Strength Training on Rest Day?

What are you trying to gain with your rest day?

How do you feel the day after your rest day?

Shane

Rest day is about absorbing the training load and preparing for your next block of training. So in essence you want to have less stress on the body then when you train. This stress applies to ALL of life, NOT just training. So if you rest day is Monday and that is your most stressful day at work, then just how beneficial is your rest day?

With strength training what are you goals? Why are you doing triceps exercises push-ups, pull-ups and sit-ups? Just like your training should be structured to maximize your benefits so should your strength training, i.e. is should be goal oriented and applicable to the muscle and movements you use in sport. If you want to work on your core I would suggest doing movement patterns that focus on your core (Front seats, RDL's, planks, med ball exercises, etc.) and you get a lot more benefit out of them.

I would also ask what is the goal of your strength training? Every session should have a purpose.

I'm new, so this may not make sense, but here is my reasoning/goal for the strength training. I find the upper body work, especially the pull-ups and triceps exercises help my swimming. I can't say this with absolute certainty, but I feel like it does. I was also getting a lot of shoulder fatigue on my aero bars at first, but since I started my strength exercises, this has been alleviated. Now, both of these perceived "results" could simply be from the other training and my body getting used to those two sports and has nothing to do with the strength training.

I'm going into my fourth month of training and I sort of started pretty hard out of the gate. I struggled a bit at first, but over the last month, it's gotten pretty easy. I really feel zero fatigue between my workouts, but I'm hesitant to change it up as I am seeing a lot of gains in speed (the bike is lagging a bit, but the swim and run times have been dropping quite a bit). So another part of that is on rest day, I'm kind of bored. Here's my workout schedule, I've based this around splitting upper body days and leg days. So you'll see that S-legs, M-legs, T-Upper body, W-legs, T-legs, F-upper body, S-legs+upper body. That was my logic anyway:

Sunday - 45 mile bike
Monday - 7 mile run
Tuesday - Strength Training
Wednesday - 20 mile bike + 3 mile run
Thursday - 10 mile bike + 6 mile run
Friday - Swim 2,750 meters
Saturday - Swim 1,500 meters + bike 12 miles + run 3 miles

I use the Saturday workout as a time trial, which is how I know I am still dropping time pretty readily even though the work load has gotten pretty easy. Here is a graph of my total time for the Saturday TT workouts:



Edited by 3mar 2014-09-18 8:00 AM






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Looks like you are doing something right--it has taken me about three years to make gains like that. Not sure how much is attributable to strength training but that wasn't really your question. As for whether you should do it on your rest day, only you can answer that. Try doing the following day's workout after the strength work and after a no training day for a couple of times each. Does it affect the quality of the workout or your perceived effort/exertion? if not, then you are probably recovering adequately. If you find you're consistently more tired or have trouble hitting paces you can otherwise handle, then you probably need the rest day. This might vary week to week depending on overall training load and other life stresses.

I personally do some strength training and feel it has been beneficial, mainly in terms of injury prevention (correcting muscle imbalances fom previous traumaic injuries) and to a lesser extent in very specific areas of swim and bike (swimming in strong current, pushing a harder gear on the bike). I think this is due to my physical makeup. I have a very small build and probably close to 100% slow twitch muscles. I can keep going for a very long time at a moderate intensity but really struggle when it goes higher. Even after lots of (decades in my case) endurance training my strength/power are probably not as good as many untrained people. I feel like pushing my strength "ceiling" up a little with both strength training and sport-specific power work has been useful with some of the more strength related aspects of tri. Maybe less so for others with a different physical makeup or athletic background.

Edited by Hot Runner 2014-09-18 8:42 AM

Rest days are for resting strength training is not resting, I try to incorporate a short 15- 20 min strength or Core session after or before most workouts usually my swim workouts of which I do 3 per week. and target one particular area at a time, occasionally I will drop a run or bike workout to do a big overall core & strength workout maybe once every couple of weeks.

That being said I have always been very injury prone and I have found that since introducing strength and core into my training schedule my injury rate has dropped very dramatically so definitely if you can squeeze it in go for it. Its helped me a lot.

I have also felt like this in my experience. If I were to run a 100 meter dash, I'd probably only be able to hit my 5k pace. I've struggled with that a lot. It's most pronounced on the bike. I hear a lot of advice about doing intervals on the bike, but I'm sitting here thinking...I've only got one speed! The difference between my 45 mile pace and my 12 mile pace is maybe 2 mph.

