Why You're Doing it Wrong: CBCG Strength Coach Daniel Silver Explains Lifting for Endurance Athletes

CBCG Strength Coach Daniel Silver with his favorite weight: his son Davin

“So I grew up with the idea that getting strong lifting weights wasn't just for aesthetic reasons, that it carried over to sports performance and things like that. And then that led into me getting my first gym membership when I was eleven or twelve. Something inside of me just said that getting stronger will basically make you all around better at sports. And this was early 90s or something, so it wasn't exactly normal to have a kid in the gym. And nobody's insurance covered it, so we ended up having to find one of the rare places that was dedicated more towards families, and I began my strength-training career there.” 

                                                            —Daniel Silver, CBCG Strength and Conditioning Coach

How many times have you resolved to get your skinny endurance athlete butt to the gym, in order to build some “sport-specific strength” you’ve heard everyone talking about on podcasts or at the local 10k? Or to “build some lean muscle” in order to “improve body composition?” Or because you’d like to “ward off injury?” Well, your author certainly has, but the results are usually the same—after a few weeks or months of consistency, since I don’t know exactly where I’m headed (or how to get there), the allure of strength training begins to wane, and I stop, and then three months pass, and my hamstring hurts (or I’m feeling heavy, or weak) and the cycle begins again. Endurance athletes tend to struggle in the gym—at our core is a desire for flight and exploration (or, more darkly, we’re all running from something), and the gym is a static location. A couple of years ago, though, I met a strength coach who had just moved to Portland named Daniel Silver. He talked about strength training in the same vocabulary with which I discussed endurance work, and understood that coaching is much more than writing workouts and walking away. He began working with a few CBCG athletes, and their results instantly improved. Not only that, they enjoyed the time they spent with him in the gym, as he included them in the process and showed them the process they were making. I sat down with Daniel to ask him some questions about his style of strength training for endurance athletes.

What’s different about the way you approach strength training?

Where I think endurance athletes go wrong with strength training, basically, is everywhere. It starts with the original breakdown thinking maximum strength means low repetitions, power means medium repetitions, hypertrophy eight to twelve reps, and then muscular endurance above that. And those are incredibly simplistic ways to look at the approach, but I think the average endurance athlete picks attacks weight training in the same way they approach their endurance work. So they end up doing high repetition circuit training, boot camp type training, repurposed bodybuilding style training, and all of these are going to fatigue the athlete in the same way that they're doing on a daily basis in their endurance training, which I think is why we often see so much fear of strength training from the endurance community—it just makes the athlete more tired. But it feels familiar, so they gravitate towards that style.

 Let me give you an example. A 70.3 is a long term endurance event that relies primarily on our aerobic system and slow twitch muscle fibers. So if we can use the weight room to isolate and improve certain variables within those muscle fibers, then why would we not do them? We need to be moving slowly and economically against resistance so that we're not encouraging our body to rely on fast twitch muscle fibers. How do we do that? We can add a slow tempo to a squat so we’re in fact training in a way generates the adaptations that will be useful on race day. So maybe we’re doing squats, but doing them in a way to generate mitochondrial growth in the muscle fibers that can power our race day performances, not just going for X amount of repetitions or to see an increase in weight kind of over a period of time. But a more general oversight is we want to make sure that we're focusing on the parameters that are going to actually improve athletic performance rather than just hope that exercise X increased over period of time Y will lead to miraculous results, which is how I think most endurance athletes approach strength training: as something they have to just get out of the way so they can get back to what they want to be doing.

You mention the squat—is there another exercise that you see as beneficial to endurance athletes, or one that elucidates your process a bit more?

Triathlon is all about economy, but we're still going to need to rely on our big, fast twitch muscle fibers at certain times during a race. Especially if we're on a brutal course with tons of climbing. In that case we need our big fast twitch muscle fiber (which are historically inefficient, historically anaerobic) to be as aerobic or as resistant to fatigue as possible. We need to maintain a high power output over a period of time. Imagine I put Joe Triathlete on the treadmill this morning, and I said, "Joe, you're going to do walking lunges for ten minutes." If he starts at a certain pace and then slows down, I need him to start off a little slower. What we’re doing is finding the line in the sand where the bulk of his fast twitch muscle fibers are starting to fatigue. And then we try to push the boundary of fatigue a little higher each time so that you can do a little more fast twitch work each week. Rather than just using sets and reps, we would say, "Yes, this is a strength exercise, but we need to improve endurance and we need to improve it in a specific way, which means we're going to set parameters on this particular exercise." These two approaches are almost polar opposite. Both slow squats and walking lunges would be in the program of a 70.3 triathlete at times throughout the year because we both need to have incredible, oxidative qualities of our slow twitch muscle fibers, but we also need to be able to call upon a great deal of fast twitch muscle fibers and have them be as fresh and ready to go as possible.

How do you start working with an athlete? How do you assess their fitness?

If somebody comes to me, say a 50 year-old guy with high blood pressure who can't touch his toes, and wants to run a marathon, I'm not going to discourage him, but I'm going to give him a program to make him a little bit healthier, and making that guy healthier is going to significantly decrease his marathon time. So for him it’s more of a general health and wellness perspective, and just that attention will make it possible to finish the marathon, and for him that IS performance, so it’s not really different from someone you’d describe as elite: we’re trying to find out what performance means to different athletes. If somebody's not functioning at the level where they're able to train specifically without breaking down, then we need to get them to that level. And then once we're at the level where we're basically able to train hard without breaking down, you use the weight room to assess what areas of the body may need a little bit extra protection for the rigorous demands of the sport they’ve chosen.

Then I look at a variety of joint positions and range of motion positions to see if you can get into the positions required for your sport. And if you can’t, we need to identify and work on those limitations and restrict stress on those systems. Then—and this is probably the most important step±—we look at the isolated pieces of your health as an individual: injury history, static assessments on the table, blood pressure, resting heart rate, sleep quality, and things like that. Because if those areas have issues that need to be addressed, then addressing them is going to be the most performance enhancing program that that individual can have. Once those bars are met (and most people don’t meet those bars!), then and only then can we start talking about performance.

Ready to make a change in your training and racing? Join Daniel at the CBCGym using his Open Gym program, which gets you personal training-like attention in a small group format. Daniel will craft a program that meets your needs as an athlete and help you to achieve new heights. Athletes such as OBRA Road Race champion Annick Chalier use Daniel’s guidance, and whether your goal is a win or a completion, he can shorten your road to that goal and keep you healthier and happier, two of our biggest goals at CBCG.