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. Something is almost always much better than nothing, and many of the problems created by years of doing nothing in the gym are easily solved by doing a few months of something. But what comes after that?
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 we even see 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.
The Path is a membership that renews monthly at $80 USD/month.
Cancel anytime.
The Path is an ongoing interactive training template that members have access 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. The 21-day intro phase will help trainees determine whether the template exceeds their current ability. Advice is offered throughout the program for 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. Training is written as a rolling calendar, with all members following the same weekly template, with freedom to rearrange the days of the week in the way that best fits one’s schedule.
By interactive, I mean that it’s not a .pdf. Training is delivered via the Fitr 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 4-7 training days per week. While consistency is critical, sessions can be missed without impacting the overall progression. Shorter “homework” sessions are very common, and these can be combined to do a few days at once, or tacked onto gym sessions to best work with your schedule. 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.
The Higher Ground Athletics training method is one of no method. Rather, a blind loyalty to what works.
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. To achieve our internal training goals, the template uses 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 training an effort in 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, 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 tolerate endurance training year-round, absorb that stress, and turn it 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.
This template is written with a principles-based, thorough approach for athletes that have chosen to make their strength training a priority alongside their running/riding/swimming. Access to a standard gym of equipment will make executing the training much easier, but the emphasis is on standard rather than specialized. Chances to use unique equipment and novel training methods will be offered for those with access to take advantage of, but these methods are not the meat and potatoes of the program.
Access to the equipment listed below will allow an athlete to complete the overwhelming majority of training.
Dumbbells
Kettlebells
Barbell + plates
Trap Bar
Boxes
Benches
Glute-Ham Developer
Ankle/Wrist weights
Physioball
Yoga Blocks
Foam Roller
Tennis/Lacrosse Balls
The template includes guidance for training the respiratory system in isolation, including apnea and isocapnic hyperpnea with a rebreathing bag. Members will be given instructions on how to perform this training with the needed equipment and secondary smart phone apps.