# Ten Strength & Conditioning Mistakes Ironman Athletes Make (And How to Fix Them) | Ep 547

An episode of [Oxygenaddict Triathlon Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/951501034), 16 Jul 2025, 21 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/ea99f7d8/podcast/play/105469538/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-6-14%2F2d9b6625-26ad-d229-b523-256b1f162e24.m4a

In this episode of the Oxygenaddict Triathlon Podcast, Coach Rob explains common strength and conditioning mistakes made by Ironman athletes and how to fix them. Topics include: The importance of conditioning over mere muscle building... The significance of maintaining muscle activation... How to prevent injuries while sustaining long-term athletic health... The importance of S&C for those over 50 or under-muscular runners... Why bodyweight focused exercises should be the go-to for most Ironman athletes... The benefits of incorporating flexibility and mobility activities like yoga... How to adapt strength training as peak training and race preparations approach... How to manage S&C workouts without overloading your body, ensuring consistent performance and avoiding injuries. * * * * * * * * SPONSORS * * * * * * * * Like what you heard in this show? Join hundreds of other age group triathletes making the most of their limited training time, training with Team OxygenAddict! http://team.oxygenaddict.com - The most comprehensive triathlon coaching program for busy age groupers. Book an application call to see if you'd be a good fit for Team Oxygenaddict for the coming season here: https://team.oxygenaddict.com/consultation-call/ * * * * * * * * * * * * precisionfuelandhydration.com Precision Fuel & Hydration help athletes personalise their hydration and fuelling strategies for training and racing. Use the free Fuel & Hydration Planner to get a personalised race nutrition plan for your next event. And then book a free 20-minute video consultation with a member of the PF&H Athlete Support Team to refine your strategy. Listeners get 15% off their first order of fuel and electrolytes with Precision Fuel & Hydration. Simply click this link and the discount will be auto-applied at the checkout. * * * * * * * * * * * * Watch on youtube Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts

## Transcript

[0:04] Hello and welcome to the Oxygenetic Triathlon Podcast.
[0:07] We're brought to you every week by our sponsors, Precision Fuel
[0:09] and hydration.com. You can get 15% off your first
[0:12] order with the code Oxygen Fuel 25.
[0:15] Welcome to the show everyone. I'm your host coach, Rob Wilby
[0:18] from Team Oxygen Addict Triathlon Coaching, and every
[0:21] week I bring you an episode of this podcast to help educate,
[0:24] motivate and inspire you. On this week's episode, we're
[0:28] going to be talking about 10 strength and conditioning
[0:30] mistakes that Iron Man athletes make and most importantly, how
[0:34] you can go about fixing them. S&C for Triathlon and for Iron
[0:37] Man is a massively contentious issue.
[0:40] There's lots of different contrasting views here.
[0:42] I'm going to kick this episode off by stating this is my view.
[0:45] People have different views. There are people who I'm sure
[0:48] you'll, I'm sure we'll hear about this later and they'll
[0:51] have very different views on strength and conditioning.
[0:53] To me, I've got a slightly different view on strength
[0:56] conditioning than a lot of coaches and certainly than a lot
[0:59] of athletes. And I'll explain why I've come
[1:01] to these conclusions and, and why I think this is a, a
[1:04] different and in my opinion a better way of doing it for
[1:07] certain groups of people. And there will be exceptions and
[1:10] I'll go through those, but I'm hoping this will clear up a lot
[1:13] of confusion for people. So before we get started, 2
[1:16] quick things you can do to help us out.
[1:18] Please. If you like this episode, please
[1:20] follow us on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.
[1:23] And if you're looking for help training for your first time
[1:26] line on 70.3, check out the coaching memberships over at
[1:29] teamoxygenaddict.com. I think we've got the most
[1:31] comprehensive coaching programme specifically aimed for busy age
[1:34] groupers. If you're interested, there's a
[1:36] link in the show notes to book a membership call with us and see
[1:39] if you'd be a good fit for joining the team.
