Do strength athletes tend to avoid endurance training?

Hello, dear doctors!

I am currently writing coursework about the interference effect when combining strength and endurance training. However, I have a problem explaining why this topic is relevant and needs to be addressed and studied more in my paper.

To be more precise, I am required to provide scientific evidence that proves that strength athletes do tend to avoid endurance training in fear that this will impact their strength performance and muscle gain, but I could not find any sources that prove it, apart from Rip’s article “Why you should not be running” and other fitness magazines articles, which are not really scientific :smile:

I assume you have read a lot of literature while preparing for your conditioning podcasts, so maybe you were able to come across some good sources, that prove that gymgoers avoid cardio and you would be kind enough to share it with me?

Thanks!

M,

Not sure I saw anything specifically studying barbell sport athletes’ conditioning practices relative to current guidelines. In our metabolic syndrome podcast, we discuss low fitness levels in strength/power athletes presumably due to insufficient conditioning in the context of obesity. Lots of citations there, though it’s not specifically what you’re looking for.

If I was trying to make the argument that strength/power athletes “fear” doing conditioning, I would start with Hickson’s classic paper from 1980 describing the interference effect. Subsequently, discussions of the interference effect and how it’s translated into the conventional wisdom regarding strength training would be the direction I’d take, albeit tenuous. See part 2 of our cardio series podcast on this. The citations are linked in the show notes.

Hope that helps.

-Jordan

Okay, thanks for the response.

Yes, I couldn’t find it either. But that would be a cool study to conduct!

Nice, I think Hickson’s paper could be a good example of where “the fear of cardio” might have originated from!

I will definitely check the citations on the 2 podcasts mentioned by you.

Thanks again,

Max