Strength Training for Ultrarunning Part 1 with CTS Coach Sarah Scozzaro⎮KoopCast Episode 15

what's going on trail runners welcome to another episode of the KoopCast i'm your host Jason Koop and today on the podcast we're going to talk all about strength training for ultra runners i know it's that time of year where people are thinking about maybe getting back in the gym maybe bulking up a little bit maybe doing some exercises to help prevent injury and there is a lot of misinformation and confusion around this area and so what i did is i actually uh pulled in one of our newest coaches sarah socorzo and i promise you i will butcher her name way worse than that in future editions of the KoopCast because it's just hard to pronounce and i'm not very good at it but i pulled in one of our new coaches sarah who actually has uh quite an extensive background in this area having worked with uh some professional sports teams that we talk about on the podcast as well as within her own personal interest we talk about a lot of areas and and and what we really tried to set up during the course of this podcast is is strength training the right option for you to achieve the goal that you want to achieve whether that is improved performance whether that is is you just like it you just like to do strength training or whether you're trying to prevent

injuries and what we decided in the middle of the podcast this is actually quite fascinating is is we're going to make it a two-part series so this first part what i want the listeners to really focus in on is is strength training the right outlet for you to achieve whatever goal that you have and i think that we painted painted that picture quite well and then in the second part of this podcast which is going to come out uh maybe one or two weeks after the first one we're going to really dive in to the nitty-gritty programming uh elements of what a strength training program might look like should you decide to undertake it uh so we had a lot of fun with this uh we pulled a tremendous amount of uh research in advance of this and we actually start the podcast out with with just kind of some dialogue about what that means and how that's changed over the years and really how hard it is to to to find kind of the right combination of papers and research and literature that's out there to to point coaches and athletes uh in in the right direction and so much so at times you can hear us like filtering through uh some of the papers that we were uh that we were referencing throughout the podcast so we started out there but really the conversation transitioned to this overarching dialogue of is strength training something that is right for you to actually uh partake in so without any further ado have a listen to coach sarah and i on is strength training right for you

so i always ask coaches whenever they have like good um whenever they have like good research framework meaning they know how to actually like pull research what's that a product of because not because trust me i've i've i've trained and i've um developed and hired like hundreds of coaches and so i see all the different patterns of how they look up and pull research and it's it's very very clear i mean you have some coaches that come in that they that they that they're doing everything that they can and they're trying to do the right thing and they're trying to like be well thought out and well researched but they just don't pull the right papers like they just don't perform the the information gathering step correctly so they're pulling like small studies or really bizarre things because they fit a certain search term or whatever but when you pulled all the stuff i was like yep that's like that's exactly what should have been pulled so i was just wondering like where does it come from yay um i don't know i i honestly the funny thing is i couldn't find like in my email i was trying to find studies more on the corrective stuff which i couldn't find so it was more of like well you know let's go with what most people associate you know strength training and ultra running and there aren't many of them so then it was like well let's go to distances that are as close to that as we can get with studies that

are large enough because you don't want to just do 10 people yeah it's interesting that you mentioned that you can't find a lot of uh research specifically on the corrective training yeah i think a lot of that has to do with everybody calls it something differently that's a good point and and we we've talked about that a lot just in our own like internal continuing educations that that sometimes we tend to use these big broad umbrella definitions or this big broad umbrella vocabulary for things and they don't really they're not really the same thing but we don't have a better way to describe it agreed yeah no that's a good point and i it's funny because of my notes here too i i even kind of said that you know uh with strength training it was like well we kind of like let's define that and what we're going to be discussing today in terms of strength training for ultra runners because it's such a broad brush right exactly yeah exactly yeah yeah so but yeah and then i tried to look for studies that were more recent than like 20 and you know you get these ones that are like from 2003 and 2002 and that's not to say they're not good but let's see if we can find things that are a little bit more peer-reviewed and more recent no i appreciate that like i said it's not and that's a that's a correctable skill like whenever i've had coaches that have come in the door and i say hey you know go research x y and z and they just come back with garbage like that that's a correctable skill just like any other workplace skill and and and we and we work on that with with those coaches but i'm always

impressed that when when we have coaches kind of right off the bat that kind of know what to look for and know how to look for it and how to pull them and how to and how to interpret it which is a completely different which is a completely different thing right i mean it's so easy just to go right to the conclusions and go oh well these are the conclusions that the research team made so they must be the conclusion but then like when you combine the conclusion with the methods and then the statistics that went into it so or just read the abstract on the first page and don't even read the conclusion you just skip right in it yeah and i think too what a lot of people this is the problem the challenge some people run into is they only pick the studies that they think will back up what they want to prove and i think it's good to look for ones that don't because you need to see that side too well like yeah and that and that's super easy to do nowadays because we get we get a lot of what to look up just through social media and social media is like the ultimate confirmation bias lens because it feeds you more of what you like right because they want the apps to be sticky but also just as humans like we tend to like follow and like and seek out people that are more like us and then it feeds us more of that because of the algorithm so you get more of that yeah and it's true well i mean you know we used to have our we we actually used to have our interns like actually

pull the physical journals and like an exercise that i would have them do is like just like literally like photocopy like photocopy you know the these seven things in this journal that we got out of the you know a couple dozen or so journals that we would get every every month or every other month go ahead and photocopy out these you know these studies and then we're all going to bring them together around a table and discuss them and there you're really truly kind of getting a representative sample of what the research is kind of presenting out now the way that that information is disseminated which is essentially twitter you know for anybody who's not in the academic space it's it's it's twitter um i would say anybody that's kind of in the practitioner space right the academics they they'll still get all the journals and they'll pour through them and things like that but the practitioners like the coaches and a lot of the physical therapists and even the rds and things like that like their their information source on the research side tends tends to come through that social media platform because that presents the it's the lens that you give it right yeah and i and it's confirmation bias this is what i believe and and here this confirms what i believe and there's yeah yeah anyway that's a whole nother i want to get i should find an expert on that topic to really that would be really interesting because i don't think people think critically and i think so many people are afraid to be wrong because to be challenged in your own belief makes you question

you know it it's not it's not comfortable totally and it's okay to go wow maybe i was wrong about that yeah let's look at it from a different angle totally i've found i have to i have to work really hard to keep a balanced perspective when i'm like when i'm using social media to like weed through relevant information like i i have to i have to intentionally unfollow people that are just put either putting out nonsense or or or in a lot of cases like just perpetuate the exact same point of view and i have to intentionally follow people that have a different point of view and that's that's not easy like that's an easy statement to make but just to like actually go through and do it i've actually found it professionally really challenging i bet that would be yeah that's a good challenge though anyway that's not what we're here to talk about i do i do i do appreciate the research that you pulled and i and since you had a hard time finding the the research that was more in your sweet spot sarah i think that let's start with that because you've got this really cool background that that that that i that i kind of really appreciate and i think there's all there might be some like little funny anecdotes that go along with it uh that that you can tell working in a in a professional league sports team kind of at the at the top of the food chain there yeah so you want me to kind of go into that background

yeah yeah absolutely yeah okay so um i worked with the uh cincinnati bangles for four full seasons and a little bit of the last season before they did a coach changeover um and my primary role with that was i was a consultant working on um kind of restorative exercise in the to that sense of like injury prevention and correctives um i'm not huge on that word um it's a lot of flack sometimes that you know when people throw on correctives as if someone's doing something wrong but we'll just use that word we'll use the word corrective um and i worked with the players on um every i got to work with every player on the team which was really cool all positions and um just kind of individually worked with specific issues they may have had and then worked with them in group settings as well on ways to kind of balance out their bodies with the demands of their their uh playing yeah it's interesting because a lot of people think of football as the exact same sport for all the players yeah exactly no it's absolutely not i mean you've got not only you know players on both sides of the ball but you have skill players you have huge offensive linemen you have very fast players you have very skillful players and kind of the whole run in between and so in essence like when i when i look at that through like through a coaching lens you're really not coaching one sport you're really coaching like five or six different nuances within the same like umbrella sport of football um yeah but but to get a

