Weight Room Lessons from Top Athletes

The lessons we’ve fixated on from Norway’s world-beating endurance athletes mostly focus on, well, endurance training: double thresholds, lactate testing, VO2 max records, and so on. This is logical, but it’s not the whole picture. What if there are other elements of the Norwegian approach that underlie their success? Has anyone studied the Norwegian diet? Maybe fårikål and tørrfisk are the fuel of champions.

Or maybe there are some more obvious candidates. In the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, a team of sports scientists led by Thomas Haugen of Kristiania University College in Oslo digs into how Norwegian endurance athletes incorporate strength and speed training into their preparation. The resulting insights aren’t radical or revolutionary—there’s no “double threshold squats” workout or anything like that—but they offer a valuable window into how some of the best athletes in the world manage the delicate balance between strength, speed, and endurance.

The Coach’s-Eye Perspective

The researchers interviewed 12 Norwegian coaches who have worked with the best of the best athletes in the world. The coaches remain anonymous, but they work in long-distance running, cycling, triathlon, cross-country skiing, rowing, swimming, and biathlon. Collectively, athletes working with these coaches have won about 400 medals at major international championships.

While we don’t know who these athletes are, there are plenty of stars to choose from. At the last Ironman world championships, for example, Norwegian men swept the podium and Solveig Løvseth won the women’s race. And then there’s the cross-country ski team, led by Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, whose ridiculous uphill sprints en route to six gold medals at this year’s Olympics went viral. If there’s a smoking gun for why we should be curious about Norwegian strength and speed training, it’s Klæbo.

The coaches identified four key reasons for including strength and speed work in an endurance training plan:

1. Reduce injury risk: there’s reasonably strong evidence that this can be effective, though the devil is in the details. Doing biceps curls isn’t going to fix your shin splints.
2. Improve efficiency: for runners in particular, this is the most reliable benefit you can expect from lifting weights or doing plyometric exercises, well supported by research.
3. Improve finishing kick: it’s logical to assume that sprint training will improve your ability to sprint, and the coaches felt this becomes increasingly important for endurance athletes logging huge volumes of endurance training, which can suppress natural speed.
4. Improve bone health: this was a minority take, but two running coaches emphasized bone health as a priority, particularly for young female athletes who may be at risk of low bone density due to heavy training.

The Practical Details

If you’re convinced that strength and speed training are worthwhile, the next question is how you implement it in your regimen. There’s no universal formula among the coaches, or even among different athletes within an individual coach’s group.

That’s because the single most important consideration is that it shouldn’t interfere with the main endurance workouts. Different athletes respond to and recover from strength training in different ways, so the precise workout routine and scheduling are the most individualized part of the overall training program, often with the athletes themselves judging how much they can handle and when they can best handle it.

The total amount of strength and speed training ranged from less than 50 hours per year (e.g. among triathletes, who are already training a billion hours a week) to as much as 200 hours per year among rowers. Runners and cyclists tended to be in the range of 50 to 100 hours per year. For the most part, strength training persisted throughout the year, but was reduced or eliminated during tapers and competition periods. Speed training tended to increase as competitions approached.

A general overall pattern was workouts using free weights or machines, with four to eight exercises, two to four sets per exercise, five to ten reps per set. These sessions were often scheduled after hard endurance workouts, so that recovery on easy days wouldn’t be compromised by the strength workout.

Sample Routines

Here’s an example, provided in the paper, of a strength workout for a long-distance runner:

• Squats to 90 degrees: 2-3 sets, 6-8 reps, load 50-100 percent of body mass
• Trap bar deadlift: 2-3 sets, 6-8 reps, load 50-100 percent of body mass
• Hip flexor: 2-3 sets, 10-15 reps, leaving 5-10 “reps in reserve” (i.e. stopping at a point where you could probably do five to 10 more reps)
• Hip thrust: 2-3 sets, 8-12 reps, 0-5 reps in reserve
• Ankle hops: 2-3 sets, 10-15 reps
• Core/lower back: 2-4 exercises, 4-8 sets, 10-20 reps

And here’s the corresponding speed workouts, with two different options:

• Strides: 6-10 x 60-100 meters at 90 to 95 percent intensity, with 1 to 2 minutes rest
• Strides: 3-6 x 150 meters at 90 to 100 percent intensity, with 3 to 5 minutes rest

Is there anything uniquely Norwegian in these routines? Not that I can see. Instead, what seems most notable to me is the focus on fitting in strength and speed without disrupting the meat-and-potato endurance workouts. This, too, is not exactly a hidden secret that only Norwegians have figured out.

But you could say the same thing about the broader Norwegian method: threshold workouts aren’t new, and neither is the idea that you shouldn’t push so hard in one workout that it compromises the next. What the Norwegian method does is transform this from one useful insight among many into the central commandment of the whole system.

That shift really does seem to be having an impact—see, for example, this recent LetsRun interview with Frederik Ruppert, the first European to break 8:00 for the steeplechase, who attributes his breakthrough, and the general rise in performance among his fellow Germans, to going Norwegian: “There has been a change in the training approach for everybody here, and this is why we see consistent progress.” Getting in workouts without overdoing has been the key, he says. According to Norwegian coaches, the same advice applies in the weight room.

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