Strength Training Mistakes and How to Fix Them with Nicole Rasmussen | Koopcast Episode 117

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop and i'm psyched everybody is here with me today anytime i get to talk about strength training with one of our coaches or somebody out there in the space it always generates a whole lot of interest and so i wanted to bring on the podcast today one of our cts coaches nicole rasmussen who works with some of our trail and ultra runners she's also a heck of an ultra runner in her own right she has a master's in exercise science as well as has this really cool background where she was a strength and conditioning coach at the university system where she worked with a lot of different athletes and i appreciate her perspective for that breadth the fact that she has not been locked into one specific sport throughout the entirety of her professional career i think as a very unique lens on what we do correctly and which is the subject of this podcast what we might be doing incorrectly in the weight room with our strength and conditioning programs and how we can actually correct those so i wanted to bring nicole on the podcast today to discuss just that what are the most common mistakes that we see with trail and ultra runners

ultra runners strength training programs and how to actually correct them now inevitably when we talk about things like this people are going to think oh my gosh they are talking about me we are not we just see these things commonly and we want to bring them to the forefront so please do not take offense we do poke fun at the modalities and the interventions but it is limited to that we're poking fun at the modalities and the interventions not the people who are are actually undertaking them so don't take offense but please do take it as a little bit of a cautionary tale that you probably can do things a lot more effectively with your precious time all right folks there is the preamble i am going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with cts coach nicole rasmussen all on strength training mistakes and how to correct them nicole i think i think before we before we dive too far into this we're gonna start we're gonna talk about strength training obviously which is whenever i post a strength training thing it's like strength training and low carb diets always go to the top of the of the list in terms of in terms of downloads so as much as it sounds like i'm pandering to to the number of downloads i'm really not i'm actually looking very much forward i'm very much forward looking to this to this conversation uh but before we get into it too much i think it'd be helpful if you gave a little bit of a background on yourself

what you have done kind of in your coaching and strength training career and then kind of where you are at right now with cts and and and and use that as to kind of like paint the picture for just who is talking to them through their earbuds right now sure sure yeah so um just kind of the brief brief nicole story um i kind of come from a really multi-sport background um lucky enough to go to a small enough school that you know if you didn't show up for a tryout in a certain sport the ad was knocking at your door like the basketball team needs you um so yeah like played a lot of sports growing up um i i ran track at brigham young university um was like a sprinter hurdler type of athlete there um at the time i thought distance runners were so weird um we had a we had like a running joke on the track team that you couldn't have a conversation with one of the distance runners without them using the word mileage very true and it was like a joke among the sprinters you know like let's see if we can get them to talk about anything else other than their training their mileage and it was impossible um but so it's kind of fun to see like i don't know i'm the weird one now i definitely can't use have a conversation without using the word volume at this point so it's all right i was about to say a trail runners it's vert right that's that's the that's the analogy exactly exactly um but

yeah so i think i just always had that interest in human performance and that kind of led me to a to do my degree in exercise science and do my master's in exercise physiology um and then from there in terms of like professional coaching um the majority of my coaching experience is in collegiate strength and conditioning um so i you know kind of did the internship thing and the graduate assistant thing um and coaching at brigham young university uh that was a really fun time of life right like i saw a really broad range of athletes you know you have your country club golf tennis sports and your court sports sports volleyball basketball the swimmers track um yeah so um and then kind of entered a phase of life where i started having kids and decided to kind of stop coaching for a bit that's when i discovered trail running and um i kind of knew when i came back to coaching that that's the area i wanted to go into just like really passionate about the sport and the community and found it really intriguing so um started working with more distance runners and kind of a full change in my focus and yeah that's kind of led me to i started with cts last year it's been phenomenal it's been a really great organization to work for i just i get giddy about our coaches meetings it's it's just

fun to be surrounded by like-minded um by my people right it's been great so yeah that's a little bit about me i mean i work with kind of all levels um wide variety of events right from a first 50k runner to someone training for a 200 but that's the nicole nicole rundown the reason i appreciate your background so much is that you have what i would call a proper strength and conditioning education as well as practical background it's not like you picked it up because you were in another sport or because of some sort of you know uh some sort of other circumstance like this is kind of what you originally went into and you did for years in a collegiate setting which is always really hard i mean for for the listeners out there that have never been in a collegiate athletic setting the strength and conditioning coaches in that world they really do kind of range the gamut in terms of both how good they are but then also what they do with the with the students the student athletes that they're working with some of them are very very detailed and they have a lot of autonomy and in other words are just copy pasting programs that they get from their cscs manual or something like that and everywhere and everywhere else in between and i've always thought that the ones that have master's degrees have advanced degrees and go through this for this formal program of working with a variety of sports they offer a different context to the conversation of where and how and to what degree strength training is

appropriate for certain individuals sure sure and this is kind of this is going to kind of be the this is going to be a little bit of an undercurrent i would say the conversation that we're going to have we're going to use this framework where it's like these are the common mistakes that you see across the board in your practice but we can't just like debunk and throw things under the bus we have to offer offer kind of practical pragmatic solutions to to people who uh people who are listening right now and so we'll definitely take it but i do think that looking at this from the okay let's not do this i understand what you're trying to do we're going to do this instead as an alternative so that's the framework we've offered up four different categories of things who knows if we're going to get through all four we might get through one we might go through 10 depending upon how much we how much we actually get into it but i'm very much looking forward to it because i always appreciate your perspective when we get together and we talk about these things okay the first category is one that you and i see a lot and i'll i will put the and first off let me also offer this piece of background these are the things that you came up with these aren't the things that like i personally came up with you just came up with them and i was like oh yeah let's go ahead and let's do that you can totally control the outline here so i'm gonna offer a little bit of my perspective on it and then you can kind of like jump into why this is such an issue and then what the alternative is so the first category is training for muscle endurance and i have i have two perspectives on this and i'm just laughing my ass off because i know that some

