Georgia Gould did not worry much about her weight during her first two seasons as a professional mountain bike racer in 2004 and 2005. When she lost a few pounds before the start of her third season, which was her first as a member of the LUNA team, it wasn’t because she tried to. The weight loss was simply an effect of stepped-up training.
After winning her first national championship later that year, however, Gould couldn’t help but associate her improved performance (she won a number of other races in 2006 as well) with her drop in weight. Gould started to give her weight and her food intake more attention than she had in the past. Even a single pound of gain concerned her, and while she knew better than to undereat, she tried hard to limit her intake to what she considered “barely enough.”
Eventually, Gould realized that her constant worrying about calories, pounds, and ounces was draining a lot of the enjoyment out of her eating. An avid cook, she decided that if joyless eating was what it took to stay lean and to win, she would rather enjoy eating and lose. So she continued to eat very healthily but went back to eating enough to feel completely satisfied. And she stayed lean and kept on winning.
Subsequent experience taught Gould that it was really the training that had made her leaner and improved her racing. A healthy diet was something that was always there for her. But when her training slipped for any reason, she tended to put on a bit of fat, whereas when she got into a good groove with her training, the fat disappeared.
Gould’s favorite type of workout is a long tempo ride—three or four hours with lots of sustained efforts close to lactate threshold intensity. When she gets a few of these rides in her legs at the beginning of a new season or during a break between races, she can feel her fitness improving almost from one day to the next. Long tempo rides also move her more quickly toward her racing weight than any other type of training.
This is no coincidence. The most effective training for improved endurance performance is also the most effective training for a lean body composition. Endurance athletes are the leanest athletes. Sure, endurance sports select for naturally leaner individuals, but it’s the training above all that makes cyclists, swimmers, runners, and triathletes leaner than ball players. In a typical workout an endurance athlete raises his or her metabolic rate 8- to 16-fold and keeps it there for a long time. There’s no more efficient way to burn calories.
That is why many nonathletes exercise more or less like endurance athletes when their goal is to lose weight. As an endurance athlete you should not train specifically for weight loss, however. In other words, you don’t want to change your training for the sake of shedding more fat without regard for how the changes will affect your performance. You should train for performance and trust that your body will move toward racing weight as your fitness moves toward peak level. The one exception to this rule is the quick start period that falls outside of race-focused training, when fat loss briefly supplants performance as your top priority and you modify your diet and training accordingly. Within a race-focused training cycle, however, every decision you make about how much you train, how intensely, and so forth should be made exclusively for the sake of better performance. If you do, you will discover, as Georgia Gould did, that what’s best for performance is best for body composition.
The modern sports of bicycle racing, running, and swimming have existed since the late nineteenth century. Triathlon started in the 1970s, but since it comprises swimming, cycling, and running, it’s not really as new as other sports of the same vintage. The training methods of today’s top endurance athletes are very different from those of the early competitors in the various disciplines. These methods have evolved as innovative techniques have yielded better results and then spread throughout the sport to become universal practices.
Innovation in training methods has slowed considerably since the 1960s. In each sport athletes have figured out what works and are now focused on just doing it. The occasional good idea or new trend comes along, but these affect the margins only. One hundred twenty years ago most distance runners trained by walking. Then they figured out that running worked better. It’s been a while since a shakeup of that magnitude appeared.
Interestingly, despite the obvious differences among the individual endurance sports, the best athletes in all endurance sports train in fundamentally the same way. We can see this when we look at training mathematically. A number of years ago Stephen McGregor, an exercise scientist at Eastern Michigan University, co-developed a set of mathematical tools to quantify the physiological stress imposed by swimming, cycling, and running workouts. One of these tools, called Chronic Training Load (CTL), is a rolling average of an athlete’s training stress, including duration and intensity of workouts, over the previous several weeks.
