How to turn a Strength Athlete into a Hybrid Athlete. Part 2 of 5.

Part 2: Consider regressing on the Strength front - at least for a bit…

As mentioned in the part 1, the strength athlete already has the ability to perform highly specialised movement patterns with great efficiency and, by my experience, will tend to load those movements patterns (like squat/bench/deadlift) and their derivatives excessively.

This is potentially a problem for the newer Hybrid athlete on 2 fronts:

➡️ Performing lifts like the Romanian Deadlift (at least to a max effort degree) when you already have an overdeveloped ability to hinge is unlikely to help with your new found quest to become a better runner. Building better running economy as a strength athlete is going to be severely hampered by your hamstrings if they are trying to recover across most of the week. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big hamstring training fan, but it might be better to focus on more knee flexion hamstring variations. When strength athletes run, they have a tendency to kick backwards more with an excessive trailing leg rather than driving forwards from the hips and knees, and it’s this area where a newer strength athlete turned hybrid athlete can make some huge early “low hanging fruit” gains into building better running economy early on. Hybrid is about compromise after all.

➡️ The second area strength athletes will have to look at is load management, at least in a more pared back way than they are used to. Going back to the regressing of the strength theme, I find it best to start off those “pure” strength athletes with as few as two tightly controlled strength sessions a week, building to a third that is less actual strength focussed. These strength sessions will have well regulated loading parameters for the 1 Main lift, and then no more than 2 well selected Accessory lifts. This is mostly because strength athletes can actually maintain strength like this very well, and it leaves so much more room for the ever increasing systemic demands of adding and building endurance volume into their programme - which is going to compromise a strength athlete more than their gym based work, simply because, they’re not very good at it yet.