of our coaching colleagues are going to listen to this and they're going to bang their heads against the table the first one is is actually a piece of cycling training framework that we used to use many many years ago that has now been it's been obsolete for several years let me just say that and that's the concept of very low cadence intervals to stimulate or to improve muscle endurance so you go out and do an interval at like 45 or 55 uh revolutions per minute and because of the length of the contractile time that's associated with doing a cadence interval at that low of an rpm somehow is going to stimulate this this this concept or this improvement of muscle endurance we also see this in the endurance running world and i would say it's particularly uh or i see it more commonly or i see it often i guess is the best way to put it i see it often with athletes that live in flat level conditions they live in florida they live in texas or whatever and they're training for the mountains and they want to do these really high rep strength training exercises of greater than you know 20 30 40 or something like that whether it's box step ups or squats or whatever it is in order to train specifically for the eccentric component of running down of of running downhills so that's our first category is this concept of muscle endurance and using these very high reps in a strength training setting in order to prepare for

an endurance event what do you have to say about this nicole sure sure um so i think it's helpful maybe to first step back and like lay some groundwork on like a couple of principles like training basic training principles to get like an idea of like where where did this come from like why are athletes so inclined to train this way when they come into the weight room or when they decide strength trainings for them um and so i think it's important to look at you know we talk about as coaches all the time this principle of specificity right that the add up the the whatever training load you're giving should be specific to the event right and we hear this all the time um and a good example like if we're talking about ultra runners is that you know like let's say you're training for a hundred miler it's mountainous there's going to be a ton of climbing and descending your average pace in your race might be 17 minute miles um and so sometimes if you look at that through a really narrow lens of specificity you might come away and think well i need to train at 17 minute miles all the time all year long right and so it's a mistake that we make sometimes in being too specific for too much of the season um right and if you train that way like if you only ran 17 minute miles with lots of vertical you could probably finish your event right like you could probably make it through but if you step back

you can you see that there's there's actually a huge benefit um in doing flat and fast intervals right for certain times of the year even though it's not there's never going to be a time in your hundred mile race where you're running at a 10 out of 10 rpe for four minutes right but there's a time in the season where we we're going to run flat and fast intervals there's a time in the season where you're going to run tempo runs right and and so you have to kind of look back and say what are the demands what are like the demands of my event what are the predictors of success what are adaptations that will give me success and then step back further and say well what's the best practice in training that adaptation um and and i think and i start out with a running example because we're runners and it's helpful so like to contextualize this idea that um sometimes you can be too specific and if you do that you miss out on this opportunity to train an adaptation in the best way possible that adaptation that you're going to need um and you know sometimes as runners we're really brought we're really narrow-minded so i think another example would be like let's say we had a tennis player right a tennis point is rarely longer than 10 seconds you see the occasional like 30 second point um but for the most part like it's really quick it's explosive um and so you might say well like we only need to focus on quick explosive movements but if you look at the duration of a

tennis match you're looking at a two-hour match and if they're going to play a doubles match and a singles match like they're probably playing three hours of tennis um and so there's time in a tennis player's career where they need to be running they need to be focusing on their cardiovascular fitness and even though there's never a time in a tennis match where they might be running a three-minute interval right like we know that that's the best practice to to get that vo2 max adaptation which then will transfer over into you know then you layer on the specificity later right you develop the adaptations the fitness you layer on the specificity and get the result you want um and if you think i'm making this analogy to say and that's why you should be weight trained that's not where i'm going with um but like just to demonstrate this idea right that specificity is important um but if you are too specific all year it won't set you up for the success as successful as you could be um and so when when you see you know we talk about these mistakes that endurance athletes make with their strength training and when you look at this really prevalent idea of lifting light weights for a lot of reps and it is very prevalent you see it all the time i like i think it's helpful that i think that's where the idea came from right i think people are thinking we need to be specific right we need to be as close to what running is if we're going to strength train and and it seems like a good idea

right but if you step back and look at the bigger picture and say okay like what adaptations are going to give me success in my event and then what's the best practice to train that and doing anytime you're doing like a rep range that's greater than 20 or even greater than 15 um you're kind of stepping out of the range of intensity the load that's necessary to elicit strength so that's the first thing i think to take away is that reps of 20 or higher and i'm going to say as low as 15 and higher like you're you're in you're no longer that's not enough load to elicit any kind of strength you need you could repeat that 10 times to in order for it to sink in for people i mean i think that that's a really poignant aspect so i've always thought about it like this strength training is training for strength right and you should never like define something with the word that you're using to define it but i think a lot of people will resonate with this strength training is training for strength and so if strength training is training for strength the load and the intensity of the workout needs to be a combination such that it elicits adaptation that will make you stronger yes otherwise you're not strength training anymore you're not training for strength anymore you're training for something else and what you're saying to put a little bit of a paraphrase and also to give you give you a break and collect your thoughts a little bit is once you get over and i and i would say the literature the literature is probably

mixed between 15 and 20 and it depends on you know what percentage of your max you're doing it but from a practical perspective that's a good range to think about it once you get over that the adaptations that you are going to reap from that type of workout move away from the strength domain and into another domain not that there's a switch it goes from strength to something else it just moves away and certainly there are better ways to train for strength by using a different set rep combination as opposed to very high reps yeah yeah and i think that sets it up nicely you said well it moves into another realm so let's talk about like what is happening like at a muscular level if we're training at reps higher than 20 okay let's like just take a step back and say okay well what what are you doing in that range like what is what will be the result um and i think it's helpful to think about well how like first of all what's the duration like how long is that set going to take what do you think jason like a set of 20 to 30 reps of a uh i would say i'm gonna go i'm gonna go with one rep per second so 20 to 30 seconds yeah yeah so that's like the lower end and let's say you're doing 40 reps so so i mean you're doing this repeated this like repetitious movement for let's say 20 to 30 seconds or upwards to like 90 maybe like that's where these that's where a lot of these programs fall within like that's

how long um and because the load is small enough to allow you to do that many repetitions you aren't recruiting very many muscle fibers and the the amount of fibers recruited to do a single rep with that load isn't going to increase as time goes on like you're just going to recruit a small amount of muscle fibers and then you're just going to fatigue that same small amount throughout the whole set you're just fatiguing them you're not recruiting more you're not doing anything to increase your strength um and and i think people are like man but my muscles are burning and i'm sweating so it must be a really good workout but um well yeah you're burning you're producing lactate right like it's it's high enough intensity you're producing lactate like feeling the burn but um it's like this weird middle ground of an intensity where it's not actually is is is a 30 second to 90 second anything enough to increase your endurance right if your goal was to increase your endurance is that enough jason no it is not and let me add a little bit more commentary on this before it escapes me the iron in the the ironic nature of this is you started out with talking about specificity and the rationale that you see used a lot with this type of programming very high reps and what we mean by this is you see what people do like lunge matrices and a lot of bicep curls and you even see people like run in place with weights with like

