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Combining Weight and Endurance Training for a Marathon

It’s not uncommon for folks who are weight training to suddenly get the urge to get into endurance activities.  More specifically they decide that they either want to ride a century bike event (100 miles), run a marathon (26.2 miles) or do one of those Tough Mudder events.  This raises the question of how best to combine weight and endurance training for those types of events.

Generally the explicit goal here is to be able to complete the event but not sacrifice too many of the hard earned gains from the weight room.  And that will be my primary focus in terms of the recommendations I’ll make.   That is, these are folks who primarily weight train and just have some desire to do one of these events.

I won’t explicitly be talking about the role of weight training for high-performance endurance athletes although much of the information will more or less apply to them.… Keep Reading

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Surviving Indoor Aerobic Training

So I know I promised a video to wrap up my reposting/rewriting of the Training the Obese Beginner series but, honestly, it was just going to be pointless ranting and I seem to have lost the fire in my belly to do it right now (to be honest I think I just didn’t want to deal with the shooting, editing and transcribing part of it).   So here’s some actual new content instead.  Today I want to talk about surviving indoor aerobic training.

While we can probably argue until the end of time what the “worst” part of training is, I imagine that most would be willing to put indoor cardio (especially of the steady state/aerobic type) right up there near the top.

And while certainly one way to avoid the issue is to either take the no-cardio or intervals only approach, I don’t think either are ideal.  The simple reality is that whether it’s for fat loss, general fitness, or for endurance athletes who live somewhere where it’s cold, doing longer duration indoor cardio of some sort is usually a necessary evil.… Keep Reading