[1:42] Let's get started on these mistakes and what you can do to
[1:45] fix them. Making strength the main focus
[1:48] instead of conditioning. So the the big thing I'm always
[1:52] saying to athletes is when it comes to strength conditioning,
[1:55] think of it as a little SA, big C.
[1:58] And what we mean by that is the purpose of the strength
[2:01] conditioning is conditioning rather than strength for
[2:05] triathletes, we're not going into the gym.
[2:07] For almost all of us, we're not going in to try and build
[2:11] muscle. We're not trying to get the kind
[2:12] of bodies that people show off on Instagram.
[2:15] We're trying to get our bodies into a condition where we can
[2:18] swim, we can bike, we can run, but we have enough strength in
[2:22] our muscles to be able to do that and to stay injury free.
[2:26] That's the key purpose of the conditioning and strength work
[2:29] outside give to our athletes. Now you'll hear other people say
[2:33] other things and especially as you're on YouTube or or
[2:36] podcasts, there will be different people with different
[2:39] opinions for different reasons, though it's it's equally valid
[2:42] if people want to go in the gym and build muscle because they
[2:45] want to have a beach body, but that's not what the focus of
[2:48] this episode is about. The strength conditioning that I
[2:52] want our Iron Man athletes to do is purely there to support your
[2:56] desire to do swim, bike, run, and and most importantly, to be
[3:00] able to keep on doing the sport that you love into your 50s,
[3:04] sixties and beyond. So we want to be able to support
[3:08] the muscle mass that you need for our older athletes.
[3:11] We want to be able to maintain the muscle mass that we've got,
[3:14] but what we're not looking to do here is give people a kind of
[3:17] strength conditioning workouts that's going to build
[3:19] considerable muscle mass. Now, as I've said, there might
[3:22] be athletes for whom they've got different goals.
[3:25] It might be that if you've been to a physio who has said you've
[3:28] got a specific weakness in this muscle group and you have to do
[3:31] exercises to address these, then that's absolutely the right
[3:36] thing to do. But for the vast majority of
[3:38] people watching this, the key for you doing strength
[3:41] conditioning is the conditioning.
[3:43] It's the keeping of the the body's muscles activated and
[3:47] able to be used rather than trying to build bigger,
[3:52] stronger, larger muscles. That's where I'm coming from in
[3:56] this episode, thinking that you need heavy weights in order to
[4:00] get strong. So for most Iron Man athletes,
[4:04] we really only need our body weight exercises in order to
[4:07] stay strong enough to have the durability we need to support
[4:11] our swim, our bike and our run. We don't need to be using
[4:15] barbells for the majority of time for the majority of
[4:17] athletes in order to support those goals.
[4:20] Now, there will be times when barbells can be useful, but for
[4:23] most of us, all the conditioning exercises that we need to do to
[4:27] keep our muscles activated and to maintain the strength and
[4:30] muscle mass we have can be done at home just using our body
[4:35] weight. It's a contentious view that not
[4:38] everybody is going to understand.
[4:40] It's not something that everyone is going to agree with, and
[4:42] that's OK. The athletes that I work with
[4:45] are ones who want to support their swim and bike and run, and
[4:48] they're going to spend the majority of their limited
[4:51] training time swimming, biking and running.
[4:54] And my conditioning exercise, as a gift to athletes, are entirely
[4:57] there to help the muscle stay activated and to prevent those
[5:00] injuries. So a classic conditioning
[5:02] exercise I'll get athletes to do will be hip bridges where you
[5:07] lie on your back and you have to lift your bottom off the floor.
[5:10] It's really good for activating your hamstrings, for activating
[5:13] your glutes. Those are two of the muscle
[5:15] groups that we don't use very often in everyday life.
