The Endurance Athlete’s Formula For Success!

To start, I want to make my point clear when it comes to human performance. I have mentioned in previous articles of mine the fact that you should think of fitness as a broad spectrum of many traits. For instance, total fitness or even athletic fitness consist of many variables that range from endurance, strength, flexibility, stamina, recovery, resiliency, and overall performance. Now certainly there are events like those that you endurance athletes compete in that consist of you having to have a significant amount of the trait of endurance! This is true, however, I have found that a lot of endurance athletes overemphasize their training by ONLY practicing their specific event in order to condition themselves for the actual event.

This general mindset basically stems from the fact that the athlete believes his or her performance will be compromised if they attempt to include any other variance of training into their personal program. This is a false belief. The fact is that if you are a marathon runner you know that you cannot condition your body by only practicing running a marathon, as your training, before you run your actual marathon event. This would be impossible and unproductive. Once again, fitness consist of a broad spectrum of traits that you must try to improve on in order to have a successfully fit and fine-tuned body. The athlete should work on developing and implementing a proper strength and conditioning program that will help to optimize all of the variables of fitness with slightly more emphasis placed on building endurance. The key here though is to not think that even more time should be spent on the other variables in addition to the miles you are running or cycling. As a matter of fact, you don’t have to spend as much time running, if you are a marathon runner, as you think you do. A well planned and competent strength and conditioning program will help you to develop an exceptionally high level of performance when race day comes! There have been many studies done on this and many winners to show for it. The proof is in the pudding!

So when it comes to your endurance training think about every trait of your performance. Every trait across the fitness spectrum should be improved. You will get a tremendous amount of cardiovascular conditioning from both your actual even practice time, as well as, your strength and conditioning sessions!