Personal Best: Does Weight Lifting Make A Better Athlete?

MIKE PERRY, a 31-year-old rower, trained by himself in Ann Arbor, Mich., for six years while his wife attended medical school. Now he is a member of the United States rowing team and hopes to be selected in a couple of months to compete in the Summer Olympic Games.

These days, he works with a coach and a team, and for the first time he is also going to a gym twice a week and lifting free weights for his upper and lower body, and doing a lot of core exercises, he said. His coach insists upon it. Mr. Perry, though, said he cannot tell whether weight lifting is helping his performance.

His 29-year-old teammate, Mark Flickinger, thinks weight lifting has helped him. He said it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of training by rowing on the water and weight lifting at the gym.

But, he added, after three years of working with weights — including lifting to failure, the point at which he cannot do another repetition — he has become a better athlete. The training “improved my P.B.’s by a substantial margin,” he said, referring to personal bests, his best performances.

As it turns out, the question of whether weight training matters to serious endurance athletes is a matter of debate.

Researchers who study weight lifting, or resistance training as it often is called, are adamant. It definitely helps, they say. But other experts in the field are not so sure.

Gary R. Hunter, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is a believer. He cites, for example, a recent study involving middle-distance runners. Three months of resistance training, he said, improved their leg strength and running efficiency, a measure of how much effort it took to run.

And, he said, it is not just runners who become more efficient.

“There is no doubt that an appropriate weight-training program would improve efficiency in pretty much any athlete,” Dr. Hunter said.

William J. Kraemer, a kinesiology professor at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, said lifting weights also can increase endurance and reduce the risk of injury, especially to connective tissue.

And don’t worry about becoming too muscular, Dr. Kraemer said.

“The fear of getting really big is not plausible for most people,” he said. Competitive distance runners and cyclists, who are naturally slender and light, “don’t have the muscle fiber number to get really big,” Dr. Kraemer said. “I can train them until the cows come home and they are not going to have big muscles.”

But other researchers, like Patrick O’Connor, an exercise scientist at the University of Georgia, are not convinced.

Dr. O’Connor points out that the weight-lifting studies, as is typical in exercise science, are small. And each seems to examine a different regimen, to measure outcome differently and to study different subjects — trained athletes, sedentary people, recreational athletes. It becomes almost impossible to draw conclusions, he said.

That may be one reason why different athletes end up doing different weight-lifting exercises. Chris Martin, a 31-year-old chemical engineer who has an elite racing license from USA Triathlon, the governing body for the sport, works on his entire body. But for his legs, he does exercises like leg extensions using one leg at a time, to correct any muscle imbalances or weaknesses. Mr. Martin, who lives in Lawrenceville, N.J., said he got the idea from coaches and from his own reading.

“Cycling and running are one-leg-at-a-time activities,” he explained. And one-legged exercises “recruit more muscles that help the hips.”

Steve Spence, who won a bronze medal in the marathon at the 1991 track and field world championships in Tokyo, is also a proponent of one-legged exercises. Now 45 years old and the head cross-country coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, Mr. Spence enters local 5-kilometer races and typically finishes in about 15 ½ minutes.

“I feel that every major breakthrough with my running has come after a period of strength training,” he said. He attributes this to the emphasis he puts on leg exercises, but he also believes that working his upper body and abdomen helped.

Other athletes concentrate on exercises that require them to jump or leap to develop explosive power.

And many top athletes spend lots of time in gyms lifting weights, and many trainers and coaches swear by it.

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