The Upper Body Work Your Training Plan Left Out...

And Why Your Race Times Are Paying for It

What happens at mile 20 facing the wall…

At mile 20, at the famous all, the runner whose form holds isn’t more aerobically fit than the one falling apart next to them. They trained something their fellow runner’s plan never mentioned.

You’ve seen it, maybe from the outside, maybe in the mirror after your own race photos came back. Shoulders creeping up toward the ears. Head drifting forward like it’s trying to reach the finish line before the rest of the body does. Chest caving in just enough that every breath costs a little more than it should.

Nobody collapses all at once. It’s slow, and it usually starts somewhere past the two-thirds mark of whatever you’re racing, whether that’s mile 18 of a marathon, hour two of a long bike ride or the run leg of a half Ironman after the swim and bike have already taken their cut.

Everybody goes for the same goal...runners and cyclists spend months building the engine: VO2 max, FTP, long run mileage, threshold pace. Pull up almost any 12-week marathon plan and count the upper body sessions and there usually aren’t any...ok, there’s some lower body work.

The plan trains what produces the power and ignores what decides whether you can still access it four hours in.

Most running and cycling programs don’t cover it either, at least explicitly...endurance sport has drawn a hard line around what counts as “training,” and anything above the hips gets filed under optional.

If you’re building your first triathlon or marathon plan from scratch, this is the gap nobody flags, because on paper the program looks complete. Miles logged, intervals hit, long runs getting longer. The upper back never comes up for example...

I present to you…the ab-wheel

Now, I didn’t learn this from a textbook itself, I learned it from the one piece of equipment in my closet that gets zero respect and does more work than almost anything else I own: the ab wheel, the devil’s wheel as some people call it...it’s Fifteen bucks on Amazon, ugly little thing, and once a week I get on the floor with it.

Thirty reps, rest, move to something else, usually some squats or lunges; come back, another thirty! By the time I’m done I’m somewhere around 120 to 150 reps total. The next morning, getting out of bed hurts like hell, a simple cough or sneeze hurts...every muscle from ribs to hips is still “burning” in a way...

What that exercise trains isn’t “abs” in the mirror-muscle sense. It’s the ability to resist the spine folding under load, exactly what gives out late in a swim, three hours into a bike leg, or in the last 10K of a run. It’s a quiet exercise.

Nobody’s impressed watching someone roll a wheel out and back on a gym floor, but it’s the one piece of work that shows up across all three disciplines of a triathlon, because a trunk that can’t stabilize leaks power everywhere: your catch in the water, your position on the aerobars, your stride when your legs are still willing but your torso has stopped cooperating.

I found a small study…

There’s a small, honest study that backs up what those ab wheel sessions taught me the hard way. Researchers at the German Sport University Cologne put seven well-trained distance runners through a control day and a day of trunk-fatiguing circuit work, then measured running economy on a treadmill right after.

Running economy dropped by up to 1.5 mL/min/kg compared to control, a moderate-to-large effect. Honest part: with only seven runners, it didn’t reach statistical significance, and the researchers call it a pilot trial, not a verdict.

But the direction matches what every fatigued endurance athlete already knows in their body. When the trunk goes, the engine gets less efficient before the legs admit they’ve slowed down.

So the ab wheel is one tool I use for myself, I highly recommend it, but it is not the whole plan. You need three patterns, trained together, which cover what most endurance programs skip entirely.

Include these exercises once a week!

Horizontal pulls. Rows, any variation, build the mid-back strength that keeps you upright when everything in your body wants to round forward. Two or three sets of 8 to 12, heavy enough that the last couple reps are honest work. This is what keeps a marathoner’s chest open at mile 22 instead of collapsed into a defensive crouch.

Scapular control. Face pulls and Y-T-W raises off an incline bench train the small muscles around the shoulder blade that keep your shoulders from rolling forward and caving your chest in. Light weight, high reps, 12 to 15 per position. On a bike, this is the difference between holding an aero position for three hours and slowly folding out of it.

Anti-flexion core work. The ab wheel is mine, I advocate for this one! But, loaded carries, farmer’s or suitcase style, do the same job if a wheel isn’t your thing. Either way you’re training the trunk to hold its shape under load instead of caving, which is the pattern underneath the postural collapse in every other sport on this list.

One session, once a week, 30 minutes, covering all three. This isn’t bodybuilding, it’s just structural maintenance for an engine that has to hold its shape for hours, not minutes. If your first triathlon or marathon plan has zero upper body work in it, that’s not an oversight you can skip, it’s the part of the race nobody trained you for.

Your legs carry you to the finish line. Your upper back decides what shape you’re in when you get there. Next time you’re out on a long run or a long ride, notice the exact moment your shoulders start to drift. That’s the moment this work is for.

Not sure where your training actually stands right now? I put together a free “Transformation Readiness Profile?” Self-Assessment, a short set of honest questions that will tell you more about your readiness than most articles will.

Take the Self-Assessment → Transformation Readiness Profile

Already know you’re ready to build this into a real program? Reply to this email and I’ll tell you how coaching works.

Sources

1. Donath, L. et al. (2019). Trunk and Upper Body Fatigue Adversely Affect Running Economy: A Three-Armed Randomized Controlled Crossover Pilot Trial. Sports, 7(8), 195. https://doi.org/10.3390/sports7080195