The sports science revolution of the last 20 years has ensured that, whatever sport or the level an athlete competes at, maximizing sport fitness is absolutely essential for achieving true potential in 2010.
Many sports require not just high levels of strength but excellent levels of endurance too. The problem is though that for hundreds of thousands of years, humans have evolved to be either as strong or as tireless as possible, but not both.
The basic reason is that, within our bodies, the two processes of building strength and endurance are diametrically opposed: in other words, one tends to prevent the other.
Strength is usually improved by coordination of the motor units within the muscle, the rate of firing of motor neurons within the muscle spindles and an increase in cross sectional area of the muscle. Endurance is improved by the ability to take up more oxygen (VO2max) through central processes such as an increase in stroke volume (blood volume pumped with each heartbeat) as well as at the cellular level through an increase in capillarisation (the network of tiny blood vessels that supply working muscles) and the number and size of mitochondria (energy producing factories) within the cell.
Endurance training on its own has not been shown to improve strength training and strength training on its own has not been shown to improve oxygen uptake. Therefore, to master both strength and endurance, one has to overcome limitations that have been laid down in our genes over hundreds of thousands of years.
It is not just decathletes that need to master both endurance and strength. All motor-endurance sports – for example, running, cycling, swimming and rowing – require both, as do many games, including rugby, basketball and ice hockey. Therefore, knowing how to optimize both strength and endurance is one of the keys to success for the modern athlete.
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