Five Resistance Training Myths in the Running World Pg 2
Myth #2: Machines are just as good as free weights.
Next time you’re running, I want you to ask yourself how many times you’ve been seated and moving in a fixed plane of motion while you run. If the answer isn’t a resounding “NEVER,” then you probably ought to get your head examined.
Resistance training isn’t just about “feeling the burn” in your muscles; it’s about grooving connections between the muscles and the nervous system that tells them what to do. When you plop down on a machine and work through a fixed line of motion, you’re allowing your nervous system to get lazy, so to speak; it doesn’t have to recruit any stabilizing muscles to ensure that you move efficiently. Machines turn you into a “motor moron” and ingrain muscle imbalances that can negatively affect your running efficiency and lead to injury. Let’s take a look at an example to illustrate my point.
When you do a dumbbell lunge, your body has to generate force in single-leg stance – and in order to generate force optimally, you need to have what is called “frontal plane stability.” With the lunge, this refers predominantly to the ability of the adductors (inner thigh muscles) and abductors (outer thigh/butt muscles) to co-contract, working together stabilize your thigh so that you don’t tip over. By doing a lung correctly, we can teach these muscles to balance each other out properly, and in doing so, improve running efficiency and prevent problems such as lateral knee pain, anterior hip pain, and lower back pain (just to name a few).
A look at the status quo, however, shows that most women will try to train their adductors and abductors with those inner and outer thigh machines that you’d only expect to see on a trip to the obstetrician. Unfortunately, the adductors and abductors NEVER work in isolation like this, and they never work in a fixed line of motion. The adductors and abductors don’t just move the thighs in and out; they also have subtle effects on rotation of the femur, so when we’re “stuck” into one plane of motion, we promote dysfunction.
Factor in that the lunge also trains the hamstrings, glutes, quadriceps, and core stabilizers extensively at the same time, and you’ll realize that it isn’t only safer than these machines; it’s also offers more bang for your buck. Why do five different exercises when you can get even better results with just one?
Myth #3: Yoga and Pilates “count” as resistance training.
This was another great information tidbit a client brought in after a conversation with an endurance training coach who is actually quite popular locally. I have to say that I was really surprised when I heard:
“He said that we need to resistance train, but it didn’t matter if we used free weights, used machines, or took yoga or Pilates classes.”
After I finished choking on the gum I was chewing, I explained the concept of progressive overload to my client.
When we resistance train, it’s important that we – over time – gradually increase the load that is imposed on our system; otherwise, our body doesn’t really have any reason to adapt in a manner that will be favorable to use getting stronger, faster, or leaner.
Now, how do we make a class that is body weight-only harder? I’ve never seen anyone wear a weighted vest to yoga class, so – as Mike Boyle has pointed out – gaining weight is your only option. After all, the most overweight people always sweat the most during yoga, right?
Obviously, I’m being facetious – but I’m proud to say that it’s with good reason (although I’ll probably never date a yoga or Pilates instructor after this article). When you lift with free weights, you always have the option to provide progressive overload to your system; there is no “ceiling” effect when you get proficient handling your body weight.
Myth #4: Super-slow training is valuable.
About a year ago, I had a phone conversation with a noted triathlete coach who had previously worked with one of my clients, Jon (who completed his first Ironman this past July). When I took over Jon’s training, he was a mediocre endurance athlete with a VO2max of 50.6 ml/kg/min., with anaerobic threshold occurring at 60% of VO2max (laboratory test). After six months of training with me, Jon’s VO2max had improved to 73.1 ml/kg/min, and his anaerobic threshold didn’t occur until an impressive 80% (anaerobic threshold is now generally believed to be the best predictor of endurance performance; the higher the percentage, the better). It’s also important to note that during this time, Jon’s max heart rate remained constant; normally, it decreases when an endurance athlete does a lot of longer duration steady-state training. When this coach got wind of the results, he just had to know how the heck we had gotten such staggering results. My response was essentially:
“We got him to go faster instead of longer, incorporating more threshold runs and sprint work. And, probably more importantly, I told him he had to stop lifting like a sissy. He got a lot stronger and more explosive on compound free-weight movements, and it clearly made a big difference.”
His response: “Wait, you mean you don’t use super-slow training? Free weights are dangerous! Endurance athletes aren’t conditioned to handle high-speeds and heavy lifting!”
I had to cover the mouthpiece on the phone because I was laughing out loud. For the next ten minutes, I explained to this coach that the last time I checked, the most successful endurance athletes I’ve known are the ones who go the fastest for a set distance – not the ones who can run the longest. Anybody can go forever; just look at the people who jog at a snail’s pace for years and years and never look or perform any differently. Jon got out of his comfort zone by moving faster, desensitizing himself to zones above his normal race pace, and – perhaps most importantly – by taking his training serious with heavy and explosive resistance training. Super-slow training has no place in this picture.
In layman’s terms, if you train an athlete slowly, that athlete will be slow in competition; specificity of training is more important than we think. If you want to run a marathon, you don’t do all your training on a cycle, do you? Of course not! It wouldn’t be specific for you!
In scientific jargon, super-slow training doesn’t work due to a phenomenon called “asynchronous recruitment.” We all have slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers, and it’s to our advantage to activate as many of them as possible when we resistance train in order to truly reap the benefits that our nervous system and muscles can offer. As you may already know, slow twitch fibers are always recruited first; your body won’t also call upon the fast twitch fibers in your muscles unless it really needs help with a challenging task – like the last few reps on a set of five squats. Once we’re a bit experienced with resistance training, in order to recruit fast twitch fibers (which can actually be converted to slow twitch fibers to enhance endurance performance), we need to train with at least 70% of our maximal strength on a particular exercise in order to build strength with classic “repetition work.” The more experienced one gets, the higher this percentage goes; really experienced lifters won’t get stronger below 85-90%, in fact.
With super-slow, we’re stuck with a protocol that forces us to use less weights because we have to do a lot of reps – and at a very slow tempo. This load falls short of the crucial 70% mark – and definitely far short of the 85-90% mark. And, believe it or not, we don’t even getting all our slow twitch fibers contributing! Instead, through asynchronous recruitment, certain fibers simply “turn on” and “turn off” during the set; the weight is so light that they can actually take breaks while their “helpers” pick up the slack in the meantime. I’m not making this stuff up!
Don’t forget that super-slow is traditionally performed on machines, too, and we already know that machines are about as useful to an athlete as a Derek Jeter Fan Club membership would be for a Red Sox fan.
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