Regarding the gains...I'm new so that's where they are coming from. Give me 6 months and they won't be the same I'm sure.

Making a few assumptions:

45 mile pace - 20mph
12 mile pace - 22mph

This gives a delta of 3.2km/h or about 10s/km - using some rough estimates, you are looking at about 100W difference (which is huge). While it is unlikely that you are actually looking at a difference of 100W between the two, there is certainly a big difference in effort so you have more than one speed.

Shane

Agreed - you shouldn't feel completely shelled by every workout but there should be a little bit of fatigue if you want to continue to make progress. For example, you may feel pretty much fine most of the time but you climb a couple of flights of stairs and your legs feel extremely heavy.

ETA - rest days are overrated - they can be valuable but are often over utilized.

Shane

Edited by gsmacleod 2014-09-18 9:18 AM

Close on the guess, but I'm a touch slower. About 19 mph ave on 45 miles and 21 mph on the 12 miler. Those are averaged though and there is so much variability during those times that I would have a really hard time properly adjusting my effort. I just don't think I'm comfortable enough on the bike yet. A power meter would be awesome but I'm pretty sure the meter would cost more than my current bike and would much prefer to upgrade the bike if I has the cash and the inclination (in other works, my wife letting me).

The key is not the actual wattage or delta in wattage but rather that you certainly have two very different gears. Further, if you were to scale back to efforts that have a much greater contribution from the anaerobic energy pathways (say a prologue type effort under 5 miles) then you are going to be at an even higher effort level (i.e. wattage).

Shane

I'm putting "rest days are overrated" under the "you told me what I wanted to hear, so I believe you" category. I really hate rest days and end up bored and fidgety all day.

I'm a strong believer in strength training, but its not for everyone. For a triathlete, strength training is mainly to help with repair and to avoid injury. Plenty of articles that talk about that, so there's no need to be repetitive. Does it make you faster? Yes, because you can train harder due to the strength training so your other training has more impact.

Should you do it on rest days? Depends. Some people do 40 minute runs on "rest days". If you do a 5 mile run on a regular day then a 30 minute strength training session may seem like a lot. If your regular day consists of a 45 mile ride and an 8 mile run, then a 1,500 meter pools swim and 30 minutes in the gym (assuming they're collocated) can feel great.

Incidentally at least one great triathlete, Dave Scott, is strongly in favor of strength training and he has routines that will actually help you on your various disciplines.

Also, there's some evidence to show that when slow twitch muscles become very tired, localized fast twitch fibers begin to take on some of the load.

And finally, "everyone" agrees that if you do strength training then 3x per week is a minimum to get material benefit. I would mix up high rep routines with low rep routines, never stressing muscles so much that you'll regret it the next day, and keep it in a circuit format.

Edited by FranzZemen 2014-09-18 10:37 AM

I agree. Matter of fact, as a 38 year-old (ouch!), I'm very mindful of the necessity of strength training. Aesthetics is also a motivator for me. 3x per week for me & varied.

On the other, I find "rest days" as really overrated. There will be days where I just can't get out of bed. BAM... rest day.

One week of light taper before a race works for me.

I didn't want to admit it at first, but x2 on that as well.

This is exactly how I would like to do it, but have been forcing myself to take rest days just due to...peer pressure I guess?

You know, replacing the rest day with another swim session would probably solve both issues. I've been slacking on swimming because it's been a naturally easy sport for me. So I would still get the upper body aesthetics, release the nervous energy normally associated with rest day and give my legs a break. I think I'm sold.

That's awesome for you if that's the case. I'm 6 foot & walk around comfortably at sub 145 lbs (which I do during marathon season). I just have to weight train to maintain 155 lbs throughout the year.

Besides, I really do think the jury's back on the importance of some sort of strength training to ward off muscle mass loss due to aging.

Ummmm.....Maybe true for guys with a muscular build. But there are plenty of us scrawny triathletes of both genders out there! If he wants to build muscle from an aesthetic point of view, 3-4 swim sessions may not do the trick. Functional strength, yes. Pleasing muscle definition, maybe.

As a teenager I swam probably 50,000 yards a week during the summer and winter seasons,including quite a bit of fly as I swam that in on the relay, and did the 1500 in about 21 minutes. I was 5'6" and about 112 pounds. Not exactly "ripped".

Really, the OP needs to think about his goals for weight training as well as whether it affects his recovery. If it does, then maybe he needs to consider where his priorities lie--Is it more important to have the physique he wants or be able to nail the next day's workout?