Thousands of endurance athletes around the world, including many world-class athletes, track their CTL with McGregor’s software. A while back McGregor began to notice that peak CTL scores tended to fall in the same range—between 120 and 140—for elite cyclists, runners, and triathletes, and he was able to estimate that the pattern held for swimmers too. This pattern suggests that there is a maximum amount of aerobic training stress that the human body can tolerate and that endurance athletes perform best when they hug that threshold without exceeding it. Athletes in different disciplines get there in slightly different ways, and most don’t do it consciously, but they all get there because it works.
It takes a very high volume of training to reach a CTL of 120 to 140. High volume is a universal characteristic of effective training in every endurance sport. A second characteristic is a training-intensity distribution that is weighted heavily toward the low end of the intensity spectrum. Almost all endurance athletes do most of their training at lower intensities and a little at higher intensities. If a CTL of 120 to 140 is the magic number for maximum endurance performance, then this training-intensity distribution is to be expected. An athlete who does a large volume of high-intensity training will exceed the CTL range of 120 to 140 and burn out. An athlete who does most training at very high intensities will not be able to do enough volume to maintain a CTL higher than 120 without burning out because intensities above the lactate threshold are (literally) exponentially more stressful than intensities below the lactate threshold.
Most endurance athletes cannot handle the volume of training required to maintain a CTL of 120 to 140 even if they do all of their training at low intensities. But the essence of the training approach that is proven to work best for elite athletes in all endurance sports (McGregor suspects that the 120–140 sweet spot applies in cross-country skiing and rowing too) works best for age-groupers as well. You will perform best and attain your racing weight quickest by maintaining a high training volume relative to your personal limits and by doing most of your training at lower intensities.
Whatever you do—whether it’s cycle, run, swim, or engage in all three—you need to do it a lot. How much? Train as much as you can without breaking down, burning out, or losing your job or spouse. If motivation is your limiter, then train as much as you can while still enjoying the training process.
The sheer amount of time you train has a stronger effect on your performance than any other factor. The reason has to do with efficiency. A low-volume, high-intensity approach to training will increase your aerobic capacity, or VO2max, as much as a high-volume, low-intensity program. On a high-intensity program, however, you stop improving as soon as your VO2max hits a genetically defined ceiling, which doesn’t take long. But with a high-volume program you become more and more efficient the longer you keep doing it, and so your race performances keep improving also.
The reason high volume yields ongoing efficiency gains is that each swim stroke, pedal stroke, and stride is an opportunity to practice that movement. The more you repeat it, the more practice you get, and the more practice you get, the more ways your neuromuscular system finds to trim waste from the movement pattern.
Exercise physiologist Edward Coyle performed physiological testing on Lance Armstrong from the time he started cycling professionally at age 20 until after he won his seventh Tour de France. During that period, Armstrong’s VO2max did not improve. But he most certainly improved as a cyclist, as evidenced by the fact that his best finish in his first four Tours was 36th place. Coyle’s testing revealed that the physiological change that enabled Armstrong to elevate his performance long after his aerobic capacity was fully developed was an 8 percent improvement in his mechanical efficiency on the bike between the ages of 21 and 28. That came from years of consistent high volume. (Interestingly, efficiency is not affected by performance-enhancing drugs.)
A high-volume, low-intensity training approach is also a more effective way to shed excess body fat than a high-intensity, low-volume approach. It’s a matter of simple math—and physiology. A 40-minute workout that includes five intervals of 4 minutes at 100 percent of VO2max is a very hard workout. Few athletes would ever want to pack more training at such a high intensity into a single training session. The precise number of calories burned in this workout depends on the size of the athlete, the specific activity, and how much distance the athlete is able to cover. A 150-pound runner who covers 7 miles in this workout will burn about 787 calories.
Compare this to an easy 90-minute run covering 11.5 miles at 75 percent of VO2max. This workout burns almost 1,300 calories, yet it is less stressful on the body than the shorter, faster run. This means the runner could do such runs a lot more often than he could do interval sessions and would thereby multiply the discrepancy in calorie burning.
