Strength Training for Ultrarunners with Sarah Scozzaro and Nicole Rasmussen | Koopcast Episode 142

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 on this episode of the podcast we are aiming this at all of the runners that have gone through your season you've gone through your main a race of the year and you are now in this transition phase and you were thinking about adding a strength training program into the mix because maybe it was something that was lacking last year or maybe you're just strength curious and you want to start to get back into it and so i brought on our two cts coaches that just happen to be strength training experts and sarah scissaro who helped me design the strength training component of training essentials for ultra running as well as nicole rasmussen and we go through a very practical example of what to do here and now and how to actually start not only that but also how to plan for the future and what you should be thinking about now that is going to benefit your ultra running for the next year and whatever your next a race happens to be i always appreciate nicole and sarah's perspective on this because they come to it as experienced coaches not only in the strength training realm but also in the endurance realm and they make no bones about how it can help you and also how you can screw it up and we talk about

all of that throughout the course of this podcast so with that as a little bit of a backdrop i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with sarah scissaro and nicole rasmussen all about how to start strength training right here and right now cole's aware of this but i don't think sarah is so i i saw nicole at bigfoot or not a bigfoot we were just talking about bigfoot at big horn big something or other she rocked by the way congratulations thank you friends thank you yeah and uh i think it was after the race she comes up to me she's like do you really only lift on your arms and not on your legs and like kind of like in a snooty way like is this real is this really what you do and i was like well yeah and i gave her some stupid rationale for it and she goes why don't you just go do some freaking deadlifts and that was it and then no the line was something to the effect of no further respect will be given until you're deadlifting again i think it was closer to that like respect is gone jason well here's here's what you don't know here's what you don't know is i have this outstanding i have this outstanding bet that i have to pay with this guy i hope he's listening to this podcast his name is rob sanders uh he was timothy olsen's old massage uh therapy school buddy and he came out during the pct last year and uh helped him out helped him out a lot in some positions

where we we really need tim tim really needed some help and uh he's a you know weightlifting you know team sports kind of guy you know not definitely not an endurance athlete and so i made him i made him bet i'm like hey dude you have to do 50k and i have to deadlift 405 pounds how are we doing on that i'm not very good i have until the end of the year to pay it off and i actually just saw him last week and um uh we're we're we're equidistant from our respective goals let's put it that way so he's gonna do 50k shout out to shout out to rob sanders he's a he's an absolute sports medicine wizard and uh i'm i'm gonna start working i actually started working on it this week i started incorporating more legs thank you nicole respect has been restored oh it's pending it's pending yeah i have to post a video 405 pounds 405 pounds i was trying to figure out i was trying to figure out what the so the audience can relate to that i was trying to figure out what the ultra marathon equivalent to that would be like couch to x distance which is kind of what i'm going through is like couch to a 405 pound deadlift like that's not insignificant why why the 405s uh where did that number come from it's four plates right yeah yeah 90 90 9 yeah plus 45 plus 45 yeah because 45 45 is 90 so you'd have 180 plus the yeah 360 plus 45 so it's four plates

that's a 45 okay yeah so that's where it came from he's gonna make me do 500 originally i was like no way but uh i was trying to come up with an equivalent to that to try to explain to somebody and i failed to do so so maybe you guys can help me out with that later this podcast is not going to be all about this by the way we're just going to spend a couple minutes talking about it so needless to say i have a deadlift debt to pay you guys can figure out what the equivalent is a little bit later um but to get into like what we actually what we actually should talk about which is more important for the audience out here right now is the time of year where everybody is like recalibrating you know it's late august people might catch this podcast in kind of early september nicole you just mentioned you had an athlete out at bigfoot whenever they you know finish this race and get recuperated they're going to think about what they want to do for the transition or the quote-unquote off season or whatever vocabulary you want to use and part of that incorporates what i'll use the super broad umbrella as cross training and a subset of cross training could be strength training we probably shouldn't call it that but just for the audience's sake we'll entertain that for a second and you know i think that from a coaching standpoint the more important part is it gives us the opportunity to set things up right because i wish that i had 18 months to work with every single athlete at a very minimum reality will always dictate that it's different people get

into the western states lottery in january and then they don't sign up until february and then we've got a race that's in you know july that we've got june that we've got to prepare them for but it but but truth be told we would like 14 to 18 maybe even 24 months to prepare somebody for for for something like that and this is going to be as close as we're going to get to it and so what i want to do during the course of this podcast is since everybody's thinking about it right now i want to go through how we would initially set it up from a strength training perspective now given that we've got copious amounts of time we don't know what we're training for next year in most cases now that we've got copious amounts of time in the future to to to fully develop things and actually and actually work work on them so sarah i'm going to start out with you when you have athletes that you're either working with for long periods of time like two or three years or you start or in the ideal fictitious situation that i just painted you get them right now and you want to start them out on a strength training program let's start to orient the listeners around why it's so important right now and then what we're going to start to do initially to take advantage of this long time frame i think so the great thing about having such a long runway before an event or a season is that you get to work on you get to start from scratch foundationally in terms of strength so there's no working through you know trying to butt up against certain zones or ranges with their training and we're not worried

about like peak volume weeks we've got plenty of time and that time allows us to really address some of the weak links and what i like to do with an athlete whether they're new to me or we worked together in the previous season is what didn't work last what worked well and what chinks in the armor do we have what areas of weakness did we have what maybe common injuries kept popping up that we can start to try to address through strength training and kind of making you more durable and then that sets kind of how i start to frame out their individual strength training and so let's say somebody doesn't have an event until like june and we're starting in august or september oh my gosh that's such a great long runway so we can really hit the weights harder in the beginning or more you know three to four times a week for some people then in season would be a much reduced volume and also exercise selection would vary slightly so sarah's focused on like some of the weak links and what didn't work nicole what like where would you work to work too but yeah not solely focused but that's a big that's a big part of it but nicole where would you where would you take things given this long time frame well you know as i've observed the ultra running space and as long as i've been in this coaching space i i feel like runners come into the off season or the transition season and they fall into like three camps you know that i've kind of seen over time um and a lot of time you have the runner who um kind of falls off the face of the earth you know they have this big race they trained

