Have you ever heard of a person who trains for a marathon by lifting weights everyday? What about a power lifter who trains by running five miles everyday? I sure hope not. This is because we know that we need to train our bodies and our muscles to do the movements that we plan to actually do. This can get complicated when it comes to obstacle course race (OCR) training though because you need strength, power, and endurance in order to excel above the other participants in the race.
I’ll give you just a little bit of science behind this. Our muscles have three different fiber types: type I, type IIa, and type IIx. For the most part, the percentages of each type of muscle fiber that we have are genetically determined but training a specific way can help us change those proportions slightly.
Type I muscle fibers are also called slow twitch muscle fibers (think slow and steady wins the race). These muscle fibers are dominant in endurance athletes because they are used for aerobic metabolism – aka energy production through the use of oxygen. They tend to be smaller, less ‘strong’ (they produce less force), but can last a whole lot longer than type II fibers before becoming fatigued.
Type IIx muscle fibers are called fast twitch muscle fibers. They’re dominant in power lifters or heavy weight lifters because they rely primarily on anaerobic metabolism – aka energy production without the use of oxygen. If you think about that, it makes sense. Our bodies don’t have enough time to breathe oxygen in and get that oxygen to our muscles while trying to hit a one rep max or sprint 20 yards. Those muscle fibers have to be able to produce that force without us supplying them with a ton of oxygen. On the other hand, an endurance runner breathes fairly steadily and is constantly supplying his or her muscles with oxygen. Type IIx muscle fibers tend to be thicker, able to produce more force, but fatigue very quickly compared to type I fibers.
Type IIa muscle fibers are basically a combination of the other fibers. They can transform, in a way, from one type to the other depending on how they’re being trained. They do tend to be slightly more resistant to fatigue than type IIx but not as resistant as type I and they tend to be able to produce more force than type I but not as much as type IIx. These fibers are left out of super basic explanation and readings though because they do complicate things a bit.
Now, what do you do if you want to train for endurance, power and strength? Well… the simple answer is that you have to train for all three and eventually train for all three in a similar fashion that you would use them during the race – aka stop and do some obstacle type training activities during a run.
Let’s say that you have a 5 mile race with 25 obstacles coming up in a few months. You would need to be training your body to be able to run 5 miles without fatiguing too much (endurance), while also training your body to be able to climb up a rope, crawl under barb wire, jump and climb over walls, flip tires, etc (strength and power). Where your training would begin would completely depend on your current fitness levels. So for simplicity sake, let’s say that you’re able to run 3 miles fairly easily and that you lift weights a couple times every week already. You would need to build up your running distance a bit, do some similar obstacle-like exercises, and do some specific weight lifting exercises. How to build up your distance and what types of exercises you’d need to do would depend on you as an individual and what your strengths and weaknesses already are.
One of the problems with having to work on both endurance and strength is that working on your endurance can actually hinder your strength training. You don’t see many super buff and bulky endurance runners, do you? This is because of the processes that go on inside your muscle fibers. To be the least science-y as possible, the processes that go on when you train endurance stop the process of protein synthesis, which is how your muscles grow in response to strength/resistance training. This ‘blocking’ type mechanism in the cells can last from 24 to 36 hours.
So, why am I telling you all of this? Because how and WHEN you train is important. If you have a heavy lifting day followed by a high endurance day, you’re not going to see the same benefits that you would if you allowed yourself a day (or at least 24 to 36 hours) in between those two drastically different types of training. Again, these differences in training days are dependent on you as an individual though. You have to take the time to learn how your body best responds to different training styles for different types of events.
One last comment on all of this is that it is so important to have rest days throughout training. Our bodies need time to rest and recover while training hard for an event. More on this to come…
That’s all folks. Talk to later.
– Chelsea
References
Baar, K. (2006). Training for Endurance and Strength: Lessons from Molecular Biology. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 38 (11), 1939–1944. Baar – 2006 – Training for Endurance and Strength Lessons from Molecular Biology.pdf
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