Vegan Bodybuilding & Fitness

I'm curious if/how endurance athletes on this forum incorporate resistance training into their programs. I've heard some say that high reps are useless for building any kind of strength (even endurance-strength), and I've heard others say that anything under 15 reps is not appropriate for endurance athletes.

Personally, I'm doing 2-4 sets of 20 reps for squats, straight-leg deads, overhead presses and bent-over rows once per week.

Mike

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"If you're not growing, you are dying!" - James Arthur Ray

that's a tough one Mike
most distance runners I've known avoid weight training completely.
A few will use low weights and 8-10 reps
(they all fear adding too much weight to their frame

This is an interesting piece but it only concludes that it is beneficial to shorter distance runners.


http://faculty.washington.edu/crowther/ ... ngth.shtml

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What's the difference between boogers and broccoli ?
-Kids don't eat broccoli.
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You can definitely benefit from high reps if done right. If you do lots of slow negatives you really will build up muscle endurance....however if you plan on racing lets say fast 5k races rather than 20k+ races you will destroy your fast twitch muscles if you do them too often. There are also two schools of thought...many distance coaches are completely against lifting with legs...but they tend to be for building a strong lats, shoulders, and biceps...while others say compound leg lifts supplemented with isolation exercises for the legs are great...but don't do any upper body since you don't want any extra mass up top.

Personally I think lifting is a great supplement to base building. Once your base season is over...its good to lift less and do some speed work...once the season comes around I don't recommend any lifting for runners that train for anything over 1 mile...only speed work and the occasional base mile reinforcement training.

Some say also that anything over let's say 35 reps or 50 reps is useless to build muscles. That's false, even with high reps and light weights we can become really strong and gain lots of strenght for speed, explosivity, endurance and even sheer strenght. Of course it's not building big muscles. It's small muscles but really powerful and with lots of potential.

There was a Indian wrestler called Gamma (or something like that) who was doing about 4 000 reps of special indian style bodyweight squats every morning plus thousands of reps of other bodyweight exercices each morning. I didn't see any picture but I've read he had very impressive quads.

My brother built some serious muscles while training for kung-fu classes, just by doing hi-reps, never heavier than 5lb dumbells except for some squats with an olympic bar but I think only 30lb, everyday routine, always fast movements, exercices like 150 reps press chest with 5lb dumbells, shadowboxing with weights, etc...

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"Do your best, don't worry, be happy" - Meher Baba

I just put a big spoonful of peanut butter in my mouth and noticed that the first two replies were from JW and Potter. What a coinkidink .

I was intrigued by the post from I'm Your Man. I would imagine that all of those high reps your bro did were largely responsible for his vasularity. I'm not a martial artist by any means but I am a huge fan of the way they train for functional strength and endurance, which are my main goals. You should have him join and post his routine .

Mike

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"If you're not growing, you are dying!" - James Arthur Ray

I'll ask if he wants to join but he's not vegan and not even vegetarian! He never told me much about his routine except for the things I wrote above. Training to increase the speed and power of punches, so nothing like heavy/slow reps.

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"Do your best, don't worry, be happy" - Meher Baba

I'm trying to figure out what the heck to do about this. Obviously I don't want to bulk up or anything, but I'm not terribly worried about putting on a few pounds of muscle, I think it would be more beneficial than not for me (I am 5'7" and 108 pounds.) I think body weight stuff is probably good enough for me for now, but it's a matter of figuring out what to do.

I really don't see the problem with running, and lifting weights. I started with weight training, and then last year started running for various reasons. I still weight train every week, and since January I've lost 10 pounds, giving me a somewhat leaner/smaller look. But today I got on the scale and weighed 5 pounds more. This is because I started to lift heavier, quite recently. And the running, and heavier weights used in squatting have definitely made my legs stronger and I'm faster now too.

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The devotion of thought to an honest achievement makes the achievement possible.

If you pack on muscle really easy lifting can be very bad for an endurance athlete. Also lifting "can" hurt your ability to build good base mileage....not always but it can.

I know what you mean, hs. I took a year or so off of running and went on somewhat of a squatting binge (oh, the pain), and was amazed at much easier it is to run after I gained a little leg strength.

Mike

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"If you're not growing, you are dying!" - James Arthur Ray

I certainly don't know a lot about the topic but is exactly what I'm going through now. I used to do distance running about 60kms a week. But as I wasn't thinking of compeeting I started to do BBing after 3 years because I was looking kind of sick skinny.

Bodybuilding didn't decrease my endurance at all. But I got injured on the track and I had to run less so my performance is not as good as before because of the pain. When I'm fine I recover my usual resistance (the one before bbing) pretty quickly and a little bit of muscle has helped to worry less for the muscular pain due to the training and focus more on endurance. This is just my personal experience though. I do have seen that about 25 repsx5 in fast squats with a weight that is about a 70% of my max capacity gets my cardio on and helps for maintaing/improving endurance.
Good luck with running and stay away from injuries!!

Lena, I bet those high-rep squats would be great for endurance. I'm getting winded just thinking about it! I imagine that would make a person's legs burn like crazy, but in a good way.

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"If you're not growing, you are dying!" - James Arthur Ray

Did you run in college or something???