The question of the right approach to high-intensity training in endurance sports is controversial. Some coaches, trainers, and scientists advocate doing most training at high intensities with the understanding that the overall training volume must be kept low because the body cannot tolerate a high volume of high-intensity training. Others advocate a high-volume approach where most of the training is done at lower intensities and a relatively small amount of high-intensity training. Nobody champions a training approach that excludes high-intensity training, although some folks in the high-intensity camp like to argue against a straw man who does.
It is my observation that most representatives of the high-intensity camp come from backgrounds outside endurance sports, such as personal training and CrossFit, whereas all coaches of elite endurance athletes are squarely aligned with the low-intensity school. Among coaches of elite athletes there is consensus that most training should be done at lower intensities. This is not to say that there isn’t some disagreement at this level. But the disagreement falls within narrow boundaries. An elitelevel coach who considers himself a “volume guy” might have his athletes do 85 percent of their training below the lactate threshold and 15 percent at and above threshold. An elite-level coach who considers himself an “intensity guy” might have his athletes do 75 percent of their training below the lactate threshold and 25 percent at and above threshold.
The low-volume, high-intensity approach has been tried at the elite level of endurance sports. It was even the dominant model in some sports before the second half of the 20th century. But in the 1950s a New Zealand runner and coach named Arthur Lydiard experimented with a high-volume, low-intensity approach that soon transformed his tiny country into one of the world’s top running powerhouses. Lydiard then took his approach to Finland, which became the next global running powerhouse. Runners everywhere began to copy the “Lydiard Method,” and the high-intensity model was gradually abandoned at the elite level and has never returned. It was surpassed.
Exercise scientist Stephen Seiler and Finnish rowing coach Åke Fiskerstrand conducted a fascinating analysis of the evolution of training methods among world-class Finnish rowers between the 1970s and 1990s (Fiskerstrand and Seiler 2004). They learned that over that 30-year period average training volume had increased by 20 percent while high-intensity training volume had dropped by 33 percent. These changes were directly linked to improved performance. The best Finnish rowers of the 1990s pulled 10 percent more watts and consumed 10 percent more oxygen in standard rowing ergometer tests than had the best Finnish rowers of the 1970s.
The “modern” training intensity distribution of elite endurance athletes has been studied in various sports and places, and the results have been very consistent. A 1995 analysis of the training of national- and international-level swimmers over the course of a full season revealed that 77 percent of their swimming was done at or below a blood lactate level of 2 mmol/L, which is itself well below the lactate threshold level of 4 mmol/L (Mujika et al. 1995). And these were not distance swimmers but swimmers who specialized in the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints.
In 2001 Veronique Billat analyzed the training-intensity distribution of high-level French and Portuguese marathon runners (Billat et al. 2001). She discovered that these athletes did 78 percent of their training slower than marathon pace (which is slightly below threshold intensity for runners at this level) and 22 percent at marathon pace and faster.
Scientists who have conducted this type of analysis have developed a rule of thumb for training intensity distribution: the 80/20 rule. It stipulates that endurance athletes in all disciplines should aim to do roughly 80 percent of their training below the lactate threshold and 20 percent at and above threshold. (Some experts advocate an 80/10/10 rule, where 80 percent of training is below threshold, 10 percent is at threshold, and 10 percent is above threshold.)
One could argue that the universality of the 80/20 training-intensity distribution among the world’s best endurance athletes doesn’t necessarily apply to nonelite athletes. After all, age-groupers do a fraction of the total volume that elites do. If they follow the 80/20 rule at such low volumes, they will do only a small amount of high-intensity work.
This is a sensible point, yet the best available evidence suggests that the 80/20 rule applies to nonelites as well. In a 2011 study researchers at the University of Stirling, Scotland, tracked the training of 10 age-group triathletes for six months as they prepared for an Ironman (Neal, Hunter, and Galloway 2011). The researchers calculated how much of the athletes’ swimming, cycling, and running time was spent below lactate-threshold intensity, at threshold, and above. They also subjected the athletes to standard tests of swimming, cycling, and running fitness at the beginning and again at the end of the study period.
