What you absolutely should know about Triathlon Weight Training before starting with it

The first thing I want you to understand about triathlon weight training is that it is not really crucial in the beginning. It becomes more relevant for you once you reach a certain level to further improve your performance. Your primary focus should always be on the endurance part of your training.

While forming the strength of your arms and legs is important you will mostly want to work the strength of your musculature of trunk. This is the critical part in your triathlon weight training efforts. When you improve the musculature of your trunk you will be able to put much more power into each stroke, pedal or step.

Most beginners get this part wrong and focus too much on improving the musculature of their arms and legs. Because they think that will lead them to the best results. But you won't even be able to make use of your arms and legs properly without a strong torso. So keep in mind that you will gain at most by stressing your trunk first and your legs and arms second. This took me some time to find out.

Now it is really important to find out what kind of distance you are aiming at. If you go for the shorter distances you need the power to maximize your speed.

On the longer distances it becomes more important to maintain a good execution of the movements throughout all the three different stages. Once you start to fatigue your motion sequences degrade. With proper triathlon weight training you can work against this effect.

Here is good news: You won't even need to spend an hour in the gym if you don't want to! All of your necessary weight training can either be done at home with simple exercises or is already included in your regular training workouts (e.g. swimming with paddles, cycling in the mountains with high gear transmission ratio, running in the mountains or running at the beach).

Consider a proper ratio between your weight training and your endurance training. Too intensive weight training can harm your endurance capabilities by causing decreased flexibility, decreased coordination and a bad weight-strength ratio (if your body weight increases disproportionally as opposed to your strength).

You can improve your musculature by increasing the width of your muscles and by increasing the inter- and intramuscular coordination of your muscle fibers. The later one is preferred for our demands. And before you might ask: Yes - it is very possible to affect the desired outcome by the way you exercise. If you are untrained you usually make use of only about 65% of the fibers in a particular muscle. With training you can achieve about 95% of your fibers being involved in a contraction of this muscle. That is simply put what is meant when someone talks about inter- and intramuscular coordination in conjunction with muscles.

To sum this part up we learned that triathlon weight training does not play that kind of an important role especially not if you are starting out.

Keep your focus on your endurance training and don't let yourself distract by the opinions of the "pros". Keep it real and simple. You want to find out which category you do belong to in order to select the proper training methods: Are you going for the short distances or for the longer distances? If you eventually decide on triathlon weight training then focus on your trunk first and on legs and arms second. We don't do triathlon weight training to gain weight but to improve the inter- and intramuscular coordination of our muscle fibers.

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