 Our next caller is Becky from Minnesota. What's up, Becky? How can we help you? Hi. I'm so happy to finally get to say hi to you guys. I'm just gonna try to keep it short, but basically my question boils down to how to keep cardiovascular endurance during the off season and gain some muscle and strength. I'm just a little background. I have been a long distance runner for about the past 12 years. And I love it. Nothing makes me happier than going for a long run and listening to a podcast. I've done several marathons, half marathons. And in the past three years, I started doing sprint triathlons and the competitive side really came out in me. And I just, I really got competitive in doing them and I love doing them. And then since about March, when the lockdown began, I started running about seven days a week. I was running about 60 plus miles a week as well as adding in biking and swimming during the summer months. And due to my high endurance, my triathlon times this past year were excellent just because I had so much endurance and I was able to keep just putting out mileage and going for long distances. But as I get older, I'm 39 and I'm starting to find value in rest and recovery. And I just don't know how to do that with other triathlon training I'm doing and running and wanting to gain strength over the off season. Okay, good question. So Becky, what you can do is you can actually put a barbell on your back when you're doing all these exercises. You just, she made me exhausted going. I'm just, I'm totally joking. Okay, I'm gonna ask you a few questions that helped me out with advising you, okay? So if you were to rank your endurance training in terms of like how much you value and how much you enjoy on a scale of one to 10, where would it be? I'll say 10. 10, 10. Now if, and you gotta be honest, strength training, how much do you value it in terms of while you're doing it, enjoying it and love it on a scale of one to 10? I started out as one. I'm currently probably at an, as far as liking it, I'm at a six, but seeing the results I get when I do it, I'm at like an eight to nine. Okay. How many days a week do you want to exercise? Seven. Okay, so you like to work out seven days a week. All right, I'm gonna have you, one day a week do resistance training. That's it. You're gonna get the strength from it. It'll help protect you. The rest of the days you could do what you enjoy. And this is what's really important, Becky, is that we don't wanna get stuck in the, I want everything because that's impossible. You have to be honest and say, well, I enjoy this the most. And what I like about, this is what I think I hear from you. What I like about resistance training is how it makes my body feel, the strength, you know, the muscle. While I do it, I don't enjoy it nearly as much, but I like some of the benefits. Well, you're gonna get some of the benefits with one day a week of resistance training. On the other days, you could do the other stuff. I would definitely throw in a mobility day though. I would definitely do one of the endurance days, just focus on mobility. So I was a little confused here. So are we not trying to transition out of all this running and so that, are we? I really like the muscle that I'm building and I feel more confident and I can feel, I have strength trained in the, like more the winter months when I'm inside. I try to get in two days a week of that, but I could also see that really helped my endurance this summer as far as like the biking and the swimming, my swimming time improved and my biking time. And the only thing I did was add in just a little bit more resistance training over the winter. So I guess what I'm asking is, are we trying to get rid of all the running and marathon? Are we? That's something you- I just had to try to have a family in this off season when it's cold, I'm in Minnesota, so it's cold during the winter. I run early in the morning or later at night, it's cold and it's just sometimes it'd be nice to just stay in the house and lift weights versus logging all the miles and just building that strength over the winter months. I mean, you could do like a hybrid approach to this, right? We had a question not that long ago where we talked to somebody kind of similar and we were telling them that, yes, I agree, one day a week what Sal is saying, but let's say it's a week where it's so cold, you don't go out and run and do any of your cardio all week long and then that week you could train two or three days in there, but you have to adjust the strength training based off of how much cardio endurance type of training that you're doing or else you're gonna do too much and then it's counterproductive. So you have to be able to go, okay, this is a week where I'm probably not gonna get out and run very much, therefore I can strength train full body two to three times a week. If it's a week when you're getting out and you're getting these runs in, then I'm with Sal, I would tell you just to do the one day a week, but people like yourself who obviously have a competitive streak and very disciplined, the mistake I think they make when they start to see some of the benefits from strength training is they try and do all of it. They try and be this super, super athlete as far as endurance sports and then they also wanna get really strong and they think that the more that they strength train in addition to all this running they're doing that the stronger they're gonna get and there'll be a tipping point, there'll be a point where the body says nah, you're just asking too much of it and so you have to learn how to balance the two of them and what that looks like is some weeks you're gonna be one day a week of strength training and then maybe other weeks when you completely scale back on all the endurance training and it's cold and you don't wanna get out and do that and you wanna be inside and lift then you could do two or three days but I would never go beyond three days of lifting and I would always be between that one to three and I would let my endurance training dictate how much strength training I've got. You wanna bolster your endurance training and reinforce your joints. One thing I would recommend and I do love that you're considering strength training however I also want you to consider moving in different planes and being able to do things in the frontal plane, the transverse plane so you're twisting, you're also moving laterally and this is gonna be really important because of all the repetitive stress of you doing the same type of movements going forward in the sagittal plane constantly. This will help to build more longevity support structure around the joints, avoid chronic issues in terms of pain and weaknesses later on so to incorporate that in your strength training I highly suggest. Yeah, Becky I'm kind of reading between the lines a little bit and I've trained a lot of people like you and in my experience it's not gonna happen until you start to enjoy it. That's why I'm saying once a week. I think once a week is realistic and here's what I think is gonna happen. If you do it right and you don't over train you'll