Endurance vs. Strength Training: It's Not Either-Or

by Lou Schuler on Feb 28, 2008 10:07 AM EST in News Comment 5 comments

The idea that strength training can help just about any type of athlete, even one involved in endurance sports, is almost universally accepted in the world of high-performance conditioning.

And in today's New York Times, Gina Kolata comes pretty close to saying that:

"There is no doubt that an appropriate weight-training program would improve efficiency in pretty much any athlete," Dr. Hunter said.

William J. Kraemer, a kinesiology professor at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, said lifting weights also can increase endurance and reduce the risk of injury, especially to connective tissue.

"Dr. Hunter" is Gary Hunter of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an exercise scientist whose studies have been widely published and often cited by journalists like me. And, of course, Dr. Kraemer is the guy we cite more often than anybody. One of his protégés, Jeff Volek, designed the diet program for my first book, The Testosterone Advantage Plan, and one of Dr. Volek's Ph.D. students, Cassandra Forsythe, created the nutrition plan for my latest, The New Rules of Lifting for Women.

But their views aren't good enough, apparently, which is why the issue is presented as a controversy:

But other researchers, like Patrick O'Connor, an exercise scientist at the University of Georgia, are not convinced.

Dr. O'Connor points out that the weight-lifting studies, as is typical in exercise science, are small. And each seems to examine a different regimen, to measure outcome differently and to study different subjects -- trained athletes, sedentary people, recreational athletes. It becomes almost impossible to draw conclusions, he said.

This type of reporting drives me nuts, and Kolata strikes me as the most flagrant practitioner among the handful of journalists who specialize in health and fitness. She'll counter the opinion of two scientists who have published dozens of studies on the subject in question with the seemingly authoritative view of someone who doesn't actually do research in that area.

I went through PubMed looking for studies by Dr. O'Connor that relate specifically to strength training. I found a handful, including this one from 1995, looking at mood changes and body awareness after a weight-training session, along with this one from 2002, which looks at perceived exertion during a specific type of strength exercise.

I tried several keywords and combinations of keywords, but couldn't come up with more than five studies by O'Connor that seemed to focus on strength training specifically. Using the same keywords, I came up with 82 for Kraemer and 17 for Hunter.

In terms of expertise on this subject, it's not even close.

But let's look at O'Connor's specific arguments, as quoted by Kolata:

The studies are small: This is acknowledged to be a problem with all exercise studies, since we're talking about human beings and not lab rats, and it's hard to get a large group to follow any regimen dictated by researchers. The more competitive the athletes are, the harder it's going to be to get them to change their training for a study.
They use different regimens: I'll grant that this is a legitimate pitfall of training studies, which is why veteran researchers and journalists alike encourage readers not to change their entire approach to fitness and exercise based on the results of any single study.
They measure outcomes differently: There's a simple way to sort through this -- if the subjects in the intervention group (i.e., the ones who added strength exercise to their sport-specific training) improved performance relative to the control group (the ones who trained for their sport without supplemental strength exercise), then we can say that's a positive outcome, can't we?
They study different types of exercisers: I don't want to put words in the mouths of Kraemer or Hunter, but I think it's safe to say these esteemed exercise scientists wouldn't be so convinced of their positions if there was really this much ambiguity. If studies didn't support the use of strength training for all classifications of endurance athletes, I suspect they'd say as much.

I could go on here about the story, but it would only obscure my big point: Anytime you go this far out of your way to inject doubt and ambiguity into an area in which, for practical purposes, there is none, you're doing a disservice to your readers. Maybe you could parse this a bit, quoting experts who caution runners not to pick a routine out of Flex magazine and expect their marathon times to improve. But other than that, there's really no honest controversy here.

Which brings me to another column by another veteran health and fitness journalist, this one writing on the U.S. News & World Report website. She asks readers this question:

My inbox has been filling up with PR pitches on the ineffectiveness and/or evils of steady aerobic exercise, which most academic fitness experts have preached as the best way to control weight and improve heart health. ...