they're done with it maybe they maybe their race was taking a big sacrifice for their family or their personal whatever so and you know they probably really need it but you see these runners who do nothing and they disappear they're done they're cooked yeah they're done yeah i'm out i'll still away go yeah and that's okay that's okay for depending on the goal um and then you know you have this other camp of runners where you see them change nothing right this is the change nothing people where i run 40 miles a week and i'm gonna run 40 miles a week all year long um it doesn't matter if it's christmas or raining or blizzard or maybe i'll do a little more before my race but like even through the off season it's like i have to hit my miles um so that's you know like the second camp i see and then you know we have this third camp of people that i think do the best in my opinion um as they look at performance and improvement in their sport and these are the planners right so sometimes this is driven by the individual sometimes driven by the coach we're fortunate enough to drive the process for people they don't have a choice but to be a planner but you know like these are the people who have looked at their year and they have a general idea of you know these are my key races or events they you know they've done a little planning maybe they're just coming off a year where they did a little planning um but you know like i've got these key events anchored into the calendar and because i know when

those are i know when i can take a rest right i know when it's important to give my off season a purpose and if that purpose is rest then great if that purpose is like sarah said you know maybe this is a great time to address some weaknesses um it's a lot easier to tackle something you're bad at when you're not also running huge amounts of volume right so i i love that sarah started with that is that you know we have this opportunity to cut back the running volume you have more time you have more energy but you know um you know when you look at like what we see as coaches in the off season i think athletes get to this point you know they do take a little time they take a little rest but they're excited to do something different you know like they're they're i feel like athletes are really open to strength training at this point because you do you have more energy you have more time um it's probably cold outside and you it's being indoors lifting weights is not as big of an inconvenience when the mountains are calling um but yeah i was gonna say i i have a lot of athletes that have just finished up their races and now they're much more receptive and excited about strength training because they don't have anything on the calendar until you know five six seven plus eight months out so they're like let's they really want to dig in and knowing like you said those cold winters are coming where they maybe won't be running as much or don't want to be out in the cold and don't need to put that volume in they can really focus on something different yeah and they're i think

people are really receptive to it at this time in the year you know like even if they've never strength trained before even if or even if they're experienced or maybe they've and they know they just haven't been doing much during the high peak volume running time like it's a great great opportunity no matter where you are with your experience level like this is a really great time to get started so because i think you touched on a really good point there especially near the end of a seat like a running season like before a big race is people are making a lot of sacrifices with their time and even if strength training does fit into the volume like it's appropriate for them that's going to be the first thing to go usually that's going to be the thing that starts to drop off because they have to make you know decisions for family and you know sleep and recovery so now they're coming at it where they don't have as many things pulling at them so they have a lot more time to really put down this foundation and also i think mental bandwidth for the different skills they might need to learn if they're new to strength training so it's just a really beautiful time because there's not the stress of all of this training run training going on that's causing this stress so they have a little bit more um i think energy to give to learning new skills in the weight room as well yeah that couch to 400 pound deadlift just seems doable i mean that's exactly what i was gonna say we need to start a new program to be honest with you we've got a new program i might need to reach out to y'all for some counsel on this i'm gonna take both of those themes and kind of meld them together right you both mentioned strengths and weaknesses and bandwidths and what i want all the listeners

out there to be really really mindful of this even when you're going through a really heavy training phase where you're just doing everything you can you're super tired like you're just and you're just put you're just putting in the work right somehow you can always find room to do more of the things that you are good at even even when you're in those heavy training phases and we've all seen this before i'm really good at climbing so i'm just going to climb more and more and more and more closer to the race right so to ping off of you know sarah's earlier dialogue of the strengths and of the strengths and weaknesses you can always find the bandwidth to use nicole's vocabulary there you can always find the bandwidth or people can typically find the bandwidth when it's in their strength but when it's not in their strength that's when the that's when the bandwidth starts to get crimped upon and i think everybody out there and exercise that they can go through right now is if their season's like over they've already reached their apex race or the a race or whatever is just go and make a simple list from a running perspective these are all the things that i'm good at and all these are all the things that i'm not so good at and as you're organizing the next nine months do more of the stuff that you're not good at now and more of the stuff that you are good at closer to the race that right there is like 60 or 80 percent of periodizing somebody's program just just like right there it's really not not to like

discount what we do as coaches because i certainly wouldn't do that but really if you get that down early on that it it provides such a reasonable framework to work with because you have to realize that although your weaknesses might not necessarily take up a lot of physical bandwidth and we can talk about how much that physical bandwidth that is from a strength training perspective it's still hard to learn at the same time and develop learn and develop we'll use both of those words learn and develop at the same time as all of your other physical faculties and resources are kind of already already taken out if it truly is a resource because the cost of that is so much exponentially greater than it is in your strength that's why you're not very good at it right because you don't do it a lot and you don't adapt to it for whatever reason physical psychological or whatever and so it's just going to take more of your resources up and you have to do them such that you have to just give it space i guess that's kind of what i'm saying so we've got the space in our ideal world nicole you can prepare us i'm going to call call out you first on this one we've got the ideal space in in this world we're going to take an athlete that like you haven't been working with and is new to the strength training game but is an experienced runner and they want to get into it where should some and there's a lot of people out there listening to this that are in that camp let's like make no mistake about it right i'm in that camp i'm about to i'm i would say i'm relatively experienced in the weight room i just don't do it a lot

however ironic that might sound but nicole if you had that athlete give some people out there some places to where they can actually start yeah so i think the first concept that's really really important in this population that we deal with is that that we are probably runners first right like we're here to improve our running performance primarily as coaches that's our job that's why people come to us and as such like that's an important thing to to you know lock in on is that the strength training we do should be smart it should be effective but it should support your running and it should support the running volume and the training the the time that we spend running it shouldn't make us significantly you know more fatigued or take away from what we're trying to do as runners so if if it's a good strength training program it supports the running and it allows for adequate recovery you know those two things and with that in mind a really good method to apply as runners is to look at your season and to you know break it into like three sections or three three areas where we can match up the weight lifting volume with the running volume and try to make sure that those things complement each other and support each other throughout the year so a good way to do that and

and maybe sarah would use different terminology or explain it differently but a really easy way to do that is to say you know i'm going to break my season into three segments and we can say early season mid season late season and remember like you said this is assuming we have this great runway to work with and we have lots of time um and you can think of the early season as a couple of months where maybe this is where your run volume is the lowest you know um and so we want our strength training to be more of a priority um and to have more volume here you can think of it as your general prep phase um but you know like in this time it might look different depending on if you have an experienced or a beginner athlete but in general like you can handle more volume here you can handle three days a week when you're running less um and you might expect as the season progresses for the days per week to decrease maybe in the mid season you train two days a week and maybe in the late season it's two or one even one um but early in the season you know we start out you can handle a little more you can handle you know higher loads heavier weights and then we will progress and help that match your running as we go along i'm going to let sarah jump in before i say too much so do you have anything but it's plan i want to encapsulate that before we get too far into like the like the annual periodization or anything like that the the key point that that that uh that

nicole is making here is that before you sit and go in the weight room figure out if you're going to deadlift or bench press or everything all the above is just plan it out yeah yeah no it's it's having a plan and nicole you know exactly you want to kind of look at the when you get an athlete or your athletes coming off of an event and you kind of can see when that next big event is and you break that season the seasons up into your early mid and off season um and and kind of back kind of circling back if i've if i've got an athlete who is a very experienced runner but maybe doesn't have a lot of experience in the weight room then this time is like foundational like this is the we are getting the movement patterns right we are making sure are they comfortable do they need to meet with somebody locally and get eyes on them to make sure they've got the right form um we're we are making sure that they are comfortable um as we've talked about before kind of that gym literacy they're comfortable in the gym they're comfortable with loading and movements um there's no reason if someone doesn't have a lot of experience to start going for one rep max right now they need to just get comfortable and competent and um very fluid with the movements and then we can start expanding from there so what does that look like then so they so is it high repetition is it a lot of multi-joint movements versus single joint movements like just like a little bit more detail behind that framework yeah so if i've got an athlete and nicole i'd love to hear your thoughts too but i'm we're making the assumption when i carry here that someone's got access to a gym and equipment some form of equipment um so that would involve

generally kind of it kind of crosses into that that endurance range of kind of that eight to 12 reps is where i get with people but when someone is really really new to strength i really don't want them going anything more in terms of loading in the beginning of like eight rep max like of eight reps of your one rep max so you can't i don't want somebody loading you know three reps or two reps i'm talking someone that's never really squatted with a barbell on their back we don't need to worry about loading that 405 pound deadlift just that's going to come back so i should start with like a broomstick right yeah but i mean truly a lot of times when we do you know movement prep with with athletes is can you move properly and then loading it appropriately and can you move well with that then you increase the loading so a lot of that endurance range is going to be in that eight to 12 reps you're going to have two to three sets you're going to have 45 to 60 seconds rest um and it can be squats uh dumbbell deadlifts are great think about those those key movements we've talked about in the past the hinge the lunge the squat the the push the pull um and just get them comfortable with it and then they'll start to communicate what they struggle with what is easy for them areas of weakness and then we can kind of dig deeper into that nicole no i think that's great i think an important piece there is that you know if if you're implementing strength training and is if this is something you want to do

it's worth the time and investment to have the right setup like like sarah said um you're going to be limited if all you have is two pink dumbbells at home that weigh three pounds each you know um so if we're going to do this like let's it doesn't necessarily mean you need the gym membership but it might mean you need to invest a little bit in several dumbbells and several kettlebells you know and it's worth you don't the gym membership's great but like you can do it from home with the with the right investment with the right equipment making sure you have enough to elicit an adaptation and a load um and that's less than i think a lot of people i'm sorry nicole go ahead no well and and it's the same same idea with if we're going to do this and we're going to devote time to do it let's do it right and invest in have someone teaching me that my movements are correct that the form looks good and that all is a part of like setting yourself up for success in the beginning yeah you're going to lose interest if all you have is the pink dumbbells because you're going to stop progressing and it's not interesting right like you're going to lose interest if your form is bad and you don't know what you're doing so set it up for success from the beginning yeah the way that i've always positioned that nicole is is when you don't have a reasonable set of equipment and by no means or any of us advocating that everybody has to go out and have a five thousand dollar home gym right you can get away with very very minimal but when you when you don't have some of that equipment available

it pigeonholes you into the only type of overload is how many repetitions can you do and how fast can you do them time under tension exactly you know yeah yep and we see this a lot when the only tool in the toolkit are like uh like a leg circuit or something like that like a body weight leg circuit which can typically work for a short period of time but then once you once that athlete develops underneath that specific load how else are you going to add load if you don't have additional resistance to throw on to the athlete you just add more and that becomes very and that becomes very limiting at the end of the day it's like a volume where you're just think about run training it's like a volume where the only tool in your toolkit to increase an athlete's load they can only handle so much either from time or injury or kind of from whatever developmental reason so you need intensity and intervals and climbing and descending and all these other stuff all this other stuff strength training is the same way to so go back to nicole's really important point right from the onset is plan like plan it out like if i'm going to start strength training i'm going to need some sort of reasonable initial investment let's dive into that a little bit because sarah i know you that you've like counseled a lot of athletes on like what this actually looks like and we we mentioned this on our one of our earlier podcasts as well paint that picture really quick because it's not so astronomical to what people normally think yeah and it's funny because i've had like five athletes this week going okay