eventually wanna do more because you'll really start to enjoy that aspect of it but forcing yourself to do more of it just cause you like the results but you hate doing it and you love running so much that tends to be a failing strategy. Tends to be like oh on again, off again type of strategy. You love running so much so then I would say fine. Not to mention the body's not gonna respond the way you want. If you're running. That's what I was wondering too is with all my endurance training I feel like maybe if I backed off that a little bit and strength train more I'd see more. Of course. Of course. And that's what I mean by you need to be able to do that. You need to be able to listen to Sal only do one day a week cause you love your running and you're doing that but then if there's a week or two where you say you know what the next two weeks I'm really gonna scale back. I don't have any competitions coming up for a while and I'm just gonna focus on strength training. Nothing wrong with you going to two to three days a week but I also wouldn't do this. I wouldn't go one day a week strength training all of a sudden you back off all your endurance training then all of a sudden you go seven days of strength training that's kind of your personality would probably naturally gravitate to that and you need to not do that. You don't wanna do that. You're always looking to do the least amount of work to elicit the most amount of change. So for you, it's one day a week and then if all of a sudden you decide to scale way back on the endurance training then sure give yourself two times a week maybe three max following like a MAPS anabolic protocol. Just objectively Becky the most success I ever had with the triathletes and marathon runners that I train and these are people that that's what they wanna do. They wanna do well in triathlons. They wanna do well in marathons. I've trained a couple Ironman competitors. That's the priority and we use resistance training as a way to support that and it was once a week. We didn't do more than once a week. I would have them do mobility stuff and that would happen either before after the runs or their swims or when they would ride but once a week of resistance training was the best. I've tried two, three and with the amount of training that they were doing for their sport it was just too much. They would have had to back way off on their triathlon training in order to do more resistance training but then they would have lost performance in the particular sport. So this is the trade off. That's why I'm saying we'll also consider an off season, right? Right, because that's what we're going into now is pretty much the off season. Yeah, so consider the off season as the way to reinforce and strengthen your body and you can back off the volume of running and the endurance side of it to really hyper focus on bolstering your body, strengthening your body, building support around your joints and then come back into the season. Every athlete needs an off season to rebuild their body. So you keep doing the same thing over and over again and inevitably you're gonna run into problems. Do you have maps performance? Cause I feel like that would be the best kind of resistance training program for what you're doing. I do not. Okay, we'll send that to you. Now it has three foundational workouts a week in there. Pick one, pick one of them. And then the mobility sessions, I suggest you do those a few days a week. They're short, you can do it for 15 minutes, maybe as a warm up or a primer before your endurance training. And I think you'll be good. I really think unless you cut your running and your cardio down, your endurance training down, more than one day a week of resistance training. Look, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna bet that you're probably already a little over training. So I do, yeah, well, I do resistance training three days a week. I run four and then I do spin twice. Yeah, you're way over trained, Becky. You could definitely take a beating. I think you've proven that, but. And that's cutting back. I've cut my mileage in half since the summer. Becky, you're a certified badass. That's what you are. So it's tough when you're that badass to kind of scale back. Don't let the badass turn you into a dumbass though. Don't hurt yourself. Okay. So many miles was just, yeah. But you're getting up there in age with us. So you definitely. Yeah, I know. Happy 40th, by the way. Thank you. Thanks, Becky. Thanks for calling in. Thank you. All right, thank you. You know what's funny? The people that do this the most are the late 30s, early 40s clients. I don't know what it is. I think it's that like, I don't know. It's just like the clients that I had that would constantly overdo it or like in that age group. This is starting to really inspire me to write a program. I feel like we get this so much right now. And what I would I find us consistently advising and it's funny, right? We're bouncing between, where I see flow sessions from hit being amazing. I see mobility sessions from performance being amazing. And then I see foundational days either from anabolic or performance. So if we could build some sort of a hybrid for people that do cardio first, like it'd be like the maps cardio program. Like so if cardio is your endurance training is your first love, how do I blend strength training? And we write some sort of a program that actually, I mean, if we get enough people that I reach out after hearing this, maybe we'll do something like that. Cause I feel like we answer a lot of questions around this and giving people a more structured guidance on how we would do that, I think would be helpful. Yeah, it's so, it's like, I used to do this. I used to do my workouts. I would look at my workouts and be like, you know what, I want more strength endurance. So rather than changing my workout, I would just add it to what I was currently doing. Oh, totally. And I would just add, oh, the sled is good, throw it on top. Oh, plyo is good, throw it on top. And it doesn't work that way. You need to back off. It's just way too much. And I used to love getting clients like this cause I would, I'd be an asshole and I'd get them to cut way back. And then it would be wonderful cause they come back and be like, I'm faster. I'm strong. What the hell is going on? I'm like, well, I told you. Yeah, no, as a trainer you always who'd rather have somebody you got to pull the reins. I mean, that's just like, that's in life, right? As employees, I'd rather have the two. I'd rather have somebody I have to pull the reins back than the guy or the girl. I got to constantly be motivating every day cause that gets exhausting as a coach is trying to inspire them every day to get up and go do their session. They're just the heart, they're type A. They're type A personality and they think more means more results and it just, it doesn't work that way. So I totally get it, but I feel like we're getting a lot of these questions of people that have endurance sports, and then also wanna build muscle and what does that look like? 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.