Ironic enough, weeks before the Tour De France started, I read an article on Lance Armstrong where it stated that he had deleted all strength training from his training regime this year in order to lose weight. He did this because he tends to gain muscle (weight) easily when he strength trains.
After reading this I told my wife what I had just read, and that I believed this would become a problem for him when it came time for him to perform in the Tour.
Now, I know he was doing fine until the tire flats on the cobblestones and then the 3 crashes in one stage, but had all this not happened, I still believe he’d be performing at what we all know to be sub-Lance abilities at this point in the Tour.
My reasoning for this stems from the importance of strength training, and its direct relationship with an athlete’s performance.
1) As we age, our strength and power will decrease at a faster rate than that of a younger athlete, therefore; it is even more crucial to implement strength training in an athlete’s training as he or she is aging if it had not been used prior to this point in their training.
2) Hypertrophy training will increase muscle growth, which in turn equals size and weight gain. If you watch any of Lances’ videos on YouTube where he is training, you will see that it is this type of training that he was utilizing during last year’s comeback. Even though he may have gained some muscle and size, he actually did very well with the extra weight because of his increase in strength. Yes, heavier, but strong.
3) Maximal strength and power training allows the athlete to get stronger and become more powerful with little to no size or weight gain. It is for this reason alone that Lance should have never stopped his strength training regime leading up to this year’s Tour, but perhaps should have changed the method in which he was training.
As I said in one of my previous blogs, you can have all the watt and power meters you want on your bike, but if you don’t have the strength to hold or create the watts or power you want, it’s useless and your performance will suffer.
Strength Training- We all need it!
TB
