It’s helpful to keep a few things straight in the mind:
- There’s only one kind of strength, defined as your ability to produce force against a resistance.
- Endurance is a subset of strength, defined as your ability to continue to produce sub-maximal levels of force many times.
- In order to be able to do a task many times, you must first be strong enough to do it ONCE.
- Endurance activities will interfere with ones strength training program as the two “qualities” are the products of different adaptations. Strength training creates structural adaptations such as increased bone density, tendon thickness and elasticity, muscle cross sectional area, and an anabolic hormonal profile. Pure endurance training create chemical adaptations aimed at improving energy use and oxygen delivery - mitochondrial density, capillarization, and a catabolic hormonal profile.
- The structural adaptations are deeper, more permanent, harder-won, and slower to acquire. The chemical and enzymatic optimization of endurance training is more quickly acquired - and more quickly lost.
- With the above in mind it makes sense to organize our training to get strong first, then convert that strength (which does not revert back to some pre-strength training baseline) into adequate endurance for our sport or for our activities of daily living.
- It’s also helpful to keep in mind that while Strength is not task-specific and therefore need not be developed in postures and positions which mimic the expression of strength on the field (another thing to pray that your competition believes), conditioning IS highly specific to the task at hand. You wouldn’t train for a 40m sprint by running 5k’s nor vice versa. But either event is improved by getting an untrained individual’s squat up tbrough the easy gains of the Novice lifter.