In Part I, we introduced you to the principle that performance fitness is in the muscles, not in the cardiovascular system. Now we would like to introduce you to Return on Investment (ROI) and the Principle of Specificity, Endurance Nation’s “do-not-pass-go” concepts for the age-group athlete living and working in the real world.

Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on Investment is the rate of return, on race day, for every minute you have spent training.

For now, let’s forget all this training/exercise physiology mumbo-jumbo. Let’s talk about the real world; your reality as an age-grouper living in an age grouper world. It’s a busy place! Between family, work, a personal life outside of training, family, and…family, your weekly time-pie is cut into many slices. Training is just one of those slices and, we feel, relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

As age-group athletes you owe it to all of the very important pie slices in your life to consider the rate of return on race day for each training minute spent. Dads, when you’re walking your daughter down the aisle on her wedding day, are you going to regret not spending more time in the gym trying to improve your half Ironman bike split? Moms? We hope not! As coaches completely focused on the R.O.I. of each training session and totally dialed into helping you achieve the maximum results with a minimum of time invested, we have concluded that sport-specific activities are the answer and the non-sport-specific stuff gets tossed first.

The Principle of Specificity
The Principle of Specificity states that the benefits that you get from a particular type of training are very specific to the type of activity that you performed to get those benefits. In other words, if you want to get good at a thing, do that thing.

Certain movement patterns activate specific muscles. For example, cycling activates the muscles of the quadriceps and the soleus. Most importantly, while cycling these muscles, and many, many others, all work in concert together (firing patterns, joint angles, rate of firing, etc) to create the very sport-specific act of pedaling a bike. There is no better way to force these cycling muscles to become better at pedaling a bike than by…pedaling a bike.

Force is Not Your Limiter
The fact is that endurance athletes are simply not limited by the amount of force they can produce. For example, let's examine the force required to pedal a bike. Let's say you're on a three-mile hill at 10% grade. You’re in the lowest gear, at about 50 rpm, and the hill takes about 30 minutes to climb. So 30 minutes' x 50 rpm = 1,500 pedal revolutions. If you went to the gym and put a weight on the leg press that you could lift 1,500 times in 30 minutes, how heavy would that weight be? More importantly, how strong would you need to be lift this weight 1,500 times? Any endurance activity is one you do for a long time. Because of this, by definition, the force requirements of endurance activities are extremely low compared to the traditional weight-training movement.

Invest Your Time Wisely
What you've really done, by going to the gym two hours a week and pushing up weight on the leg press, is made your legs very good at pushing up weight on the leg press. But if our ultimate goal is to push pedals harder/faster or to run faster, shouldn't you be out there on the road instead? The best, most time efficient machine for improving cycling is your bike and, with an additional two hours of cycling a week, you’ll increase cycling volume by about 30%. Or you could keep your volume the same, ride hard, but recovery from these session more effectively because you’re not also asking your legs to recover from two strength training sessions per week! Now those are significant changes that will improve your ability TO RIDE A BIKE!

Endurance athletes are told to strength train largely because it is part of the cultural fabric of the sport. Bob does it because he read a training article by a guy who read a training article by a guy who read a book. The idea is that the strength you gain by pushing up a leg press will be converted, at some point in the season, to pushing pedals harder and faster or running faster.

In other words, we spend a lot of time doing one thing (packing a bag, driving to the gym, lifting, showering, re-packing, and driving to work/home/etc.) in the hopes that it will eventually help us do another thing, running or riding a bike, better. The science has shown that this is just not the case.

While strength training has general health benefits for all of us, we are speaking as triathlon coaches with the goal of maximizing your triathlon potential. We are not physical therapists or health care professionals. If you are just looking for general health benefits, we believe you should:

• Consult with your physician to determine what strength training is appropriate for you.
• Keep these activities as time efficient as possible.
• Take care to minimize their impact on sport-specific activities.

In summary, if you want to weight lift or cross-train this Winter, don’t do it because you are hoping to be a better triathlete. Do it because you enjoy it, because it keeps you active and fit, because it fits into your time-limited winter season. And when you are ready, you can flick the switch and get back to some quality triathlon work that will undoubtedly make you a faster triathlete!

Be sure to attend our next webinar: Introduction to Training and Racing with Power. Fans of Endurance Nation receive the ebook and full podcast of the presentation for FREE! Become a Fan of Endurance Nation today!

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Endurance Nation Triathlon Team
We are triathletes of all ages and abilities who train collectively for long course events. We train as virtual partners utilizing training and racing content specifically designed to provide the greatest returns on our training, enabling us to achieve an accelerated fitness and learning curve unmatched by traditional coaching methods. We are one of nation's fastest growing triathlon teams, with more than 450 new members last year alone.

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