Gym time

With my last couple of events finished for the year, and the next events not being for weeks, today it was time for the inevitable, today it was time to return to the gym.

More and more science is pointing towards the benefits of a well designed gym program to all forms of exercise, including endurance sport. For power sports the benefit of strength training is obvious, however, it is a little less intuitive when it comes to endurance events.

I am not an expert on it (although I have friends who are close) but I think the benefits of incorporating weights into an endurance sports program are two fold. Firstly strength training helps in injury prevention. The less injured an athlete gets the more consistently they can train, which in turn leads to longer term performance improvements. Makes sense. The other trend that is starting to appear is that endurance athletes are seeing performance improvements through real 'power' type strength programs, high weight, low rep sort of stuff. This is the sort of strength training that traditionally endurance athletes have stayed away from, considering it to be unnecessary. However, as far as I understand there appears to be a correlation between maximum power output and running efficiency and, therefore, performance. As I said, I am not a strength and conditioning coach, but that is my understanding of it, based on chats with mates who are strength and conditioning coaches. Interesting stuff.

Anyway, whatever the reason, today it was time for me to get back in the gym.

As you can imagine it was not pain free.

Actually the gym session wasn't too bad. It has been a couple of weeks since my last gym session, but the time away doesn't seem to have done too much harm. I didn't have to lighten my weights too much and was able to make it through my planned sets. Of course the test will be how I feel in the morning and also how I feel on Wednesday morning. I already struggled to get up the stairs earlier tonight, so in the morning things may not be too pretty. I may revise my earlier view that the session didn't go too bad.

While the return to the gym was always going to be fairly unpleasant I am pretty sure that the longer term benefits will make it worth it.