this is the year i'm doing strength training what do i need to get like the hierarchy that list and i'm like well if you've got this much this you know these are the priorities but it's amazing what you can get a couple dumbbells a couple a set of kettlebells um a trx can be good but that can be getting kind of fancy there but bands many bands to use because you can actually loop the bands around the weights to create more resistance you know so then you can add accessible loading it doesn't take as much as people think it just sometimes takes a little more creativity but i recommend for most people depending on the starting you know where they're at is a pair of 20 pound dumbbells 35 pound kettlebell there's a lot you can do with that there is a lot you can do with that because then you're just doing offside loading you might do a suitcase deadlift with one kettlebell but that's great for your core because it's anti-rotation so bang for your buck right there um i'm i'm lucky that anybody that's seen my setup only because i ran a boot camp for many many years so my gym is has a ton of stuff but that's like 12 years of gathering things but i use a lot of the same things over and over and over again but they last for forever they're not like they last forever oh my gosh it's and that's the thing too it's like if you have the investment you will have that equipment for and you take care of it it will last you forever and uh yeah and you just need a small space and a couple kettlebells and there's a lot you can do with that i had an athlete when uh when covid first hit who like freaked out and she was hoarding kettlebells

like like toilet paper and then she said like all of a sudden one day she realized i have no toilet paper but i have a thousand kettlebells you know it was like yeah it was hoarding the wrong thing at the wrong time but yeah that would be that would be tricky there's not really a good crossover but you know i think if someone you know i always advise give yourself room to grow so if you're using 15 pound dumbbells right now you probably want to invest in some high don't like go higher because you're going to be there pretty quickly and so get some weight that you can grow with and then it's time under tension holding lack of you know reducing the rest increasing the reps and things like that that you can then challenge someone with what they have available adjustable dumbbells i've got athletes that have them and love them yeah yeah they work not a bad tool no if it works you know it's a tool in the toolbox yeah i guess what we're saying is is there's a there's there's a low minimum amount of investment to to to make sarah you wrote an article on the cts site right that had like three different setups so i'll link i'll link that in the show notes people can go and check it out i thought it was a very very reasonable list that most people look at and go oh if i can get away with it i can certainly swing that and that was the point let's make it realistic and accessible because you know if you give me a thousand dollars we can get you know everything you know a lot of equipment but if you're limited to say 100 150 bucks or even 50 dollars you can do a lot with that okay let's switch

the conversation right so we've talked about how we want to do it if we have this like totally idealistic 18 month time frame we've got a new athlete we're going to teach them to you know we're going to teach them to be literate in the in the weight room we're going to uh start them out with you know reps of 8 to 12 somewhere around there and then gradually and then gradually impose different stress that stresses on the athlete what should people avoid when they're first starting out meaning we want to keep this from a we want to we want to we've got this long-term perspective nicole mentioned her planning process we want to plan this out throughout the course of the year make sure that it's sustainable and things like that when they initially start out what are just the what are like the terrain traps that athletes need to avoid when they're setting this whole system up for themselves sarah you're chomping at the bit so you can go oh no i just don't want to i could see it no i i think um people get over ambitious or caught up and they'll they'll do too much intensity or too much loading too quick like they'll do 405 pound deadlifts right out of the gate yeah okay i wasn't gonna say it but yeah um i think i or or what i've seen with athletes is they remember the athlete they were in college when they lifted as part of their football program or their you know their wrestling and now it's 10 years later and they think that they can squat the same load i they go in gangbusters

day one and um they are walking funny for a good week and very sore and yeah at best you know or worse there are other things happen so i think that's a trap is um well first i would say that and also not knowing appropriate form which kind of circling back to it nicole and i talked about earlier it's worth even an investment of paying a personal trainer at your local gym or college you know i've talked to a professor or something and making sure that someone can get eyes on you are you doing it correctly that investment will pay dividends as you go because then you will have the confidence knowing that you've got correct form i see more and more people doing that over facetime at my local gym like my local gym has like personal trainers there but i've noticed like more and more people really in the last two years who set up their phone with like a tripod like a proper you know tripod at the right level and things like that and for a while i thought that they were just instagramming it and this is gonna sound horrible but i'm gonna say it anyway i'm sure somebody's gonna get super pissed off when they hear this but they weren't the instagram type like it wasn't the typical like gym bro you know i'm trying to show my guns and shoulders off and stuff like that they just looked like normal like normal people and so i started like getting a little bit more curious and finally asked somebody i'm like what like what is this setup for like kind of being naive is like oh my strength training coach is on the other side watching me and i was like wow that's actually i'm glad to see that like actually being used because it's strength training professionals you guys i don't need to tell you

you're just well aware of some of the some of the like gaping holes in the personal training world right now but in any way or as opposed to you know getting into the gym they can hire one of you guys one of you guys to watch them virtually i've done that i do do that because and i think it really comes down to if you're good at queuing because you've got to be able to queue somebody to be able to move into an angle or you know you have to be able to verbally kind of help direct them to shift things you can't be there in the moment and so once you get good at queuing and knowing what to see it can it can be done virtually absolutely that's i don't know if nicole that's a really hard skill to develop oh yeah yeah and i think that's cultivated you have to spend a lot of time in the gym with eyes and on people in 3d and once you cultivate that it's a lot easier to do it yeah you can't develop that skill well i don't know it'd be very hard to develop that skill virtually yeah nicole um yeah you know to continue along where do people go wrong in the beginning um i think a lot of athletes make the mistake of like selecting a workout or you know following certain types of workouts that don't give the ability to progress right um and so there's a couple of like types of workouts that would fall into this category where you lack some you know workouts lend themselves into this area where you lack the ability to progressively overload over time um so for example