little bit deeper into like what you're actually doing since we've since we've already agreed that the vocabulary isn't very good yeah like take the listeners through from a like a realistic practical perspective what the prescription looked like with the players that you were working with like what types of exercises were you taking them through what were the different conditions of the players and things like that yeah obviously you know not getting into specific players and sure injuries and things like that yeah um so when i would work with the like we'll use uh foot health for example which sounds so like that's not strength training but they tend to have very weak feet and they tend to have they they were really tight cleats when they play so they tend to have very weak feet you don't think of that you know you don't think of feet and football players but they they we worked from foundationally from the ground up so we would literally start with foot conditioning strengthening the foot working on ways to work out the fashion their feet the tight spots how we strengthen those feet um and then we'd go up through the chain calves knees hamstrings hips and we would do different uh both stretches but also more actual movement type exercises to activate and help balance out the weak spots so that's what we're going for as the weak spots because these these players um are very good at what they do and depending on what position that is and depending on their body type and size um but you'd be really really amazed at how

much generally players lack in certain areas well yeah because we we kind of laud these professional athletes that are out on the field i mean super bowl just happened you know last weekend and that's like the pin the pinnacle of that sport obviously but we tend to laud these athletes as these like superhuman you know types of people that can you know run faster jump higher you know lift more weights than you know anybody else out there but what a lot of people kind of lose sight of and the hype of the in the hype of the sport is that they're actually real humans and they have deficiencies in their athletic game just like any other athlete that's training for a marathon or 5k or whatever has a deficiency in their athletic game absolutely and i i think it's kind of neat for people if they realize that because you see these people on the screen you think they're almost like superhuman but in fact they have issues too they have platter fasciitis they get it band issues they get hip things they you know what i mean so it's they're they're still a human body playing at a level above most of us will ever see but it's still a human body and if the human body has deficiencies and weaknesses in certain areas it doesn't matter if you're an nfl player or a weekend warrior things are going to pop up well and you probably saw them at their worst yeah yeah well i see them at the best in the beginning of the season and then by by the end it's it's it's strikingly different yeah you know and and it's hard sometimes

too because you see these 23 year old guys like not moving like 23 year old men anymore you know by the end it's it's a rough sport yeah that's such an awesome that's such an awesome perspective to like bring into endurance sports because you know there there are a lot of parallels i mean endurance athletes are kind of notorious and we kind of put an s on our chest uh proverbially speaking because of all the hard work that you know that we put in and it is a heavily injury ridden sport you know there's there's a study that i pull up a lot that you know kind of analyze the trends of runners over the course of an entire year and they found that you know almost 70 percent of those runners missed at least one day of training due to an injury and i've presented that in our coaching group before and they just kind of look at it and go well the other 30 percent are lying like it's it's everybody i think everybody has right i mean i think those other people aren't really being forthright because everybody has something pop up and for some people it's just a a really small little thing that doesn't take any time and they're back at it and other people it can be season ending it can you know literally their race season is gone yeah so so you've got this perspective where you see these like really big or really fast and really athletic dudes on yeah tuesday wednesday thursday they've played a game on sunday beating the snot out of each other you see them tuesday wednesday thursday you're trying to get them kind of back in the in the field to play not only for the next week but the

week after that and the week after that but along that same time you're also like a pretty badass ultra runner like you were doing a lot of of pretty cool like ultra running events at that time did that ever like come in to the you know to the training room or to the weight room or anything like that yeah they thought it was insane they're like crazy they literally were like you are yeah i was the crazy one they're like no that's that's that's awful they're like we don't run i'm like but you run and they're like no we don't run like that they're like what why a couple of them thought it was super cool yeah they really they really were like that is awesome i really think it helped me identify with them more because i had a sport i had something that i trained for and i was passionate about and they could they could even though they didn't understand wanting to run 100 miles they could totally respect what goes into something like that the commitment involved sure it gave you a little street cred oh total street cred they would be like oh my god that girl crazy i mean they would they would be like then a new guy would come in and they'd be like you you got what do you do tell them tell him what you do like they they just thought it was hilarious um yeah but that they were generally you know interestingly enough most of my events were in the off season like the summer you know where they're kind of on break so i'd work with them like april may into june and then they'd be off and then you'd start back and when the season started so like lead bell and never summer in july august so i'd come back and be like what'd you do now what did you run what did you do and i wouldn't say

i'm badass i'm just really i'm good at being persistent well but the funny thing is is you don't i never told i never told you this but when i was screening all the resumes that for the incoming coaches that we had i saw that and i paired two and two together i paired like the athletic side along with your job side and i painted this picture in my mind of you know the players coming in on tuesday or wednesday and you also coming in on a tuesday or wednesday after some event and like these comparative war stories of the football game on the on the player side and then your ultra marathon on your side and i just came up with this hilarious scene in my mind and i've actually i just realized i never talked to you about it so i'm glad that that scene is at least somewhat validated it is no that's funny and i appreciate that because it really was you know especially if i was like sore after a particular run or event and i'd come you know come in and they would be beat up and we'd be like oh what's the time with you today you should have seen the other guy but uh yeah so it was it was fun to be able to to be able to relate in in a different way but still fatigue and recovery are kind of universal yeah i mean that's that's a really good point that's a really really good point so so now i mean you with that experience and you've been you know working with runners and you've been you've been a runner that entire time but now you get to take a lot of

that experience and a lot of that practice of working with athletes they're kind of at the at the pinnacle of they're not kind of they are they're at the pinnacle of their sport and you get to apply some of those same principles to runners how do you how do you go about doing some of the same things and and kind of like sessing up a runner sizing up a runner and saying okay these are the things that we're going to work on from uh i'm going to use the word that you don't like from a corrective exercise you know point of view yeah i don't i don't mind i just know some people get all i do too because i don't like but you know it's the it's the vocabulary that we're stuck with but but how do you how do you go about doing that for for like a trail and ultra runner because that's where that's like your world now yeah yeah no and it was then too and so it was it's very um relatable you know but so in the sense of like if i get a runner in front of me or i get a new athlete that i'm working with like how do i yeah either one either way yeah yeah yeah so because i do both i work with people you know in person and um my athletes remotely um so we'll we'll go with the remote option sure kind of now so generally you'll get someone in and you know i when we have our conversations and we do our questionnaire and just kind of like hey what what are you doing what's your injury history you know kind of what are your weaknesses and areas that you want to improve um and just also kind of getting a feel for what they're doing in their day-to-day life because most athletes your everyday athlete is also has a job they have a family they have other things going on so

they might run one to two to three hours on a given day but then they might be sitting at their desk the rest of the day they might be um you know there might be some other thing they're doing a repetitive motion in a different way um and so not to paint a generality but a lot of um runners especially if they have a desk job will just focus on the running and then they will go and sit and they tend to be very weak in their posterior chain again i'm painting a broad brush here um but i don't like their glutes aren't firing your glutes are firing they're just not maybe you know there's a there's an imbalance there or there's a weakness in your lateral hips or there's hamstring tightness or you've got some hip things um maybe your feet are weak and so i try to work into their strength training um ways to kind of balance that out and but but i like the fact that you're that you're sizing up the athlete you look at them and everybody's always going to come to they come into coaching for both general and specific reasons the general reasons is they usually have an event lined up but the specific reasons are are i have this one thing this one like little niggle that i can't fix or i can't you know solve my nutrition you know program or something kind of very very narrow and i think what i'm what i'm trying to what i'm getting from you is is that the athlete's telling you that really specific thing