you know 10 10 pound dumbbells for 30 seconds and things like that oh we're getting to that we're going to get to that one too so the ironic thing of it is is that they're the the rationale behind that programming is with some element of specificity the person doing that program is thinking okay i'm going to have to run up a hill for however long and i'm going to use this lunge matrix or this series of step ups or whatever to prepare myself for going up the hill they're using the principle of specificity yeah or the downhill or the downhill whatever but from a very simplistic and basic nature it completely violates this this this rule of specificity because you might be running up that hill for hours or down that hill for hours and if you think that 30 seconds of load is enough to prepare you for that i have a bridge to sell you somewhere because that is just not going that is just not going to happen so there's this great irony in this i'm going to be specific for the event and train for the event by doing this thing that maybe the maybe the biomechanics i would not even argue the biomechanics aren't all that similar but maybe the biomechanics are similar maybe you could get around with that but if you just look at it fundamentally from a duration and intensity perspective it complete like it it makes absolutely no sense at all and your your commentary around how muscles are fatiguing is very basic strength training this is not advanced stuff that we learned in the

last two years this you could go i've got a book on my shelf that's probably 30 years old you know the anatomy of strength and conditioning that has that principle in there and it really hasn't changed all that much in terms of what we've learned about how muscles fatigue underneath that type of condition so needless to say the specificity component i think in this in this situation is ironic where we're using low load high rep thing or where people are not we people are trying to use low load high rep situations in order to mimic whatever is going on in an endurance event right right well and i think that um another mistake that people make or think you know this something we see is that people often will go to like a boot camp style class or a circuit style class in the gym and it's kind of a similar idea it just it just falls into the same category like it's not enough to elicit strength it's not enough to elicit endurance yeah you're gonna get super sweaty and have a great workout if your goal was to burn some calories if your goal is health and movement and you wanted to move that day then i think those things are great like if you love going to the gym and doing your boot camp class like that's awesome you know you should you should do it but if your goal is to improve as a runner to do something that's going to help your performance it's this weird middle ground that just won't so what's the alternative we promised this from the onset we're going to present an alternative and i say this like there's like some sort of magic bullet because i kind of know where you're going to go with it um if we're if we are from a

from a perspective of this is a bad utility for the for a strength this is a bad strength training utility using a high rep low weight scenario in order to specifically improve run performance and i'm probably going to say that several times throughout the course of this podcast because as you mentioned if you like going and doing this stuff great go freaking have at it if you think it's going to improve your running that's when we're going to have a conversation about it but what so what's the what's the alternative right we've got we've got people out there they're listening they're about to do their lunch matrix they're about to go and do 50 you know box step ups in their homemade gym yeah exactly what so if they're about to do this what should they do instead yeah well and i mean if the goal is endurance if the goal is strength endurance muscle endurance the answer is to run more right if that's if that's the side of the range that we're going for if you're limited on time and you you're choosing between this like go run more um run an interval and and even that like 30 second to one minute range is still a weird interval even for running right but but like bump it up um add a little more mileage like add a little more running like be more specific in that area right like um but if your goal is strength if you're if you like strength training and if you want to see like a lot of times we come back to is there a benefit to your running economy like it doesn't prevent injury right like if those are some of the things you're focused on and if you've determined

strength training is for you um you have to kind of come back to the other other end of the spectrum and say well what's the best practice for increasing strength right and it doesn't the sport doesn't matter right football cheer like running like the way to increase your strength is going to be the same across the board right it's not as specific as we once thought um and so like what i recommend and what i think works really well for a runner is that you know if you're coming into the weight room two to three days a week you can get and and you're working you know full body large muscle groups multi-joint exercises um and you know relatively heavy loads so i'm talking like 85 or more of your one rep max or or if you if you don't want to do the math it's like well what can i do that's relatively heavy for 12 reps or less right like the majority if you're a runner the majority of your reps all year long should be 12 or less and i would even say most of the year should probably be six reps or less right like there's a time in the season where 8 to 12 is really helpful or but like really like you want relatively heavy loads six reps or less um focusing on those full body multi-joint type of exercises in other words train for strength i mean i keep kind of coming back to this like very basic

thing and you're right that the the periodization of this for most folks out there is it kind of gets lost right i think if we get people into this general bucket of do a do a few to several meaning less than seven exercises at several reps throughout the year and then maybe you modulate that a little bit just to achieve some sort of overload and adaptation that's probably going to be enough to take care of 90 of the improvement that you're going to that that you're going to elicit compared to something that's done picture perfectly exactly exactly and i think you and sarah did a really good job two weeks ago like talking about you know you covered why is this so complicated for people you know i was having a conversation with an athlete the other day about strength training and he explained it really well i think like his perspective is spot on and he's like i'll tell you why it's complicated you know getting all fired up like this is why it's complicated because if someone says go strengthen your quadricep muscle he's like there's literally 7 000 exercises that will strengthen your quadricep what are we supposed to do like like how are you supposed to know but i think like if you just take away like those general guide like put it into kind of a general guidelines like you said um it makes it a lot easier for people and it's easier to wrap your head around it doesn't have to be complicated you don't have to switch up your exercises constantly like it's kind of the

same simple things will increase your strength over time running is a pretty simple thing like we can mix up our intensities and our durations with intervals but it's still running right right and so it seems really simple for people and strength training i don't think it has to be that complicated it's you fall into like a certain intensity range a certain load range focus on a few key movements and and you'll be set yeah i always kind of come back to the value proposition i think that that's the best way to to position it that most people will identify with it and you can comb through all of the literature that admittedly is mainly focused on the more traditional endurance running activities 10k in the marathon and things like that maybe maybe if you get it all right it's a two percent improvement and so you have to decide just as a person right if you're looking at it from a performance perspective do i want to spend this time trying to gain that two percent improvement now if you want to look at it from another perspective as we've mentioned a few times already i just like doing strength training i i you know did some strength training this morning just because i like doing it do i think it's going to help me and coconut 250 in a few months no absolutely not might actually make me a little bit worse and i'm okay with that trade-off if you're okay with that that's fine but that i think that that's the the this value proposition from a performance perspective is really i think what we've got to wrap our heads around uh initially right let's move on to the second one perfect i'm really i'm really glad that you put this one down as well like you must have been like reading my mind during this for whatever reason and this is

