Mobility, Stability, and Strength with Erin Carson | EP#137

Erin Carson is a strength and conditioning coach (and a top age-group triathlete herself) in Boulder, where she works with some of the best triathletes in the world, including Flora Duffy, Mirinda Carfrae, and Tim O'Donnell. She discusses how to work on mobility, stability, and strength, in order to be faster, stronger, and healthier, all leading to improved triathlon performance. 

• What a typical session in the gym (of at most 45 minutes) might look like
• Exercises and methods to improve mobility of the ankles, hips, and shoulders
• Exercises and methods to improve core stability
• Exercises and methods to improve and maintain strength
• What aspects of mobility, stability and strength can be generalised to all triathletes, and where might you need individual assessments

3:03 -

• Strength and conditioning coach in Boulder, Colorado, where she runs the ECFit Boulder training program, and also the Rally Sport health and fitness club and training facility.
• She is the S&C coach of world class triathletes like Mirinda Carfrae, Flora Duffy, and Tim O'Donnell, as well as plenty of everyday age groupers seeking excellence in their triathlon performance.
• Erin is also very handy triathlete herself, placing sixth in her age group at the 70.3 World Championships in Maloolooba, Australia.

4:54 -

• I think Mirinda Carfrae and Tim O'Donnell when they first came to me were pleasantly surprised when the conversation didn't start with adding a bunch of external load to them. But rather, the conversation with me started, how could I as a strength coach make their speed feel easier to them? And so we started that hashtag of #EasySpeed.
• The first step for me is to just recognize and understand the inherent tightness that comes from swim, bike and run training, and how we can undo some of that tightness so that the athletes get more access to what they already have.
• And then we build layers once we have this really good mobility.
  • So much of the conversation is about getting the glutes firing. Well, if the hips aren't moving, it's very difficult to get the glutes to fire, let alone to fire world class.
  • In addition to hip mobility, we also focus on shoulders and ankles.
• So when it comes to mobility we want comfort, we want speed, we want no injuries. And then once we have that, we move into stability where we want to create appropriate stiffness in the skeleton and throughout the fascial system so that the athlete can safely produce and absorb impact.
  • If there's too much lateral movement in the body, we call that energy expensive because energy is leaking out sideways. We want to be moving forward as quickly as we possibly can and as efficiently as we possibly can. Stability just takes some of those energy leaks out of the system so that the athlete can just be free in their movement and stable in their movement and be reactionary and hopefully become very elastic in the way that they accept and produce force.
  • To work on stability, we use a lot of single-leg exercises and we also use a lot of single-arm exercises. To me it's about producing different challenges for the nervous system that are consistent with the demands of the sport.
• When we're talking about building strength, we're talking about four to six repetitions of very heavy load. And let's be truthful, it takes time for us as strength coaches to teach our athletes how to lift weights. So there's a little bit of a journey into pure strength training for all of my endurance athletes and sometimes it can take up to a year. That doesn't mean they're not going to get stronger along the way. They're going to gain more access to more watts and speed in the work that their sports specific coaches have given them. 
  • The true strength we typically build in the off season. In the racing season, my goal is not to make my athletes stronger, but it's to keep them from losing strength. There have been studies done in cyclists that say that whoever stays the strongest for the longest has the best chance to win those championships at the end of the season.

13:52 -

• I think that we have to be really gentle with somebody who's racing a lot not to over overtrain them. These athletes just need to keep everything as healthy as possible and do 20 to 30 minutes of the right things in the gym.
• But for some of my pros or my elite age groupers we might do things loke add in a three-week strength period in June to work on those four to six reps of heavy load and really give that strength stimulus in mid-season that will pay off big time in September. 
• I also think that people should not be in the gym longer than 45 minutes if they're training anywhere from 9 to 20 hours a week. I think that would be too much of an ask for most of us.
• Structure of a 45-minute gym session:
  • Mobility is always first and the hip openers are always first. I might add a little bit of foam rolling and tissue care that comes even before mobility.
  • Then we work into stability as the second part of the session.
  • And then we start to add external load at the end of the session
• The first two workouts in a program will have much more mobility than e.g. workout seven and eight. They'll have less mobility and more strength.
• For many age-groupers, training 10-12 hours per week or so I would have them do what I call two and a half sessions a week. Each session is 30 to 45 minutes and I like to have the athletes if possible do their gym work directly after their hard run session of the week, and after a hard bike session, assuming there's a day between the gym sessions. The "half" session would come perhaps at the end of a long ride on Saturday or at the end of a long run on Sunday.
  • This means your easy days can actually be easy. If you do gym work on your otherwise easy days, they're not that easy anymore. 
  • If you are time-crunched and this feels out of reach, I would still say that the gym workouts are absolutely necessary, but just do 20 minutes if that's what you have time for. Cut a swim, ride or run short if need be. Doing the gym work will give you a bigger return of investment than 10 minutes of jogging or easy spinning.