hey my knee hurts it's really easy to go and zoom in on okay what's going on with the knee let's try let's try to quote unquote fix this like a cute problem of the knee but you're backing up and saying okay what are you doing for work what are you doing for life what are you doing for stress and and and using all of those different inputs to start to create like an exercise program for that athlete correct yeah i don't just take it as oh you're a runner this is what you're you know and and just go from there it's like okay yeah you're a runner but you're also you do this or you do that um okay so you've had uh and again scope of practice i'm not a physical therapist so i don't diagnose and i can't you know treat in that aspect but if someone may come to me and they're like i have a history of it band problems i have a history of of this and it's like okay well what have you been doing what you know let's explore what potentially led to that because generally um there are some pretty i don't want to say easy there are some simple ways to help with the general simple does not mean easy correct so there are some simple ways you can address common issues that runners and we'll say specifically ultra runners are facing um whether or not it's easy you know is is another it's another question as far as doing the work and and really kind of cutting down the layers of what we're working with but um generally when a runner an individual

starts you know incorporating some of these correctives into their programming um they start to see improvement because they're actually activating and using muscles and you know their body in a way they may not have been because running is trail running has an advantage running is pretty repetitive for sure in the you know in the plane of motion trail running has an advantage because you're you know rocks and jumping here and kind of laterally shuffling there it's a little bit different um but as a whole it's pretty repetitive over and over and over again so one little chink in that armor of movement can have can really have a domino effect yeah yeah yeah well okay so we've we've talked a little bit about what to do when you know something's wrong and and we've also talked about the fact that that's just about everybody right because everybody gets injured it kind of at least at least uh once a year but before we dive too far down that rabbit hole and this is going to start to talk this is going to start to set up the framework for the rest of the conversation there's this other side of strength training that a lot of runners are also and including myself as a coach is also really fascinated by and that's really strength training as an ergogenic aid meaning your strength training very specifically to get a performance improvement now you could say that the corrective side of the strength training uh world is also ergogenic because it will keep you more it'll keep you less prone to injury right you're not going to be as prone to injury and then therefore because you have more

training availability throughout the course of a year that then can improve your performance but there's another piece of the strength training size that that says we're going to strength train very specifically to get some sort of physiological adaptation that will therefore improve performance and that's usually go ahead as i said it's usually people will say running economy and vo2 max exactly that's exactly what i was going to say is usually what people will throw up exactly and that is a totally different prescription than the quote-unquote corrective side that we were that we were just talking about um and i and i know that you have you have done a lot of research and you've done a lot of practice on this on this side of the strength train on the ergogenic uh side of the strength training equation as well so let's go there next okay and start to talk about first what are these specific kind of physiological improvements that we're getting on the ergogenic side and then the second thing just very very broadly and then and then the second thing is what does the prescription generally look like because what i'm then going to do is compare that prescription to the corrective prescription to kind of paint the picture that they're that they're very different yeah no they are and so when most people there are a lot of when runners think of that or the performance side of strength training you tend to get more of the power and strength so your one to five um reps one to five

sets depending on you know what study and you know what you're looking at of lifting you know very very high heavy of your one percent rep max so it's very heavy it's intense you need more time in between sets for recovery um you're going the whole idea is to strengthen the body and this is very very broad you can go so deep with this but generally speaking strengthening the muscles the connective tissue to get that strong elastic kind of response in the muscles and people will then argue or not argue they will say that that will then help with running economy yeah and i think that's very well teased out in the literature and we pulled a lot of a lot of literature before this i don't know if you guys who are listening you can hear all of the papers being flipped every every now and again we probably have about five or six different studies in front of us that we're going to reference i destroyed a small forest i'll plant i'll plant a tree later today and we'll be all good thank you yeah exactly um but um um that that's my point with that is is that's very well teased out in the literature if you have some reasonable strength training program reasonable is in air quotes if you have a reasonable strength training program where you're lifting heavy and heavy being a set of five a set of six maybe times two or three or something like that that's hard challenging for the athlete and or fast ballistic types of movements plyometric movements box jumps and things like that you have

one or both of those components almost any study that you look at you'll see improvements in economy and if they measure a performance improvement you'll also see an improvement in in performance as well uh i'm gonna take a time stamp at 29 minutes is that coming from is that sound coming from your side oh it's your cat okay we'll just wait for a second i'll try to get him to shut up here let me let me sprinkle some treats out for him do you want me to let me uh no no no no just let it go i might actually leave this audio in here just to make it more real it's okay he never does that except when i'm on the phone and it's like wow i need love do not include that in the conversation there's cats might make a might might might make an appearance on the podcast again don't be embarrassed trust me sasha's interrupted way more than i i actually released the world um okay so that let's kind of let's kind of recap that again so so the the the the primary argue the primary argument for strength training as an ergogenic aid as it relates to uh as it relates to running relies in the fact that you're going to be able to improve your running economy the prime and that's the primary one that's not the only one before everybody starts yelling at me the only one yes it's a primary one it's one of them one of them but but running economy tends to like rise to the to the top of the heap almost in all of these studies and the conduit or the programming conduit to that is very heavy weights relative to the athlete

yeah exactly relative to the athlete going back to your football analogy they were lifting way way heavier weights than and then our skinny little runners are um heavy weights and or fast ballistic types of movements correct that's the that's the that's the conduit there now i would be remiss if i didn't mention the fact that those types of training sessions are hard correct and if programmed appropriately as programmed they should be like that's that's the stimulus that's that's the reps and sets guide you know based on the percentage of one rep max that's the goal yeah they should be hard and so there's a there's there's an amount of training stress that the athlete and or the athlete and coach need to take in mind with the entirety of all of the other training stresses and life stresses that there that there are and it's not and it's not insignificant correct i would agree with that okay so now we're on the same page yeah yeah yeah so now that we painted that picture you can get a you can get a performance improvement with this type of strength training using strength training as an ergogenic aid the strength talk about the amount of improvement yeah yeah that's good context yeah sarah go ahead yeah well i mean most of the studies that we see you're getting maybe two to four three to four percent that is such a good point in running

economy and vo2 max so let's say you're a track athlete okay good well no no keep going where you're going sorry i was gonna say short what is important for people we're probably i'm probably getting ahead of myself so um but is that three to four percent two to four percent you know every the studies usually find it around that that range yep how much is that going to make a difference in an ultra marathoner with the how much is the cost benefit of that is my point yeah yeah well i think i and we can talk about what that is but i think your point is is it's a few percent not 10 or 20 or 50 it's not a significant percent significance would be in the eye of the beholder right it means that's true if you if you finish western states underneath the 30 hour cutoff by two percent and that's the difference maker then hey there you go but i i think that the the the correct picture and thank you for stopping me before we went on to point this out is is that the magnitude of improvement is typically along a few percent and it doesn't matter you can look at the actual economy improvement or the vo2 max improvement or the performance improvement which is always what we're primarily concerned with the performance improvement that performance improvement typically lags a little bit behind any one of those individual markers and this is this goes both inside and outside of strength training it doesn't it you can

look at a nutritional intervention it's the same thing you improve vo2 max by four percent and then maybe the maybe the actual performance improvement depending upon what the performance marker is is usually less than that by one or two or three percent or something like that so my point is is when we see these hey you improve your vo2 max by four percent the actual implication to the athlete isn't the full four percent because performance is multifactorial and you're only measuring one or you're only kind of like measuring against one aspect of that performance but suffice it to say as a summary let's kind of go through our big points as first strength training as an ergogenic aid it has to be heavy and or fast yep the training load is relatively high it's a hard session correct and the improvement that you're going to get is on the order of a few percent that's a correct that's that's a good stylization of that without spending five hours which we could easily do okay okay so every all the listeners have that in mind if you want to use strength training as an ergogenic aid you're lifting heavy and or you're lifting fast and you might get a few percentage improvements and here's another thing that's worth mentioning you might just like it exactly i love the strength train yeah so i'll own that right now right up right out the gate before anybody throws tomatoes i i love strength training well john asked me the other day he's