core training and i love i love discussing this and it gives me a chuckle for for for two reasons the first one is i cannot find the origin of this in any of the literature or in any sort of uh academic journal or book or even if we go back into the university system i can't figure out who termed this word core nor actually what it means and if you if you know what it is go ahead and tell me um well jason haven't you been reading the uh the journal bro science journal bro science journal came up with it okay there we go you missed a whole series out on this yeah you missed that journal i think they canceled my membership a long time ago um but anyway i can't so despite the vocabulary piece of it um whenever whenever studies do come out and they compare core exercises to a squat some basic exercise that is out there we will typically see more abdominal and what people would consider their core activation on the traditional exercise versus a plank or whatever other silly exercise that we think is is associated associated with core and jason not just like more activation but it's upwards of

like 30 times the amount of course that your abdominal wall is creating during a squat versus a plank like it's it's it's i'm i'm probably making that number but it's upwards of like 30 times the amount we'll link we'll link those papers and there's another one that i actually put on my instagram a few days ago that uh linked uh uh core training with injury susceptibility and found no difference at all so anyway my my point with that is is that it still gets a lot of focus like this is probably one of the most click-baity things that runner's world and char runner magazine puts out every single month is something on core because everybody wants to focus on it but the reality but the but the reality is is when you actually look at the programming side of it right a it probably doesn't it or at least the programming side of it from the literature perspective a it probably doesn't make a difference b just doing normal activities is going to engage your core more than some of the things most of the things that we typically associate with core training activities aka planks and sit-ups and kind of whatever else so why are why are athletes doing this incorrectly and what should they be doing or what how should they correctly be thinking about it i guess is the best way to put it yeah yeah i mean like it is hard like you said to define like what is the etiology like why are we so where did we how do we get here like yeah exactly i don't know if it's like the classic high school track where you'd finish practice and then you had to sit around in a circle and do 10 minute abs every

single day like i don't know where this started or how it became so is it an ego thing that we want to see our abs and you know i i don't know either um but i think it is helpful to like just first get an idea of what was your core supposed to do like there's a lot of muscles in your core and i think but like you said the vocabulary who knows but like anything from like your chest to like your knees is considered your core um and and so first it's like well what is your core supposed to do right like maybe let's lay that out there and like first of all respiration right the muscles in your core help you to breathe okay so that's important um uh secondly like your core is supposed to stabilize your spine okay and it's not necessarily like initiate movement but to stabilize um and then like the third big function of the core that people talk about is um to transfer energy from the lower body to the upper body or vice versa lower body to upper body so i think a really nice visual of that is like imagine like an olympic sprinter in slow motion they always show like a runner who's running super fast there's very little movement in their trunk and in their core right like you want you do as a runner you want to have a stable core like you don't want to have this like excessive crunching or like excessive twisting right you want your core to be stable while the other limbs propel you forward um so like is it important to have a

strong core well yeah yeah just like any other part of your body right um and and we've all seen that right like we've seen the runner that's crunching every single step or that's twisting a little too much and that is inefficient right they're losing energy if your core isn't stable you are losing energy that could be transferred from like the arm swing from the upper body to the lower body into the ground it's inefficient um so so so yeah your core is important as a runner you need a strong core i think the problem is we're focusing on the wrong things and we're training it in the wrong way right um and where what you see people where you see people going wrong is all this like excessive bending and twisting of their spine curling their spine in any which direction like chasing the burn um because it's the same thing like oh my abs are burning it must be making my core stronger um and and really like you want your core to be stiff right you want anti-movement you want anti-rotation you want anti-crunching type of movements um and so so like when you talk about well what's the best way um to train the core and first of all like you want to avoid all that excessive twisting excessive crunching um and think about like anything where your core has to resist movement in multiple planes of direction

is probably an effective way to train your core and so if you look at all the traditional things that people are doing there's a few that make the cut that are like okay like those i can see because you're resisting movement while the other limbs are moving through multiple planes let's go through let's go through those before you go too much there's kind of like three categories of things that that make the cut and the first is like the all the plank varieties like those are you know they make the cut you're you're working on stability and oftentimes in a plank variety you're moving arms or legs so that makes the cut um any kind of like a dead bug variety so a dead bug is like when you're laying on your back your spine is really stable against the ground and you're somehow moving arms and legs there's a lot of different varieties but anything in the plank variety anything in the dead bug variety and then um things the last thing that kind of makes the cut is like any kind of a bird dog variety so if you're on hands and knees on the ground stabilizing your spine while moving arms and legs those kinds of things i would say aren't hurting you and and might might help with stabilization that's not a very that's not a very uh efficacious bar to jump over they're at least not hurting you i mean i think let me but let me try to let me try to put a little bit of a different frame of reference on it is is like because you can see you see a lot of those i mean wasn't that long ago where like planking was a thing right you'd see people do it in the park and they'd just be on a bench or

whatever and you know it was like a meme essentially but what you're saying by the working their cord well i know but what you're saying by the varieties is because there's some sort of limb movement attached to it that makes that makes it kind of rise above the rise above the rest of the crop and i i i i agree with that but is there any way like i think we're we're kind of like i think we need to back into is it worthwhile or where on the order of priority is this type or where should this type of training be on the whole order of priority lists very specific to your very specific to your core because yes it's important but could you but you could also say foot strength is important lower back strength if that's if that's part of your core is important right your cardiovascular system is important the way you metabolize fuels is important the your joint stiffness is important i mean there's all these other things that we could add to importance and at the end of the day there's only so much time that we have to that we have to kind of like train certain things and so well i agree while everybody can sit there and nod their head and go yeah you know we don't want to be like the hunched over runner and maybe some you know core stability or core strength is going to help that person have better posture or more economic um or more economic gate how important is it really at the end of the day that we carve out time to do our 10 minute abs at the end of practice yeah it probably comes right above importance to like how good a runner is it doing the farmer blow

