Strength Training (Brief How and Why)

Today's topic I'll touch on Strength Training and its effect on sports performance.

Before we go into the very conventional ways of thinking that….

Strength Training = Lifting heavy weights in the gym repeatedly until you feel pain, follow that by 1 min rest and do that for 'X' number of repetitions…

Lets think about what strength training actually does and how we can leverage on that for sports performance, specifically triathlon.

In summary, proper form of strength training will definitely aid in sports performance, and no elite sportsmen reach the podium without strength training. This is especially true in strength and power based sports (think Power lifting, 100m track sprints and contact sports like wrestling). However, we will learn how it can apply to cardio sports as well.

Like I've always shared, whatever we are doing, when we go down to the lowest level, it is always about muscles flexing and lengthening (yes, everything, even typing this post with my fingers!) and the heart and lung providing oxygen and blood being the medium of providing the needed fuel/nutrients.

So lets put the heart and lung out of the equation and zoom into the muscular aspect first.

What strength training does is that through Progressive Overloading, the muscle fibres will breakdown and reform to perform Specific Adaptation to the amount of load we put on it over a period of time.

In layman terms, Progressive Overloading refers to the amount of resistance, in addition to whatever we can handle currently, that we apply to our muscles.

Specific Adaptation refers to the process of your muscles growing stronger to do a specific movement that you've used to done the Progressive Overloading on.

With that in mind, we must then look further into Sports Specific Performance. Sounds similar to Specific Adaptation right? Because it is where Specificity will come into play.

Our body is made in a way that when you expose it out of a comfort zone, it will learn and it will adapt.

In the most extreme of example, if you have no clean food to eat and clean place to stay, you have to survive by eating cockroaches and live in unhygienic place, over time, your body will adapt and you will SURVIVE AND LIVE ON. That is provided the change is introduced over time in a Progressive manner.

Lets summarize again the points we've gone through so far.
The body will adapt to become better in handling a situation of change. The process of introducing the change, is called Progressive Overloading and the adaptation to the change is called Specific Adaptation.

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In the high level of sports performance, we can't take running as moving the body forward with your legs, and we can't take swimming as just using the arms to sweep through under the water and then your body will move forward as long as it is fairly streamlined.

It is true that we have to increase our arm power and back power so we can have a stronger pull in our swim. But does doing 20 pullups a day translate to a stronger pull in swimming? Or lets ask a more specific question, does the amount of strength that you gain from the adaptation of doing the 20 pullups a day translate FULLY, like 100% into swimming power?

Specific Adaptation states that we will get better at what we do as long as we kept doing it. A lot of people cannot perceive that it is a double edged sword. It is the same reasoning behind practice does NOT make perfect, practicing correctly makes perfect.

In order to get better in our sport, we need to understand the specific movements of each muscle in each specific movement that is required by the sport itself, before we can start training them to apply a higher amount of force in that specific movement.

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Let me digress into strength training movements in gym and their effects so that you gym goers can relate better. Generally we do single joint movements and multi joint movements in the gym with free weights and also machines like the smith machines.

A single joint movement such as dumbbell curls will train your biceps and depending on you do them standing or seated, you also may or may not train your muscles in your core to stand with stability while applying force to lift that dumbbell up with your arm flexion.

Take another single joint movement like your tricep extension (take your dumbbell, extend the arm above the head and start dropping the weight downwards then straighten the arm pressing the dumbbell upwards again), trains your tricep to become stronger in lifting a weight in that position.

So how good are they when we don't usually carry our grocery up and down like you were doing the dumbbell curls? How specific are they to your life? Do you do your swim by constantly flexing your elbows seated or standing and lifting the water up and down like your bicep curls? If not, I don't understand how they are to translate to swimming prowess since the application of force and stabilizer muscles used are completely different.

Multi joint exercises seem to have more benefits because they are more functional. An example like squatting a weight up seems to make more sense in our daily life (sitting on the chair and standing up is a squat). Cycling tend to benefit quite a bit from squats too but are they really that sports specific, I don't think so.

I use squats to help grandma and aunties to regain their ability to climb stairs properly and even stand up from their chairs on their own… But for bike strength and run strength, I rather hit the hills since they overload my muscles in the most specific way my sport requires them to exert force in, as in really cycling and running!

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Strength training does NOT have to come in the gym. It can happen on your bike, it can happen in your run and on the stairs, it can happen in your room and it can even happen when you go through your daily life just by carrying a heavier backpack. So, its time to think out of the box and throw whatever you know about gym training off the mind first.

Lets look back into sports specific performance.

1. To perform running, we need to keep the legs moving and keep the body in a more or less upright position and leaning forward fashion.
   