like could you been in the weight room a lot i'm like yeah i've been in the weight room a lot he's like how do you feel i'm like well i like physically i feel great because i always i always feel great i'm a little bit heavier because i put on like 10 pounds of muscle and i'm slower uphill that's all i can notice yeah and i don't know you know i'm sure we're going to circle back around to this but you know if you like doing it awesome but if if you're doing it to improve your ultra marathon running that's where i think we're going to kind of deep dive deeper here in terms of your cost benefit of doing it yeah and is it the is how is that balance with your volume and intensity of your running yeah that you're doing that was my point is my strength training right now is in no way i have no way designing it as an ultra marathon or could you negate is because i would just want to go in the weight room curls for the girls it's that midlife crisis thing i guess we're both 41 okay let's let's move over to the quote-unquote corrective side of it okay and why don't you why don't you go ahead and paint the picture for what that type of prescription looks like yeah so from a corrective exercise standpoint it's it's going to be when i say i'm using air quotes for my higher reps it's higher reps than three to the one to five is the point so it could be 10 to 12 10 to 12 it also could be time some things we do for 45 seconds like your favorite monster band walks things like that we might do for 12 in one direction and 12 in another direction

things like i know i couldn't resist so um there are certain things but the point is i don't ever go personally i don't do the like up to 20 reps you'll see that or people are using like a two pound dumbbell that's just not how i design my program or like swing their arms in a running motion for two minutes oh i definitely want to talk about that later too okay yeah well not necessarily that but how people try to mimic running in the weight room okay yeah you're gonna be you're gonna get better at running if you run and then do the accessory stuff that'll help support that running um it's less skill based a lot of those heavier weights you have to be very very especially the ballistic movements involve a lot of skill to do would you would you agree yeah totally absolutely yeah there's a lot that's an advanced there's a lot more room for error um whereas the corrective is going to be less intense you can do it more often and it's really not going to pull away in general from if done correctly from your running it should add to it not detract from it is the point that i try with my athletes so it's higher rep lower weight lower overall training impact and let me let me see if you agree or disagree with this a little bit of stylization it's focused on usually correcting certain movements and so therefore the corrective exercises tend to be like more precise so it's a so in the on the ergogenic side it's a squat and on the corrective

side it might be some like a some sort of really specific hip exercise yeah or get something like a lateral step up where but we're not doing it to max weight you know but we're trying to engage or a pelvic list or some way yes you painted that picture correctly that it is definitely um you're we're trying to correct certain movements so it's very specific in that movement that we're looking for and the goal of which yes is to keep people in the field of play as much as we can yeah so you're going to test these people before and after in a typical research setting we go and we test their running economy and their vo2 max and their pace at lactate threshold and maybe some performance marker the outcomes of those interventions when you test them before and afterwards i would i would say are much more nuanced or you can't even tease them out before and afterwards yeah i i could i could agree with that it's so also instead of having a magnitude of three percent it's a magnitude of one or maybe even or maybe not even statistically significant yeah you're not injured right that's that's the point i'm trying to paint when we're looking at the ergogenic side we can we can do some testing and say okay the athlete is a few percent better across these parameters

when you do it in a corrective setting that type of testing becomes are you less injured correct and the magnitude of that and i think this is super important the magnitude of that quote-unquote less injured piece and we're going to be we're going to stylize that a little bit we're going to stylize this a little bit because when you dig through the literature it's it's it's impossible to weed through all this stuff but the magnitude of the injury prevention side is actually quite remarkable i mean it's 50 percent yeah it's it's it's definitely higher than the than the other yeah numbers we're getting from the ergogen yeah exactly so when you look at the situation and say okay you can incorporate strength training specifically as an injury prevention aid and you're getting numbers that athletes are spending 50 percent less time being injured or whatever other kind of categorization of injury you want to use typically it's about i mean it cuts it in half which is actually quite remarkable and if you think about that from a practical standpoint you're injured or you lose maybe 10 days of training a year for for a reasonable runner right you lose 10 days of training a year because you're dinged up you're injured you got to take a day off here a day off there whatever if you're able to reduce that by half to five days a year that's actually a lot of training availability that you've then just gained because of whatever intervention i would say that that's market and almost more market than the ergogenic side i don't know what what your opinion on that would be no i agree with

that i mean and i and i think there is a uh i will kind of interject this that i think there is a role i am not anti-lifting heavy my view is there's a place for it in a training cycle so that ergogenic you know three to five reps that high you know close to your one you know within your 87 to 90 max is great in the off season but what i like to focus on we were just talking about that can be done throughout the whole season if done appropriately during your actual training yep yeah so you know you don't have to shelve it and there will be people that say no i still lift heavy and i run great and i'm like yeah but for what return and what are you potentially sacrificing in terms of rest and recovery and those are hard sessions on those legs and your body stress is stress and whether it was a hard run or a really hard session in the gym your body still needs time to recover and a lot of people think oh it's my rest day i'm gonna go lift because that's i'm not running you know what i mean so i'm resting and i'm like no but there are so many things going on when you lift heavy like that yep i i yeah that let's put a pin in that and remind remind me in like 10 minutes to come back to the heavy lifting is not rest piece of it i want to still kind of go down i still want to now that we've painted these two categories and we're going to call them since we're just making up words we always make up words we're going to call them the ergogenic category

that's the heavy and fast category and we're going to call it the corrective category that's the more repetition and lower impact category what i want to do next and i'm going to give you a second to start to internalize this so i'll go i'll go first is give like an example program of each and i'm going to leave you actually to the corrective side all yourself because i know that you can you can come up with that off the top of your head but on the ergogenic side of it i'll paint a quick picture of if i just had a generic athlete the things that i would have them do and then you can kind of either say well you might want to substitute this for this you can kind of give a completely different program cool okay okay cool so on the ergogenic side purchase thinking cap on and since i asked you to do this off the top we didn't plan this out in advance um so on the ergogenic side if i had a new athlete that wanted to include strength training they were the right candidate for it we went through this like work rest you know equation that we're going to kind of come back to later i would have them start out with two or three sets of five across a few different exercises and the two to the two to three you could probably do a coin flip but if they didn't have any experience i'd keep them at two and then move them up to three to three sets and if they had some experience you could probably just start them out at three but i would have them do a push a pull a hit a hinge a carry and then some some sort of dynamic core exercise i hate using the word core that's why i paused right

there so the i got stuck in your throat i know i was like anyway that's another that's another topic um so the push i just have them do a dumbbell bench press three by five at something that they felt pretty darn tired tired at at the very end the pull lat pull down or an assisted pull up the the the the what i say push pull hinge and carry the hinge i'd have them do a simple squat or step up three by five squat can be with a back bar or a trap bar trap bars are hot now why are trap bars so hot now oh they're just the new thing du jour they've been around forever but i love i know but everybody's using trap bars now so who doesn't who doesn't feel badass holding a trap bar yeah i think you're absolutely right it feels more badass because you're picking it up off the ground versus like lifting it up off of a rack so for the listeners that don't know so normal back bar is just a straight barbell you know it's sitting up on a rack you can either bench press with it or squat with it or do a deadlift with it or whatever but it's just a straight bar a trap bar is is it an octagon or a hexagon it's hexagon one two three four five six yeah hexagon yeah so it's a hexagon with the with the ends of the bar just like you would see a normal you know a normal straight bar where you'd put the weights on and you step into this hexagon this metal hexagon and you pick it up by handles and so you're kind of like actually inside of this metal contraption and to saranize point you kind of