you know we mentioned the bodyweight exercises bodyweight exercises have a great place in a program but you're going to be limited with your improvement after a couple of weeks and so um you know like you you can ask yourself the question as you go along like do i have the ability to keep improving the way that this is set up can i progressively overload week to week and month to month um you know if you're doing circuit type training or you found this cool workout on the internet it's probably a nice workout but is it period like do the sets and reps progress does the weight increase over time um if you're setting yourself up to do the same thing week after week after week then you know you're you're it's like that inability to sorry to progress i keep saying that but um but it's true i mean it's true and the classes at the gym yeah like the high fitness type class and stuff like you get a great workout but set yourself up to where you know i'm going to set up this exercise progression and stick with it for several weeks so that i can increase the weight over time or or the volume in another way um and i think you really nailed it there nicole the whole it's it's of of sticking with it and also kind of circling back of when you get gym equipment or you join a gym that's keep that in mind of if i'm going to be doing this for six weeks do i have the equipment have i purchased have i accumulated have i got do i have the things at hand that will allow me

to progress um or have i boxed myself in yeah yeah i think another area that we sometimes go wrong is um doing too much volume especially as runners you know like there the sets and reps that you choose with your exercises should support a certain goal right and there are set and rep sets and rep ranges that support for example strength there are sets and rep ranges that support power um there are sets and rep ranges and volumes that support hypertrophy or bodybuilding and so sometimes you know you don't want to go in and be doing too much volume um as a runner for performance i like to tell athletes we want to have a cadillac engine in a volkswagen chassis and so meaning you want to be as strong and your engine as big as possible in like as small of a frame as possible so you don't want to go in with like this bodybuilding routine i mean it's really really difficult for runners to hypertrophy at all and we can get into that if we want but but in general like if if you stick to two to three days a week full body routines it's probably just the right amount of volume to get strong but without um you know this like goal of hypertrophy and being big and bulky and like i said it's really hard to do but but don't do too much like make sure that your sets and reps support the goal as a runner and support with what you're trying

to do with your strength here here's what i'll say to both of those i'll bring in a more clinical term the minimum effective dose is always extremely low in our in our situation and extremely and what i mean by that is it's extremely low compared to all of the other work that you're doing so let's just say you're doing 10 hours a week of run training right just to make the math easy for me if you did 30 minutes of strength training a week which is five percent of your total volume this is why i made it 10 hours a week so if i was one hour it'd be 10 if i cut that in half 30 minutes it's five percent that's you know i don't have a calculator out so i need some help good work coach there you go that's an effective enough dose to make an adaptation 30 minutes a week five percent of your total volume and it's probably even less than that i mean we could debate whether it's 20 minutes a week or 15 minutes a week or 40 minutes a week or kind of whatever but i guess my point is is as especially as ultra marathon athletes which is a subset of endurance uh athletes we tend to be kind of volume mongers you know volume kind of rules the day and this isn't this is an area because we're runners first and we're not strength training athletes or power sport athletes where there is a minimum effective dose that is actually quite effective and not that much at all and at the beginning which is circling back to my initial point of this it's really not that much it's one set of eight of four or five different exercises and

then you get out of the gym when you just start that could take 10 minutes right there and that's enough to elicit a neuromuscular adaptation in and of itself and then you come back a couple days later and then you do it again and then a couple weeks later you add in another set and then several weeks later you add a little bit more to that i mean i guess the point that i'm trying to make is is when you initially start out you can pretty much undershoot every expectation that you have in terms of the minimum amount that it takes and you'll probably still get an adaptation yeah especially for someone who is new brand strength training yeah yeah yeah absolutely i mean that's that old i'm sure nicole's probably heard it in the personal training world is that anybody can get results with a bad personal trainer in the beginning if they've never done anything because a bad program will still get them more results than what they've done because they're doing a little bit more than what they've done before but that's the difference between a good coach and a trainer and a willy-nilly plan is that things then start getting very specific and what dose is right for that athlete um and at what period in their training and i don't know about you know nicole but i have athletes right now the season and they're like i just crushed my hundred it was awesome but i miss the gym and i want to lift heavy like i do want to go through a little bit of hypertrophy i do yeah and i fully support that because if we look at the plan and we map it out and we talk about like okay we've got this phase but then this is when we start need to change gears and we're all on board with it but this is the time to scratch that itch in that off season if that's something that they enjoy doing i'm not you know

but yeah so because i do get some of those that are like can i can i coach the time can i yeah but that's the i mean that's the sign that you've weaned it off at the appropriate time yeah during kind of the peak phase of training because this all all of this has to get counterbalanced right we just we meant at the very beginning we mentioned bandwidth and space and if you've got more bandwidth to get in the strength training you know get in the strength training setting you should absolutely take advantage of that but a certain point that's going to go away and then you go back to your minimum effective dose essentially to bring back that vocabulary and the strength that enhances the running not takes away from it exactly i think let's peel on that a little bit because i always like to talk about this is kind of like off topic or off our little outline or whatever but yeah like we ever stick to the outline it's like 50 50 some people it's like 90 10 that we're not on it but i think it is important to understand and to elaborate on this concept that there is a give and take that at a certain point in time it's okay to do some strength training that might detract from the running and the opposite is also true there is a time where you should not do strength training that detracts from the running because the running has to be the hero and if anything i've mentioned this to both of you guys and then kind of like several pod several podcasts if i've ever made any error in this realm it's how to communicate that and probably that's why i want to talk about it as much as i can as much as i can

because i want to find out better ways to actually to actually communicate it so i think the way to the way to discuss this a little bit more is almost from a practical example sarah as you mentioned like you have this athlete that you take them through these ebbs and flows and cycles within their running and their strength training and now they're like coming full circle to the point to where they actually want to get back in the weight room a little bit more i want to elaborate on like what that looks like throughout the course of a typical season for somebody just to get it ingrained in the listeners heads you want me to go first yeah go ahead okay so you're talking about like how we would set up old like off-season mid-season yeah just like uh nicole's three phases that she went through some parallel to that yeah that we've talked about yeah so in the beginning and this is someone who's like eager hot to trot they've come off of their a race and they're like give it you know let me have strength i want to do a 405 pound deadlift in the next four weeks if people miss the beginning of this they're going to be so confused um so yeah we have a lot more play there and you know we have again with conversations we look at the long range plan of the year especially if they've already come they're like okay i'm doing you know this race in june and i've already gotten into it i know it's happening but it's now september and i've got some latitude here so this the rest of this year there's a lot more the last two to three months of this year we have a lot more play with the strength they can be in the weight room three days a week they can be lifting heavier they can have higher volume

