 Are you training for endurance and stamina, but you don't want to lose muscle? Watch this. Our next caller is Stephanie from Ontario, Canada. Stephanie, what's happening? How can we help you? Uh, so my question is about muscular adaptation for performance. Um, I grew up loving long distance running and cycling, uh, since listening to your podcast about two years ago, uh, I started to incorporate resistance training into my training. So like in high school, uh, and university, I, I was a competitive volleyball player, but I didn't really train in the gym very much. I just like ran and biked in the summers when it was, um, mild enough to do that. So anyways, yeah, I started resistance training, uh, a few years ago, and I feel very strong. Like I feel, uh, good when I do that. Um, but I'm just worried, uh, because I signed up for a half ironman this summer. I'm worried that my strength gains will be, um, like will be weaker because I'm training for a half marathon and I'm going to be biking like 90 kilometers as well, uh, in this race. So yeah, I was just wondering does, uh, increasing performance in, um, like long distance steady state activities mean that my performance as a volleyball player. So like my vertical jump or the power that I get, uh, from jumping and serving and hitting will decrease. I'm just wondering about, yeah, like muscular adaptation. Yeah, good question, Stephanie. Okay. So you, you played at a, at a regularly high, at a decently high level in volleyball, right? And you practice pretty, yeah, let me ask you a question. Let's say you have an athlete that you're coaching who's playing volleyball and they, and they practice five days a week and then they go down to practicing one day a week. Are you going to notice a decline in their skill and performance? Um, I would say, I don't know. Like I think maybe if everyone else on the team is practicing still five days a week and they only do one, let's say somebody's just training five days a week and they're practicing volleyball and then they stop practicing five days a week and they only practice one day a week. I think you can, you can expect to see a decline in some performance and skill. That's normal. Okay. Yeah. If you're training for an iron man, you're going to improve your skill and your stamina and your performance specific to the iron man, and you're probably going to lose some of it in other arenas. And depending on what arena we're talking about, you'll see more or less, you know, gains or losses. So for powerlifting, you'd see a bigger loss than you would maybe for volleyball, um, but that's expected. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's, in fact, not only there's nothing wrong with that, but when we're looking at things longterm, it's great to move from one type of adaptation to another back and forth. Whatever strength you lose training for an iron man, you'll gain back so fast when you switch your training back to strength training. So my advice to someone like you is first off, like, how important So then, so do you think I should start? Oh, go ahead. Well, no, go ahead. Go ahead. Ask what you were going to say. Oh, I was going to say so. Then do you think like I should do 16 weeks of iron man training and then right after the iron man, I should do like a jump training, like a vertical jump training program. I would go specific to iron man training for however long you think you need for the iron man. After you're done, I would give yourself a couple of weeks of deload. So you're because iron man's pretty half iron man is intense. So I give yourself a couple of weeks and then I would go specific to train for what you're looking for. Now you're not going to lose all your performance because you're still running, cycling, swimming, you're still moving, but the skill and the specific type of strength, the specific type of power you may lose a little bit because you're training more in another direction. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. So if you really want to perform well for the iron man, focus on the iron man. And then when you go back to your other training, it'll come back pretty quickly, especially because you have such a good base of that kind of training in the past. The one thing that I would add is nutrition. So where this could get out of hand real quick is what happens sometimes someone will, they're not focused on building muscle and we're not focused on like volleyball performance. I just want to be good at iron man. And so it's all about training iron man. And we kind of like aren't real. And you're burning so many calories so you're not, you know, you're not going to put on body fat. So you're not really tracking food so much. And then your protein intake is really low and you're in a deficit a lot of times and that's going to accelerate muscle loss. So the one thing that I would add to try and mitigate how much performance slash strength slash muscle that we're going to lose is make sure you're getting adequate calories and protein especially. So, you know, I would be tracking that and making sure I'm hitting my kind of one to one, your body, body weight in protein on a daily basis. And then, you know, when I know I'm about to go on like a real long run or ride, loading up, making sure that I have maybe some liquid calories that