Remarkably, most of the subjects showed little improvement in fitness in any of the three disciplines despite six months of hard work. The reason might have been that they were working too hard. On average the athletes spent 30 percent of their total training time at or above the lactate threshold. In pushing themselves too often, the athletes were unable to fully absorb and adapt to their training. They started each workout a little tired and therefore got a lot less out of it than they should have.
An 80/20 training intensity distribution is appropriate for even the lowest training volumes. An example will drive home this point. A recreationally competitive runner with a busy life might run four times per week for a total of 3 hours. Here’s what a typical week of training might look like for this runner if she followed the 80/20 guideline:
•RUN #1: 5 minutes easy warm-up; 9 x 2:00 at 3K race effort with 2:00 easy recovery jogs between intervals; 5 minutes easy cooldown
•RUN #2: 34 minutes easy
•RUN #3: 8 minutes easy warm-up; 18-minute “tempo” effort at 10K/ 10-mile race effort; 8 minutes easy cooldown
•RUN #4: 1 hour, 15 minutes easy
Runs #1 and #3 are not easy. As a supplement to the easy running in this schedule, they will supply this runner with enough of a challenge at faster speeds to elevate her racing performance. If there is a difference between the intensity distribution that’s best for elite endurance athletes and the distribution that’s best for recreational athletes, it’s not that elites should do only 20 percent of their training at the lactate threshold and above while recreational athletes should do a higher percentage. Rather, the lowest-volume trainers should follow the 80/20 rule closely, while the highest-volume trainers may need to do less than 20 percent of their training at higher intensities.
Even though the proper place for high-intensity workouts in endurance sports training may be relatively small, it is extremely important. Numerous studies have shown that the addition of a small amount of high-intensity workout to a foundation of high-volume, low-intensity training quickly increases performance. For example, in one study researchers from Brigham Young University (Creer et al. 2004) separated 17 trained cyclists into two groups. One group performed only moderate-intensity training for four weeks. The other group included a very small amount of sprint training—just 28 minutes per week—in the training mix. Total work output increased significantly in members of the sprint group but not in the moderate-intensity group. Studies such as this one show that a little high-intensity training goes a long way to enhance performance through mechanisms that are complementary to those by which moderate-intensity training boosts performance.
THE TIME DEVOTED TO HIGH-INTENSITY WORKOUTS IN ENDURANCE SPORTS TRAINING MAY BE RELATIVELY SMALL, BUT IT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.
The addition of a small amount of high-intensity training to a base of low-intensity training not only helps athletes take the last step toward peak fitness but also helps them take the last step toward their racing weight. In Chapter 3 I mentioned a study conducted by William Lunn at Southern Connecticut University. Cyclists either dieted, added high-intensity intervals to their training, or did both for 10 weeks. While the cyclists who added intervals without dieting did not lose weight, they did lower their already very low body fat percentage from an average of 10.1 to 9.9 through a small increase in muscle mass and a small decrease in fat mass.
Strength training may be the last major innovation in endurance sports training. A generation ago most elite endurance athletes either did not do strength training, gave it lip service, or practiced primitive methods that have since been surpassed. Today strength training is taken very seriously at the elite level of every endurance sport. Even the runners of East Africa, most notably 27-time world record breaker Haile Gebrselassie, are starting to pump iron. The reason for strength training’s spread through the elite ranks of endurance sports is its effectiveness. Strength training is proven to increase performance, reduce injury risk, and improve body composition in endurance athletes.
Some athletes who started their careers before the rise of strength training took it up in midcareer and reaped the benefits. In 2008, Dara Torres, at age 41, attempted to qualify for her fifth U.S. Olympic swim team. To counteract the physical effects of aging, Torres incorporated an intensive dryland training regimen into her program. In the run-up to the Olympic Trials, she performed four 60-to-90-minute functional strength sessions per week with Florida Panthers strength-and-conditioning coach Andy O’Brien. The result was a chiseled physique, complete with six-pack abs (a rarity among swimmers) that drew a lot of attention during the Beijing Games. More importantly, Torres swam better than she had in her 30s, 20s, or teens, qualifying for the U.S. team in the 50-meter and 100-meter freestyle and winning silver medals in the 50-meter freestyle and two relay events.
