How to Run Faster with Strength Training Ep 10

If you train appropriately, there is a mountain of evidence suggesting that you will improve endurance running activity in particular. There's a bit of evidence on swimming and cycling as well, but it's a little bit less researched. But on running, it's crystal clear. It's, it's, I would go so far as to say it's conclusive that if you do neuromuscular training for a distance runner, You will improve performance.

Welcome to the Find Your Edge podcast. Get ready to dive into all things training, nutrition, recovery, and more. Whether you're a new or experienced endurance athlete, a weekend warrior, or someone who just wants to improve your health and fitness, this podcast is for you. I'm Chris Newport, founder, head coach, registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, and certified personal trainer with the Endurance Edge and the Fueling Edge. With more than 20 years experience experience in the fitness industry, 18 years in multi-sport, and over 10 years as a sports nutritionist. I'm speaking with athletes and experts about key actionable steps you can take to reach and sustain peak performance and health. Let's do it. All right, welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast. This is your host, Christina Fiumara Newport, and today I am joined by Mike Young from Athletic Lab. So thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Chris. Good to catch up again.

So you, I think, are probably one of the most highly educated gym owners in the area, perhaps even on the East Coast, arguably. So give us a little bit of background as to what your background is, how you got into this, and, uh, and then maybe a little bit about Athletic Lab.

Sure. So, uh, my background's in sports science and coaching. Uh, educational pedigree is a bachelor's degree in exercise physiology, master's in coaching science, and then a PhD in biomechanics with physiology as a minor. I've always coached all through that entire timeframe, even while I was doing my PhD, mostly in the sport of track and field up until the past 10 years, in which point I've kind of lived a dual life of working in elite-level track and field and soccer. I work with 5 or 6, uh, maybe 6 professional clubs on staff. And then have consulted for a lot of the top rugby and soccer teams in the world. Athletic Lab, I started 12 years ago, a small, smallish warehouse in Morrisville, North Carolina, and then we've gradually progressed. We're in our third facility, our fourth expansion, uh, in those 12 years. We now have a 25,000 square foot facility in probably about a half mile from where we originally opened up, built to suit. It's pretty much everything that I would have ever dreamed of 12 years ago in terms of size and equipment and everything else. So we don't have too many constraints in terms of training environment. Pretty nice. We work with everyone from developmental athlete to the elite professional. We've got quite a few high-level athletes in practically every sport, a couple pro teams that train with us right now, and then general fitness, which is something that I find just as rewarding as our elite-level athletes.

So that was my first introduction. My first introduction CrossFit was with you guys a couple of years back. I was like, you know, can we take an endurance athlete mom and what, what, what can we do with this strength? So I remember you leading me through my very first workout there. I was like, how do I do a kettlebell swing? And, and learned a lot since then, but how, as, as a fellow small business owner, how have, have things been? Over the past year? So we're, we're recording this in February of 2021.

Sure. So it's, uh, obviously not ideal. I think the industry as a whole was decimated really by COVID-19. North Carolina in particular had some of the stricter shutdown rules in the country. So our industry as a front-facing fitness, fitness and training service provider was shut down, closed doors for 6 months. So this is just 2 to 3 months after we had opened this new facility. You can imagine that a 25,000-square-foot facility is not cheap and certainly doesn't pay for itself while the doors are closed. We scrambled to make things work. We trained outside during the summer months. There were some abilities or, or kind of loopholes for professionals to train indoors— professional athletes, that is. But a lot of it was just, you know, making things work. In spite of the restrictions. We did hold ourselves to the highest account in terms of safety and following the guidelines. I know a lot of small business owners weren't able to do that, and by no means fault them for that. You've got to, you know, keep your business alive and do what you need to do for your family or whoever you're providing for if you can do it safely. But we did adhere to the strictest letter of the law in terms of letter and, you know, spirit of the law in terms of what was passed on to us. Sometimes it felt like shooting ourselves in the foot, but we've come out the other side of this. I think we're almost— we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and we're not back to normal. We're probably realistically 20 months behind where our revenue should be at this point in time. I know we're going to survive it, which is more than a lot of lesser fortunate businesses can say. And, um, you know, I, I didn't fully— it's a little bit of a discussion here, but it was kind of odd that a lot of what strikes the US is why COVID hits us so bad is the very same things that services like you and I can provide. You know, if people are healthier and fitter and eat better, all the comorbidities go away. And, uh, the reason why it hits the US so hard is because We're none of those things.

Yeah, we're all backwards.

Yeah. So if we would have just shut down Kentucky Fried Chicken drive-through but kept open gyms and nutritional and health and fitness services, we probably would have been better off. But that's another discussion. Right. Yeah. We survived. I'm very grateful for that. And I think those that are able to make it through will probably be stronger in the end because we've learned to be flexible and dealt with the worst and, and, uh, you know, do what small business owners do, which is, uh, adjust and move on the fly.

Yeah. And I think that speaks volumes to you and your staff too, for being able to— I think that's been meaningful for, um, for surviving is adjusting and adapting and that kind of thing. So, but what the big meat and potatoes that we're going to talk about today is I wanted to get your expertise on how Can we get more endurance athletes to buy into strength training? So I know you're allowed on the strength and power end of things. Of course, you've got soccer players, rugby players, that kind of thing. But, um, first off, what are some of the benefits of strength training just for in general, and then more specifically for endurance athletes?

Sure. So when I look at, uh, strength training in general, so regardless of the athletes we're dealing with. The benefits really kind of fall under two categories. One is injury reduction, and then the other one is performance enhancement. The two things go hand in hand. Uh, obviously if you stay injury-free, you can train more. Distance runners, especially those that are seeing higher volumes, tend to be one of the most injured populations in terms of injuries per year or injuries per hour of training. And so if you can continue to train, You can get better. If you have to stop training, you don't get better. So performance and injury prevention are not uncoupled. They're always together. But even outside of the tangential benefits of just continuing to be able to train as a result of enhanced injury reduction likelihood, you get— you see some very real tangible benefits in terms of performance, and they are oftentimes not easily recognizable. I think they're especially in distance running or endurance communities. So you're right, I mostly work in speed-power activities in terms of the track and field running domain, but I do work in quite a few activities that have high-level endurance demand, and then such as soccer and rugby and AFL. And then also I've consulted with a lot of very high-level, uh, distance runners and, uh, have written their strength programs and even have done so at some universities. So, and most recently at NC State, was working with their distance program there. And what's interesting is that, counter to popular belief, that strength training can actually improve endurance capacity. Now what's interesting here is that this is not a, uh, it's not necessarily a two-way street. So if you do If you're a speed power athlete, you almost want to avoid too much, too much endurance work. It can blunt your capacity to be really powerful and strong and so forth. But if you're an endurance athlete, strength training can do something very beneficial. And most of what that is, is it falls under this kind of adaptation known as neuromuscular efficiency. So when we train a a distance runner or an endurance athlete of any, any kind, uh, triathlete, biathlete, whatever— what you're trying to do with the strength training is not to improve somebody's one rep max in the bench press or the squat. It's not to have them look like a bodybuilder. It's not to, you know, put on extra muscle mass, whatever. All those things are perhaps even things we might want to avoid. You know, we have to be very careful about adding extra excess body mass, especially if it's you know, in the upper body of a distance runner or the lower body of a swimmer. So what we're looking for here is this enhanced neuromuscular efficiency. So the type of strength training you do is a little bit important. You know, you, you can't just do anything. We can't just bucket strength training as this blanket domain and say that it's all appropriate for everyone. You know, that would kind of be like saying, uh, running is just a thing, you know, as without regards to, are we sprinting when we run? Are we doing distance running when we run? Are we somewhere in between? So the details matter a little bit. And if we want to have this adaptation from neuromuscular stimulus response, then we need to train a certain way. And before I get into that, to kind of clarify this, and this is always the crux of the argument here. Is that if you train appropriately, there is a mountain of evidence suggesting that you will improve endurance running activity in particular. There's a bit of evidence on swimming and cycling as well, but it's a little bit less researched. But on running, it's crystal clear. It's, it's— I would go so far as to say it's conclusive that if you do neuromuscular training for a distance runner you will improve performance.

And I'm assuming some of these markers are like VO2 max or running economy or such.

So running economy is the big one. The current evidence suggests about a 5% increase in running economy and running economy for laymen is effectively how fast you could run at a given oxygen consumption. Or another way of putting it is at the same oxygen consumption, how or running at the same speed for less oxygen consumption. So take two twins and, uh, one, they have the same exact physiology, and one of them improves their running economy as a result of neuromuscular training by 5%. They're going to likely improve performance by around 3%. So that's what the, that's what the evidence suggests. All the research studies say about 5% improvement in running economy and 3% improvement in actual performance. So take your 10K time, subtract 3%. Take your 5K time, subtract 3%. You know, people are— people fight over seconds. 3% is not seconds. This is like we're talking about significant gains here. So you get this improvement, uh, in running economy, which is effectively how efficiently your neuromuscular system is firing, how well it turns on muscles, how well it turns off muscles, and how much force those muscles can produce is kind of the very simplified way of thinking about it. So if we are— if it takes a certain level of work output in the muscles to run, say, at a certain pace, say a 6-minute mile, if you improve your running economy, now the threshold or the percentage of threshold close to your max is much lower. You know, it's not too dissimilar from, you know, it's the thought of like raise the ceiling is what you've done. So even though we're not more aerobically powerful, we are more powerful from a neuromuscular standpoint. So I, I can run— the ceiling of how fast I can run is higher, then the cost of running at submaximal efforts is lowered. Another kind of example that I, that I like to give on this is you think of, say, this, uh, some of the recent world records in the marathon, right? That's one of the more extreme events in, in the running community is a marathon. And you got men now running, albeit with, uh, kind of questionable assistance and shoes and stuff like that, breaking 2 hours, excuse me, right? So a 2-hour marathon, just think about that for a moment, is like a 4:30 mile. That's a 2-minute 15-second half mile. That's a 1:08 quarter mile. That's a 18, 17, 18-second 100 meters. Now you take that guy to be able to do that, uh, who's going to run a 2-hour marathon, that 18-second 100 meters or 17-second has to just be a jog because he's going to repeat it thousands of times. So if your 100-meter sprint time is only, you know, 20 seconds, you have zero chance of running, running a 2-hour marathon. Zero. You're not going to repeat it over and over and over again.

Dang.

But if your dreams are shattered, if you are one of these athletes, you know, and you're an elite level marathoner, the men could probably run a 4:05 1-mile run and the women could probably run, you know, not too far off that. Cause now they're hovering in the, not too far off the men's record. So what we're doing here is we've just raised the ceiling so that ability to run at a desired pace, say, if that's kind of something that a distance runner could wrap their mind around, becomes a lower percentage of what they're capable of. And a lot of that comes down to neuromuscular efficiency. So we're just kind of raising the, raising the ceiling a little bit. It doesn't have to be in the weight room. It can be in other ways, but there are some key criteria to, to get this stimulus.

Oh yeah. Perfect segue. Tell us about that. Yeah. What are these magic keys here to get that neuromuscular training?

So the first one, and this is killing a sacred cow for many endurance athletes, is that when it comes to training for neuromuscular efficiency, fatigue is your enemy. So you don't want to do it to failure. You don't want to do it to the point where you're just absolutely dying. In fact, what we want to do is think in terms of quality rather than quantity. And, you know, that means doing high-intensity work, and not high-intensity work in the, in the way that a lot of endurance athletes think of it, where it's almost HIIT-based or vomit-inducing work, or just, you know, drag yourself across the line or that kind of thing, but intense in terms of how close is it to a full effort, a full unconstrained by fatigue effort. So intensity in that regards can get a little bit confusing because every demographic has slightly different definitions of it. But one thing that is a little bit easier to understand is intent. So you have to train with intent, and I like to say maximize intent but minimize fatigue if you're trying to train the neuromuscular system. So you're not going to be doing sets of 20 and 30, you're going to be doing sets of I don't know, 3 to 5 repetitions. If you're doing sprints, they have to be full effort with sufficient amount of recovery to maintain, uh, the intent or the intensity. One of the fundamental pillars of this is that intensity and volume are always going to be in opposition. And in this regards, we want— we're focusing on intensity really, or intent. And we can't have both at the same time. For certainly for your endurance, whenever you're training endurance capacities, volume is the critical variable. You know, you need to have some level of volume. There's never going to be an elite marathoner who runs 20 miles a week. It's not going to happen. You know, they're up at 200 miles a week or whatever it is. Likewise, you're not going to have an elite level sprinter or an elite level jumper or an elite level weightlifter who just does a lot of low-intensity work. And these two things don't really— they don't really, uh, mix in a given training demand. If you want to sprint or you want to lift or you want to do plyometrics, they have to be done in a relatively low volume with a high intent. So this is actually something that is, is another sellable point for the endurance communities, that you really don't have to do very much at all. It's shockingly small how little you have to do to see these benefits in terms of endurance-related capacities. And the programming is very, very simple. You know, you could do— if you want to go to the weight room, if that's your preferred method, then that's fine. You know, I would suggest in the weight room we're doing lower focus on lower extremity multi-joint loaded activities. So 3 big things are lower extremity multi-joint loaded activities that are either performed with a higher load, so something that you could probably only do less than 8 times if you really had to, or with a higher speed. So you choose one of those two things, and the two things could be combined. So if, for example, you were doing a kettlebell swing or doing an Olympic lift, you may very well use high load and high speed. But at the very least, you have to be multi-joint, lower extremity loaded Loaded is an opportunity to create power. And then high load or high speed, one of the two or both. So that's in the weight room. And that, I would assume, are things like squats, squats, lunges, yep, step-ups, uh, kettlebell swings, Olympic lifts, those kinds of things. Yep. And then if you wanted to do it if you wanted to do it on the track, it's very well possible, but it's not the perfect tool for the job, but it is very well possible. And this is what a lot of your, say, East Africans were doing. You know, when, when you would look at the East African success and you say, oh, they don't lift. Well, that's true. Uh, at least up until recently, they think they've started to lift quite a bit as they've gotten into more programs with European agents and things. But they, uh, in the past, what they would do is just do plyometrics up a hill. So that's what they're doing is effectively sprinting up a hill or plyometrics up a hill.

So was it, was it like bounding up?

Yeah, you look at a lot of the Kenyan programs and the Moroccan programs and they were doing that. So that there, it's not too dissimilar. What we're doing is, uh, you know, you could either do it in the gym, in the weight room, you could do it in plyometrics, or you could do it in sprinting. If you do it in, in terms of sprinting or in plyometrics, The same basic criterion holds true. The intent has to be there. So don't just, you know, go through the motions. You actually have to really get after it. Don't try to bound for a quarter mile, just try to bound for 40 meters or sprint for 100 meters. And the intent relative to maximal needs to be there, uh, in terms of trying to connect dots with, um, distance runners. You know, distance runners sometimes think in terms of race pace, right? And so you need to be, you need, and race pace being in some, in some schools of thought being effectively your, your, uh, sometimes you run above it, sometimes you run below it, that kind of thing. Well, in terms of this, you pretty much need to be pedal to the metal or pretty darn close to it on all of these activities. Uh, and then the moment any kind of metabolic fatigue enters the picture, you should have already stopped. And if you haven't, you need to shut it down. We want to keep the power output as high as possible. And the more you increase volume, the lower the power output gets. You know, that's the why the marathon is, is slower than the 100 meters, uh, is because you simply can't sustain these really high, high power outputs. Um, but as I said, you don't have to do too much. And that's kind of the, that's kind of the interesting thing is that a distance runner or a triathlete who were, say, already a relatively trained individual— I'm just going to throw out some numbers here, but say you're a 25-mile-per-week runner, and you can translate that into whatever that means in terms of commitment for a cyclist or a triathlete. But that's kind of your more committed than weekend warrior type, you know, someone who's kind of training but maybe not Uh, elite level, anything like that, maybe like a 5-hour, 6-hour an athlete kind of.

Yeah.

So nothing, anything from that level of commitment on up. If you were to just devote 2 20-minute blocks a week to this neuromuscular type training, you will get far more benefits than you would get if you added that same time commitment to extra running. So if, for example, you're at that 5 or 6 hours of commitment a week and you're deciding, hey, I've got 5 or I've got an extra hour or 40 minutes that I can devote to training this week, what, where am I going to see the largest return on investment on my 5K time? It's unquestionably going to be by getting that 2 times 20 minutes in the gym or bounding or sprinting or something like that. And you really don't have to, uh, as I said, you don't have to do a lot. This is not volume-based training, so you, you can do very little and it can be very impactful on performance. As I said, most people would love to get 1% improvements, but then 3% improvement is just astronomical. We run some programs, some of which you've been involved with at Athletic Labs, some of which are kind of very generic and general, and they're not really training specifically for neuromuscular development, but they will certainly hit it. But, you know, it's not unusual for us to have long-time distance runners in the program, and they'll, you know, come up to us, uh, after being in, in our general fitness programs and say something to the effect of, wow, I dropped my training volume by 10 or 20% or 10 miles a week or whatever, and I'm running faster now. I'm running 5Ks. I set a PR in my 5K. And it's not because we're you know, making them better aerobic animals. In fact, their aerobic qualities may have maintained or potentially even dropped off. But what's superseded that is the 3% improvement in performance, the 5% improvement in running economy. And, uh, you know, because it's neuromuscular, the adaptations are very, very quick, but you do have to maintain them. So you don't have to do a lot to get them, uh, you don't have to do a lot to maintain them, But once you have them, you need to do a little bit to keep, keep them up. It's really a kind of a closed case for me in terms of what the impact can be. You know, when you look at a lot of, say, the top— really, if you'd go back 10 years ago and you say, wow, what, what caused American distance running to become good again? Because if you think back to the '90s, America was a laughingstock in the distance running community. You know, we would— it was almost like people were wondering how we could ever be good. Our men are running 2:16 marathons and running, I don't know, 1:48 half miles, and no one's running well in the mile. And, you know, no one's even making the finals at Olympic Games, World Championships, and any of, any of the distance running events. You know, people were chalking it up to being genetics and so forth. And but then the Europeans are doing better than us, and there's probably a very comparable genetic pool. And then all of a sudden, um, Nike Oregon Project kind of steps in and, you know, I don't know that they had everything right, but what they started to do was treat distance runners as athletes rather than just lungs with legs. And, you know, doing things like mobility work for the hips, doing things like strengthening and, you know, working on running mechanics. So instead of just thinking about runner as a single system organism or their aerobics/cardiovascular system only. Let's take a look at them holistically and see all these different systems of the body kind of integrate and support each other. And it's kind of a rising tide raises all ships type of thing. You know, if the limiter is, uh, the limiter is that you simply can't run fast enough or you can't produce enough power output to You know, compete, then it's not going to matter how aerobically fit you get, because you've already reached the ceiling of what your neuromuscular system can produce.

It kind of reminds me a little bit of Ryan Hall and his being so, so, so lean and then getting out of the sport because he was frequently getting injured and having lots of issues. And then all of a sudden he gets in the weight room, gains, you know, 40, 50 pounds. And he's like, man, I can still. I still run pretty fast.

Yeah.

I'm like, why can't we get more people to take that risk of, you know, backing off on the— it sounds like generations of coaches are kind of like that generation is sort of moving out of the industry and we're getting more people who support a more holistic programming of not just mileage. Yeah. Yeah.

It is really tricky. I mean, I was kind of a neuro— I had the distance running neuroticism. As a, as a younger athlete, even though I was training as a decathlete, I kind of like to count miles and things like that. And you just associate fitness with volume and, um, you almost— and there's a, there's good reason that a distance runner would never want to miss a day or not drop off on volume because those are, those are the metrics which lead to success there. If you just trickle in this, this, uh, other little elements of training, whether it's mobility or neuromuscular training, whatever, you're going to see massive improvements that are not even represented by your time committed. You know, you just have to put in so little and you get out so much, especially if you're a reasonably trained athlete or above. You know, if you're, if you're just like, you know, starting out and you've never run before, sure, running is going to make you a better runner, better more than anything.

You've got to develop that engine. A little bit. Yeah.

But, uh, at a certain point, the biggest bang for the buck turns into something else. And then, you know, as I said, we, you're not going to become an elite runner without all this other stuff as well. But you know, why would you pass up this really low-hanging fruit of 20, 40 minutes a week and you can see massive gains right now.

We've got to, so let's get into like what's going to happen in this 20 minutes. Are we just going to like be squatting and lunging or, and like a little bit of sprint? Like, cause it's, that's not a lot of time.

Yeah. I mean, ideally I'd, ideally I'd have 40 minutes, but I kind of like to present the extreme of what, what you could get out of that time span. If I were only given 20 minutes, you know, realistically I'm spending realistically, I hope that's actually 30 minutes with about 10 minutes of warmup and mobility and that kind of thing. And then, yeah, I could make a lot of, uh, I could make a lot of money on just 20 minutes. Teach somebody to do, say, some plyometric activity is what I might do first, and then a lower body strength exercise, say like a squat or a lunge. I think things need to be very simple. Don't get too fancy incorporating, you know, crazy exercises. Just not necessary because this is neuromuscular training. You don't have to be hyper-specific to the activity. You're training physiological qualities. Which basically means, um, tension in the muscle and motor recruitment. So if those two criteria are not met, then it doesn't matter what it looks like. You know, you— if you're— I'll see, uh, it's common in distance running circles to do things like arm swings with a 2-pound plate in your hand or something like that, or running on a running, running actions with ankle weights or whatever, you know, kind of what I would consider not very efficient. Yeah, the motor recruitment isn't there, the tension in the muscle isn't there. But if you do a squat, a heavier loaded squat or a faster squat, looks nothing like running. But what it, what it does look like from the physiological side is tons of neuromuscular recruitment, tons of tension in the muscle. You get greater tendon stiffness, you get greater neuromuscular coordination. The muscles can— the agonists, antagonists don't fight each other. The Agonists are able to produce more force and do so more quickly. So it's, you know, the exercise— my exercise selection would be relatively small, uh, if, if I'm working with a distance running community. If I have the time, we'll do a plyometric, then we might go in— if it were day 1, say plyometric exercise, then in some squats and maybe a lower or upper extremity exercise, whatever you want— push-ups, pull-ups. Some dumbbell exercises, that would be fine. There my goal would be get strong but don't add any excess, excess body mass. And then day 2, we might do something comparable, maybe an Olympic lift, maybe a kettlebell swing, maybe a plyometric activity. If you want to sprint or do resistance sprints, that, that would be a good fit. And then we— if we did a squat on Monday, we might do a lunge or a step-up on, on the next day. So it's bilateral on one day, unilateral on the other day, and And then we'd pair that with some kind of upper extremity exercise as well. So, and then if we've got the time, so now I'm kind of cutting it close with just 20 minutes, but I would probably do some core, a loaded core, not mindless.

I would pack as Mike, come on, get on the bandwagon.

We wouldn't do a mind-numbing number of crunches or anything like that. We'd do loaded, loaded.

So like, it sounds like med ball or like, yeah.

Right.

Loaded, um, something, laundry detergent, something like that. Yeah.

And then, uh, posterior chain, which is hamstring and glutes. Uh, so those are hamstring and glutes are kind of the engine of running fast, especially as speed increases. So I would be sure to include something for the hamstrings, ideally as a hip extensor, not, uh, but really it's not terribly important. The research— bridge or a deadlift or glute or deadlift or even kettlebell swings could be used in that regards. But even if you wanted to do a knee flexor dominant exercise, that would work just as fine. Like Nordic hamstring exercise family has been proven to reduce hamstring injury and even has some association with sprint speed. So really there, the— even though the exercises don't, you know, look anything like what you might see in that muscle action of running, the evidence is really clear. If it— if you produce the tension in the muscle and get the motor recruitment the benefits in terms of neuromuscular are going to be there. So pretty simple, you could be in and out of the gym with kind of 5 exercises. Uh, say power is what I do for number 1, then I would do a lower extremity strength and an upper extremity strength, and then I do a little bit of accessory work. So lower volume or dedication in terms of time of posterior chain and core of some fashion. And then basically repeat that same template. It's, uh, shockingly simple. That is super low-hanging fruit, especially for someone that's come from a track and field background or strength and conditioning background, how little you have to do and how to some extent unsophisticated the training plan needs to be to see just massive improvements in performance.

That's awesome. What about something that, so let's say, I mean, you guys have amazing equipment. I am ceaselessly impressed by how Nice. You're saying— and I've worked in and worked out in a lot of gyms and you guys have fabulous equipment. So let's say we can't get access to your facility. What, what can we do at home? Like, cause just the squat is—

Yeah. So I mean, you can, bodyweight exercises can be scaled up to make them quite difficult. You know, people kind of confine themselves to pushups and bodyweight squats and, uh, say even pull-ups, but bodyweight work can be done infinitely difficult. You know, the, can you do a single leg squat? Can you do a, uh, Can you do a single arm push-up? Can you do a clap push-up? Can you do a slow squat or something like that? So all of those things can scale up even if it's just body weight. There's some ways you can introduce some resistance, whether it's put a backpack on or sandbag or something like that, or maybe buy a kettlebell or dumbbell, and you can do a lot with that. And then as I said, if the load is not there, if for whatever reason you don't want to use load, which is basically weight You can get motor unit recruitment through speed of movement. So as long as the intent is there, if you have a load, all it's going to do is constrain the velocity of the movement. So you could do plyometrics, uh, say you're in your living room and you just want to do some, some— your strength routine. You could do, uh, I don't know, alternating lunge jumps or tuck jumps or something to that effect, or squat jumps. Those would all work fine. Again, the goal here is not to like create a pump or to get aerobically or metabolically fatigued. The goal is to train the neuromuscular system. And if you do that, you're actually not going to be aerobically or metabolically fatigued at all. You'll, you'll actually stay away from that a little bit.

So cool. So, uh, I think you've provided some pretty good evidence. Hopefully we can convince some people to do some strength training. So You have an endurance athlete program on your website, right? Or did I just give you an idea that we could, that we could direct people to your site to sell?

So we, we are working on it. We do have an elite distance running group that kind of uses us as a facility. We have flirted with the idea of that right now. We have some, uh, mostly speed and power and team sport work, but yeah, that would be a great, that is a great idea to push forward because there is certainly a need for it. I think to have strength training for. For endurance athletes in kind of a semi-structured way.

Yeah, definitely. So you're welcome on that entrepreneurial idea. You know, great minds think alike. So if they, if in lieu of not having that quite yet, how else can people work with you?

We do offer remote programming. And, um, right now that is available by our website. If you just follow the dropdowns or athleticlabonline.com is one. We have a kind of a coaching academy for those who are interested in kind of this underlying sports science that I was I was talking about Athletic Lab Academy. We're actually launching it as an online course in just a couple of days. And then, um, you know, if you're ever either in the area, love to have you stop in. We do have, as I said, quite a few distance runners in, and, uh, it's a great distance running area. And then if you wanted to do something remote, we can either do that individually or kind of buy this easier templated format.

So cool. Okay. So that was Athletic Lab Online and Athletic Lab Academy, right?

Yep.

Okay. We will be sure to link to that because probably by the time this is airing, that's going to be out.

Yeah.

That's exciting. All right. Well, Mike Young from Athletic Lab, thank you so much for joining us and giving us all of your expertise and hopefully we'll touch base again soon.

Thanks, Chris. Awesome.