[aaholmes]

As a lifetime endurance athlete, I’ve finally decided to incorporate weight lifting to be more well rounded and reduce the rate of the inevitable sarcopenia decline.  I’m working with a coach to learn the lifts (back squats, deadlifts, presses, Bulgarian split squats, etc).  I’m slowly building the volume and intensity of the lifting while allowing running volume to decrease.  I’m certainly not trying to be a powerlifter but want to get the lifts up to a reasonable level for general life and running/hiking/ski tour durability.  I’ve heard mentions in Evoke podcasts of what might be a good 1 rep max (actual or calculated) baseline for strength, such as squat 1x your bodyweight (though can’t remember the exact value).  What’s the point of diminishing returns for these lifts?  I was thinking that could give me some targets for getting my 1 rep maxes to a reasonable level and then focus more on strength maintenance and/or moving to ME.

[Scott Johnston]

Great question but here’s a not great answer:
No one knows how where that point of diminishing returns is!   The comment you heard from me in a podcast is:   If you can’t deadlift your body weight you might see gains in running performance with increasing that number.  This is just my opinion that deadlifting 1.5xBW and back squatting 1xBW are likely to help your overall sport performance and durability.  Speding hours and hours in the gym trying to increase your deadlift to 2xBW is just going to take time away from more spent specific training. These lifts are great general strength movements but, again in my opinion, have poor transferability to endurance sports once these numbers are reached.  However they can provide a great base for progressing to  more sport specific strength and power movements as well as muscular endurance. Power (the rate at which force or strength can be applied)and muscular endurance (the ability of a muscle to produce a high % of of its max force for many repetitions) are really what we care about in sports.  Those general strength movements are done at speeds in on the order of 1-4 seconds. This is far slower than the rate of force production in running for instance.  Thus the brain is not learning to recruit and fire the propelling muscles in the same way it would do in, say, running.   So, while those power lifters are very strong they are not necessarily very powerful.  The Olympic lifts of clean-and-jerk and  snatch are the epitome of power.  To enhance endurance sport performance strength must be converted to the much more spent specific qualities of power and muscular endurance.  Even when developed in only semi sport-specific ways like high rep Bulgarian split squat as an example of a muscular endurance exercise or hurdle hops when it comes to power, these transfer very well to improving  endurance performance.

Think of the progression being:

#1- Increase general strength

#2- Move on to more sport specific strength

#3- Use that sport specific strength to develop sport specific power and muscular endurance.

All that said I have had many athletes just do #3 when they have limited general strength experience, have a rapidly approaching event, or don’t have access to a gym.  They will see good gains in both power and muscular endurance.  Maybe not as big of gains as they would have it they had many months for the full progression, but impressive gains regardless.  But this method is less likely to reduce sarcopenia or improve daily strength.

The hill sprint workout described here is my go to power exercise for all mountain athletes.  Similarly the various forms of muscular endurance routine described here have a powerful training effect and transfer well to all mountain sports.

I hope this helps,

Scott

[aaholmes]

Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply.  Really appreciate the time you take with responses and podcasts to give actionable advice!

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