Lets distill down what is involve in an OCR. In the end it is a race and that involves running, but there are the obstacles as well which involve strength. So there is no one thing that you can truly focus on to be good or even great at OCR.
When I started running I knew that I had to ease into it. I had an ankle injury many years ago while playing football. So I started small and short distance with breaks in between. I knew that if I did to much to fast I would cause me pain and potential injury. So I designed a way to run with breaks in between. In order to train like a race I would need to throw some strength training into my running so that my body knows how to adapt to the sudden change. I feel that this is what caused me to be so successful in my most recent race.
So as a start I would go only a half mile out and back for a total of a mile. This was a good start as around my house has a lot of hills and this route had a large downhill, but also I would have to go back up it to get home. Running hills is basically a must for OCR training. I started to gradually add miles to my runs like many of the half marathon training schedules show. Adding a mile every week so that your runs gradually got longer and longer. What I did differently was add in what I called rotations in between my miles. So that I would run a mile stop and do strength exercises before running a second mile. This rotation continued until I was up to five miles and at that point I started to add miles between stopping. The reason was because the longer OCR events had sometimes a mile or two between obstacle stops. So my rotations stayed right around three strength rotations, but instead I would do two miles before stopping.
As my runs got longer I would continue to do more miles between stops. In the end for my 13.3 mile training run I stopped and did a strength rotation every three miles. So I ended up doing three rotations in between the running.
In the end I would run no more then three days a week. Even that was only when I was trying to make sure I was in enough running shape to tackle a half marathon distance OCR.
So now that I have talked about the running part lets talk about the strength training part of the race. Yes it is a race and running is important, but on most OCR companies failing an obstacle is punished in some way shape and form. That punishment can be worse then the rest of the race combined.
So what kind of things should you train to do OCR? Everything is really needed. The best way to start is at least body weight exercises.
Push ups with knees up or down will start building your push strength.
Crunches help your core strength which will help support your back when carrying heavy objects.
Burpees are a great full body workout that is required if you do Spartan OCR (its the punishment).
High Knees works your calves and hip flexors in order to aid in jumping.
Squats works your quads and gluts to also aid in jumping and the ability to move heavy things.
Lunges to work your stabilizing muscles in order to keep your legs healthy with all the running.
These are just a few of the exercises that can aid in an OCR race. No if you noticed I didn't have any of the traditional lifting exercises above. That is because these were the exercises that I would do in the middle of my runs.
Also during my runs every other week I would add either a bucket carry or a sandbag carry to my runs. These were also planned to aid in my general strength and cardio conditioning to be prepared for the races.
Then I strongly believe that weighted exercises are very important to improve strength beyond body weight and also to improve grip strength. Weighted exercises need to target muscle groups that you specially don't work with your body weight exercises. Area's like biceps, triceps, back muscles and forearm muscles.
Bicep Arm Curls work the biceps which aid in pull strength.
Triceps behind the head raises that helps with your push strength like pushing yourself over a wall once you grabbed it.
Pull ups or Lat Pulls to work the back to aid in pulling yourself up to a bar or wall.
Dead Hangs to help grip strength so that you can hang from objects for long periods of time.
These are just a few of the exercises that I do in my workouts. I do strength exercises at least twice a week.
In the end during the "off" season of my OCR training I did a rotation where I would run three days a week and lift two days a week. Then the next week I would switch it around and lift three days and run only two. I felt like this was great as it would keep my body guessing and caused it to have to adapt to changes faster. I saw a great improvement from my last 2016 race two my first 2017 race.
Of course I have recently seen a Stadium Race that I have signed up for in November and the obstacles look very different. I am going to come up with a different training plan for this other type of race.
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