Conditioning for Strength
You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe
It’s impossible to go onto social media anymore without some advertisement or some influencer boasting about the latest, greatest strength hack, exercise, or stretch that promises to transform your entire world. It’s beyond exhausting. So we’ll start out acknowledging that we’re going to attempt to be the proverbial finger in the disinformation dike, despite the waves crashing over the top of the dam.
Runners need to be strong. We all know this. What most don’t know is: How strong is strong enough? Is there a “right way” to be strong? What exercises for what effect, and how do they fit into an already demanding run training schedule? We’ve spent a lot of time learning from some of the world’s best coaches, and feel confident that we can answer all of the above questions with the most appropriate, world-class answer: It depends.
Let’s start with one of our biggest pet peeves: the need to vary exercises in order to ‘confuse the muscles’. Let’s stop for a moment and consider this statement. Let’s pick the bicep muscle (which is actually two: there’s the long head of biceps brachii, and the short head). Now: Confuse it. Confuse the bicep muscle.
Image found on Internet without attribution
The bicep is made up of over two hundred fifty thousand individual muscle fibers. Each muscle fiber has two actions which it can perform: One: contraction; and Two: relaxation. Confuse that. The physiological concept of muscle contraction is based on two variables: length and tension. There are four basic types of skeletal muscle contractions: concentric, isometric, isotonic, and eccentric.
Concentric contraction is when the muscle contracts and shortens (such as a biceps curl or standing from a squatting position).
Isometric contraction is a change in muscle tension without a change in muscle length (as when pushing against an immovable object).
Isotonic contraction is a constant muscle tension with a change in muscle length (such as walking, running, or squatting).
Eccentric contraction is when the muscle resists extension (such as slowly coming down after a pull-up or during downhill walking). Eccentric contractions act as a braking force in opposition to a concentric contraction to protect joints from damage.
OK, so all that can be a little bit confusing. But is it the muscle fiber, or us, which is confused?
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