When it comes to “strength training”, most endurance athletes are lost. Focused almost solely on the development of their aerobic fitness, training often fails to prepare them for the entire demand of their sport. For most, the hours (and hours) of volume spent covering ground make it all too easy to ignore other potentially beneficial training stress via exposure to ranges of motion, contraction types, and levels of neurologic demand that do not at first glance seem sport specific. Yet, there’s a vast landscape of qualities that are relevant, trainable, and in some cases a critical influence on the health and adaptability of our tissues.

Without the context needed to describe this discrepancy, athletes, clinicians, and coaches are unprepared to close the gap. Physical therapists can be invaluable when acute injuries show up. However, due to patient compliance, the constraints of the medical system, or incomplete understanding of training stress, they often are unable to progress an athlete as far as needed to truly solve the problems they face. Traditional S&C coaches (the kind with collared shirts, whistles and clipboards) don’t understand the different rules that apply when the trainee is engaged in five to thirty-five hours per week of exercise outside the gym. Sport specific coaches-often dedicated runners, cyclists, and triathletes themselves-do an admirable job of piecing together whatever information they can on strength training and passing it down to their athletes. Still, supplemental training for endurance sport is a Wild West of conflicting information, bias, and bro-science, bordered by a vast frontier of potential ways forward to better performance. And some dead ends. 

Higher Ground Athletics is founded on the idea that vast, broad context allows for more specific decision making. From high enough up, we can see those paths forward and dead ends, sometimes even shortcuts. This template is a product of climbing towards that vantage point using academic research, principle-based thinking, respect for old-school wisdom, and experience honed intuition. 

It’s not the only path, but it’s one that I see from where I stand. It’s a path I’ve walked in my own training, and the one I try to lead committed athletes down when they trust me to. 

It’s a template, in that it’s written for a hypothetical athlete with no major issues that stand between them and productive training. This is not individual training design, so trainees should not expect any level of specificity to them. That said, I plan to offer advice throughout on how to individualize what’s written to one’s body, injury history, equipment set-up, and psychology.

By ongoing, I mean that it will take you as far as you want to go. It’s not a 12 week macrocycle of training that you buy once and run through once. I’m writing it ahead of the first group of trainees, and anybody new starts at the beginning. Feedback from trainees allows me to go back and change, refine, and improve past training phases for those who haven’t gotten to them yet. 

By interactive, I mean that it’s not a .pdf. Training is delivered via the TrueCoach app that allows for basic communication between athlete and coach, movement demo videos for every exercise, recording of metrics and other useful features. 

The Path runs year round with three training days per week. It is meant to be dropped in and out of as needed. It’s progressive in that the training builds on the work done in previous phases, but it’s flexible enough that if you miss a week for life commitments or for racing, you can just hop back on the path. After a while, you may decide to move to a more individualized coaching relationship, or you may move off the path to design your own training using principles that hopefully stick with you. 

As a coach who works closely with athletes in person, I’ve been reluctant to write a template style program for remote athletes. Our bodies adapt to training on their own timeline, not the one we choose and fit neatly into a calendar. Inevitably, changes need to be made as coach and athlete discover more. I simply can’t wrap my head around being responsible for training that isn’t fluid and responsive to individual circumstances. 

My response to this is Detours. If communication reveals that more attention needs devoted to some lagging capacity (mobility, absolute strength, tendon health, etc.) you can be shifted off of the base Path programming to a version that biases your needs. This continues on a month to month basis until we agree that some change has been achieved and it makes sense to return to more balanced training. 

Over time the, different paths will emerge to reflect the distinct needs of road vs trail runners, cyclists, short vs. long course triathletes etc. The composition of membership and feedback from trainees will be the first consideration for what the base program looks like and what sort of other paths need to be offered.

There are no exercises I can claim to have invented (well…maybe a few.) There’s no novel periodization scheme. There’s no magic movement that will solve your pain or make you faster. There are exercises that are so simple that they are often ignored despite profound benefit. There are movements complex enough that it may take a trainee months to arrive at competency. 

If there’s anything unique about my work with professional endurance athletes, it’s the combination of Internal training that attempts to make long term positive change to structure and function, and External training that’s comprised of classic strength and conditioning methods. This is also true of The Path template. The initial phase of training makes heavy use of Functional Range Conditioning principles that help athletes understand, isolate, and improve their articular function for a wider range of movement options. The program itself dives into why I believe this is such an important place to start, and why -in my experience- this is the superior method for addressing deficits in “mobility”.  This and other aspects of the template combine to make the first phase one of discovery; what movement possibilities does our structure allow for? Among the possibilities, what things are most important? Among the important, what characteristics are trainable, and how? 

Armed with this understanding, successive phases of the template will provide balanced, progressive, year-round exposure to training inputs for mobility, connective tissue health, absolute strength, reactive/plyometric ability and respiratory coordination. The ultimate goal is to build a body that can withstand the mechanical stress of endurance training, and turn training stress into fitness at the fastest rate possible. Many athletes have opinions about what ingredient they might be missing. Experience shows over and over again that variety is king and the synergy between seemingly different styles of training IS the the way forward for those willing to transform their training and walk The Path. 

The first 12 weeks of the template involve minimal equipment and what is required can often be improvised at home. As things progress, options for loading become helpful in some exercises and and critical for others. No one piece of equipment is an absolute requirement, and trainees are encouraged to get creative with equipment when needed. Show me what you come up with!

Trainees will have opportunity to use the following equipment and more:

• Dumbbells

• Kettlebells

• Barbell + plates

• Hex Bar

• Glute-Ham Developer

• Ankle/Wrist weights

• Furniture sliders

• Physioball

• Yoga Blocks

• Foam Roller

• Tennis/Lacrosse Balls

Let’s be clear, this template is written to allow just about any motivated individual to start and progress at their own pace. Athletes are not left to sink or swim. That being said, consistently following a template like this alongside your sport specific training requires a certain level of control over the circumstances of your life. This template would not exist if we didn’t see for ourselves that the destination is worth it. Nothing in the details of this template is remotely as powerful as overall consistency. Consider your motivation and ability to stay on the path carefully before joining us.