2. To perform a swim, we need to keep the body in a streamline position while applying force with our core and arms to pull ourselves forward.
   
3. To perform a biking, we need to keep the body in a aerodynamic position while spinning the pedals with force.
   

Do you see a trend? All the sports requires us to hold a position while applying force in a fixed angle repeatedly.

And the muscles that we use to hold that position is generally called stabilizer muscles (of course there are scientific names such as antagonist, fixators and synergies but I'm not here to impress).

Stabilizer muscles are the primary muscles we should take note of while doing strength training because if you cannot keep your body in the position that we need them to be while applying force, we will 1) lose out in streamlining, 2) lose out in aerodynamics, 3) lose out in run efficiency because of non proportionate weight distribution above our legs.

That brings us back to Specificity in strength training. When you do a squat to train your legs, your focus is to train your biking and running strength capacity… and when you do a pullup, you want to increase your swimming power, when you do a tricep press you want to improve your swimming's push phase but consider these:

1. Squat: Does your resistance come from the barbell on your shoulder when you bike?
   
2. Squat: Do you go into your aero position when you do the squat? Elbows on the pad and sitting on a saddle?
   
3. Pullups: Do you swim while hanging upright?
   
4. Tricep extension: Do you really push with your tricep only or do you rotate your core and pull your body forward with an anchor in your EVF?
   
5. Dumbbell curl: Do you swim with your fist clenched or fingers must hold a paddle shape?
   

Doing a pull up requires you to prevent your body from swinging forward and backward in air. Doing a squat require you to straighten your back and push a weight upwards. Doing a lunge require you to stride your legs forward with a weight by your side or a barbell on your shoulder. Specifically, does it help your run and your swim, I'd say no because of the different stabilizer used and also the angle of force application is different.

In summary, strength training in the gym can be done in the base phase of periodization training but once the training goes closer to the event (approx 3-6 months to race depending on distance of event), the strength training should occur specifically in the way you move your body for the event.

Again, why specific to the movement? There is also the phase where by your RELAX your muscles after each pull/stride/pedal… if you do it in the gym, how are you going to replicate the force application phase, timing and relaxation as per specific in the sport's required movement?

My advice to you is if you want to do strength training, study the below list of movements and how they are to be done in gym and think about how to replicate the movements, activating the same stabilizer muscles as you do when you're doing your swim, bike or run before you go and whack yourself with heavy weights. I will touch on the proper forms and also the difference between Training and Using them for performance if there are people who request that.

Just please remember that doing the movements with weight in the gym does not improve performance completely, because we still have the lung and heart aspect that is not covered in specific fashion (aerobic, anaerobic etc etc).

Freestyle Swimming (personally, I find that it is so hard because you can't hover in the air in that swim specific position and lying chest down on a chest means you're stable and you won't activate the core muscles needed like you were in the water:

• Arms:
  
  • Elbow flexion at catch
    
  • Wrist neutral and palm and fingers opened and placed together
    
• Legs
  
  • Straightened but relaxed throughout the whole kick movement
    
  • Slight knee flexion at downbeat of kick
    
  • Hip flexion at kick
    
  • Hip extension at kick
    
  • Plantar flexion at feet (Relax effort at up beat and exertion at down)
    
• Body
  
  • Stabilizing as one piece and isolated from the arm and leg movements
    
  • Ability to rotate from side to side
    
• Shoulder
  
  • Internal rotation at catch
    
  • Depressing of shoulder (opposite of shrugging) before the pull and push phase
    
  • Shoulder flexion when arms extended in front
    
  • Shoulder extension when catch and pull starts
    

Biking (easier to train):

• Arm
  
  • Elbow flexion and Holding the position of aerobar (Specific width to your set up) or your road bar
    
  • Relaxing on that position while holding your core tight
    
• Shoulders
  
  • Holding position of shoulder flexion at 90 degrees
    
• Legs
  
  • While holding a aero position, do the following:
    
    • Knee flexion
      
    • Knee extension
      
    • Hip flexion
      
    • Hip extension
      
    • Dorsi flexion
      
• Body
  
  • Just holding a tight core
    

Running

• Arms
  
  • Elbow flexion
    
• Shoulders
  
  • Swinging of flexed arms (shoulder flexion and shoulder extension)
    
  • Keeping shoulder depressed and prevent shrugging
    
• Legs
  
  • Hip flexion to a specific height and degree required of your swim
    
  • Hip extension
    
  • Knee flexion (when you lift your heels off the floor)
    
  • Feet Dorsi Flexion to neutral plane to the floor
    
  • Repeat in an alternate legged manner
    
• Body
  
  • Keep the torso from swinging from side to side
    
  • Keep torso extended and straight while doing the leg movements
    

Cheers
KK