[5:18] Especially if you spend a lot of time sitting down in a chair all
[5:21] day, the glutes tend to be quite inactive and your hamstrings
[5:24] tend to be quite inactive. And when you go out to run, we
[5:28] expect our glutes and our hamstrings to suddenly join in
[5:31] the game and be active and be working, spend a lot of time
[5:34] sitting down. The conditioning of your
[5:36] hamstrings and glutes is really important because they're not
[5:39] getting to do very much all day long.
[5:41] If you're working a more manual job and you're you're up and
[5:44] about and you're walking and taking your body weight all day,
[5:47] then it might be different. But for the majority of athletes
[5:50] I work with, lots of them are at desk bound jobs.
[5:53] So two or three times a week to get them to do relatively small
[5:57] numbers, 3, three sets of six or eight of the hip bridges or the
[6:01] specific variations of hip bridges that I'll give, they can
[6:05] really help you stay activated. And most important, that's going
[6:08] to be the thing that really stops you from developing
[6:13] hamstring or glute issues in your running.
[6:15] Now, if you compare that with what might happen if you went to
[6:17] the gym and you tried to do hamstring curls lying down on
[6:21] your front on a bench, pulling weighted hamstring curls, if
[6:25] we've already got hamstrings that aren't activated very well,
[6:28] putting them under a large load isn't going to be great for
[6:32] them. And you can make the argument
[6:33] it's possibly taking you closer towards injury.
[6:38] So what I would say to people here is be very clear about what
[6:41] you're doing and why you're doing it.
[6:43] And make sure you're taking care of the very basics first and the
[6:46] activation of the muscles before you think about adding anything
[6:50] extra on top. Lifting like a power lifter
[6:53] instead of a triathlete. So again, I'm going to reiterate
[6:57] here our purposes. We're training for durability,
[7:00] we're training to support our endurance training.
[7:03] We're not training for maximum strength and we're not training
[7:06] in order to build enormous muscle bulk.
[7:09] So the kind of power lifter or bodybuilder type exercises with
[7:13] very heavy weights and low reps, they have got a specific
[7:17] purpose, but they're not for the majority of Iron Man athletes,
[7:21] the best way to spend your training time.
[7:24] Now I'm going to have a little caveat here.
[7:26] There's two subgroups of Ironmont traffic who will
[7:29] benefit from doing some kind of strength and muscle building
[7:33] exercises at some points during the year.
[7:36] And those two groups are athletes who come from a running
[7:40] background, and you have very low muscle mass already, and
[7:44] athletes who are over 50 for whom maintaining muscle mass is
[7:49] going to be important. Now we know that over 50, our
[7:51] muscle mass is naturally going to decrease probably by between
[7:55] a half a percent in the percent every year.
[7:57] And left unchecked, that's what leads us into that, that decline
[8:02] into our 60s and 70s where people completely lose their
[8:05] muscle mass. Now the good news is swimming,
[8:08] biking and running have a strength element to them
[8:10] already. We're, we're pushing load into
[8:12] our muscles on the bike. And but what we're not doing is,
[8:16] well, there's, there's an element of pushing load into our
[8:19] muscles and our shoulders and our backs in the swim.
[8:21] I'm not convinced it has a massive muscle maintaining
[8:25] effect though. So for those two subgroups, the
[8:28] over 50s and the the under muscled, if you like the very
[8:31] skinny runner, there is a benefit to having a traditional
[8:34] strength training regime where you're going to aim at the very
[8:38] least at maintaining the muscle mass for the over 50s and
[8:40] slightly building muscle mass for those who are who are
[8:43] underdeveloped. But for the vast majority of
[8:46] those, durability is going to be the key part of this skipping
[8:52] strength work when time is tight.
[8:54] Now, this is an absolute classic here to skip strength
[8:57] conditioning when you've got limited time in the week.
[9:00] I think it's a fool's errand because the conditioning work is
[9:03] the thing that's going to allow you to keep swimming, biking,
[9:06] and running injury free. I remember hearing a great story
[9:10] from an American Olympian triathlete and he was saying the
[9:14] reason that his career eventually came to an end was
[9:17] because he'd always dedicated himself to the strength
[9:20] conditioning that he needed to do in order to stay injury free.
