over the toe, or should they be able to see their foot or whatever? Are there resources that we can point athletes out to, where they can at least look at an analog of somebody or something that is doing an exercise correctly and then try to take that analog into the gym with them? How would you counsel athletes around? We'll start with Sarah and then we'll go to Nicole on this one how would you counsel athletes on that area in terms of these form checks that we like and you guys like to do as professionals, but the athletes might be kind of under resourced in this area.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there are good sites. I look for the credentials at the NSEA. There are, you know. They've got libraries. You've got websites that have those. I love.
Speaker 3:Find somebody, if you have the resources, find somebody that can do a form check, whether it's just one session in the gym, one session in the gym with a trainer. I do form checks virtually. I am very confident in that. I've been doing this for over 20 years. However, not everybody is, and you also.
Speaker 3:I will say that even though I do it and I'm very confident, there's something that you can get from somebody in person with you that you just can't get virtually. They might see something that I can't see from a certain angle that they can then help you with. So that's important. But I also use there's sites like Trainerize and PT Distinction that have banks of videos that people can join and use and look up a squat and it'll demonstrate a squat and give a good. You know queuing for that. So there are resources out there. I would vet your influencer as well. Maybe this will be a rant for later, but there are some good ones out there. There really are. But you know you have to be careful. So that's why some of the sites that are more. This is what they do, versus what they're trying to just sell a product on Instagram for a service.
Speaker 1:I look at. Here's my filter. I'll fully admit this. I look at who you like on Instagram.
Speaker 3:Me.
Speaker 1:Yeah if I'm getting fed stuff because you know how it'll say oh blah, blah, blah. Whoever you actually follow like this. That is one clue that I'm like okay, this person might know what they're doing because Sarah approves. I don't know how discerning you are in doling out your likes, but I use that as part of admittedly cheekedly, I use that as a little part of my filter. And you see Taylor Swift on that yeah, you like all those so discerning it all.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I mean that though. I mean you start to kind of get, you start to know a network of people that aren't just pushing products or pushing certain things, but they actually take the time to break, form down. They have the experience and the credentials they're actually working with athletes, not, you know that's important and yeah, so those are resources that I like to use, and a good old textbook. I mean, it's not the same as a video, but you can get a lot from some of the classic textbooks.
Speaker 1:Nicole, you have anything to add there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, like Sarah, I'll ask an athlete to send me a video and then what I find works well is to reply with. I really like Carl Engelman's book. I think, coop, you put me onto this one. It's the whiteboard daily guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really great, it's digital and so you can take screenshots of whatever like cue I'm wanting to give the athlete. There's a cue but then it also breaks down like a little diagram of what that form check or what that form change, how it looks right and how it looks wrong. It's like illustrated and so I'll shoot those back to an athlete. I like California Strength as a YouTube video that they're Olympic lifters and power lifters and, like I said, if you're learning form on some of these big multi-joint, higher risk exercises like squat and deadlift, like we go to the best in the world because they're gonna explain it the best. So I like them for that.
Speaker 1:Whiteboard daily is a really good one. I'll link all these up in the show notes, but if you wanted to start with one, start with that. It has a lot of Olympic lift programming in it, so you have to filter through the advanced stuff if you don't want that. But they have fantastic resources on just the basics and you can't beat the stick figure illustrations. They're the best, they're the best.
Speaker 3:I mean honestly, like that format of doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, clear and concise.
Speaker 1:And it's consistent too. That's what I've always appreciated about their content is, even though those stick figures and for those of you that are not familiar with this Instagram account, they've kind of carved this niche out by demonstrating different lifts and also how coaches can cue lifts using stick figures Very basic stick figures that always have the same size foot and always have this the hip, look exactly the same and they use the same little PVC pipe for this joint. It's a very consistent product and if you look at it enough, because of that consistency, there's a lot of value. There's a lot of value in it. So a shout out to those guys it's a great account in their digital book Nicole, that you mentioned is fantastic as well. I point athletes to that out, to that, who have questions on it. That's usually one of the first places that I go. Okay, I promised it.
Speaker 1:Now we're gonna get to it. You guys can have the floor for a rant and I'll set the stage for what it's gonna be. What do you want people to stop doing? Think about it for a second. I'm gonna go last because I've got four things, and so that way, if two of you take two of my things, I still have one pink left over, nicole. We're gonna go with you. First, though, what would you wish people would stop doing? Could be something that we mentioned or something that you saw on Instagram today.
Speaker 2:Crossfit? No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 1:Well, that's almost taken care of.
Speaker 3:I mean oh, that's usually my tip, no.
Speaker 2:I'm kidding. They are great athletes and they are great well-rounded. They rely on lots of metabolic systems. They are great athletes. I don't mean to hate on those great athletes, I don't know. I think sometimes I want athletes to stop Googling. Strength training for runners.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Actually, that's actually pretty pertinent, because the search engine optimization is bumping things up that are just popular, essentially, versus the things that are effective.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I did this recently because I was curious. But the things that pop up to the top, I don't know, and maybe this is a greater conversation of. We talked earlier about vetting your influencers or having some sort of a standard at which you can tell if an influencer is worth following. I don't know. A good program is individualized to you and a good program progresses. There's progressive overload, so it's going to change over time. There's either going to be increased weight, increased reps.