on there on the run that's what you're saying it's a step above it's not it's not no i'm just kidding um we all have skills we need to be good at in this sport right um i mean like the amount of time that you devote to your core training should be a very small percentage of your total training time yeah it doesn't take that much right um it's not as important as the world really really focuses on and makes you sound like it should be um like you said like everyday movements you're engaging your core when you're running you're engaging your core i will say though like there's kind of like three categories of like the best way to train if you're going to train let's do that here's the best way let's do that and i think this will answer your question as we go through and the first is like loaded unilateral movements so like a single like lunges um a single leg rdl um a single arm a kettlebell swing where it's unilateral so you're working one arm at a time something loaded that's unilateral right so you're having to you're stabilize your spine through a really like loaded intensity movement through multiple planes and most people won't consider that a core exercise i think that's kind of what we're getting at what we're getting at but what you're saying is from an effectiveness

standpoint that is going to improve whatever improvement is in this case stability strength all the above that is going to improve your core more so than the core specific or the core focused exercises just doing a single armed kettlebell swing absolutely absolutely so there's the first category of movements okay loaded unilateral loaded unilateral movements love it second is anything off center load distribution which might be similar but so this is like where you're holding your your weight your kettlebell your dumbbell off center and then moving through a movement so like um an off center front squat like if you hold the kettlebell on wrapped on one side or a dumbbell on one side and go through the squat that's an off off center load distribution that's going to require a lot of stabilization loaded um that's similar exercises that might work there is like a suitcase deadlift or a suitcase carry a farmer carry a single arm farmer carry or like a single arm overhead press so a lot of us are already doing like an overhead press you can do it one arm at a time and then boom you've got your core work done and you don't have to do 30 minutes of whatever abs yeah right and then kind of the last thing that that works is big surprise here like anything loaded that's a functional movement a squat

a deadlift a loaded overhead press like right like so i think the thing to take away is you know if you're already making the mistake this is like rounding out we're talking about you're you're training high reps low weight like if you make that change like i'm going to train heavier guess what that change to training heavier is also going to train your core without having to do additional court work right like it's almost like a double-edged sword that can kind of hit two birds with one stone there substitute your 60 second plank for a few one-armed overhead presses and you'll get better core improvement just through that substitution exactly and that's a pretty easy one right because it's time for time 60 seconds to you just gained 40 seconds in your life you're welcome everybody is limited by time here but in terms of effectiveness i think we can we can go through the program in a lot of literature on this and say it's it's not just a little bit but far more effective as opposed to the very isolated core exercises that you see out there perfect okay so core training was the other one don't think about core training as training like doing very specific things for your core think about it in terms of other movements that you can try to create balance or stability or have some sort of unilateral nature to them perfect okay number three once again you're in my head somehow concurrent training structure mistakes there's this really great book that i'm like three quarters of

the way through by bit ronstadt uh out of norway the title of which is concurrent strength and endurance training and it goes through is really dense it's a great book it is not for the faint of heart if you don't like reading this stuff it's not meant for the light for the lay public but if you want it as a resource if you're a coach out there or strength training professional or or or you just geek out about this stuff it's pretty good one um but the kind of the origin of this goes back to to i'm going to be showing my age here uh the origin of this kind of goes back to the 90s and the early 2000s where there was this big fear amongst the endurance crowd that if they strength trained they were going to gain weight and they didn't want to compromise their lean body mass in order to get it kind of whatever strength gains there were and so there there became this there became this phenomenon of like concurrent interference effects between strength training and in and endurance training that has since been since now we have a couple decades of practice and and literature to lean on kind of fleshed out where we know you know we know what some of those potential interferences can be but then we'd also know that it's probably not as hyped up as we thought it was initially where one gain quote unquote doesn't really kill the other one in quite the way that we were so fearful of uh in the in the early 2000s so i want to bring this down to the programming level though of when you should do your strength training throughout the course of the week so what's the mistake that athletes make both within that and then also within

the structure of the workout itself we just went through all these different exercises don't do you know these types of core go do these unilateral exercises lift heavy don't use high you know reps and things like that use a lower rep count what are the two mistakes that you see from them from that front when they're doing it throughout the week and then and then we'll take that and we'll kind of go through it and then as a second one a little bit later on we'll go through the structure of the workouts themselves yeah yeah well and i mean you mentioned there that there's kind of antagonistic effects right um and i think maybe like a tiny bit more background there is helpful for people that your strength training adaptations are vastly different from your endurance adaptations and if you want to like take it back to like an endocrine level like endocrinology 101 right um when you are endurance training and what they found is that kind of is defined as like any low force repeated muscular contraction for 45 minutes or longer kind of falls into this category um that type of a movement in the muscle stimulates this pathway ampk right and the ampk pathway has all these downstream effects um that give us the adaptations that give us greater capacity to deliver oxygen right um so that downstream signaling gives us the adaptations we need to be a good runner when we're lifting high force really high force high tension in the muscle um this activates like your mTOR pathway

right endocrinology and that has all these downstream effects um that increase muscle size hypertrophy strength um protein synthesis these kinds of things and like you said like people were really worried that they were antagonistic because one of the downstream effects of ampk is to limit protein synthesis and to block the mTOR pathway so and that is well established like it is a thing they are antagonistic at times um but it's pretty simple like a well-designed week and a well-designed structure during your day can kind of you can get around the antagonistic effects um i would say this is the way i've always put it the they're mechanically antagonistic maybe not practically antagonistic you can go through the metabolic pathways and say oh yeah this is going to interfere with that absolutely if you want to do but we are not a sum product of all of these different mechanistic pathways at the at the end of at the end of the day it's the same thing for mTOR that's why this has become this like god that all the strength training gurus try to worship is trying to like up regulate their mTOR pathway it's just like you really like do you really understand that that's like one small piece of the whole biochemical pathway is this what like this yes it's important but it's not the only thing that's that that's that's going on i'm not going to go down that rabbit hole too much but the way that i've always viewed the way that i think that i think that that a lot of people resonate with is that if you if you look