[9:24] And across time as he got into his mid to late 30's, the
[9:28] strength and conditioning work he was having to do every single
[9:31] day before he could even go out and swim, bike and run got to be
[9:35] so great that there just wasn't enough time for him to do all of
[9:39] the strength conditioning all the time.
[9:41] It felt like he was constantly putting his fingers in the dam
[9:44] is how he described it. And he got to the point where he
[9:46] realised it was two or three hours of strength conditioning
[9:49] work in order to support going for a couple of runs a week
[9:52] because he was trying to train at the very, very top level and,
[9:56] you know, trying to go really fast.
[9:57] Now for the majority of us that's not going to be the case,
[10:00] but I think the basic principle holds true.
[10:03] If you're in a time limited week, don't completely cut your
[10:06] strength conditioning from the week.
[10:08] Instead, even one set of one exercise is worth doing to keep
[10:12] that routine. And I'd go back to the hip
[10:14] bridges. That's the thing that is going
[10:16] to activate your glutes and your hamstrings and it's going to
[10:19] help keep you injury free for the run mostly.
[10:22] So even if you've only got 2 minutes at the end of one of
[10:26] your run workouts when you're already warm, get a couple of
[10:29] sets of those hip bridges done and you will stay consistent and
[10:33] injury resistant. Avoiding strength and
[10:36] conditioning training when you're on the road and you
[10:39] haven't got a gym. OK, so hopefully I've answered
[10:41] this already. If you're travelling and you
[10:44] haven't got access to a gym, a really common question that
[10:46] comes to me from from viewers and from listeners is how do I
[10:50] go about doing strength conditioning work if I don't
[10:52] have access to the gym? And hopefully I've answered that
[10:54] already. If you line up the correct
[10:56] conditioning work programme, you can get that done in between 5
[11:01] and 15 minutes, two or three times a week.
[11:04] You can do it anywhere using your own body weight.
[11:06] And so not having a gym when you're travelling isn't a
[11:09] problem, Being in a hotel room isn't a problem because you've
[11:13] got a little routine you can do with your own body weight.
[11:16] And that's the thing that's going to keep you durable.
[11:18] It's committing to do this two or three times a week, even when
[11:23] you are out of your normal routine.
[11:25] This is a great point to stop and give a shout out to our
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[11:58] practise those in training. They're essential to your
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[12:12] Right? Let's get on with more mistakes
[12:14] that people make around strength conditioning, ignoring strength
[12:18] conditioning until injury happens.
[12:21] OK, this is the big one. As I said in our introduction,
[12:24] the majority of our athletes, they don't think about strength
[12:28] conditioning. They think about swimming and
[12:30] biking and running, and they're all three discreet, different
[12:33] sports. They don't think about how the
[12:36] three tie together and most importantly, the effect each
[12:40] sport is going to have on the body and how that's going to
[12:43] either positively or negatively affect your ability to do the
[12:47] other sports. Most people, they're so busy
[12:50] with swimming and biking and running that they don't end up
[12:53] doing any strength conditioning work.
[12:54] Now you might have heard me say this before.
[12:56] I'm a big believer in conditioning being more
[12:59] important than strength. So this isn't about you going
[13:02] into the gym and lifting heavy weights.
[13:04] It's about you doing conditioning work two or three
[13:07] times every week to support your body's ability to swim, bike and
[13:11] run. There isn't even necessarily
[13:13] about trying to build tremendous amounts of strength or build
[13:16] muscle. It's about maintaining the
[13:18] muscle that we have. It's about activating the
[13:20] muscles that we use in our glutes and our hamstrings to
[13:23] support running, biking and swimming and making sure that we
[13:27] stay injury free. Even we'll talk a little later
[13:30] on about doing some yoga exercises, the flexibility and
[13:33] the range of motion, that's going to be improved as a, as a,
[13:37] as a way of being helped by yoga.