I'm tempted to dismiss most of these pitches as gimmicks to sell more books, DVDs, vats of protein powder, or whatever, but there are enough studies cited as supporting evidence to make it a topic worth looking into. Some of the arguments offered up against lots of steady aerobic exercise: Working out for a long time can cause impact injuries and possibly promote harmful bodywide inflammation; people tend to overeat after cardio workouts because they overestimate how many calories they've burned; weightlifting may boost your metabolism more than aerobic exercise in the period after you've finished working out; and -- the one that makes intuitively the most sense to me -- it's more efficient to do interval training (alternating shorter periods of intense exertion followed by recovery), because you burn more calories in less time.

The journalist, Katherine Hobson, is posing the issue as an open-ended question to her readers, which of course is fine. I suspect she's taking her bullshit detector out for a test drive on this one, perhaps flushing out the most specious arguments for or against endurance exercise. Which, again, is fine.

But really, there is no "for" or "against." If someone enjoys running, are we going to tell her to stop doing it because of the (undoubtedly overstated) risk of systemic inflammation? Are we going to tell her that the benefits she perceives from her favorite type of exercise are a delusion, that she doesn't really feel better afterwards, and that she isn't really improving her health with lower blood pressure, less body fat, and stronger bones in her lower body?

Most days I'm skeptical about the conventional wisdom. But today I'm skeptical about skepticism.

Thursday blog meat

Sports injuries don't get much more gruesome than this. (Hat tip: Chris Highcock.)
Angry, combative teens aren't bad; they're just wired that way. (Hat tip: Rannoch Donald.)

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Systemic Inflammation

From what I've read, systemic inflammation from steady state cardio tends to occur only in individuals who trains at too high of intensity too often. It seems to me that, whether you're powerlifting, weightlifting, running, rowing or cross country skiing, you're going to balance load volume and intensity over time and your average workout isn't going to be insane. There certainly seems to be some carryover between aerobic and anaerobic sports in this respect.

by Joe in DC on Feb 28, 2008 11:49 AM EST reply actions 0 recs

Lifting for endurance activities

My competitive sport is trail ultramarathons, up to 100 miles at a time. I do this because I love it, not because I'm under any delusion that running that far is good for me.

About 9 months ago, I bought NROL and started doing real weight work for the first time in my life. Last summer, I ran my fastest ever 100 miler at age 45. This past weekend, on limited mileage and low speed workouts, I ran a very solid training marathon.

There is no doubt in my mind that doing squats and deads and the other work in NROL has made me a better long distance runner. I'm not one of those ultra-skinny guys, and the extra strength has really helped me late in my races. My stride is so much more efficient than it was before, especially after many miles.

I wish I'd been lifting like this for the past 25 years.

DML

by dlease on Feb 28, 2008 1:29 PM EST reply actions 0 recs

Lifting rowers/rowing lifters.

I was not at all surprised that the skeptical athletes in the NYtimes article were rowers. I have been training rowers, and training as a rower for several years.
Because there is so much technique involved, and (IMO) because the eastern Europeans never took much of an interest in the sport.
The prevailing attitudes of: train for your sport by doing your sport, lifting weights will make you "bulky" and slow, lifting weights is dangerous, build an "aerobic base" for a sport that lasts at most for 6 minutes; still are the prevailing attitudes/training protocols within the rowing community. Even at the elite level. Thankfully the Australian Institute of sport have been actually studying training protocols for rowers and hopefully if they clean up in china some of these attitudes will change.

by JB on Feb 28, 2008 3:08 PM EST reply actions 0 recs

In training High School rowers

The year I trained high school rowers, we found that doing squats and deadlifts as a regular part of winter training reduced back injuries during the season. Just to tack onto your point.

by Joe in DC on Feb 29, 2008 10:10 AM EST up reply actions 0 recs

thanks joe.

I have found the same thing with the master's rowers I train and train with, yet I can't convince most of the population of my BH to lift. It's a strange population to work with.

by JB on Feb 29, 2008 3:33 PM EST reply actions 0 recs