the Judo of strength training

Good advice on building strength for endurance activities is a tough thing to find, especially on the internet. I spent an hour at the gym today with a trainer - an experience that I thought I would find miserable - but it turned out to be great. Here's why - weight training with machines can feel satisfying because its easy and easily quantified. Big weight times some number of reps = huge! Except that our muscles work in conjunction with other muscles and machines can isolate one muscle group from another. Bad knees, for example, can be caused by having huge quads and weak hamstrings and glutes. So, rather than using weight machines, the trainer, who was a former long distance swimmer (and thus knew much about building endurance), came up with a lot of simple things to stress an entire muscle group using just my own weight against it. I'd call this a plyometric exercise, but I think that relies a little more on explosive movements. This was just using my own weight against me, thus being essentially like judo.

The end result is that after only a short time, my legs were shredded. I tend to think my legs are relatively strong, so I was really impressed. Fortunately, I wrote down al the exercises immediately afterwards so I don't have to pay for another training session.