Strength Training and Flexibility
In the last article, I shared my thoughts on the value of consistency in training. Right now is the time to start choosing patterns that will lead you to success. Don't be content with getting back to last years fitness. Spend the next few months working towards improved strength, flexibility, and run durability while swimming as often as fits your life. Now on to the topic...
Besides time, another problem that will limit an athlete’s ability to train consistently is injury. There are certain injuries or nuances that just can’t be avoided, but you can certainly take the steps to tame or alleviate the problem.
Most triathletes at one point or another will have to deal with some sort of nagging injury. There are several causes of most injuries:
- overuse
- intensity
- strength
- flexibility
- biomechanics
- shoe selection
- bike fit
- nutrition
- recovery
In this article I will discuss the benefits of strength training and flexibility in regards to injury prevention. I am not going to go into the specifics or the “how to”, but give you the reasoning and the “why”.
Look at your body as a kinetic chain. If there is a weak or tight link in that chain then another part of your body is going to compensate for it. This compensation is where imbalances and those nagging injuries come from. This is why it is important to strengthen and stretch all areas of the body.
Strength Training
When reading opinions of others on various triathlon forums, I hear all the time that weight training is a waste of time and does nothing to make you a better triathlete. Or nothing you do in the weight room transfers to SBR (swim, bike, run) and you are better off training than wasting time in the weight room. Even if this is true, I still feel that weight training is very important to a triathlete. Strength training gives you the foundation and function to be able to tolerate the training. Strength training builds joint integrity by strengthening muscles, ligaments, and tendons that are commonly overused or injured.
In a way, weight training for triathletes is more like preventative maintenance and does not have to be very intricate. The goal is to strengthen areas that are usually weak or become underdeveloped over time from the hours and hours of linear movement.
Flexibility
Flexibility compliments your strength training and is very important when it comes to recovery and injury prevention. However, this is another heavily debated topic: when?, how?, type? and duration? If you asked 10 different experts, you would probably get 10 different responses. I tend to use a little bit of everything and feel that a combination of the various stretching ideas/philosophies work for me. I will use yoga, dynamic stretching, static stretching and most recently with great success, active isolated stretching.
A word of advice on stretching—don’t wait to you are already injured to start stretching and expect it to be a quick fix to your problem. You have spent years developing these imbalances, don’t expect it to take a week to fix it.
Wrap Up
The goal of these articles is to help direct fellow triathletes in the right direction. Don’t take anything you read here as the end all because there are many approaches and protocols to triathlon training. I’m here to help you realize that it’s not all that complicated. The problem is, most of us never reach the level where our approach really matters due to the fact that we never get to the point where we train consistently.
In this day and age information is rarely a limiter. To me, separating the good from the bad is the hard part. Everyone is quick to give their opinion on any matter whether they know what they are talking about or not. What you choose to believe is up for you to decide.
Hopefully everyone is hanging in there with the early season base training and staying under their heart rate caps.
Here is a quote from Mark Allen that I read quite often to remain focused on my long terms goals:
“You can either try to race with an engine the size of a lawnmower, or you can build your engine up with a good base so that you are racing with a huge-turbo charged jet engine”.