[13:41] That can be fantastically helpful for people who are
[13:43] swimming, especially if you're late to life as a swimmer.
[13:46] The mobility exercises can be fantastic that you'll get
[13:49] through yoga training like a young athlete when you're over
[13:53] 50. What do I mean by this?
[13:56] What I mean is we all know that as we get to be over 50, our
[14:00] muscle mass gradually decreases year on year, not so much
[14:04] noticeably at first, but certainly as the years go by.
[14:07] And so one of the mistakes I think people make is thinking
[14:10] the thing that I've always done is the things that I'm always
[14:13] going to be able to do. And we all know from having
[14:16] watched, watching kids play sport, they cannot warm up, they
[14:20] cannot cool down. They can be absolutely fine.
[14:23] It's as we get into middle age, we find that warming up and
[14:25] cooling down and strength training and conditioning
[14:27] training, they're the things that we really need.
[14:30] So don't make the mistake. If you're in the over 50s age
[14:33] group, you're going to have to be smarter with your strength
[14:36] training and your conditioning. You're going to have to dedicate
[14:39] a little bit more time to it. Now the over 50s is one of the
[14:43] one of the two groups I've mentioned that can really gain
[14:46] from more traditional strength training rather than just
[14:50] strength and conditioning. It can be really useful,
[14:53] especially at the right time of year, to get yourself into a
[14:56] weights room and to lift gradually increasing amounts of
[15:00] weight, putting more force through your muscles so that you
[15:04] end up maintaining the muscle mass that you've got.
[15:06] So again, the goal, the goal doesn't have to be to be a
[15:09] bodybuilder, doesn't have to be to put on five extra pounds of
[15:12] muscle, but just doing a general all overweights routine can
[15:17] maintain the muscle mass that you've got as you're over 50 and
[15:21] really slow down the decline that happens and will happen in
[15:24] all of us if we don't address it.
[15:27] Ignoring the role of mobility. Now, I've touched a little bit
[15:31] on yoga already. Yoga I think is fantastic for
[15:34] the range of movement at your joints.
[15:37] We would traditionally use the word flexibility for that, but
[15:40] what I want you to think of here is range of movement at the
[15:42] joint. So flexibility brings to mind
[15:45] being able to bend over and touch your toes.
[15:48] But rather than thinking of it like that, think of it as the
[15:51] ability to move the the movement specific exercises that you'll
[15:56] do in swim, bike and run without any kind of impingement.
[16:00] So for a lot of us, that means as we age, our shoulders are
[16:04] going to naturally get a smaller range of movement.
[16:07] And yoga's really, really good at helping us maintain that
[16:11] range of movement. And that means that we end up
[16:13] having the same reach and catch in the pool.
[16:16] We lose our range of movement at the hips, which means it's going
[16:20] to be hard for us to hold our arrow position on the bike.
[16:23] So the yoga movements that we would do there will really help
[16:26] us maintain the range of movement that we've got at the
[16:29] hips. And that means that we can hold
[16:31] our arrow position certainly for longer.
[16:33] It's all about making sure that we improve, if we possibly can,
[16:38] our range of movement at the joints so that we're giving
[16:40] ourselves the best possible chance of unlocking our swim,
[16:44] our bike and our run potential, not reducing strength and
[16:48] conditioning during peak training.
[16:51] So one of the things that's really important to do we've
[16:54] we've spent, you know, time talking about the importance of
[16:57] conditioning and strength exercises.
[16:59] One thing we need to do is we need to reduce that as we get
[17:02] closer to our peak training volume and to our most important
[17:06] races. So I'd say still have the
[17:08] conditioning work in there, but reduce the number of reps right
[17:12] down, reduce the number of sets right down, probably half or
[17:15] even quarter the duration of the S&C work that you're doing.
