What is strength and conditioning? My Perspective.
Firstly, it's not just lifting weights or delivering ‘beastings’ at the end of a training session to the point of nausea. Too often the term strength and conditioning brings images of a coach hurling athletes through hill reps, press-ups until exhaustion or….. The distinction is that an S&C coach works with athletes primarily concerned with improving performance in a sport, activity or skill. They are not there to simply make you tired, they are there to help you improve. Fatigue does not equal performance, anyone can make an athlete tired. Simply setting a 100 burpee set will do that nicely, but this will not enhance specific sporting performance (unless you’re looking to set a burpee world record). The skill of an S&C coach is being able to induce enough fatigue to stimulate training adaptation while systematically increasing training stress over time to achieve progressive increases in performance.
Now that misconception has been addressed, let’s begin.
“Strength and Conditioning is about more than lifting weights – it encompasses the entire physical development of the athlete and what is required to allow them to be the best physical version of themselves.” - English Institute of Sport
There are two overarching goals of an S&C coach, to utilise all available training methods to improve athletic performance and to reduce the risk of injury to an athlete. To achieve these goals, the coach uses evidence based sports science principles and their experience to apply these in a practical setting aligned to the athletes sport and individual goals. An in-depth knowledge of physiology, biomechanics and training methods allows the coach to work with an athlete over an extended period of time, usually over the course of a season or build up to a specific event, to manipulate training activities and achieve optimal performance.
What we do?
Assess the needs of the athlete in line with the needs of the sport or event
Coach efficient exercise techniques
Motivate athletes and supervising training
Testing performance
Monitoring training load
Planning and adapting training to progressively improve performance
We select effective training methods to make you better, that could be heavy resistance training, plyometrics, speed work, core stability work, flexibility, mobility, manipulating training volume/intensity periodisation or technique changes.
How is this relevant to endurance performance?
Firstly, strength training done wrong can add muscle bulk unnecessarily. As an active cyclist the first thing I hear when suggesting some strength work is that “I’ll put too much muscle on”. If only it was that easy. The big fear amongst most endurance athletes is unwanted hypertrophy (increased muscle size) as they’ll have to drag this extra weight around, potentially limiting performance. Effective strength and conditioning training can avoid this and see strength improvements without significant or negative increases in lean body mass (muscle bulk).
Secondly, most (not all) endurance coaches and athletes have little or no experience in strength, conditioning or training activities beyond their actual sport. They are specialists in their field but lack the knowledge of movement skills and exercise technique to optimally periodise strength and endurance training.
Lastly, there are significant performance gains when including various training methods alongside your endurance training (more on this in a later blog). Incorporating strength or plyometrics has been shown to improve a range of performance indicators in endurance athletes if periodised correctly into a training programme.
Why is the S&C coach needed?
The results of a typical google search will generically advise endurance athletes to start with a programme that progresses from 20 reps down to 6 reps over your winter ‘base’ training. This often focuses on ‘essential’ exercises such as squats, deadlifts and planks or, even worse, starting with exercises far too advanced such as bulgarian split squats and single leg romanian deadlifts. Following this advice, athletes will suffer debilitating delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) in the first few sessions, summarising that they cannot cope with the DOMS affecting their running, riding, etc and put strength training back in the box for another year or continue with this ineffective training that can actually hamper training adaptations
Summary:
Introducing effective strength, mobility, core and flexibility work into your training is essential to keep your body functioning properly and injury free, but most athletes don’t know where to start and often skip this in favour of another run. The S&C coach will help design and deliver an individualised training programme, coaching correct exercise technique and manipulating training variables to meet the needs of the athlete across all training methods, not just strength training.