Understanding the Interference Effect in Trained Athletes

This chapter examines the interference effect in concurrent training as athletes progress in their training. It highlights the adaptive molecular responses in muscles and emphasizes the importance of long-term studies to fully understand these effects in trained individuals.

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Hello and welcome to The Progress Theory where we discuss how to implement scientific principles to optimise human performance. I’m Dr Phil Price and on today’s episode we have Dr Matt Lee, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Health and Sport, at Victoria University in Melbourne.

It was originally thought that you couldn't develop strength and endurance simultaneously due to something called the interference effect. Certain molecular, hormonal and neuromuscular adaptations occur which may limit your strength training progress if you also do a large amount of endurance work, for example. However, it’s not as simple as that, and there are many factors, like training intensity and recovery time between sessions, which we can manipulate to minimise the interference effect. Dr Matt Lee specialises in concurrent training research and in this episode we discuss how the interference effect was discovered, what training factors can blunt adaptations, and what you can do to train strength and endurance simultaneously.

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As always, follow The Progress Theory on Instagram and Youtube, head to our website theprogresstheory.com, and check out all of our other episodes. So here is, Dr Matt Lee ...

In this episode, we discuss:

1:30 - Introduction
9:18 - What is concurrent training and the interference effect? The work of Robert Hickson
15:32 - The interference effect on different strength parameters
19:44 - Neuromuscular and molecular effects
27:57 - How the research supports the amazing feats of hybrid training seen today
33:54 - The effect of previous training on the interference effect
42:34 - Effect of volume and frequency on the interference effect
49:32 - minimum dose to minimise the interference effect

Final Thoughts

Thank you to Matt for coming onto The Progress Theory and talking about his research on concurrent training and the interference effect. It was awesome to get an understanding around where the misconceptions of the interference effect have come from and dive into the literature to show that this effect may not be as prominent as history tells us.

I just wanted to provide some final thoughts on key areas which really stood out to me.

Firstly, Matt’s discussion around the molecular responses to specific training and our training history really made me think. If the molecular response to training decreases as we become more familiar with that training, surely training regularly at both strength and endurance disciplines would reduce the molecular responses and reduce the severity of the interference effect? Does this mean that with an appropriate hybrid training programme the interference effect, if there is one, should decrease over time?

And secondly, Matt highlighted that a training frequency of 3 sessions a week is enough to create improvement but doesn’t increase the volume to such an extent that it could increase the chance of the interference effect? So, as an example, If we trained strength 3 times a week and endurance 3 times a week, all on separate days, the interference effect should barely exist. You’re training enough and getting sufficient rest in between sessions for the interference effect to not affect training at all.

Anyways I hope you enjoyed this episode and it allowed you to start thinking about your hybrid programming. If you want further information on this topic I definitely recommend checking out Matt’s research, we’ve created a link for it in the show notes. If you enjoyed the show It would be awesome if you could leave us a review and share this episode on your insta story. Feed that algorithm to help the show grow. We’ll see you in the next one.