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?

Short answer: Muscles do not get confused. They contract, or they relax. They operate in groups, as with the bicep brachii group, and almost all have a opponent, or as physiologists like to say, antagonists. The antagonist of the bicep is the tricep. When the bicep contracts, the tricep relaxes, and the arm curls up. When the tricep contracts and the biceps relax, the arm straightens.

The question which we feel doesn’t get asked enough: What is the skeletal muscle’s PURPOSE? Just contracting and relaxing doesn’t seem like it’s all that useful in and of itself. There must be a point to our having some 650 skeletal muscles, all contracting and relaxing, right? Indeed there is. The primary purpose of skeletal muscles is to move bones. There should be no confusion on this point. In order for muscles to move bones, there must be a pivot point. We call this a skeletal juncture a joint, or the point at which two bones meet. There are six types of joints in the human body, but only three of them are functionally classified as dealing with movement: a synarthrosis (immobile) joint, an amphiarthrosis (slightly moveable) joint, or a diarthrosis (freely moveable) joint. All of these joints have a role to play in running.

In order for muscles to move bones, they must be attached to the bones. Muscles are relatively soft and fibrous, so in order to attach to bones, muscles use tendons, which is a tough, fibrous structure which actually runs through the length of the muscle. The tendon attaches directly to the two bones, and the muscle fibers attach to the tendon. Tendons are more unyielding than muscles, with greater tensile strength, and have the capacity to withstand loads with minimal deformations. This allows tendons to transmit the contractile muscle forces to the bones efficiently, minimizing energy loss from tissue stretch. Tendons attach to the bones at points which permits the muscles to exert maximal force on the joint they operate on without excessive muscle length existing between their origin and insertion points (the longer the muscle fiber, the easier it is to tear). For some parts of our bodies, tendons without much if any muscle fibers are also used for added stability.

Joints are further stabilized by ligaments, which are similar to tendons, but bind bones together without using muscle fibers. The approximately 900 ligaments throughout the body function to provide a protective limit to degree of movement allowed between bones.

Now, while moving bones may be the main purpose of muscles, it’s not the muscle’s highest priority. As it pertains to freely movable skeletal joints, our skeletal muscles have three jobs.

• JOB ONE: Protect the joint

• JOB TWO: Stabilize the joint

• JOB THREE: Move the joint

Think about that for a moment: while the primary purpose of skeletal muscles is to move bones, movement is its lowest priority. Another way of thinking about this is that in order for the ‘freely moveable joints’ to actually move freely, they need to be strong, resilient, and happy. Last week we touched on the three muscle fiber types most important to us as runners: Fast Twitch glycolytic, Fast Twitch oxidative, and Slow Twitch. Endurance running builds our Slow Twitch muscle fibers. Sprinting, hill work, and other power-based running exercises builds our Fast Twitch oxidative muscle fibers. Strength training primarily builds the Fast Twitch glycolytic.

Consider a world-class marathoner, able to run 26.2 miles (42.2Km) in less than 2 hours 10 minutes. Their joints are going through a huge range of motion as the miles pile on. If the muscles which move the joints don’t feel that they can adequately protect and stabilize the joint, whether due to fatigue or incipient injury, they will begin to actively resist the neuromuscular demands for the rate and/or degree of movement. The marathoner’s pace slows, just when they need to pick it up to fend off surges from competitors. What’s missing? Endurance? Power? Or Strength?

Not ready to commit, but still want to help? Buy Me A Coffee!