mechanistically at it yes you can come away with the impression that they are antagonistic and they are from certain aspects from certain biochemical aspects but you can bring when you bring it up to the practical level it's not that big of a deal and we see that teased out in the in the actual outcomes of the of the literature as well yeah yeah um what they've kind of found is that like those signaling pathways um so like ampk your endurance signaling pathways the effects of that have pretty gone back to baseline after three hours right so versus you know the anabolic signaling that comes from strength training the effects of that downstream downstream signaling is active for upwards of 18 hours um and so if you kind of think about those things like all right my run anything that comes from my run that might interfere with the strength training active for three hours anything from my strength training that might interfere with my running active for 18 hours i think like that's kind of a helpful framework that you can kind of work around i like that um and so like a really way to structure your week then is to do your run well think about like your hardest runs in the week first right like you typically have maybe a speed day or two your longer runs and and a hard run is you know considered like two or three hours or longer or more than 85 percent of your functional threshold pace

like those are like the kinds of runs that are hard right but um so if you do your hard efforts in the morning wait at least three hours and they have shown like eight hours is probably best have a meal replenish your muscle glycogen do your strength training in the afternoon evening on the same day as your hard run day like that's kind of the key if you can't and then i know like we're limited by our lifestyle and the time availability so let's like lay out the perfect structure first but like that would be kind of ideal hard run in the morning lift in the evening so that the following day which is typically like an easy run or a recovery day it's a true recovery day like you are actually recovering from the strength training and the run strength training is not recovery no like you have to consider that as yeah yeah um so that's kind of a good way to structure your week and and and maybe it's not ideal for people like i know i personally don't have time to do that and so i have to lift on my easy run day and do you know what like i take it's give and take for me i care less about the performance on my interval day than like an elite athlete or someone who cares more would right um so you you have to work with what you have and make it ideal but that is a mistake i see made a lot is that you put your strength training day on your easy day um i will say too if you don't have time to to do your strength training in the evening on the same day

as your hard day so let's say you're in a situation where i have to run and lift in the same block of time right like i have to do one first then the other next um and what they what they've shown is that it's the strength training shouldn't have an effect on your run if you did the strength training first but i have found in practice and in theory like like anecdotally that like a runner who is going into a hard run workout and they just lifted before like that's a big mental component and you are tight like anecdotally you do feel the effects of that right um and so if you have to put it in the same block you should do the thing that's most important to your success first you should do the activity that's most critical to your performance and in our case that's running right like we talked about earlier you said what's the benefit of strength training at the end of the day to your performance two to three percent right so do your hard run first lift after and then try to put as much time between your strength session and the next hard run i think that's another key takeaway there yep i've always boiled this the whole thing down to first off everybody listening should appreciate this framework that you're getting some some metabolic interference effect for a few hours when you

transition from an endurance activity to a strength activity and several maybe maybe up to like three quarters of a day in the opposite fashion from strength training to endurance i think that that framework is is very very important for people to understand the i've always boiled this down to i want to put from a programming perspective i want to put the hard workouts the critical workouts at kind of the top of the hill i want as little going on before those as possible i want them kind of in the ideal place at the ideal time so that the athlete can perform during those hard workouts with maximum intensity and they have all of their faculties available to them backing up from that architecture and when we're including strength training or any other type of training right i want the lead up to include as much recovery as possible and so naturally i want the strength training workout to be as far away from that hard workout as as as practical it just so happens that the timing of that is usually right afterwards either the later in the day or in the the following morning if the athlete is doing their work their run workouts in the evening that's the right place for the strength training piece just because it offers the most spacing between that strength training workout and the next hard workout it just

happens to match all of the other timing that that you mentioned but from a practical standpoint i think the way that i've always boiled it down to is just putting those hard workouts on the calendar in such a way that the athlete can succeed the best at those hard workout or from those hard workouts and trying to back into them with as as as as little fatigue as possible love it okay so now let's get into the workout workout itself athlete goes into a gym they've got five exercises on the docket and they're going to do one first and the second one second and the third one third and the fourth one fourth and i've always seen these sometimes like bizarrely put together in a combination that i'm sure it made sense to the person who is prescribing it but then i look at it and i'm like this you should be doing this the opposite way than what you're actually what you're actually doing it so what what's the right framework for this inter-workout order that we can apply to strength training activities that we can kind of generalize for people out there that we know we're going to use a multitude of different uh a multitude of different movements yeah yeah um so in general you know natalie natalie goes into the gym um the first the first area that you want to address like while you're the most fresh in terms of

muscular and nervous system fatigue you want to do anything that the goal of that activity is to increase your power that stuff should be done when you're the most fresh so things that fall into this category are like plyometrics um or like olympic lifting um so like a clean a jerk a snatch if you're someone who's familiar and doing those things like those anything directed where the goal is power should be done first and i see that mistake a lot i think people throw in their plyometrics at the end um and i guess if the goal of your plyometrics is to put a load on your axial skeleton to so that you're increasing bone density it probably doesn't matter where it is but if you put that at the beginning like you can get a power benefit out of it right like you can increase your power um like moving down the list um the next thing you want to do are like your biggest multi-joint large muscle group type of exercises so um this would be like your deadlift your squat maybe if lunges your big lower body thing that day like anything that number one you can achieve the most amount of force with right like heaviest types of lifts that work the most amount of muscles and multi-joints those kind of go at the beginning of the workout um and then as you kind of work through that and move down throughout

your structure of the day um you want to go down in order of like how many joints am i moving like is this a small muscle group is this a large muscle group and then towards the end of the workout you know you have like your if you're singling in on like a single muscle group like a bicep curl a hamstring curl a shoulder raise things like that should go at the end right you're you're moving less weight you're working smaller muscles less joints in within the movement those should go at the end um and i will say too like as a runner if you already went in and you focused on a multi-joint exercise like an rdl you don't have to do as many of those supplementary lifts at all right like you so that's the key is if you're trying the same time you don't have to spend as much time at those but if i don't know some of us just for vanity reasons like our shoulders and we want to do our shoulder raises at the end you put those at the end end of the workout right so vanity exercises the end practical exercises at the beginning that's your general philosophy there go from practical to vanity i could dig that i could dig that absolutely so let's take this from a really practical point point of view you're designing a strength training program for your athlete how how many exercises does it encompass and how long is that going to be and how frequently during the week is it going to be for your typical ultra marathon runner you just went through the very beginning of this you kind of have a big variety of ultra runners when you're doing this how intensive is it on a week on a day