feel like a badass when you step inside of it and then you pick up these handles and lift it off the ground so maybe that's it there's some sort of psychology to the trap bar and why it's hot my point with that is is this the hinge could be a squat in a trap bar people like the trap or a deadlift or deadlift that's that's also a hinge so we've got dumbbell bench press a lat pull down or an assisted pull i say assisted pull up because most runners couldn't do five pull-ups to save their lives correct i can i can do eight now pull-ups yeah like actual like all the way to the you know full extension yeah listeners i think we need video proof of this i'll do it next time i go to the gym i'll go to the gym on mondays i'll get video proof there we go um uh so so that's the pull the hinge is a squat well you just leave it a squat most people are familiar with the squat and the carry i like carries because it's a little bit of a dynamic core exercise just carry around a heavy kettlebell for 20 20 meters switch arms farmers carry right carry it to the other side and then there's another buzzword yes functional that's functional core work yeah let's let's not get we've got three words now so far so that's my that's my carry is just a typical farmer's carry pick up a heavy weight stand up straight walk 20 meters switch it to the other hand walk the other 20 meters and um the the other dynamic core pieces i just like the standard wood choppers

that you either do with you do a medicine ball or a cable either one either one i i i personally prefer the cable if i can get the rope ending to the cable i don't like like the handle ending to it because it just like torques my wrists around and plus like grabbing a rope just feels badass badass again it's all about feeling badass that's why the battle ropes are so pop we're so uh popular it's because they just feel badass but the anyway those five exercises the push the pull the hinge the carry and then the the dynamic core exercise are the five that i would prescribe that in that entire run of show doing two to three sets of five for any athlete is going to take maybe 30 minutes maybe 35 at the very if you're being really lazy and you're you know like constantly going back and forth to you know the water fountain or whatever you're watching sports center on the tvs in the gym or whatever maybe it takes you but my point is it's not a lot of time if i had a super advanced athlete super advanced if i had an athlete that had a reasonable strength training background i'd have them do a box jump you know i might add i might that add or i might add that on there after a couple of months but i would start them for eight weeks two sets to three sets of five repetitions of those with appropriate rest of those simple exercises and i would just call it a day

yeah but that's not necessarily sexy no it's not and that's that's where the problem lies for a lot of people because then they want to start doing all these other things which don't really they can do things but again at what cost to the running okay so let me let me ask you what variations on that could you possibly could you possibly suggest yeah i would make sure so if you're doing a squat um i would like to include like a single leg exercise in there okay yeah like a like uh um don't get me started on pistols but like a step up you kind of you mentioned that but or romanian deadlift a lunch a lunch is a great exercise um and would you do that would you do that in addition to the squat or in substitution of so you're adding a different you're adding a different exercise i would if not i would add so if you're doing a squat i would do like a reverse lunge because that's going to be a more hip and glute dominant version of a lunge yeah so your squats work everything but they a traditional squat and now we're going to be doing back squat or front squats or goblet squats or um but a reverse lunge is going to kind of pull more into that posterior chain as far as i wouldn't i wouldn't do a front lunge at a squat personally you can but i just if we're going to bang for a buck um i totally agree with you on the reverse squat like or reverse lunge sorry yeah i totally agree with you on the reverse lunge it's also easier for most people to grasp like once

usually it's like two reps two or three reps of awkwardness because they're going backwards and they're not used to working in that plane but after that and they're like okay i can kind of be aggressive with my foot and like move my foot quickly backwards and then i've got the motion then they're fine and it puts them in a better position well that's i was just going to add most people um they they do a front lunge incorrectly because they go forward and they have that shearing on their knee um they they're coming off the heel on the front foot um a reverse lunge kind of takes that out of the equation they're stepping back so they're really getting that step back drop down so they're getting more of that glute engagement and they're putting their knee they're susceptible to like patella tendonitis or things like that um anything like that usually puts their knee in a better position they can usually put themselves in a better position i should say i saw somebody uh a couple days ago in the gym pair a reverse lunge with an overhead press so she was holding so she was holding uh it was it was actually a kettlebell she was holding a kettlebell in her left hand and doing a reverse lunge with her right foot going backward at the like at the at the same time like okay i got it like and that's an offset so what she's doing there is it's anti-rotation your body's fighting the rotation so it's like again bang for your buck right yeah the shoes in mma fighter so that's a well there's that too yeah i wouldn't advise that for i wouldn't advise that for a runner just getting into it so we've got this kind of basic set of exercises you could probably take a couple of variations off of those individual exercises but a push a pull a hinge a carry and

then maybe some other sort of dynamic you know core exercises is a good foundation to start out with and i would i would make the blanket i would make the blanket statement that if you did that for eight to twelve weeks you would see some performance improvement by the end of that time if you could accurately measure it most people don't have a way to do that they do a time trial beforehand time trial afterwards but i think it's not i don't think it's an unreasonable leap of faith to say if you're able to keep that up alongside all of your other training and there's the caveat that everybody needs to listen to that we're going to come back to if you're able to keep that up alongside all of the other training you'll see a reasonable yet small performance improvement correct okay i would agree i think we can agree on that awesome okay so that's the ergogenic side let's move back to the corrective side corrective side you're the expert here you go well so sometimes a corrective doesn't necessarily look different in certain ways so there might be a squat involved because squats i believe are good for everybody if done correctly um but it might not be a barbell squat it might be a goblet squat it might you know these studies usually just tend to do like we're gonna grab a barbell we're gonna do all these things but then it'll usually include monster band walks or lateral step ups or core work that is needed um hip opening work where you know things that and that again it's very it's very specific to

the athlete but if somebody has a an issue right now let's say with uh they've gone to pt they've got patellar tendonitis they've got issues with their knee their knees sore a lot because they've just got that there right they've been cleared to work out but it still is like a little niggle um okay then maybe working on more posterior work and not focusing on the squat right now for you we need to focus on let's do some reverse lunges let's do romanian deadlifts let's do a lot of glute bridges let's work on where you need to correct your imbalances because again painting with a general brush right now everybody's individual but if you're very quad dominant and weak in your glutes and your hamstrings there tends to be a relationship in that knee that we need to work on and here's where one of the key differences starts to come out so on the ergogenic side we said listen you can use these five types of exercises and you can almost universally apply them to runners and they're going to see some benefit yeah yeah and i you know there's going to be somebody that slings an arrow or throws a tomato that says well you know you need to individualize it for this or individualize it you're going to hit 90 of runners that don't currently strength train with some with either those five exercises that i mentioned or some variation of those and it's really not going to make that big of a difference the bigger difference is actually going to be on the programmatic element or where it actually gets programmed which we're going to talk about a little bit on the corrective side of it it does from what you were just saying it does have to have a very individualistic approach because

you're trying to like use use the words that we're trying not to use correct quote unquote correct something like you're looking at like some some deficiency or some sort of imbalance or some sort of specific weakness and we're saying we're going to go and target that yes so the traditional i need to see traditional but the the ergogenic the one we first explained like you said you can throw it and 90 of the people will see a benefit of it correctives generally if you don't need it it won't hurt you generally there are some hip rotation things if you're really externally rotated and we do too much external rotation work i.e getting the lateral hips to you know you can cause that's a whole nother rabbit hole but generally speaking but the general strength program that we first described won't help the people that need the correctives so that those correctives are going to be that that piece that really unlocks things for them yeah and it's very very it's much more individualized what you need to work on correctively air quotes may not be what i need to work on yeah this is where i go just go see a physical therapist go see a good quality physical therapist have them get some eyes on you have them kind of assess the situation and if they come back with something then we can design programming around that alongside with what the physical therapist is actually doing but like i don't i don't as much as long as i've been coaching i don't have the eyes to look at that well and it's also you know a lot of

