point of failure

part of the fun of training a lot is you get to come up with theories for how to make wild improvements and attain your dreams. It's these theories that get you excited about more training because you realize that you've finally figured it all out and everything will come together perfectly.

my latest and greatest theory came about through observing climbing. I've seen a lot of benefit from doing two different sports and each gives a unique perspective on the other. Here's what I'll say about both sports. A lot of people will tell you there's a ton of different aspects to running and climbing. For climbing you need coordination and strength and grip strength and good movement and being able to read a climb and how to use your feet. And for running you need to train your endurance and your speed and your technique and your core and do injury prevention. And that's all true and well and good but if you watch climbing for a while you pretty quickly realize that if someone can hang on to really bad holds for a long time, they're going to have a relatively easy go of it. You watch running and you realize that if someone can sprint pretty fast, they're going to do pretty well. 

Obviously I'm oversimplifying things but that's kind of the point. If you don't isolate the main limiting factor to your performance, then you aren't maximizing the potential gain of your training. I was watching this video about climbing and training your core and this PT correctly pointed out that while the core muscles are engaged during almost every part of the climbing, those aren't the muscles that are being used the most and reaching their point of failure. In other words, your fingers and arms are going to give out long before your core does, so making your core stronger isn't really going to change the point of failure. A climber who has a limited amount of time and energy to train should focus more on grip strength. Just because there are a lot of things in both sports that we could train, it doesn't mean that they all contribute equally to performance. 

I realized this myself pretty quickly in my own climbing. I can do big moves off of really good holds. It's when I can't grip the holds anymore that I stop being able to do the moves. 

So I wondered if the same is true for running. I've learned in the past few years that I can't get away with not spending a lot of time training my aerobic system. I've been logging my miles diligently and I've seen some benefits. But I wondered if there was a "grip strength" equivalent in running. The main muscle groups targeted by running are your quads, hamstrings, glutes, hip flexors, and calves. And I looked into it a little bit more and found a few sources that pointed to the calves as the most activated muscles during running. This immediately made sense to me. After hard efforts my calves are the most sore. My injuries have tended to be lower leg injuries due to tight calves. I'm not very good at jumping or explosive bounding movements. I'm pretty sure my calves are the point of failure when I'm running.

So I've decided that I'm going to start dedicating time to strengthening my calves--something I've never really focused on before. I've had periods where I focused on lower body strengthening overall but not really progressive weight training targeted the calves specifically. We'll see if it makes a difference.

I did a bunch of calf raises and variations of calf raises today and I'll find out if I'm sore tomorrow. I felt really good on my run so maybe I activated the calf muscles more than fatiguing them but I wanted to figure out where my baseline was and work into it slowly. I'll keep posting updates. I have access to weights at the gym but I think I'll focus on single leg bodyweight calf raises for a while as they seem to be pretty challenging.