to day or week to week basis yeah i think that's important to to lay out right we're not talking about some bodybuilding routine that's going to take you all day like as runners we don't need a ton of volume um so like with an athlete with an ultra runner i think there's a lot of benefit in going in three days a week if it's early in the season and you can get strength benefits with as little as two days a week and even one if it's late in the season so you're kind of trying to balance like when my run volume is really high my weight lifting volume is going to be lower when my weight training volume is higher that that work balance as well with the times in the year that my run volume is lower so two to three three days a week depending on the time um and really like if you go in and do six to eight exercises like full body multi-joint type of movements like that's going to take you 25 to 35 minutes right so we're not talking about a ton of volume like that's enough to elicit strength that's enough to elicit the adaptation we're looking for um i personally really like to structure that with like super setting an upper body with a lower body exercise so then you're quicker right your upper body's recovering while you're doing something lower body um that answer your question did i cover that's perfect i think the the the picture that i'm trying to paint is it's not it's not a lot yeah times a week for 30 minutes that's not a lot of time if you just cut out all those ab

finishers i don't even know what an ab finisher is we made we'll coin that term we're going to start a website and make a million dollars off of it okay here's here's the bonus question for this though sure in your estimation what's the minimum effective dose because there are a lot of athletes out there that are going to just look at the proposition of going to a gym right i don't i i have to it's not just the 30 minutes that i'm in the gym i gotta drive there it's 15 minutes there it's 20 minutes back or whatever now i've chewed up a whole hour of my day i can't do it two days a week i can only do it one day a week what's the minimum effective dose and when should we just try to or it or is there a point at which you just cut it out completely um i mean with a novel if it's a novel stimulus right like you've never straight trained before you can get the benefits one time a week right one time one time a week um if you're if it's not novel you probably need two times two times a week and and i think a good way to get around this like in terms of time is you don't have to go to a gym like if you have a heavy enough load like a couple of kettlebells at home that are heavy enough so that you're working in that 12 reps or less range like that can take up a chunk of time there too as well um

but yeah like at some point you do have to consider for yourself what's the benefit what are my goals is this worth it um yeah and the reason i've kind of come at that way i kind of come at it is because we do see from a programming standpoint other like coaches and athletes out there in the field that will prescribe uh listen just do this for five minutes after your run kind of whatever it is right it's a leg circuit it's an ab circuit it's a combo burpees and push-ups and kind of kind of everything just just for five minutes and i've always looked at that saying okay it's novel to use that vocabulary that you just use you'll probably get a very very small initial improvement that maybe you feel a little bit better maybe you kind of like like doing it but then where's the overload after that right because that's once again fundamental principle of training overload and then adaptation if you if you're limited by five minutes you're either going to overload on the speed of movement right which is more the more common one if you're out there on a football field doing lunges or something like that or you're going to overload on the intensity of the entire activity which you might as well just go run 10 more minutes at that point so i what i'm trying to get out of out of this is is the what's if you're thinking about this long term and we should all be thinking long term

and you really want to incorporate some type of strength routine into your into your program realistically how much time do you need to be able to carve out in order to do that effectively and not just go through the motions i think realistically if you're doing that from home you could do that in 90 minutes but i think if you're looking at like i need to go to the gym like you're looking at a few hours a week yeah so 90 minutes 90 minutes a week is the is what you're referring to yeah okay yeah that you need to carve out i i've kind of this is us just like you know licking a finger and putting in the wind trying to and trying to come up with this based on our own like practical experience which i think is worth a lot in you and i's case because we've been doing it for a number of years but that's what i've always kind of come to the conclusion as well is that if you can't carve out i i go a little bit lower maybe my bar's not as high as yours if you can't carve out an hour a week twice a week for 30 minutes let's just leave it on the table if you want to do something else just for your own benefit you just kind of like like doing it once or twice a week great but i'm not going to look at that let's just make sure it doesn't screw up your the rest of your running and let's make sure that just the load is appropriate but i've never looked i i kind of think that that's the minimum effective dose and really the maximum effective dose is it much more than that maybe it's 45 minutes three times a week right i mean it's really there's kind of a night tight bandwidth there okay last category we already talked about this a little bit the very beginning

but we're going to come all the way full circle back to it and this is over specificity in the weight room um we could go and make fun of the people who are running in the mirror with their two pound dumbbells or doing box step ups or whatever kind of tell tell tell kingdom come but i want to know why you see this is so why you see this is so problematic like why is this something that you specifically wanted to point out and say okay let's go let's figure out and let's figure out how to fix this right right um i mean this kind of goes back to how we started the conversation right where a lot of these things fall into the middle ground of ineffective for strength ineffective for endurance they're a waste of time yeah and and when we talk about like over specific movements that are loaded i'd like like this goes back to there was a there was an era with strength conditioning where athletes were swinging weighted golf clubs yeah or they were swinging or the swimmers would come into the weight room and grab the bands and they would like do their stroke like resisting against the the bands um and and like every sport had some version of that right running with a weight vest and pump their arms running with a weight vest is another that's the other thing though that was the thing i wanted to to bring up today um because i think that is common in ours we see that a lot like and you have that idea of like i'm gonna run with my weight vest up and

down the mountains and then when i get in my race it's gonna feel really easy um and the problem overload right you're overloading on body mass yeah i'm overloading and it's specific yeah i mean it seems perfect on paper yeah yeah and i mean here's the problem with some of those things and and i'll go back to the golf swing analogy or the you know the weighted golf swing is what they found is if you're loading through a really specific skill that's specific to your sport like a golf swing when it's heavier weight the recruitment pattern the biomechanics change it's not the same as when you run and so you're not going to be able to like hit the ball harder harder or further because you're you're changing you're messing with a really specific skill changing the biomechanics of it and and it doesn't transfer um and so with a running vest um it's kind of a similar idea right like the recruitment pattern that your legs have to fire in and your your whole body when running with this load it's different than if you were running without it and it can change it doesn't always transfer um and and that's not new that's not new by the way this is you we can go back to former podcast guest roger crom one of my one of my former biomechanics professors where they have looked at