personal trainers and strength coaches sometimes i shouldn't say a lot but often people will go outside their scope of practice we are not here to diagnose yeah i can generally say well runners tend to have these issues so if we want to if you're a runner and i want to make sure you don't have that issue here's some things we can do but when it comes down to the actual you've got this problem it's best to go see a professional get a diagnosis know what we're dealing with and then we can build a program around that to help better work with that um so there are some generalizations in the correctives but it's only a generalization in terms of what runners tend to it's more specific than just do a squat yep okay so if that makes sense yep so let's let's try to paint a broad a broad brush across the across those types of exercises they're highly individualized they're higher rep they're lower yeah they're lower intensity meaning you're moving around 10 maybe 10 pounds right 10 pounds of resistance versus 50 60 80 pounds 100 pounds 150 pounds of resistance on the ergogenic side i what i'm trying to get is just less the intensity is less the resulting fatigue is less and it's gonna be 70 of one rep max or below i mean it's not gonna be the high rep one close to one rep max that you get in the other so the the picture that i'm trying to paint with that is is there's not a huge physical cost to those types of activities although there's a time cost to them you still got to spend time doing them

correct bingo that's that's it that is as compared to the ergogenic side there is a high physical cost to doing and there should be a high physical cost otherwise you're not getting the ergogenic benefit yeah okay agreed 100 okay so we've got these two these kind of two categories paint painted and i i i i i kind of this is this is kind of how i come down to strength training when i look at it and we've just spent you know an hour kind of going over this like i think that's a really good that's a really good impression of of the situation right now one of the the reason that people are doing strength training from an athletic perspective is as we mentioned earlier they're using it as an ergogenic aid or they're trying to remain uninjured we've quantified the ergogenic aid as a few percent and we've quantified the the amount of injury improvement that you can get which is basically your training availability that you improve by roughly 50 so you get injured 20 days out of the year maybe by incorporating some sort of smart strength training you reduce that 20 day smart strength training we'll call it that smart strength training i don't know if that quite call your bar your standard there is pretty low so where was i going with that oh yeah so on the injury prevention side if you're missing 20 days a year due to some sort of injury you i think you should reasonably expect if you do some sort of smart

strength training you reduce those number of days to about 10 so you're just getting more training availability and that's a proposition that i that i'd take i'd always take that with an athlete yeah yeah so so here's my alternative right so here's my alternative and in an effort of full disclosure i i had about in in training essentials for ultra running i had about um it was almost 10 000 words so to give you scope like the whole book is like a hundred thousand words maybe 120 000 words or something like that i had maybe maybe it was 8 000 words anyway i had a whole section of the book dedicated to strength training and the book got too big and something had to go and something and i reduced a lot of things and one of one of one of the things is is i took the strength training thing and i reduced it to a 500 word sidebar i got the crap kicked out of me and the amazon reviews which if you could you know if you can get the crap kicked out of you in an online review that's that's like you know i i are you even an author are you even an author right and and it's not to say that what i wrote was incorrect i just didn't i didn't give it enough space to kind of give the kind of give the position justice and i've learned from that that's a that's a that's a that's definitely an error that i made uh in in in writing and kind of crafting the book and fortunately i'm gonna i'm gonna have time to

correct that right i mean second edition is coming out you know later in the year and that's definitely an area that i'm gonna that i'm gonna expand upon but part of the nuance that was lost when i cut that down is what we're going to talk about next and that is is there there's an alternative to achieve these ends of having an ergogenic aid improving your running economy improving your performance and at the same time reducing your risk for injury and that alternative is rest i was gonna say hold your kombucha folks here we go it's rest it's not any it's not lightning it's not anything magic it's not a sexy it's not sexy it's not a super you know pill that you can take or anything like that it's plain old rest and when you look at rest once again just to paint the paint the picture and compare it as an ergogenic aid and also as an injury prevention piece of it you know that when you rest the next day you're going to perform better and we and we do that with races right you rest before a race one two three four five days whatever it is and that race then becomes your kind of ultimate performance so it acts as an ergogenic aid in that way you get better higher quality performances out of the training and then those perform and and those uh training improvements that you get compound over the course of time and in all of the literature that sarah and i pulled uh uh kind of in advance of this

talk the common theme for the intervention that is used is they compare two groups two groups that that are doing the exact same training and what they do is they add strength training on top of whatever other training that that they do that's not normally not always but normally the way that the intervention is set up you have runners that are doing 40 miles a week and they're doing one interval workout or whatever you split off half of those runners and then you add a strength training component therefore increasing the overall total load and they see some sort of benefit either from the strength training specifically or from the workload increase due to the strength training specifically but my point with that is is that on in this first category that we talked about the ergogenic category since it's hard it's not rest correct it's mutually exclusive of rest yes and we can say it's fun we can say that people like to do it we can say all these things but you can't say that it's rest correct and that's what that's the first thing that i want people to keep in mind when they're trying to when they're trying to determine if strength training is right for them is if they're going into this heavy lifting category if they figure out that that's the right choice for them it's certainly not rest and it's actually mutually exclusive of rest and somehow you have to look at the training load picture as a

whole how many hours you're doing how much hard workout that you're doing how many rest days that you have how many easy days that you have and you have to look at the strength training as a it's it's harder than an endurance run yeah well it's interesting you know because we we talk about how we teeter totter intensity and duration volume and intensity right and then people will just throw in intense strength training workouts with no thought to how that affects the overall balance of what we're what we're working on at the time because because it's air quotes not running yeah well and so once again on the ergogenic side since we're talking about a few percentage for a few percentage points improvement you can you can very easily see how you can get that same few percentage points improvement just by incorporating more rest resting smarter to use that buzzword rest like resting smarter and it it's when you look at it intellectually as a performance enhancer when you look at strength training intellectually as a performance enhancer and you compare it with the rest that you have to sacrifice it's hard to split the hair that finally and say which one's better than the other specifically on the ergogenic side of it agree that that's that's where i come to agree yeah no the second the second piece on the injury prevention side and we didn't talk about this a little bit but if you're using strength training primarily on the urging side big heavy weights and things like that that we're talking about

earlier you you do get you do get injury prevention from that that's been well demonstrated in the literature correct and once again the magnitude is that is about 50 less days i i cite this study i cite this study quite often and it's and it's because the best it's the best one that we have it's not perfect no studies are perfect but it's on adolescent athletes and uh they found that the adolescent in adolescent athletes so adolescent in this study is ages 15 to 35 so you know maybe you early 30 i know we're not adolescents anymore but it's a wide variety of sports it's it's it's kind of a meta study a lot of endurance it's a wide variety of endurance sports sorry it's a meta study several hundred athletes participate in it and they found that the athletes that had two days of complete rest per week had a 5.2 times they were they were they had a 5.2 times less chance of injury so it's 500 percent not 50 percent 500 less chance of injury than the other groups when you're factoring in everything else and i i i use that as an example not to say that everybody should take two days off a week because there's a whole host of other factors that go into it but i use it to say that if you're looking at any sort of any sort of intervention to prevent injury the magnitude of those interventions are normally 50

percent a lot but it's not as great as 500 like rest has a huge has a huge has a has an absolutely huge effect on injury rates huge absolutely huge way more than any sort of thing that you can add to the training program and kind of including strength training and so that's the second picture that i'd like to paint with the rest side of it is that normally when you look at rest there's a bigger effect from taking more rest as it relates to injury prevention than any sort of additive corrective exercises strength training and things like that those now that's not always mutually exclusive and that's what i want to talk about next on the corrective side of things we can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time a lot i know exactly and this is an area where i actually think you can i mean you can rest and use the corrective exercises and perhaps there's a compounding injury prevention effect with both of those yeah and that's what i was going to add because rest you you can't argue with with that i mean that's heads and tails above 50 500 that's not even like you can't even like well it's a couple percentage i mean that's huge my thing with the correctives is when you get someone who if they have they're really weak in their lateral hips because of their whatever they've got going on in their life the rest is not going to fix that they think we need to balance the body out so having those two days of rest is great but they're still going to be dealing