24:05 - 

• There's three key areas that I believe need to be mobile.
• One - your ankles need to move well.
  • I will use wobble boards to move the ankle into dorsiflexion and plantar flexion.
  • I will take the rest of the body and stand on one foot and rotate so that the ankle can rotate down at the bottom. So we're moving one knee across, lift one knee up high, and then just drive it around side to side as you hold onto the wall. And that drives rotation down into that ankle.
  • I will actually use a lot of hands on tissue manipulation with my hands and working through the ankle just to add a little bit of heat on the inside and the outside of the ankle.
  • I'll use manual resistance and people can do that with themselves. Just holding onto your toes, push your toes down and then pull them up and just use light resistance to work mobility in the ankles.
• Next is the hips
  • This typically starts with foam rolling the hips on the front side to be proactive. We're going to foam roll the hips, the hip bones and the pubic bone on the front side of the body.
  • I'll usually use a multiplanar stepping pattern. So some lateral lunges, some transverse lunges where the hip opens up and you step to the back.
  • We'll definitely use a move that I call hip to wall. You're about a foot away from the wall. All you're going to do is just bend your knees about 30 degrees like you're skiing and just turn your body and take your hip over to the wall and back. Do that 10 times each side.
• Then we're going to work through the thoracic spine.
  • I do some open books, where you'll be laying on your side. Just put your hands together in front of your chest and open up the chest so that your other hand is on the floor behind you and you're just going to not let your hips move. Separating the lower and upper body. Move through the upper back.
  • We also will use the foam roller on the upper back to mobilise as well.
  • Sometimes we'll throw a football overhead back and forth to mobilize the upper back.

29:02 - 

• I think it begins with standing on one foot. Running is a single leg event. I typically train my athletes barefoot if they are healthy and they're not too fatigued.
• Standing on one foot and just alternating arm reaches across the midline of the body to just move the upper body but have to stabilize the lower body.
• I use a lot of horizontal loading patterns. One of my favorite exercises is to just use a long band or a cable at maybe waist height or chest height. Stand on your left foot and hold that band with your right arm. As soon as you do that, we call that an offset load. And you need to be controlling rotation through your entire system. So we will do a single leg, single arm standing row. And be quiet on the bottom and just do a rowing pattern with the opposite side. And just do a nice pull which will strengthen the upper back and help with posture.

32:27 - 

• My favorite strength exercise is any exercise that the athlete likes, and most like things that they're good at.
• If I had to only pick one exercise, it would be that hex bar (also known as trap bar) deadlift. Because there's that inherent tightness in a cyclist, I find the straight bar deadlift to be a little dangerous. But even somebody who doesn't have very good postural control can do a hex bar dead lift beautifully. 
• We also do a lot of back lunges because it mimics a single leg squat and you can load that a little bit heavier.
• We also do a lot of single leg squatting. But in the context of pure strength training, a single leg squat to me would be more about neurological control and muscle balance than it would be about pure strength.
• The Bulgarian split squat is probably one of my favorite ones as well. And all the external load that we would use for that would be dumbbells.

44:34 - 

• What is your favourite book, blog or resource related to triathlon or swimming?
  • The book "Anatomy for Runners" by Jay Dicharry 
• What's your favourite piece of gear or equipment?
  • Hex bar (trap bar) and the ViPR by Institute of Motion. It's a tube that we use it as a mobility tool, a stability tool and a strength tool
• What's a personal habit that's helped you achieve success
  • Pursuit to help people. I think the biggest thing for me is I truly live to serve. I'm a lifelong student.

Connect with host Mikael Eriksson

Hi! I'm your host Mikael,

I am a full-time triathlon coach and an ambitious age-group triathlete. My goal is podium at the Finnish national championships within the next few years.

I first started the website Scientific Triathlon in autumn 2015 as a passion project to share my learnings with a larger triathlon audience. Later on, in early 2017 I started the podcast That Triathlon Show. 

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