If Torres is the poster girl of the strength training innovation in swimming, Michael Phelps is the poster boy. Between the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, Michael Phelps added five hours per week of strength training to his routine and successfully addressed the key weight-management challenge in swimming by adding 14 pounds of muscle—and a corresponding amount of strength and power—to his body.
The benefits of weight lifting on running performance were demonstrated in a 2008 study by Norwegian researchers (Støren et al. 2008). Seventeen well-trained runners were divided into two groups. Members of one group continued with their normal run training, while members of the other group added to their routine three weekly strength sessions consisting of four, four-repetition sets of half-squats using their four-repetition maximal load (i.e., the heaviest weight they could lift four times). After eight weeks, members of the strength group exhibited not only the expected gains in maximal strength and rate of force development, but also significant improvements in running economy (5 percent) and in time to exhaustion at maximal aerobic running speed (21.3 percent). The control group showed no improvement in any of the measured parameters.
How does lifting weights enhance running economy and endurance? Other studies have shown that it works by increasing the stiffness of the leg when the foot hits the ground (Dumke et al. 2010). The legs function as springs during running. Physics teaches us that a stiffer spring loses less energy when it lands and bounces higher. Your legs will do the same thing if you strengthen them in the gym.
It is worth noting that the loads used in this study were much heavier than those used by most endurance athletes in strength training. Endurance athletes are generally taught that they should use moderate loads and perform sets with large numbers of repetitions (12-rep sets are typical), because this approach imposes a strength-endurance challenge that is more relevant to endurance sports performance than the strength-power challenge imposed by lifting heavier loads. However, the point of hitting the gym if you’re an endurance athlete is not to do the same type of training you do in your primary sport discipline(s). The point is to get a type of training stimulus that you are not getting from your endurance training. Lifting very heavy loads complements rather than merely reinforces their endurance training. And this Norwegian study proves it.
LIFTING VERY HEAVY LOADS IS EXACTLY WHAT ENDURANCE ATHLETES SHOULD DO IN THE GYM BECAUSE IT COMPLEMENTS ENDURANCE TRAINING.
This is not to say that heavy lifting is the only sort of strength training endurance athletes should do. Core training exercises such as side planks do not entail lifting heavy loads, but they boost endurance performance by increasing joint stability and thereby removing waste from sports movements. This was demonstrated in a study performed by researchers at Barry University (Sato and Mokha 2009). Fourteen recreational and competitive runners participated in a six-week core strengthening program, before and after which their running kinematics, leg stability, and 5,000-meter running performance were tested. Another 14 runners served as controls by continuing to run during the six-week study period and not strengthening their core.
What did the researchers find in this case? Interestingly, core strength training was found not to affect the runners’ ground reaction forces or leg stability (essentially balance on one leg), but it did improve their 5,000-meter race performance relative to members of the control group. The authors of the study did not speculate about why this effect was found. Based on my own research on the topic, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was mediated by an improvement in running economy resulting from more efficient transfer of forces between the upper body and the legs.
To get meaningful benefits from strength training, endurance athletes should perform strength workouts lasting 20 to 40 minutes apiece two to three times per week. You can accomplish much in a small amount of time with focused and efficient workout designs. Build your workouts from a mixture of exercises that increase your maximum strength and power in sport-specific movements and exercises that increase the stability of key joints in your sport, such as the shoulders if you are a swimmer. There is no need to pad your workout with multiple exercises for the same muscle group or numerous sets of each exercise. Just get in, go hard, and get out. The Appendix provides recommended strength exercises for various endurance sports.
Closely related to strength training is sport-specific power training, such as high-gear bike sprints and swimming kick sets with fins. Power training does not carry the injury-prevention benefit of strength training, but like strength training it improves performance and body composition.
