I hate popular press writings on strength.

Any article that allows a new trainee to believe they’ll get huge as soon as they start lifting is an insult to athletes who have dedicated 10+ year-long careers to the pursuit of muscle mass (bodybuilders) or absolute strength (powerlifters).

Any idiot who claims endurance athletes need to keep away from maximal weights and do “light weights for 10-20 reps per set” has no understanding of strength at all.

Now, I do believe any person training toward a goal has a limited amount of time and adaptive resources. I absolutely believe that most of your training time has to be devoted to the specifics of your goal. As Dan John quips frequently, the secret to coaching is “runners run, jumpers jump, swimmers swim, and climbers climb.”

You Are A Full-Time Athlete

Being an athlete is a full-time endeavor, regardless of your level of competition. This isn’t just about the actual minutes and hours spent training. As an athlete, you make certain choices about what foods you eat. You make certain choices about what social activities you join. You make certain choices about when you go to sleep and about how you spend your energy. So, if you identify as an athlete, you build your life around being an athlete, which means you’re full-time.

So your commitment to your sport goes beyond the hours you spend training. If you do 10 hours of training a week, you probably do at minimum another 5 hours of supporting tasks to enable that training, stuff like food prep and washing training clothes and maintaining your equipment.

Meaning, if a triathlete *were* spending 9 of their 15 sport hours per week on swimming, cycling, and running, plus 1 hour total on strength and mobility/flexibility (that’s lifting and stretching, folks), they’re doing just fine. In that one hour a week of strength and mobility work, they can only create so much stress on the body, therefore they can only stimulate so much strength gain.

And for a triathlete, that’s just fine. You won’t get as strong as an athlete who spends more time training for strength and who directs more of their resources toward being weight-room strong.

No Athlete Can Ever Be Too Strong

But the line of idiocy is *avoiding* activities that actually make you strong! And here’s my real position: no athlete, in any context or any sport, can ever be too strong.

It’s impossible.

And it’s a stupid thing to worry about.

Strength is simply the ability to produce force. It’s intramuscular coordination, a big bang from the nervous system and a big squeeze from a muscle.

Strength can also be specific to a task or position. That’s intermuscular coordination, a group of muscles all firing together in a synchronized way.

Why Triathletes Don’t Need Olympic Lifts

If the intermuscular task is incredibly complex *and* not relevant to your sport, it would be wrong to spend your precious strength-training time on it. So, experienced triathlete with little history in the weight room, you have no business learning the barbell snatch. It’s an incredible lift that produces exceptional explosive capabilities and power production and dynamic stabilization, all of which help you throw things farther, jump higher, and hit harder…

But can you see how those 3 sport skills have nearly zero application to your sport? That means that learning the barbell snatch isn’t a productive use of time for you.

Now, a barbell deadlift is different. It teaches tension (and, by contrast, relaxation), it teaches good posture, it teaches glute+hamstring+quad coordination, and it teaches bracing. Barbell deadlifts can make you more efficient while running by tightening up your torso and more fatigue-resistant while cycling by building up some low-back reserve and some glute-ham-quad power.

A Triathlete Who Lifts, Not A Lifter Who Tris

But a 165 lb triathlete will never see a deadlift even remotely near that of a 165 lb powerlifter. The triathlete is getting what they need from 185 or 225 lbs on the bar. They’ve met the standard. They’ve become “strong enough.”

That 165 lb powerlifter isn’t even really a part of the sport until they pull 335 and they aren’t competitive until nearly 495. They will never be “strong enough” because every extra pound on their deadlift is another chance to win a title.

The point is this: unless the time required exceeds that allotted hour per week, the triathlete loses nothing by allowing their deadlift to march up from 225 to 275 in a year. There is no penalty to being stronger.

There’s simply a decision to make: if some other quality is lagging, like ankle mobility, and that lagging quality is negatively affecting your sport, like poor plantar flexion while swimming making your kick inefficient, it makes good sense to cut back even more on strength training to address that quality. If you train something less, you make slower progress. So maybe in a year, that deadlift only goes from 225 to 245 for our triathlete.

That’s okay.

Strength Standards Depend On The Sport

I never said 275 or 335 or 495 was “too strong.” Pursuing it is just no longer the most effective or efficient use of time to be a better triathlete.

I need every athlete to recognize the difference.

See, every sport has strength standards.

A triathlete needs little more than 1.25-1.50 x bodyweight in the deadlift, probably 1-3 pullups, and the ability to hold a 2 minute plank.

A thrower needs 1.25-1.50 x bodyweight in the barbell snatch, about the same in the overhead press, and the ability to walk with bodyweight in each hand for 20+ yards.

A weightlifter or powerlifter needs all the strength they can get in their competitive lifts – we’re talking about 2.00 x bodyweight in the barbell snatch or 3.50 x bodyweight in the deadlift…minimum.

No One “Needs” Light Weights

But if you’re a new trainee or if you’re an endurance athlete or if you’re just trying to keep the fat off and live well, you don’t need light weights any more than you need to let strength training take over your life.

There is a threshold of “too much time” to spend on strength training. Where that threshold is depends on your sport of choice.

There is a threshold of “strong enough” to know strength isn’t holding you back. Where that threshold is depends on your sport of choice.

That Runner Is…”Too Fast”?

Consider this: Every marathoner benefits from getting faster. But they also have to get in their base miles and work on their efficiency to save energy. While it’s possible to spend too much time doing and recovering from speed work, no one would ever say the marathoner got “too fast.”

An elite marathoner needs the capacity to run well under 5:00 for a single mile. That’s 75 seconds per 400 meters. Okay, so the best 400 meter runners go nearly 2/3 faster, yet the marathoner doesn’t have to become an elite 400m runner to get better. Going from the capacity for continuous 75 sec per 400m to continuous 60 sec per 400m is obviously a good thing.

Strength works the same way. Strength helps you produce force. If you move your body or you move an implement in your sport, you benefit from producing more force. So you can never be “too strong.”

Only an armchair quarterback, someone not moving and not being an athlete, would suggest you could be.