Quote:
Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!
Yeah the thing about that is the study did not correlate strength with weight gain...
It depends what strength training you're doing. What blankall suggested about putting on pounds of muscle is true. It wont magically improve your running.
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Must to clear up my position, I think that moderate amounts of strength training can increase endurance, and vice versa. Extremes of strength training and endurance training aren't really compatible though, especially in natural athletes. The major reasons being recovery time, metabolic pathway optimization, actual training time required, and differing effects of mass increases.
When you get to high levels of physical training, managing recovery time becomes your biggest obstacle. You're not going to see optimal gains in either, if your running a marathon one day and doing max weight squats the next. You could even see gains in both strength and endurance, but they wouldn't be optimal.
Once again, this doesn't really apply to OP. I would recommend he does both. At a later date he may choose to focus more on one of strength or endurance, or just continue building overall fitness. I do agree that strength training can increase endurance, and vice versa, just not at extremes.