As an endurance athlete what should I prioritise in the gym? Would heavy lifting build up too much muscle?

Question

Danny Kennedy · Answer

So if you're an endurance athlete, wanting to build up endurance for you given sport, you still need to prioritize strength training. If you're worried about putting on too much muscle than you want to be focusing more. So, on heavy compound movements in the lower rep range for strength. Avoiding too much, hypertrophy rep ranges. We're going to be building too much mass, but the same time, the strong, you can get the more Force you can apply to whether it's the upper body as well. Whatever your chosen sport is strength is super important because you don't have that strength there if you don't have that fourth production. So I think lower rep ranges and say, between 3 to 6 reps on compound movements is still essential for your strength training. And there's still room for hypertrophy in there and higher rep ranges but you just want to avoid going to too high in volume with your strengths up to the point where you're putting on too much mass, but this will also come down to your nutritional intake as well. So to answer the question, yes, have you lifting is still essential for endurance athletes but more in the strength and power rep ranges, More so than the hypertrophy rep ranges. And obviously a lot of you accessory movements are going to be higher reps with lower loads to help with that endurance, for whatever muscles that you need to use mostly human support.

Tim Crowley · Answer

For endurance athletes, which one doing prioritizing your strength training is one. Make sure you focusing on the key elements that you're going to need. That are going to help reduce injuries and make you a better triathlete. So by generally having workouts that are 30 to 45 minutes, two to three times a week, you're probably not in danger of producing. A lot of muscle bulk, most endurance athletes who are putting a decent amount of training volume. Anyways, this is not going to happen, anyhow, but you do need to develop that strength. Focusing on the quality low quality training, which are looking at three to four sets anywhere from, you know, four to eight repetitions would be sufficient. And the type of exercise you want to focus on for travel. This is a lot of polling. Upper body, horizontal pulling, which is going to offset swimming freestyle swimming as well as riding on the TT bars core stability, which is not going to come from this really floor exercises, but could come from cable exercises or doing key quality workouts. Like, Front squatting deadlifting, single and double leg deadlifting. As also, you know, front squatting single leg, squat e. All those are going to be hugely important. Then you can kind of mix in a few other things, whether it's a little bit of chest, chest work dumbbell chest, press has pull-ups and also rotator cuff exercises. With, you know, bands are lightweights. We're focusing on external rotation. And again, offsetting the, the internal rotation. We're going to get from running cycling. The Aero position and freestyle swimming.

John Sinclair · Answer

As an endurance athlete, your focus should be on strengthening and making the body more resilient in ways in which you don't spend a lot of time moving. So as an example, if you're, as an endurance athlete, if you are a runner and you spend all your time running in a straight line, then we need to do some strength training in movements and in directions and in depths that you don't spend any time in. That is where your focus needs to be. We start there, then we start worrying about intensities and volumes down the road. So strength training is not just about lifting weights heavy from a lower position to a higher position. Strength training is about creating a more robust architecture, being stronger bones, stronger connective tissue, stronger muscles, and a more finely tuned nervous system. And we have to do that by cross training and training you in multiple directions at multiple distances with different speeds and with different tools. All cross training for you endurance athletes.

Paul Edmondson · Answer

As an endurance athlete, what should I prioritize in the gym? Would heavy lifting build up too much muscle? As an endurance athlete, you're going to want to spend more of your time on your cardiovascular feats and strength endurance training in the gym. Sub-maximal loads, repeated efforts with the ability to withstand fatigue, more from an aerobic and lactate system development standpoint. If you're going to go into hypertrophy training and strength training, which you will want to do to offset the aerobic training and work on metabolic flexibility, different muscle fibre types and variable inputs to the body. If you do accumulate too much muscle though, that's very metabolically demanding. It costs the body energy, it requires a lot of ATP. That's going to have an effect detrimentally in your endurance feats. So, you're going to want to minimize that to a certain degree.

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"As an endurance athlete what should I prioritise in the gym? Would heavy lifting build up too much muscle?"