[17:19] So you're still doing a very small amount, but you're not
[17:21] trying to put tremendous load three muscles at this point.
[17:24] We're just trying to keep the routine of it going as we're
[17:28] peaking and training and as we're tapering for the race.
[17:31] It's really important that we have the same approach to
[17:33] strengthen conditioning as well and expecting to feel sore after
[17:39] every strength conditioning session.
[17:41] I think this is a historical memory leftover from a lot of us
[17:45] when we were younger and we would go into a weight session
[17:47] and we would lift really heavy with the aim of building muscle,
[17:51] and we would end up feeling very sore for one or two days after
[17:55] each one of the sessions. If that's you, If you were
[17:58] especially, I'm talking here, I think to males who weightlifted
[18:01] when they were younger, when they were in their late teens
[18:03] and their 20s. At that age, you're pretty much
[18:06] indestructible and you can lift tremendous amounts of weight,
[18:10] really overload yourself, get really sore and bounce back in a
[18:14] couple of days. That's our memory of strength
[18:17] work. Now, if that isn't applying to
[18:18] you, then this point won't apply to you quite as much.
[18:22] But for those of you who have got that memory of what strength
[18:25] work was like back then, I encourage you to let go of that.
[18:29] Soreness isn't the goal of the strength and conditioning work
[18:32] that we're doing to support our triathlon work.
[18:35] It should leave us feeling more resilient, not completely
[18:39] wrecked for tomorrow's bicor run.
[18:41] And it is important to kind of periodize the strength training
[18:45] across the year because I've often had people come to me and
[18:48] say, look, I'm going in the weights room, I'm doing some
[18:51] serious squats, and I'm trying to do my FTP work on the bike
[18:55] and I can't do both at the same time.
[18:57] What should I do? Because I know that it's really
[18:59] important to keep lifting weights, but I also know it's
[19:01] really important to do my FTP work.
[19:04] What I would do to this athlete is say to them, let's challenge
[19:07] the assumption. Why is it that you're going in
[19:09] and you're lifting really, really heavy leg weights at the
[19:12] same time that your bike training is going to be focusing
[19:15] on doing really heavy FTP work at the same time?
[19:18] The 2 are not compatible. You need to find the time to fit
[19:21] that in and you only need to find the time to fit in those
[19:25] heavyweight training sessions. If you're in one of those two
[19:28] subgroups I've talked about, if you're in the over 50s or if
[19:31] you're in one of the groups that's come from, you know,
[19:34] being under muscled, traditionally that's our our
[19:37] long distance runners. Even then, I think our weights
[19:40] work needs to support the swim back and run that we do rather
[19:44] than necessarily be the kind of weights work that we remember
[19:48] doing when we were in our 20s. So make sure that you're not
[19:52] doing strength conditioning to the point you feel really sore.
[19:55] Make sure you do it to the point where you feel it later on that
[19:57] day, but it's manageable and if recovered by the next day.
[20:01] OK, so to wrap this up, thank you very much for listening to
[20:04] this episode of the podcast. Here are some discount codes and
[20:07] deals for you. I've got Precision Fuel on
[20:09] hydration.com. You can use the code Oxygen Fuel
[20:11] 25 for 15% off your first electrolytes order.
[20:15] And over at teamoxygenetic.com, I think we've got the most
[20:18] comprehensive triathlon coaching programme specifically designed
[20:22] for busy age groupers. If you're looking for coaching
[20:25] for Iron Man or 70.3 Triathlon this year, please get in touch.
[20:28] There's a link in the show notes to book a membership call with
[20:31] me, see if you'd be a good fit for joining the team.
[20:34] So remember, there's links in the show notes.
[20:36] You don't have to remember them, just click through to ours or
[20:38] click through to position, fuel and hydration.
[20:41] And until next week, have a great safe training and racing
[20:44] week. I'm coach Rob Welby and you've
[20:46] been listening to the Oxygen Addict Triathlon Podcast.

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