Weight training will be an important component of my overall training for several reasons over the coming year. Firstly, as we age, we lose muscle mass starting in our mid-30s. Low muscle volume strongly correlates with poor health outcomes in later stages of life. As long as I am not overtraining or injuring myself, there is nothing but upside when it comes to including weight training in my weekly routine. So part of the reason why I am doing this is for general, long-term health.
In the short term, the more muscle mass I have, the more glycogen stores I will possess. That means I will have greater energy reserves to draw on throughout the race. Additionally, I will have more muscle fibers to recruit when running and cycling, which will also enhance my cardiovascular performance, and help mitigate accumulating fatigue. To achieve a broad set performance-related of goals, I will have a broad approach with weight-lifting.
For sets where I am only performing 4-5 reps, this is to enhance the “power” aspect of muscle strength, which is going to help on hill climbs. For sets where I am performing 6-8 reps, this is to build muscle volume, which will help store energy. And for the sets where I am doing 20 reps, that is to enhance endurance.
To start January, I plan to do this once per week:
- Dead hang (40 seconds)
- Chest Press
- Set 1: 4 x 110 lbs
- Set 2: 8 x 95 lbs
- Set 3: 20 x 45 lbs
- Pec Fly
- Set 1: 20 x 60 lbs
- Rear Delt
- Set 1: 20 x 30 lbs
- Seated Row
- Set 1: 4 x 90 lbs
- Set 2: 8 x 75 lbs
- Set 3: 20 x 60 lbs
- Shoulder Press
- Set 1: 4 x 80 lbs
- Set 2: 8 x 70 lbs
- Set 3: 12 x 40 lbs
- Dead hang (20 seconds)
This is my starting point because this is more or less where I left off in December. A few thoughts on this:
- The goal for the dead hang is to get it up to 1 minute at the beginning and end, then sustain this for every workout, indefinitely — for the rest of my life
- Each weight station will evolve into 3 sets as my conditioning improves. So this volume will expand.
- Yes, this is upper-body heavy. The running, cycling, and yoga will provide more than enough stress on my lower body. I may add in some lower bodywork in the months ahead during weeks when I don’t get out to a local state park to cycle legit hills. By spring, I plan to be on the bike every Sunday morning doing hill repeats. When weather or life doesn’t allow that, I’ll be doing lower body work at the gym to make up for it.
- The plan is to get through the workout in 40 minutes. The above workout can be completed in about 25 minutes currently.
- I will increase the weight for each set when each of these workouts leads me to feel completely recovered by day 2 following the workout. I’ll use that as a data point justifying increased weight in the next workout. But I don’t plan on expanding this beyond 40-45 minutes per week.
- The plan is to include push/pull upper body work in multiple planes. If I feel like different exercises are better suited, I’ll make changes. I may make changes regardless, just to ensure I don’t get to optimized at doing anything. This will be a recurring theme for the coming months: I want broad and dynamic adaptations to the systems that will support my cycling and running race efforts.
