Not Cathe here.
The original poster questions whether there is strength gain from endurance training. The suggestion is that there is strength gain from heavy weight strength training but no strength gain from lower weight endurance training.
My impression is that each type of training increases strength, but different types of strength. Following is a prior post about this same subject.
Start of old post.
This comes from Getting Stronger, a book by Bill Pearl, at p. 53.
Bill Pearl's comments:
There are 4 elements to fitness: strength, endurance, cardiovascular endurance, and flexibility.
"Strength is the ability of a muscle to produce force. It is measured by the amount of weight you can lift in one repetition; for example the most amount of weight you can bench press or lift in the squat."
"Muscular endurance is the ability of a muscle to produce force repeatedly over a period of time. It is measured by the number of repetitions of the movement."
(here is the key statement
"IF YOU CAN DO ONLY ONE OR TWO PUSH-UPS, THEN, FOR YOU, IT'S A STRENGTH MOVEMENT. iF YOU CAN DO 35 PUSH-UPS, THEN, FOR YOU, IT'S A MUSCULAR ENDURANCE EXERCISE."
end of Bill Pearl
In the forums, people sometimes ask whether a particular Cathe work out is strength or endurance. Pearl's clarifies the need to take into account the level of the person doing the work out, not just the work out. The same Cathe work out could be either strength or endurance, depending on how strong the person exercising is and how much weight they are using, and whether they complete all of the reps.
End of prior post.
So returning to the original poster's question, here are some thoughts.
(1) if you want to be able to perform some task in a repetitive manner, then you need endurance training and not just strength training. See that great comment above about bags in the grocery store.
(2) too much of anything leads to imbalance which in turn can increase the chance of injury. so a blend of strength and endurance training provides balance for your muscles and body.
(3) muscles adjust to tasks they are given. You will hear people talking about getting to a plateau where despite consistent work outs, they can't improve. Cathe is addressing this problem when she talks sometimes about shocking your body to jump start it to a new level of fitness. What she is referring to is a new routine, some new set of exercises, to get your muscles out of a rut. So a variety of exercise helps with this problem.
(4) boredom is always a threat to our training. Everyone likes new Cathe DVDs. Why? Variety, something new, something different. So another reason some people do both strength and endurance training is variety.
(5) Any Cathe routine with weights can become more of a strength work out by adding more weight to the point where you can't do all the reps she is doing on the DVD.
Hope this helps.
Have a great Cathe day.