with what they've got so we can you know two days a week work on these other things that have very low cost to their um training in the sense of it's not stressing the body it's it's pretty you can weave it in pretty well and not have a big the cut the benefits in the cost or i should say the cost is very low what it's going to take out of the body that's a you you presented that brilliantly that with a lot of the athletes that are getting injured because they have some sort of mechanical imbalance or something like that the the rest is probably not going to have as huge of an impact as 500 it might be zero percent right because they're still going to come out of that rest with the exact all the exact same issues that they had going into it i think that the ideal solution there is you got to walk and chew bubble gum right you got to give it the right amount of rest compared with the right the correct corrective exercises from the correct programming yeah well i was trying to make a cheeky joke the correct corrective exercises from the department of redundancy if you if you pair those two things up you actually have a pretty winning combination because the corrective exercises in and of themselves are not a high workload and so you can you can you can incorporate them and they're not necessarily going to impact the volume that you're able to do or the hard workouts that you're able to do

and to a certain extent you you might hate me for saying this statement so please feel free to throw whatever shade you need to throw but to a certain extent like athletes who are trying to find their own way there are a lot of self-coach athletes that are kind of like listening to this the the penalty for like kind of like stabbing in the dark on the individualization component of all of these corrective exercises the real penalty for that is just their time no i would agree with that and potentially not finding what they need yeah yeah yeah yeah but but but the internet can be wonderful and awful on interns and you know you can get great information that you can then learn to apply to yourself by just digging in deep dive and finding reputable sources and then you can start adding a bunch of things to your programming that's not going to help you but chances are they aren't going to hurt you they're just going to cost you time yeah okay yeah so quick like quick summary of that because we went off on a few tangents if you're thinking about doing the heavy hard strength training specifically as an ergogenic aid think about if you just incorporated more rest and which one is going to have more impact if you want to do hard strength training just because you love to do hard strength training that's what i'm doing right now i'd love to see if i can do eight pull-ups in a row i'll have proof of that by the time this podcast comes out i'm already on the hook for it if you want to do it just because you like doing it there's nothing wrong with that but but but you have to balance it out with the rest of the work that you're doing and kind of coming back to my personal reference i absolutely have taken hard workouts off the table because i'm tired from

whatever i did in the weight room i'm tired from the reverse lunges i did or you know grabbing the trap bar and you know loading up a couple you know loading up a couple plates which is a lot for me i'm tired from doing that and i've missed a lot of not a lot but i've missed a few hard workouts just from you know i'm just too over fatigue i'm fine with that i'm cool with that at this at this stage of the game and that's very personal that's there's no one there's no one to say that's right or wrong but just know the cost of what you're doing and how it can affect your training schedule and cycle and so that's why i'm like you know if you when you finish your fall race and you've got the whole winter that's a great time to dig deep you know start doing this type of programming 100 have fun with it go for it feel like a badass and then when you start ramping up for your races and your a races are coming you know then throttle back and just back off a little bit take more rest do stuff that's actually going to help with some of the identify maybe some weaknesses and imbalances that you've got focus on those and then rinse and repeat let's do this sarah for the listeners because i'm sure a lot of listeners will they'll like take this to heart they're going to go they're going to start hitting the weight room they're going to do you know two days a week or something like that and they're going to you know do the push pull hinge carry other type of uh uh core exercise or they're going to take a corrective approach but they're going to want to know like how to actually layer it into their program so let's do this let's agree we'll do a follow-up and we'll kind of focus on the specific programming elements of it and go okay what's the right frequency how do you modulate the intensity

throughout the course of the year and as the competitive season kind of comes into play because that's worth another 90 minute podcast just right there absolutely absolutely because that's that's where the magic happens is knowing it's again just like your run programming where to put specific workouts where do you have your different phases of your strength training well and i see so many people they they do just what you mentioned they want to feel like a badass this is exactly what i'm doing they want to feel like they want to feel like a real or perceived badass they want to go they'll go i'll go in the weight room until march or april or something like that and then i'll just be to be i'll be doing too much running in the middle of the summer and all that stuff will fall away and there's a very good argument to be made that if you're looking at strength training through the lens of of improving your ultra marathon performance and you stop it all of those benefits that you just have worked so hard to get have are going to go away in a very short order two three four or five weeks but we'll say i think that's a good follow-up we'll go over the programming side frequency how to change the intensity throughout the course of the year and things like that a lot of people are going to have questions so if you want to do it right now now you know it's february this is going to come out like maybe the first week in march or something like that you can get started do those five exercises spend 30 40 minutes a week pick the exercises you know get go go do them you can do them at a high

intensity because you know your overall training volume is pretty low right now but you're going to have to modulate that as you go down the year and maybe we can come back in like april and discuss how to modulate that cool i'd love to awesome cool okay last topic these are the things to avoid and you get to pick the first ones you can pick either just the silly crap that you've seen over the course of your professional career or just to like poke fun at it and have a few giggles or you can pick something kind of relatively serious that will have a profound impact on an athlete that is about to make that mistake oh gosh i could do both either do them both oh i i would say what to avoid before you jump in and this is more for the new person who's maybe doesn't have a lot of strength training experience or it's been a while don't jump right into ballistic movements and if you do get learn how to do things before you start doing crazy ish because you can learn the basics first yeah learn the basics i mean movement mechanics learn how to move you know i one of the thing i see is people will load up okay this is a big pet peeve they will load up a bar to do a squat with a weight that's far exceeds what they should be doing they don't do it properly they don't do it to depth their knees are caving and everything's a mess and maybe they should they can't even body weight squat

properly so maybe we need to start with the mechanics before we feed the ego with the plates and the weights and all of those things because if you if you groove a movement pattern and you do it well then you can start loading that movement pattern i have a hilarious story about this and i kind of it kind of pokes one at myself as well so i we so i i went to a big i had a big went to a big track and field collegiate program texas and m university at you know after i'd left there they'd won you know multiple conference and national titles and things like that but one of the odd things missing from that program were olympic uh style lifts we did we'd not do that at that program which is becoming more and more common since since i left the university system i've just seen it kind of pop up more and more and whether that's right or wrong is another conversation but i've just seen it more prevalent the point of that is is i i had no exposure to that uh prior uh prior to prior to leaving university and moving up here to colorado what one of my really early coaching mentors was a woman by the name of meg stone and there's zero chance that anybody listening to this has ever heard of meg stone or her husband uh mike but they are titans of the strength training industry not industry but like of the strength training education platform in the united states uh meg was a former uh shot putter from scotland uh that uh qualified for i think she had she went to two different olympics anyway great athlete

and she was she was kind of one of my early mentors as i was getting into coaching and i very specifically remember one day she's working in this endurance coaching company as the strength training guru and she you know recognized that we all didn't really know anything and so she was going to teach the a lot of us how to do olympic style lifts snatch clean and jerk things like that and the way that she started with us is she just she just brought in a broomstick so she had you know 15 different broomsticks we'd all sit in our big warehouse and she'd go over how to teach the movements and things like that and i could just not get it like i i had lifted you know i lifted weights i'd done squats like you know i had you know great form across all like the fundamental movements and things like that but when i put it together in an olympic lift with uh uh with a broomstick i i just i just couldn't get it i looked like an idiot like i was if i had any weight on the bar i would have completely like hurt myself and i was getting so i was getting so frustrated that i just couldn't put these movements uh together correctly in front of meg who i respected a lot as a professional and who was really hard on me like she was really like in a loving way but she was like coop you got to get your shit together like you got to learn this stuff like and that was true with a lot of my early coaching mentors but her in particular i just you know she she she just had this way of just being like really brutally honest so finally after like 30 minutes of getting it wrong time and time and time after again

