As you have read from past articles, I am a firm believer in the importance of cross training. Since I got serious about including regular strength training into my weekly routine, my overall performance has improved. However, strength training is not extremely popular with many runners, cyclist, and multisport athletes. Likewise, many athletes believe that in order to improve their performance and become faster they simply need to run or cycle more often and follow a well-designed training program. Nevertheless, adding simple strength-training workouts into your weekly routine, you’ll not only become a leaner, stronger, faster, and more efficient athlete but also guard against injury.

Contrary to what many believe, strength training does not always mean getting big and bulky. If you think about it, you actually need a lot of strength to move your legs over the miles and varying terrain during a run or a bike ride. In fact, your muscles are the key to being able to sustain power and speed throughout the entirety of a race. Additionally, strength training can help reduce some common overuse injuries in the lower back, hips, knees, and shoulders.

When including a strength training program to your routine, you want to focus on both muscular endurance and muscular strength. The difference between the two is that muscular endurance emphasizes on being able to perform an activity over a sustained period of time (e.g. run faster while using the same amount of energy) whereas muscular strength is focused on the ability to exert a maximal amount of force for a short period of time (e.g. lifting a heavy object). Doing more repetitions with lighter weights will help you build endurance. Alternatively, doing fewer repetitions with more weight will help you increase your strength. At the end of the day, endurance is the vital component for successful multisport athletes, so this makes both important.

For older athletes such as myself, adding a regular strength training workout to your routine can help maintain muscle mass because after age 40, you generally lose about 1% of your muscle mass each year. Likewise, as a part of the aging process, our bodies naturally slow down. This leads to a reduction in muscular endurance and muscular strength. This can make training harder and recovery take longer. Just by simply incorporating strength training into your routine will allow you to regain that muscle in addition to maintaining and improving your coordination, muscle tone, and body composition.

Because runners, cyclists and multisport athletes are not bodybuilders, they don’t necessarily need to spend hours in the gym several days a week because their goal is not to build muscle. Furthermore, there is not a need to isolate individual body parts during those strength training workouts.  In other words, there is no need for a leg day followed by a chest & shoulders day and so forth. Instead, the focus is on building strength in the muscles that that will help keep you balanced and propel you forward as you run or cycle. Do some research and experimenting to find some strength training exercises that will target are your arms, back, lats (latissimus dorsi) and core to help build muscle strength and some that involve muscle endurance to have a well-rounded and balanced cross training experience.

As a result, including strength training into your weekly program can help prevent injury, improve your speed and help you last longer during a race. As you start to implement it in your training, it won’t take long to start to feel the benefits.