Speaker 2:The exercises are going to change every several weeks and I feel like when people just are Googling, you're getting all kinds. It's just all over the board the exercise selection, the sets and the reps, the recommendations in terms of what runners should and shouldn't be doing. There's not a lot of commonality and I don't know. We gave some good resources today and we talked about some good ways to educate yourself and learn more about how to do this right. Take some time to make sure that your program is individualized to the goals that you have and that it's going to help you progress. You're not going to stagnate with this one routine that you do over and over again.
Speaker 1:One vote for the or throwing out all the generic programs. That was actually one of the things that I had, so I told you true to form, you guys are probably going to Sarah's going to take the other one. So, sarah, I bet you will. I bet you will.
Speaker 3:Oh no, I mentioned it earlier. Don't think one specific exercise is going to solve your problems, like it's a well-rounded whole body approach. I also can I name more than one.
Speaker 1:Go, yeah, do it.
Speaker 3:I want people to be a stop-freight of lifting heavy, okay, and I think we're getting away from that. I'm seeing more people that are like, especially women that are wanting to lift heavy. But like, stop being afraid of lifting heavy and seek out the people that will help you and try to get out of your own way, of being afraid of your own body and moving like learn, build a foundation. It's not a rush job. Stop thinking it's going to happen overnight. Take the time to learn it properly and you can build an incredibly strong foundation.
Speaker 1:You can keep going.
Speaker 3:I mean I could, but your turn. Let's see what you've got to come back.
Speaker 1:Mine we touched on it earlier is trying to work on your endurance in the weight room yeah, work on your endurance when you've got your frigging running shoes on. Yeah, Work on your outside and work on your strength when you're in the weight room. Keep those two things separate. And the manifestation of this is in the form of doing two minutes of step ups, four minutes of lunges, these kind of like timed circuit endurance, strength training. Sometimes they're even branded.
Speaker 1:People go out of their ways to, like you know, call them by their last name or kind of whatever. Those types of things. While they might be clever and interesting to do, they violate all of the laws of everything that we just talked about Individualization, progressive overload, training for the specific demands of the sport, training for the specific physiological or physical demands of what you're trying to impose. Those things violate all of those like wholeheartedly. So I just wish, I just hope that we just stop going in the weight room and looking at the clock and going okay, I'm going to do two minutes of lunges, I'm going to do two minutes of whatever to try to improve endurance, because we're an endurance athlete. You're going to improve endurance enough by going and running for an hour or two hours or five hours.
Speaker 3:Absolutely why. And to piggyback on that like, why would you be building endurance in the gym? Why would you be doing like hit work? If we're talking from a performance for running, you're getting all the cardiovascular work you need when you're out on the trails or on the treadmill or the road or wherever you're running. You're not getting that adaptation from two minutes of burpees or lunges or step ups. That's not going to do it. So stop trying to make your strength sessions cardio session.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it being strong. Another wrong with that at all. All right, I'm glad we ended on that note because that was fun. I hope everybody has a toolkit to work with after going through. This is a good podcast. We're going at two hours right now. After it was all said and done, I will leave links in the show notes to everything that we had just talked about. Nicole and Sarah. Thank you guys for coming on. I learned a little bit. I always learn a little bit when I get on the podcast with you two. You're just so incredible with what you do. Nicole, do you want people to follow you on social media?
Speaker 2:No, it's my kids. Okay, so don't follow Nicole. Maybe someday.
Speaker 1:Okay, maybe someday. Sarah has a kick ass Instagram account where she does a great job going through some of the programming stuff. We talked about exercise selection and how hard that is to communicate. Sarah is one of the people that I take cues off of and I'm like I'm going to try that next time that I'm in the gym. So, Sarah, where can people find you?
Speaker 3:My first name, my last name SarahSkazaro.
Speaker 1:Nobody can spell Skazaro. I know SCO Z-C-A-R-O, so you can find it in the show notes. Just click the link at the bottom of the podcast player and you'll be able to find Sarah on Instagram. She actually is. You actually are a really good follow. You do a great job with that content, thank you guys for coming on.
Speaker 3:I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. We'll see you in the next podcast.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye, bye-bye, all right, folks. There you have it, there you go. That was a big one. I hope everybody took all of that content in, guarantee you this is going to be one of the more popular episodes that I have had, because anytime we mentioned strength training it always bumps into like the top 5% of any of the podcasts that I produce. Much thanks to coaches Nicole and Sarah for coming on the podcast today and sharing some of their wisdom.
Speaker 1:If you have been keeping track, over the course of the last several podcasts I have been featuring a number of our coaches and that is with intent. I know many of you are trying to set up your season for 2024. The lotteries have transpired and you're looking at this proposition of what do I actually do with my training and, in this particular case, with this podcast, we talked about what to do with your strength training and I wanted to feature our CTS coaches because I want you to take into consideration bringing on one of them to help guide your training process for the coming years. Yes, there's a lot of valuable information in these podcasts and you can always DIY it yourself. However, the best way to make the most out of your hard-earned time is to bring in a professional to craft the process.
Speaker 1:Each and every single one of our coaches is a dedicated professional. I spend a lot of personal time developing and mentoring them, but as you can see with the last several podcasts is they're all fantastic and they teach me a lot about how to be a better coach as well. So if you want to get started on the process, all you have to do is click the link in the show notes, which is trainrightcom, or you can send me a direct message and I will work with our Athlete Services team to find the solution that is best for you and that is personalized for your experience and your goals. I hope you guys go and check it out. That is it for today, folks, and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.