um they can be doing moves that might leave them with fatigued legs because i'm not worried about them being able to nail their five hour long run on a saturday if they just did squats and deadlifts you know 24 and 48 hours earlier um i think that also can help i find give an athlete feedback on how their body feels after these sessions so when it comes full circle into the higher volume run you know when we get more into the meat and bones and of a training cycle they'll be like oh yeah i remember when i lifted my legs were pretty trashed for even my shorter runs so they kind of buy in they know you know that that it will take a toll they do feel that but right now there's a low cost to that or you know that risk benefit or cost benefit analysis and that's all it is with if you've got x amount of time to train what is our priority right now what do we need to be devoting our time to and what minimum dosage can we get of what we need and then what do you enjoy doing and as the cycle goes as we get into middle of the season we'll start probably shedding a day of strength training it's probably going to be like nicole said more in fact two days a week the volume what we do and the timing of it is going to look differently the exercise selection might not vary that much at that point because you know certain movements are just really good to have but where we place them in a week butting up against some of our quality runs intensity i want to i want to emphasize that point a little bit so what you're saying is is when the training gets when the run

training becomes a higher priority kind of the two tools that you're primarily using to counterbalance our first frequency that was the first thing that you mentioned so frequency days per week going from three to two right that's a big that's a big tool that's not a trivial change right that's a one-third reduction in the total amount of load when you look at it on a weekly basis what else are they adjusting the frequency and then maybe volume the total volume just their total reps reps and sets yeah um but you know are and how many how many exercises so in the beginning off season it might be like you got your a your a1 exercise which is like your big like your big five by five or four by six and then you've got some more of accessory and you might have some b and c exercises because you can spend an hour and a half in the gym or an hour in the gym because you enjoy it and you love it and it's fun you're not going to be doing that four months out from your hundred miler you won't have the time most likely if if you do we've got a conversation because it's gonna exactly it's gonna be eating into some other things in life um and then also that much volume just the volume of what we're asking you to do and then you start getting into things of it's just extra do you need the extra it's just noise it's it's fun but is it enhancing your running and at that point a lot of that stuff starts to take away from it um and then you're getting more into like the hyper like you're not

i will never have an athlete where i'm like okay now we're gonna do our skull crutches and our tricep extensions and our like doing these little bodybuilding exercises yeah it's just there's there's no bang for your buck for somebody if their goal is running it's almost a roi focus that's the way i kind of looked at it right like you can have you can you're okay with a lower roi earlier in the season just because you're because the strength training volume can be a whole lot higher you have to be like the precision the amount of emphasis you have to put on the precision of the prescription in terms of exercise selection and total amount of volume and placement right you mentioned that too right the placement of the workouts just increases because you you're trying to you're trying to have the an effect without detracting from the running yeah which is not easy okay nicole do you want to add on to that like general flow um i think that was pretty good i think i'm not pretty good that was really good it's gonna be pretty good it's okay i still love you i was just thinking as you went through that the question the common question that comes up with athletes as we get closer into that high volume of how we're going to handle the strength training um i get a really common question from athletes is um you know like trying to understand should we be lifting at all you know and it and it depends on the athlete but if you can understand that volume i think volume and running when we say high volume

we're talking about lots of miles or lots of hours right when we say high volume and strength training that can kind of come it's like a combination of the sets and reps so it could come as high weight with like also a lot of reps or really high reps you know it can come in two different ways and so the key is that when we have low volume at the end of the season late season when we have low volume strength training it's not the heavy weights that induces a ton of fatigue it's the high volume is really really really fatigue inducing and so you can still be lifting relatively heavy at the end of your season as long as our sets and our reps are low you know and and any athlete who's gone through this progression can tell you you know like three sets of 15 is exhausting three sets of two even though it's heavier like i can get in and out of the gym and i'm not destroyed even though it was heavy weight it's it's low volume and so i think if you have that understanding of like it's okay to lift all the way through as long as there's not that mismatch of volume and as long as the fatigue isn't too great that's that's coming from the strength training like those two things have to be in balance i was you know when you said uh this common question comes up i and i agree with you that's a common question but my first inkling was actually the opposite of that it's do instead of is this going to interfere

do it can i still can i still lift you know should i still lift at all how long does the legacy last once you stop strength training because that's what a lot of athletes want to do when their volume gets super you know when that when their volume starts to take over and they're doing you know back-to-back long runs and things like that they just want to quit cold turkey right they just want to say hey listen i don't want to do strength strength training at all and i wanted to get you got you guys see that way more you know way more than a lot of our coaches and way way more than i do so to talk about nicole's planning it's always keep keeps coming back to nicole's planning for whatever reason is this something like would you how would you counsel an athlete on that like are would they see any sort of reasonable deterioration in their like exercise capacity or their performance capabilities or whatever if they just went through six months strength training and then stopped and then just ran for two or three months and then did their peak event which i think this just might be my bias i think that that's actually relatively common yeah it's common off season is lifting and then once the nitty-gritty starts with the running it's like oh strength training what so is that an error in your professional estimation because i think this is really important for the planning part of it i think the nuance there is why are they taking the training the strength training out is it because

