Training
Many people waste their health potential by not understanding fundamental physiological principles. Strength training improves not just your power, but also your endurance — a scientifically proven law that few people actually use.
Line items
Often in life, we squander potential because we simply don't know better. Ignorance can come at a steep price. Take Vitamin D as an example: In winter, it could spare countless people from seasonal depression and flu-like infections. Many people still don't understand these connections. They suffer needlessly as a result.
Just a few decades ago, most people were completely cut off from this kind of knowledge pool. Thanks to the internet, we now live in a flood of information. While this can sometimes be a drawback, compared to generations before us, this knowledge can help us live substantially better lives.
Sports Science Laws
In our last newsletter, we learned: Without exercise and movement, you'll get sick. Exercise is built into our physiology just as deeply as the body's need for water. After reading countless studies over many years, we can say with absolute certainty: exercise and movement are beneficial in every context. Anyone who pushes through and just does it is rewarded in every context.
This is also true even when it seems completely counterintuitive. For example, with dysfunctional mitochondria. Logically, they produce too little energy for us. We might think: "Exercise? Impossible. I can barely get out of bed!" But the truth is: research shows remarkably clearly that exercise significantly improves mitochondrial function even in these contexts!
But we can also waste enormous potential in our training if we train incorrectly. Fortunately, this doesn't have to be the case, because sports science gives us laws that we should follow. Laws we can benefit from.
One such physiologically embedded principle is: Maximum strength stands (metaphorically speaking) above strength endurance and power. Hardly anyone knows this. Because it means: the stronger you are, the more (strength) endurance you have, and the faster you are. Most people would probably think these three qualities have nothing to do with each other or even work against each other.
Maximum Strength Improves Endurance Performance
So an endurance athlete might think that maximum strength training is unnecessary or even harmful to their endurance performance. Far from it—a 20-year-old study from Norway demonstrates this. Elite cross-country skiers with VO2max values near 60—meaning extraordinary capacity for endurance performance—showed that simple maximum strength training increased endurance performance under full load by an astounding 20% compared to the control group.
Let's be clear about what this means: this shouldn't really be possible. It's impossible. These are completely well-trained athletes, incredibly capable. They spend a few weeks in the weight room with heavy weights being tortured ... and suddenly their endurance performance under full load increases by 20%. These are the ones who are significantly tougher in competition.
The same research group confirmed these results in 2008 in a high-quality RCT study on cross-country skiers. In that study, maximum strength training likewise resulted in approximately 20% improvement in "time to exhaustion at maximal aerobic speed." Similar results were published by the same group on competitive cyclists in 2010.
A 2010 review concludes that "strength training can lead to improved long-term (>30 min) and short-term (<15 min) endurance performance in both well-trained individuals and elite endurance athletes."
Maximum Strength Makes Muscles Stronger ... and More Efficient
Maximum strength improves the aforementioned endurance parameters primarily because it improves economy—specifically at the muscular level ("intramuscular efficiency"). In other words: a stronger muscle gets more out of less—or gets even more out of a lot. In studies, this sounds like:
"The ability for faster force generation extends the portion of the contraction phase dedicated to maintaining the developed force, which potentially reduces the muscle's metabolic demand and improves intramuscular efficiency during exercise."
In simple terms: the energy cost of initiating a muscle contraction is higher than maintaining that contraction. The faster a muscle can contract, the more time is available for maintaining the contraction itself, which reduces the overall energy cost of the entire contraction process. That's how the study authors explain it.
And we understand all of this—even if not in such detail—because sports science teaches us that maximum strength is the force that influences both strength endurance and power.
Knowledge Matters
All of this, you have to know first. Many, many athletes don't know this. They do whatever. Wasted potential. We all experience this in various areas of our lives. In the realm of health, this can cost us our lives. In the realm of sport, we at least fail to reach our genetic maximum properly. That's a shame.
These are physiological laws that we should orient ourselves by if we want to be successful. We explore two such physiological laws in this week's blog post. Because: these laws are usually so simple that anyone can understand them. Even bodybuilders—who live by these laws essentially.
Once you've internalized this, you'll see that a lot might be much simpler than you thought. As an analogy, it's like a light switch in a dark room: whoever knows where the light switch is located doesn't fumble around blindly in the dark, but rather finds access to the light relatively quickly.
And that's precisely why we concern ourselves with knowledge.