The performance and body composition benefits of power training in cycling were demonstrated in a New Zealand study (Paton and Hopkins 2005). Researchers divided a team of cyclists into two groups. During an eight-week period within their competitive season, members of one group continued training normally, while members of a second group replaced two workouts each week with high-resistance, low-cadence strength intervals. All of the cyclists performed 40-km time trials before and after the study period. Over the eight weeks, members of the strength intervals group increased their mean time-trial power output by 7.8 percent compared to the control (or normally training) group. In addition, skinfold measurements suggested that the cyclists exposed to strength intervals lost a significant amount of body fat.
As for maximum-intensity sport-specific strength and power development, even less is needed. I recommend that runners perform one set of 6–10 × 8–10-second sprints up a steep hill each week. Cyclists may perform either one set of 6–10 × 20-second power intervals (sprints in their highest gear) or steep hill sprints once per week. Since this type of training is difficult for cross-country skiers on actual snowfields, I recommend they use either the running or the cycling protocol just described, or both. Swimmers can and should spend more time sprinting and developing power through kicking drills (e.g., sprint 25 yards on your side without using your arms while wearing fins; then flip over and repeat) and pulling drills (e.g., sprint 25 yards while wearing hand paddles), because such high-intensity work is less taxing in swimming and because pool swim races are short and require more strength and power. Triathletes should be training for strength and power in swimming, cycling, and running, of course, but they cannot do as much of each as single-sport athletes do lest they overwhelm themselves with the combination. I recommend that triathletes perform kicking and pulling drills once or twice a week in swimming and once every other week in cycling and running, on alternate weeks. In rowing, functional power is best developed with (what else?) power strokes: maximum-effort strokes of a specific count (usually 10–20) inserted into a longer, lower-intensity rowing effort.
With respect to strength training, then, athletes in every endurance sport should incorporate a bit of sport-specific strength and power training into their regimen—high-resistance sprints on the bike, steep uphill running sprints, and the like. These training modifications will not cause weight gain, but they will stimulate a slight increase in muscle mass that will in turn cause a proportional decline in fat mass by increasing fat burning after workouts and by elevating resting metabolism. Weight lifting and sport-specific strength and power training will also increase power by conditioning seldom-used fast-twitch muscle fibers and will reduce injury risk by improving the stability of the joints.
Gains in muscle strength and power cannot be maximized through training alone. Diet also contributes to muscular adaptations to strength and power training. If muscle strength and power are major concerns for you, then you will want to practice “anabolic eating” alongside your strength and power training. Anabolic eating is eating for muscle growth. While endurance athletes are not interested in muscle growth for its own sake, gains in muscle strength and power are closely linked to increases in muscle size. Use the following anabolic eating tips to get the most out of your strength and power training. Don’t worry about “bulking up.” There is absolutely zero chance that you will gain a burdensome amount of muscle weight through strength and power training and anabolic eating if you are also committed to a moderate- to high-volume endurance training program.
MAINTAIN A CALORIC SURPLUS. Research has shown that the most important dietary requirement for muscle growth is a caloric surplus. It is next to impossible to gain muscle mass if your body is burning more calories than it absorbs from food. This surplus need not be large, as muscle protein accretion is a slow process, and indeed your caloric surplus should not be large, as a large daily excess of energy intake will cause more fat storage than muscle gain. A surplus of 100 calories a day is plenty.
EAT PLENTY OF PROTEIN. Before you draw any conclusions about this advice, I should warn that it’s not for the reason you think. It is widely believed that very high levels of protein intake are required to maximize muscle growth, but research has shown this belief to be false. A daily protein intake of 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is sufficient to maximize muscle growth resulting from resistance training. While this level of protein intake is greater than the recommended minimum level of 0.8 grams per kilogram per day, it does not exceed the amount that the average person actually consumes. So there is no need to increase your level of protein intake to promote muscle growth.