that now they need that time for sleep they need that time for other things the the run volume is that like if the things that they need for appropriate recovery or to it to get the most out of their run programming is eating into that limited time they have for strength that's a that's a more nuanced i think distinction there because i do i think it's good to just stop cold turkey i think there's some benefits of still continuing some you know some modified version of it but not if it's at the expense of them not getting the proper recovery or sleep but i don't think that's the case for a ton of people i think it's choosing their priorities go go ahead nicole i'll tell you guys how i usually handle it but i want to hear what nicole is well i like that i like to bring up the point that you want to be your strongest at the time of your event that's why we're doing this right like like you want to be your strongest at the time you're supposed to perform you know like that's and so if you completely take everything out when you could to jason's point earlier you could devote five percent of your training volume modify things slightly and do the things that matter slightly get into the maintenance do things that matter and still be strong at the time of your event then it it was for something greater you know i wish i wish i had some some data on on that jason does with how long those adaptations last i i think what i see maybe you see this too nicole is a lot of people have

this all or nothing i was doing 30 minutes in the gym i can't do that anymore so there's really no point where they still could get 10 minutes and still get some benefit to prioritizing um some of the key the key things well so i was gonna i was gonna bring in the data right the strength training data so we do know that i'm going to generalize strength training adaptations although we can divide them into the strength component and the martin the neuromuscular component and the recruitment component and things like that but if we want to create these broad categories strength training adaptations come and go more quickly than the endurance side and we're talking about several days maybe a couple of weeks to which those adaptations kind of sink in on the strength training side and then on the endurance side you're talking several weeks or months so it's a shorter process on both the entry of the adaptations and also the removal of the stimulus how quickly you how quickly you detrain on the strength training side however nothing really happens like that in terms of switching the light off right because we're all training to a certain degree and there's a continuum of adaptations that always happen so going back to our earlier point of the the minimum effective dose it becomes extremely small on the strength training side once you've gone through that big peak and valley process and so i actually think it's kind of an idealistic situation because you can go through let's just say you have an athlete that is training for an event in july you can go

through a big more strength training focused process in january february and march and then leave april may and june and cut that strength training volume by almost 80 percent and hold on to 95 percent of those adaptations with that minimum effective dose it really doesn't take that much and so if you if you're looking at strength training as an as an intervention to throw into the mix in order to improve performance you have to realize that you can take advantage of those heavy times and leave a lot of space and hold on to almost all not all almost all of those adaptations and not sacrifice and not sacrifice the running side i would say it's an error if you go cold turkey for more than three weeks just to put on that like polarized example i think the data would the data would definitely back that up as well and i do think that it's also an error if you go down to that minimum effective dose for more than three months after that you start to lose an appreciable amount of the stimulus to where you can do it just for shits and giggles but if you're looking at it which is fine i mean people just some people like you said people crave strength training right you can straight train just because you enjoy doing it but if you're looking at it from something that improves performance to nicole's point that we keep berating you have to like logically plan it out because you want to make sure that the adaptations that you

intentionally and deliberately created during a very heavy strength training phase that you time it such that you retain the majority of those adaptations when you start to make that compromise towards the more running side of things that is the big point of planning and it's not as simple as i'm going to keep kind of coming back to this because i see this error time and time again it's not as simple as just go in and do this leg circuit just go in and do this one thing like twice a week because that violates all those principles that i just kind of ran through yeah so that's what i that's what i think so the people that are that are that are out there that are thinking about planning these things yes you should give yourself space but realize that there's a time and limitation to that space it's eight maybe 12 weeks at maybe 50 to 80 percent less of your maximum dosing i think that that's a reasonable compromise and it's really not that much i mean just take a typical workout at 100 you're doing eight exercises five by five if you just cut that in half much less 70 or 80 that's like 20 minutes in the weight room right there yeah and that's enough that's more than enough to retain the the adaptations that you that you have for i would say at the at the maximum 12 weeks is probably the longest stretch that i'd make but certainly eight weeks and not be a detriment to the running as you're running it's actually still improvement

that's what i mean like but it's not the fatigue the things that you're doing in the weight room now it's that balance has shifted so it's going to be giving you the performance aspect without being a draw back from impairing your running okay let's get into caveats time oh because i know both of you want to talk about this you just don't realize it yet we tend to have this like no this is no this is my performance bias right so we tend to have this super we tend to have this bias on we're training 20 year old college males and the reality is is we're not and there there are uh there are advantages and benefits the strength training that go far beyond the 10 minutes of improvement i'm going to get out of the leadville trail 100 course or whatever it is right i mean you would have put a time perspective on it that's kind of it so i'll start out i'll start i don't hear you guys's perspective on this i'll start out by saying that if you are in the strength training game for those benefits better bone health you want to be able to lift your luggage into the overhead bin without throwing your back out you think that the strength training is going to contribute to you know you preventing injuries or something like that and this whole host of other just health benefits of doing it great freaking go for it and you know what if you want to do that at the compromise of your 10 minutes on the leadville trail 100 course that's awesome too that 10 minutes on the leadville trail 100 course is

not that much unless you're finishing in 30 hours and nine minutes or 30 hours 11 minutes yeah it's not that much that so i wanted i want to start out with that caveat because i know that there's a lot of people out there that that you know aren't going to look at strength training it's with such a laser like focus on performance they're they're presenting it as this broader umbrella to where there's yes there's probably a performance improvement but they're also just health and lifestyle improvements that might even supersede whatever performance rigmarole that we actually want to go through but what do you two have to say about that what other caveats do you have to say about that as well because i know it's an area that we talk about a lot well i was just going to say to your point of you can list a host of the all the benefits right they have nothing to do with performance they have nothing to do with trail running there is a host right there's the evidence goes on and on about the benefits of strength training right um but athletes will ask me like you know should i be strength training is this something i should be doing and you know we go through all the the questions to determine if they're good candidates but at the end of the day my recommendation is like i recommend strength training for any aging athlete what's aging i'm getting into this category now so you can see the wheels turning when i say that and the athletes are thinking they're like any aging athlete like and i did have an athlete one time say we'll define aging athlete and i'm like did the athlete wake up a day older today than they were yesterday right like and then it clicks for

