Understanding Your Premium 80/20 Strength Training Plan

This document covers how to use your premium strength plan. For support on your free strength plug-in, see Understanding Your Free 80/20 Strength Training Plug-in.

Regardless of your current physical strength and neuromuscular control levels, the 80/20 Endurance Premium Strength Plans will help you improve by focusing on the fundamentals of building a strong base and progressing according to evidence-based principles in a manner that complements your endurance training.

Our Premium Strength plans features two-three strength workouts per week, averaging about 45 minutes in duration. You will be guided through the exercise with video demonstrations, step-by-step written instructions, and guidelines for loading, sets, reps, and rest.

There are four phases to the program:

• Foundation: Focusing on isolating specific muscle control
• Strength: Development of muscle recruitment and force
• Strength Endurance: Sustaining muscle stamina
• Taper: Recovery sessions with programming to stay sharp

Each phase is carefully structured with specific increases and decreases in intensity and volume.

The foundation exercises may help you find areas in your body where you need improvement or serve as excellent activation or dynamic warm-up exercises. They will prepare you for the harder work to come. After gradually building a strong base with core exercises, the program will then move into proven exercises for strength development enhancing your training and performance.

It is important to note that the program progresses from isolating specific muscles to more compound movements at a higher intensity, while chaining together additional muscle groups. The aim of this format is to develop your body in such a way that your mechanics and form become stronger and smoother.

Maintenance Strength Plans

Our Maintenance strength plans differ from the others in a couple of ways. Intended for use during "off-season" periods and other breaks from race-focused endurance training, when strength development can and should be a higher priority, they feature more challenging workouts with a focus on Power:

• Foundation: Focusing on isolating specific muscle control
• Strength: Development of muscle recruitment and force
• Power: Development of speed of contraction
• Taper: Recovery sessions with programming to prepare you to transition to a formal plan

Equipment Required

To maximize efficiency, many of the exercises require specific equipment. We recommend you acquire or attend a gym that can provide the following:

- Exercise bands of various lengths and resistance

- Swiss Ball

- Yoga mat

- Dumbbells, kettlebells, and barbells

Load Selection

For exercises involving weights (e.g., dumbbells), select a load that you could lift twice more than the prescribed number of repetitions with perfect form. For example, if instructed to complete 8 reps of the Single-Leg Reverse Deadlift with each leg, choose a dumbbell that you could lift 10 times with flawless technique.

For exercises involving bands, choose a resistance level that you perceive as "moderately hard" for a given exercise. As you get stronger and your accustomed loads start to feel easier, you'll want to move to slightly greater loads.

Workout Format

A list of equipment items required to do the exercises in a given workout is provided at the top of the workout description.

The workouts utilize the advanced strength builder in TrainingPeaks, which will clearly identify warm up, superset, single exercise and cool down elements of the session.

A key parameter will be identified against each exercise, either for time or repetitions, with a load recommendation outlined in the plans supporting documentation.

With the TrainingPeaks advanced strength sessions you can follow and record your strength sessions directly from the TrainingPeaks app on your phone or ipad.

Frequently Asked Questions