The Importance of Strength Training

BY KRISTINA SKROCE & FEDERICO FONTANA , TNN Coaches

Strength is an essential physical ability for any athlete in today’s competitive sports. In athletes, strength training improves performance through an increase in force, speed and resistance. More specifically, it promotes a selective recruitment of type II fibers while improving efficiency of type I fibers contraction mechanisms. In addition, it enhances muscle recruitment and muscle firing frequency. 

In endurance athletes, as cyclists, strength training has the potential to reduce the energetic cost of the locomotion therefore improving efficiency on the bike. For this reason, it’s not only suggested for sprinters, where high level of force is required, but also for climbers to improve their effectiveness on the bike.

Strength training improves dynamic stability and exercise tolerance, prevents osteoporosis and have a role in optimal weight maintenance and weight loss.

Strength training exercises that focus on the development of muscular force have gained increasing popularity also among youth endurance athletes. It promotes natural growth and maturation and has wide-ranging health-related benefits that assist physical well-being and vitality in children especially in combination with aerobic endurance activities.

The best way to improve strength is resistance training (RT), a popular form of exercise that is recommended by medical and scientific organisations such as the American College of Sport Medicine (ACSM) and the American Heart Association (AHA) for most populations, including adolescents, healthy adults, older adults and any patients. High level athletes benefit from resistance training to increase their ability to produce force. Thus, resistance training is an essential component of training for health, fitness and sport performance.

Strength training methodology is a key factor in ensuring a progressive overload and a balanced strength development that needs to meet the requirement of specific athletes on the bike. Taking into account all the involved variables like training frequency, volume, intensity, rest, etc. makes the whole strength training prescription cumbersome if not properly monitored.

The ability to rely on an intuitive interface, an extensive library and a friendly capability to create strength training sessions and monitor progresses longitudinally, make TrainHeroic one of the most useful tool that we currently use on a daily basis in Team Novo Nordisk. In addition, TrainHeroic’s structure permits coaches to create a structured system of active communication that improves the feedback from coach to athlete and vice versa and therefore strengthens their relationship even without having physical contact on a daily basis.

From the coaching standpoint, this is extremely relevant as it gave us a huge help on encouraging daily adherence to the program and therefore enlightened athlete’s responsibility to reach their daily training goals.