people like oh she's saying everyone like right like you can't deny that there's there's this evidence body of evidence out there and data that that this is like a great thing we can be doing as humans outside of runners you know and um you're right though like you doesn't mean you can't you don't have to go through the the questions of in every training phase you have to ask what am i sacrificing and what am i prioritizing like even though this is a great thing and everyone can benefit like you still have to go through that thought process like what am i sacrificing to to put this in and what what what will i prioritize at different times um i don't know there you go sarah i mean that pretty much sums it up i i think it's also you know you've got athletes that are very motivated and they love strength training and they're like this is a non-negotiable for me i want to do this and then you have those conversations of like again this is what it could impact and this is what it you know can we you know we have those conversations and other people are like when can i stop do i need to do this and if so when can i stop doing this you know they're not into it you know it's not their thing and i'm not going to force anybody but like nicole pointed out and like you said there are so many benefits especially well for everybody but especially women let's you know be honest and you know it's there's some valuable things that have nothing to do with performance and nothing to

do that are worth in some cases that 10 minutes on a race course because they're going to have better bone density and potentially and they're going to have all these other benefits that can come from that and i like did not to not to berate the point too much longer but i don't think that the performance compromise i think the performance compromise is either negligible or it's just so small that you could never tease it out as long as you get the programming right which is a big caveat we're professionals here we know how to get the programming right or we think you know how to get the programming right but when you do get the programming right you can blend all of those health benefits with the performance the performance benefits at the same time and they don't have to necessarily compromise each other so i don't want to present it as this like you're either or yeah i don't want to present it you know yeah especially when you look at the long-term outcomes right which we should never like we should never neglect that this is a long-term game that we're playing that's decades long not just a year long or a season long or a race long that if you look at the long-term outcomes and you blend all those things they're going to be healthier happier for that time frame i mean personally speaking for me i had osteopenia in my 20s i had the bones of a 70 year old at 23 years old and so strength training has been critical for me because i was starting out with such a deficit you know and so i go on it hard because i know my longevity is in health and not just running really depends on it for me personally

you caught that without a moment to spare too right my little window is shrinking that's amazing what a hairline fracture will do in your pelvis okay that'll get you that dexa scan real quick we can talk about that at another point in time okay what else do you guys have to mention any final thoughts what should my progression be on my 405 pound deadlift if i have three months to do it where how's the broomstick going i got the most i mean i'll be able to get the neuromuscular i'll be i'll be able to get the movement pattern pretty quick because i mean i've deadlifted a lot i'll start with a hex bar right here's some realistic advice for people start a hex bar you can get a better position and then move to actually a real bar a straight a straight bar but i'm gonna start with that i'm gonna start with a hex bar i'll probably spend four weeks just at the hex bar good and then i don't know i think if i i don't know i have to just let the progression take it but i know realistically i've got to be able to do like 350 pounds by the first of december in order to have any shot and this is by your birthday by the end of the year i should make my birthday my birthday is december 20th i was gonna say it's really close to that what's your previous best or is this a new movement it's not a new movement but it's a new movement to try to set a one wrap rep max on like i've done you know heavy sets of three probably 330 pounds 340 pounds sets of three

so i mean it's not that's a long time ago though but it's within my performance escape i wouldn't have agreed to it if it weren't like someone within the realm of my performance capability i mean i think the analogy i think the analogy is so my we'll go back to ludville my pr on the right on the ludville course is like night right around 19 hours i think it's about 18 hour ludville finish for me okay that's like the realm of like if you wanted to come up with an ultra marathon equivalent to it i think that's about close damn you rob i hope and i would just maybe add before we kind of wrap this up is i think if someone is like strength curious or if they are been kind of contemplating getting into it that this off season is a really really good time to explore that with very low risk to their running so i think that this should be a time of kind of excitement and exploration with that um and this is the time to do it if your race is middle middle of you know march and beyond or you don't know or you don't know you don't have a race on the calendar this you know there you go yeah yeah there's no hard and fast rule to what what your strength training has to be exactly but yeah pivot if you're curious and if you it's never too late to try and to learn and my sweet grandma started training at 85 you know and it's never too late so i love that that's rad all right we'll let it go there at that point thank you too for coming back on the podcast i'll put some links in the show notes

to sarah's article but also some resources on where people can actually start i would i would uh employ everybody to check that out because it's really not as complicated as you think and to youtube's point if you just start you can take it from there you can plan realistically somewhere in the early phase of it you know to nicole's point but uh it doesn't have to be nearly as intimidating as a 405 pound deadlift should be there you go perfect thanks you guys thank you that was great all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to coach sarah and to coach nicole for coming on the podcast today and lending us your experience in this area as we mentioned during the course of the show now is the time if you're ever thinking about starting a strength training program do it right now figure it out now make some of those mistakes now get your home gym set up now figure out what gym you want to go to in your area now when you have the time when you have the physical resources and you have a little bit of time to actually plan things out as nicole so aptly mentioned during the course of the podcast because it can be a big uh performance improvement for you coming down the road next year regardless of what your uh your goals might be but in addition to that there's a myriad of health benefits as we mentioned during uh towards the end of the show quick programming note for everybody listening out there i am going to be out of the country and unavailable to record any

additional podcasts starting at the end of august and going all the way to the middle of november i'm going to be a part of one of my athletes mina gully her crew as she runs marathons all around the world to raise awareness about our water crisis that everybody is going through right now however fret not because i have a number of podcasts banked that i'll be releasing during that time and in addition i'm pulling in some help coaches stephanie howe and andy jones wilkins otherwise known as ajw are going to be doing some guest hosting for me throughout uh throughout this time so don't be surprised when you hear their voices on the other end of this channel as opposed to mine they're going to do a bang up job and have a ton of good content lined up for you i will be back in the middle of november with a regular scheduled programming and i'll be picking it up from there i've already got a number of great guests lined up for when that time happens to come but until then expect some podcasts that i already have in the can and expect stephanie and andy to take you through the initial part of this winter season appreciate the heck out of everybody listening out there all your support over the years and as always we will see you out on the trails