I can take before. So I've got a good amount of fuel and energy that my body can utilize that would be the one thing that I would add to try and mitigate how much because it's inevitable. Right? We're switching to adaptations and focus. You're going to get more, you're going to build a more endurance body type, not a explosive, big, strong, muscular body type. By doing that, that's okay. And like Sal is saying, that's going to bounce right back and it'll bounce back even faster if you do a good job of hanging on to as much of it as you can nutritionally by feeding the body. It'll take you that much longer if you just disregard that and just, hey, I'm running all the time. I'm not really worried about food. I can get away with eating kind of whatever I want, which is what happens to people sometimes who do this. And then they end up eating 40 grams of protein every day and the body says, oh, we don't need this muscle anymore. We're just endurance athletes. And so they, it pairs down. Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing to consider is just the competing adaptations. So the, the more you can go into one versus the other, you know, the more, the more efficient your body is going to respond to that and actually learn that adaptation going forward. So, you know, obviously like endurance versus strength, you're going to have both of those are going to compete a bit. So, you know, if you can, if you can separate those out and in through periods and like say you're moving then from your, your Ironman to go back, like you'd mentioned, more vertical jump or like, you know, plyometric, you know, explosive type training, you know, just stay in that very specific adaptation for a few weeks. Now here's something you can do the whole time, Stephanie. I think the entire time you should focus on or, or add an element of correctional exercise to prevent imbalances or injury or movement issues that cause you to lose efficiency of movement. So this will be valuable when you're doing the Ironman. This will be valuable for volleyball or anything else you do. Do you have Maps Prime Pro? I don't know. Okay. I'm going to make a deal with you earlier. You said you were a teacher, right? Are you teaching, you're teaching your class right now? Okay. No, I have a gym class. I'm just on my prep right now. Okay. Are you, but you do teach students? Yeah, I do teach students. Yeah. All right. If you promise not to give them homework today, I'll give you Maps Prime Pro for free. I want to hook everybody up. Okay. All right. Excellent. So we'll send over Maps Prime. I'll let them have a break. Beautiful. And tell, hey, say, Sal gave you guys a break. Sal from Mind Pump. From Mind Pump. And I'll send you maps. Yeah. I'm going to send Maps Prime Pro to you. And you can use that through all of the training, no matter what you're doing. It'll benefit you no matter what. They actually know who you are. Cause I, for their culminating, like their midterm, I made them listen to one of your podcasts about why everyone should deadlift and write a report on it. Oh, that's awesome. Well, there you go. You know, one last thing. So we, I don't know if you follow, um, uh, PJ, uh, PJF performance, Paul Fabritz. Yeah, I do. Okay. So his, I heard you talk about vertical. So I think he's the best in the business. So if you, if that's a great program, you know. All right. Thanks for calling in stuff. Okay. Yeah, I'll look into that. So then, yeah, just if my goal is overall athleticism, do you think switching between, uh, endurance and power based training is a good way to go? Or do you think it should be consistently one of them? And then just switch up what? If you want general overall, then you do a little bit of everything. If you want specific, then you gotta be more focused. Okay. Sounds good. All right. Thank you. Okay. Thanks very much. Let me tell you, man. I'm winning those students over no homework for you guys. That's great. Yeah. It's a similar question. It's always, we get questions like this all the time. Like, how do I prevent my body from, it's literally, what you're literally asking is, how do I prevent my body from adapting in a way that makes it get better at what I'm doing? Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? So, and you, and you can't like, you got to pick one or the other or be okay with a little bit of all of it. Well, I, you know, it, that's just it is being okay with that you're not going to be the best at the, the one thing if you're doing multiple things. If you're sending multiple signals to the body, it's not going to be the best at that one thing, which I think it's totally okay if you're not a professional athlete or maybe it could be like, she's competing for Iron Man. So I would switch all my focus so I can be, do the best I can at that. Totally. And then when I get back, then I, and then I get back, I'm going to be more focused on probably volleyball because that's what I'm doing. And then yeah, I want to throw some endurance in there every once in a while. So I don't lose that, you know, because I like those things, but knowing that the more I do in one way or the other, it's going to take a little bit from the other one. Totally. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here, or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe.