Weight Room Lessons from Top Athletes

The lessons we’ve taken from Norway’s world-winning endurance athletes mostly focus on endurance training: double thresholds, lactate testing, VO2 max records, and so on. This is logical, but it is not the whole picture. What if there are other elements to the Norwegian approach that underlie their success? Has anyone studied the Norwegian diet? Perhaps furicle And Torfisk Are the fuel of champions.

Or maybe there are some more obvious candidates. In Journal of Strength and Conditioning ResearchA team of sports scientists led by Thomas Haugen of Christiania University College in Oslo is researching how Norwegian endurance athletes incorporate strength and speed training into their preparation. The resulting insights aren’t radical or revolutionary — there’s no “double threshold squats” workout or anything like that — but they provide a valuable window into how some of the world’s best athletes manage the delicate balance between strength, speed, and endurance.

Coach’s Perspective

Researchers interviewed 12 Norwegian coaches who have worked with the world’s best athletes. The coaches remain anonymous, but they work in long-distance running, cycling, triathlon, cross-country skiing, rowing, swimming and biathlon. Collectively, the athletes who have worked with these coaches have won nearly 400 medals at major international championships.

Although we don’t know who these athletes are, there are plenty of stars to choose from. For example, at the last Ironman World Championships, Norwegian men took the podium and Solveig Løvseth won the women’s race. And then there is the cross-country ski team, led by Johannes Hosflot Klobo, whose ridiculous run uphill Went viral en route to six gold medals at this year’s Olympics. If there’s a smoking gun we should be curious about regarding Norwegian strength and speed training, it’s Klobo.

Trainers identified four major reasons to include strength and speed work in an endurance training plan:

1. reduce the risk of injury: there is reasonably strong evidence This can be effective, although the devil is in the details. Doing bicep curls won’t fix your calf cramps.
2. improve efficiency: Especially for runners, this is the most reliable benefit you can expect from lifting weights or doing plyometric exercises, which is well-supported by research.
3. Improve finishing kick: It is logical to believe that sprint training will improve your running ability, and trainers realize that this becomes increasingly important for endurance athletes who undertake large amounts of endurance training, which can suppress natural speed.
4. Improve bone health: It was a minority opinion, but two running coaches emphasized bone health as a priority, especially for young female athletes, who may be at risk for low bone density due to heavy training.

practical details

If you’re convinced that strength and speed training is worthwhile, the next question is how you implement it into your diet. There is no universal formula among coaches, or even among different athletes in an individual coach’s group.

This is because the most important consideration is that it should not interfere with the main endurance workout. Different athletes respond to and recover from strength training in different ways, so the exact workout routine and scheduling is the most individual part of the overall training program, with the athletes themselves often deciding how much they can handle and when they can handle it best.

The total amount of strength and speed training ranges from less than 50 hours per year (for example among triathletes, who are already training a billion hours a week) to over 200 hours per year among sailors. Runners and cyclists are in the range of 50 to 100 hours per year. For the most part, strength training continued throughout the year, but was reduced or eliminated during taper and competition periods. As competitions approached, speed training increased.

A common overall pattern was to perform workouts using free weights or machines, consisting of four to eight exercises, two to four sets per exercise, with five to ten reps per set. These sessions were often scheduled after harder endurance workouts, so that recovery strength workouts on easier days would not be compromised.

sample routine

Here is an example of a strength workout for a long distance runner, given in the paper:

• Squats to 90 degrees: 2-3 sets, 6-8 reps, 50-100 percent of body mass
• Trap Bar Deadlift: 2-3 sets, 6-8 reps, 50-100 percent of body mass
• Hip Flexors: 2-3 sets, 10-15 reps, leaving 5-10 “reps in reserve” (i.e. stopping at the point where you can do maybe five to 10 more reps)
• Hip Thrust: 2-3 sets, 8-12 reps, 0-5 reps in reserve
• Ankle Hops: 2-3 sets, 10-15 reps
• Core/Lower Back: 2-4 exercises, 4-8 sets, 10-20 reps

And here are related speed workouts with two different options:

• Steps: 6-10 x 60-100 meters at 90 to 95 percent intensity, with 1 to 2 minutes of rest
• Steps: 3-6 x 150 meters at 90 to 100 percent intensity, with 3 to 5 minutes of rest

Is there anything uniquely Norwegian about these routines? Not that I can see. Instead, what I find most remarkable is the focus on getting strength and speed fits without interrupting meat-and-potatoes endurance workouts. It’s also not really a hidden secret that only Norwegians have understood.

But you could say the same thing about the broader Norwegian method: Threshold workouts are nothing new, and neither is the idea that you shouldn’t push yourself so hard in one workout that it compromises the next. What the Norwegian Method does is turn it from a useful insight among many to the central command of the entire system.

That change seems to be having a real impact—see, for example, This recent LetsRun interview The first European to break the 8:00 break for the steeplechase is Frederik Rupert, who credits his success and the general increase in performance among his fellow Germans to the Norwegian move: “There has been a change in the training approach for everyone here, and that’s why we are seeing consistent progress.” He says it is important to work out without overdoing it. According to Norwegian coaches, the same advice applies in the weight room.

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