both loading and unloading running and looked at the just the very simple kinematics of running and they do see differences there and when you translate that into the real world with interventions you have to understand some of that very fundamental research that yes you're messing with in your words a very specific biomechanical pattern that you have trained over in many cases decades and now you're untraining it with the idea of overloading it with with weight and it in my i've always viewed this as just a lack of understanding of very basic biomechanical principles anyway keep going yeah yeah and and you know you say you're running up the mountain with your vest um or i know a popular thing is to load with water and then you dump the water at the top so you can run downhill without the load um i mean when you're doing that like you're getting a great workout like there's a great burn there it's hard you're like this is hard this is so hard but like if you want to increase your skill and your ability to run that climb then run it at your normal weight or whatever weight you might be racing at right like we have packs like we carry things run it whatever you're going to face in the race but run it harder run it faster like work on getting faster on the climb versus trying to add additional weight right um the only

use case i've seen the only use case that i will kind of buy into it for and i honestly i think that this is a little bit of a stretch so i don't deploy it all that often is when the extra weight changes the mode from a run to a hike and you have an athlete that doesn't have enough of that mode availability and training so you have an athlete that's training for some mountainous ultra run and they just don't have the amount of terrain availability to hike as much as you want them to in training because of what kind of whatever reason using maybe not a weighted vest but maybe something that's like kind of like 10 of their body weight or something like that which is pretty reasonable eight or 10 percent uh that change that changes the mode from a run to a hike because of the extra weight artificially inducing that it's the is the only application it but i gotta be honest with you if i look at all the programming that i've ever delivered it's such a small fraction of it that i kind of even question doing that because i once again i know that even with that extra weight from a walking standpoint it's still not going to be the same as them walking kind of walking during the race so anyway that it's when i first got in this in the sport of ultra running it was really common for people to use weighted vests in all kinds of ways like you name it they do we've been making fun of box step ups the entire time they do box step ups with them they do long runs with them they do this they do that and whatever and now it's still kind of trimmed down but it's still

there and i've just kind of look at this and it's like why are we still doing this well and it's still there and you see that argument of well it's only 10 of my weight it's only you know and i'm like well just wear your pack that you're gonna yeah exactly yeah just wear the pack that you're gonna we're already carrying a little more than we're probably going to in a race anyway right because we're supported on our long runs anyways anyway okay what so so what other areas of this over specificity phenomenon do you see manifest itself in the weight room or in any of these other sort of adjunctive exercises that are that are uh that are pretending to be strength training exercises let's put it that way those those are the two big ones i see i see the pumping the arms the weight vest but even with um like when people are training for a downhill race and that's their rationale that's their use case for strength training right like they'll come and just try to do a bunch of eccentric loading um to try to match what they'll see um with with a lot of downhill um but it falls into that same mistake right it isn't actually specific it's not the actual movement you're going to be doing when running downhill this i get that question every week i get that question i get that question every week on instagram i don't have climbs should i use the weight room to train for the downhills and my answer is is well that's a pretty novel attempt and maybe it's better than zero but i'd

rather probably just better just running because of the lack of specificity there right and and maybe the weight training will make you more hardy and more sturdy as an ultra runner but like it's there's not not a lot of evidence to be able to say that's going to help your downhill performance that's going to help your quads be more resistant to fatigue like that's it's a difficult difficult conclusion to come to so i think the practical the practical takeaway for the listeners here is that if you are in that situation you're running a mountainous uh race and you are limited to the flats don't chew up your time trying to be over specific and not being specific at the same time don't try to no seriously i know that sounds super weird but you're trying to be over specific by including some sort of eccentric component either with running up and down stairs or getting or doing copious amounts of squats or doing copious amounts of lunges thinking that they are going to quote unquote season your quads or whatever silly vocabulary that we use for this those are all likely very ineffective and at the very least you have a solution that is not going to be effective and at the very most you have a solution that is going to be counterproductive to your training because you're substituting it for time that you could be spending doing other things that are more effective so i we both understand the urge to do it because it is important you're better off

not doing it and resisting that urge and i think i got asked this question on a podcast i think it was released today actually i got this question asked to me on a podcast just a few days ago um what can the flatlanders do and i just say do everything you can to try to carve out a camp if you can carve out a three-day camp and go relocate yourself for a few days in the mountains that's going to make a hundred fold more difference than spending five minutes after every single run doing lunges or reverse squats or kind of whatever you think else is going to season your quads for the downhill just because that those exercises are just not very specific even though they're intended to be we got to come up with a term for this that'll be our homework come up with a term for this for this phenomenon where people are coming up with exercises to be specific but they don't contain the specificity that they are chasing specificity i don't know what i'm gonna think about it i'm gonna we're gonna nail this all right we're gonna nail it we're gonna leave it at that though that was a good one i i appreciate you coming on um i i think this is this is going to be one of those podcasts where people are going to something is going to resonate with them meaning they have done this in training and that's okay we're pointing out these things because they are common modalities they are common interventions that we see we want you guys to spend your very precious time doing the right things doing the things that are efficacious and not simply

spinning your wheels so don't feel bad we're not making fun of you maybe a little bit don't don't feel bad but realize that there there are likely sharper tools in the toolkit so to speak that you can spend your precious time doing as opposed to some of the stuff that we mentioned nicole thank you do you have any parting shots and where can people learn more about you and find out more about you i remember remember jason i'm the dinosaur i'm not the i'm not the social media guru that's all right send me an email i would love to hear from anyone oh my god that's a bold statement that's a bold statement all right i will i will include the email in the show notes because yeah i'll include the email in the show notes we'll see what you've got yourself into there but uh you know how that works out thanks for coming on the podcast today and putting some things in the crosshair that i do think need to be in the crosshair every now and then this is uh this has been a fun one perfect thank you jason thanks for having me all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to nicole for coming on the podcast today her email address is in the show notes i'm still laughing that she agreed to do that i would never do that um but you guys know how to get a hold of me get a hold of me via social um i hope you guys appreciated nicole's background and her thoughts on some of these common strength training mistakes it's always been a fun one to discuss within our coaching group and i think that that came to light throughout the entirety of this podcast appreciate the heck out of all the listeners

out there if you enjoyed this podcast share it with your friends share it with your training partners feel free to forward it to them if you know people who make this mistake and do the 10 minute abs after practice maybe this is a good podcast to share with them if you really like the podcast give it a review on apple podcast it's quite meaningful to me and helps the podcast reach a much broader audience and i'm always very appreciative of those reviews whenever i check them out online so thank you thank you thank you for all of those once again thanks to nicole for coming on the podcast today that was really fun as always you guys we will see you out on the trails you you you