However, increasing your protein consumption may help you minimize the body-fat gains that often accompany muscle growth. The reason is that dietary protein is less readily converted into body fat than dietary carbohydrate and fat. Consequently, if you maintain a diet with a 100-calorie daily surplus in which 30 percent of your calories come from protein, you are likely to gain less fat than if you maintain a diet with a 100-calorie daily surplus in which only 18 percent of your daily calories come from protein (which is average), although the amount of muscle gain is likely to be the same on both diets.
EAT ANIMAL FOODS. Animal proteins are more conducive to muscle growth than plant proteins, for a few reasons. First, they are “complete” proteins, meaning they contain all of the essential amino acids that the body cannot synthesize for itself, whereas proteins from plant foods are not complete. Second, animal proteins are more bioavailable than plant proteins, meaning they are more readily incorporated into the cells of the body. Only 78 percent of the protein contained in high-fiber legumes is actually digested, compared to 97 percent of the protein contained in animal foods. Finally, and not least important, animal foods tend to contain much larger amounts of protein than plant foods. For example, a large (1-cup) serving of brown rice contains only 4.5 grams of protein. By contrast, a small (3-ounce) serving of beef flank steak provides nearly 23 grams of protein.
For all of these reasons, you are likely to find it easier to gain muscle if you get most of your protein from animal foods such as fish and dairy products. However, it is certainly not impossible to gain muscle on a vegetarian diet. You just have to work a little harder at it. Because plant proteins are less bioavailable, you should aim for a target of 1.8 to 2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily if you don’t eat meat. Meeting this requirement will be much easier if you make regular use of vegetarian protein supplements such as soy protein shakes.
EAT CARBS AND PROTEIN AFTER WORKOUTS. The timing of protein consumption has a significant effect on the rate of muscle protein synthesis. Research has shown that protein consumed right before, during, and after exercise causes more muscle protein synthesis than equal amounts of protein consumed at other times.
The optimal amount of protein consumption after exercise is 20 grams. Consuming protein with carbohydrate after workouts is proven to result in even greater amounts of muscle protein synthesis. This is because carbohydrate stimulates the release of insulin, which in turn transports the amino acids from dietary protein to the muscle cells and initiates muscle protein synthesis.
TAKE A CREATINE SUPPLEMENT. Creatine phosphate is a fuel that the muscles rely on for maximum-intensity efforts such as sprinting 100 yards. Certain precursors of creatine phosphate, such as creatine monohydrate, are taken as supplements to increase creatine phosphate stores in the muscles. Research has shown that creatine supplementation enhances gains in muscle strength, size, and power resulting from resistance training, as well as performance in repeated high-intensity intervals. While creatine is extremely popular among strength athletes and recreational weight lifters, few endurance athletes use it. Yet it is likely to be helpful to those athletes who are seeking greater muscle strength and power.
The nutritional and behavioral steps of the Racing Weight system that we explored in previous chapters—increasing diet quality, managing appetite, balancing the energy sources, monitoring performance, and timing nutrient intake—represent the tried and true weight-management methods of the most successful endurance athletes. As such, they should be emulated by all endurance athletes. The training step of the Racing Weight system is likewise an example set by the elites that nonelites must copy to reach their racing weight and realize their full performance potential.
If most age-group endurance athletes don’t eat like the top professionals, even fewer train like them. I’m not talking about matching the volume that the pros put in. We mortals obviously cannot do that. I’m talking about emulating their winning approach, which entails prioritizing volume within your physical and psychological tolerance, keeping the intensity low most of the time yet going really hard when the time is right, and carving out a modest amount of time for strength training.
In my experience, and in that of many other coaches I’ve talked to, a majority of even the most competitive endurance athletes work out in a way that is the training equivalent of eating fast food three times a day—rushing through training sessions, getting workouts over with, steering clear of low and very high intensities like the gutters of a bowling lane, and giving lip service to strength training. The more you make your training regimen look like those of the men and women on the podium, the more your body will resemble theirs and the faster you will go when it really matters.