time and time and time again she said coop you know if anything you're going to be the example of how not to do it today and that is your value in this whole exercise is you are the bad example i'm like all right i'm gonna come back tomorrow and do better meg thank you very much so you brought value yeah i brought value to the whole to our whole you know 15 person coaching group by showing everybody how not to do it it was awful so anyway i like to back up your point like even if you have even if you have a reasonable strength training background and you're jumping into the olympic style movements or the ballistic movements you have to exercise a little bit of caution hire a coach hire a professional have hire somebody even you can go to these centers and work with an olympic weightlifting coach have eyes on you one or two sessions where they can help evaluate and teach you the movements yeah and then you can go from there but why not learn how to do it correctly so that's your thing too that's your thing to avoid is go into the one of them go ahead you got more keep rattling them off we got all that oh no no no just i just really i think it's really easy to get caught up on what people you see online and you see people doing we've talked about this you see lebron james's trainer doing a really cool fun exercise and know if that has a place in your particular training just because you might not be there and and it's fun to play i love movement i love playful movement um but realize where that kind of fits in with your particular training and your

physical abilities yeah and the endurance space kate courtney is going to be the one that everybody's imitating she she has she has a pretty badass instagram game where she's flipping weights around on you know unstable services and things like that and that feels like a badass when you do that yeah so if she is a badass but i try that i'll probably kill myself so for those of you don't know kate courtney she's a reigning world mountain bike champion right now she uh kind of has a home base out in the marin area of of california go go go check her out on socials she she might just save the entire sport of cycling that's how highly i think of her right now no pressure yeah no pressure i doubt she's listening to this okay here here's my thing here's my thing to avoid and it and it plays off an aspect that we uh talked about earlier that if you're thinking about incorporating particularly heavy and or explosive and fast movements into your training program take some training off of the table yeah don't just add it into it we mentioned all the studies that we've been that we did uh that we looked at in kind of preparation uh for this podcast the the other common thing that they have other than the strength training being additive which is it's not universal but it's pretty darn close um the other thing that they all have in common is almost all of them are done on college age men who can handle that type of increase in workload much more easily than another population group somebody in their mid-30s

or sarah's raising her hand on the other side of the line early 40s i'm sorry without your age sarah it's okay we're in the same boat sir i know but if you have your the point is is very few people listening to this podcast are are the same cohort as the cohorts that they're that they're studying in these strength training studies which are college age men who can they can adapt to training stress just better than us just just fact they're great athletes they're at a stage in their lives where they can take on that training stress so as a consequence to that don't imitate the intervention if you're going to incorporate particularly hard strength training take some running off the table you're probably it's probably not going to be that big of a ding to your overall uh to to your overall improvement but don't just layer it on don't just add it on willy-nilly and that's just a recipe for disaster yeah exactly and that's why when if some people have a hard time with that that's why off season and early season is a good good time to do that because they can pull some of their running volume off they can you know swap something and not have this existential crisis of or or have their coach be mad at them because they're dropping a quality run out of their week or layering you know and so on a day when that's not such a good idea to do that you know what's really interesting is whenever i've gone through this practical okay let's let's like walk through are we going to include strength training we have a discussion just like we've had maybe we'll shorten it by a lot we'll shorten it by

a lot i'll give them like the 15 minute like nickel overview here the two areas that you know we can kind of focus on if you want to do heavy stuff if you want to do corrective exercises blah blah blah and when i come to the point of okay practically here's how we're going to implement this we're going we're going to take tuesday's hard workout and we're going to make it an endurance run so we're going to take that hard workout off the table and then we're going to plop in strength training instead of this hard run or we're going to manipulate the calendar in some other way that results in a reduction of volume and or intensity when i present that proposition to add the strength training in that that's when the pushback comes like whoa whoa whoa whoa they don't like it yeah like whoa like i don't want to like i'm i'm doing 10 hours or 50 miles or whatever it is like i have to do that amount a week i don't want to i just want to add this to it to which then i go okay well that's not how it's going to work because you're already working out pretty hard so you can't add stress on stress on stress yeah exactly but again people it's not running yeah strength that's what people come back with it's it's not running so they don't think of it that way you know until you point out like yeah but your body is still feeling stress it's still undergoing a lot of stress with that type of workout i can't tell you how many coaches that i've talked to professionally that have told me some story about an athlete that they're working with that thinks that hard strength training is an appropriate thing to do for a rest and or easy day like that is such a common that is

just such a common piece of feedback in the coaching i just kind of laugh at it now so athletes if you're making that mistake you're not alone but stop making those mistakes yes and please don't start trying it like the week before an a race that's the all right we're not gonna go that rapid hole but suffice it to say sarah we're gonna come back in a few weeks we're gonna talk about we'll get in the programming piece specifically i know we we offered a really broad brushstroke on the types of exercises the frequency and then how to like calibrate the intensity and what days to do it on and things like that that's a fascinating discussion that that that we'll come back and do maybe in like four to six weeks time but great yeah we're gonna put a pin in this right now i think this is like really good really good for people to start to chew on because a lot of people at this time of year are making this evaluation of is this something that i want to start to incorporate into my workout routine do i want to start to do strike training they're like just coming to that thought process right now and i hope by listening to this podcast they they have enough to chew on that if they're self-coached they can kind of go through those if then scenarios and say yep it is and then start to do it or if it's whatever reason kind of not in their favor then they just can kind of then they can kind of leave it on the table but it's certainly a decision making process that i want people to be thoughtful about agree absolutely because there are many benefits to strength training um but if you're just doing it for the performance enhancement for ultra running

there's a time and a place for that and you gotta you gotta weigh that out 100 all right brilliant place to leave it at sarah thank you for your time i do my best yeah thank you for having me this has been great yeah thank you for joining all the way from germany i really appreciate it and uh yeah we'll do it again sometime okay sounds great thanks okay trail runners what did you think you have a clear answer on if you're going to incorporate some strength training into your routine is that answer yes is it no is it a big fat maybe was it not very clear it wasn't very clear it's sarah or i up on social media we'd love to hope you answer those questions it is a conversation that we routinely have with athletes if you can't tell from uh from the podcast everybody wants to ask uh is it something that's right for them and after we go through that dialogue sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it's no and sometimes it's let's see and let's just kind of see how you feel um but it is not always one way or the other just like any other training aspect or any other aspect of life as we alluded to during the podcast we are going to do a follow-up and that follow-up is going to be really detailed very specific exercises sets rep intensity and even when and i think this is actually one of the most critical pieces of programming in a strength training program when to actually do those strength training activities during the week we're going to follow up podcast to discuss all of those things if you want a specific

question answered you can reach out to me on social i put this out on instagram and both on twitter or you can hit me up on either one of those platforms and we will incorporate those questions into the podcast we would really appreciate to get you guys's feedback on that appreciate sarah coming on board and also i'd be remiss if we didn't thank our sponsors no wait i'm just kidding this podcast doesn't have sponsors you guys know that i don't take money from anybody and that's all in an effort to keep it real here keep it honest talk about what i want to talk about thank you guys for listening that's really what i wanted to say thank all of you to the listeners you guys are really what makes this podcast shine and it is what it is today because of you guys so appreciate the heck out of you if you have not already taken the opportunity to do so go ahead and subscribe to this on itunes and or give it a rating and a review on itunes i would really appreciate that love to hear from you guys love to see you out on the trails or maybe even in the weight room anyway we'll see you guys next time have a good one peace out you