Strength Training for Runners - Part 1
If you haven't seen or read an article extolling the benefits of strength training for runners in the last few years, you’ve obviously been living under a rock! We aren’t going to shy away from that - we’re firm believers in strength training. Not only does it reduce injury risk but it improves running economy and makes you faster!
This series of blog posts will break down why WE believe strength is important for trail and ultra runners, how we structure a strength training program for our runners and how you can implement some of these concepts easily at home or at the gym.
Part 1 below will examine why strength training can help trail and ultra runners to train more and improve performance.
Back-to-back 50km long runs: “No worries.”
3 × 10 calf raises: “This training plan is unreasonable.”
How does strength training help runners?
At the risk of sounding like an AI bot, we’re going to list how strength training benefits runners, but hopefully in a more relatable way! In order of importance (from our perspective):
Stronger Tendons and Connective Tissue
Achilles tendinopathy? ITB syndrome? Shin splints? Runners knee? You’ve definitely heard of all of these, if not experienced them at some point in your running journey. What do they have in common? They’re all caused by connective tissues that have exceeded their capacity.
Your body has a certain capacity to handle training (read: stress) which is impacted by a large number of factors (including everyday life stress). When your capacity to deal with training stress is reached repeatedly, it leads to a breakdown at your weak points. This could be your achilles tendon, ITB or patella tendon. Then you can’t run and you get sad 🙁
However one of the main benefits of strength training is that it increases the capacity of these connective tissues to tolerate MORE training load. Over time strength training makes them thicker, stronger and stiffer (yes thats a good thing for a tendon) which means they can handle more repeated loading from running.
Strength training wont make you ‘injury proof’ - it just allows your body to handle more training.
Improved Running Economy
Quick primer - running economy is the amount of oxygen and energy you use to run at a given pace. We’ve all had a situation where we’re running with a friend. They’re running along and chatting like they’re not even trying, whilst you’re struggling to string two words together. Yep, that's running economy!
When you strength train, you improve the ability for your muscles and tendons to both produce and transmit force efficiently. This means you’re producing more power on each stride, your stride length is longer and that you can use less energy to maintain the same speed. Sounds pretty good right? Power and plyometric exercises are particularly helpful for this - we’ll delve into those in Part 3 of this series!
Improved Fatigue Resistance
Ultra runners listen up! When running for long durations, your muscles become progressively fatigued (duh!). And as they fatigue they become less efficient, the body starts to use less efficient movement patterns (your running gait changes) and sometimes they just give up the ghost completely and start cramping.
Strength training improves neuromuscular capacity, giving you more reserve before your muscles start to fatigue and affect your performance. How? Let me tell you!
Better brain - muscle connection - your brain learns to activate your muscles more efficiently and in smoother patterns, meaning they don’t have to work as hard (and therefore fatigue less).
Lower relative effort - as your overall strength increases, the percentage required for each running strides becomes less, meaning they fatigue less.
Changes to muscle fiber type - Strength training helps to shift muscle fibers to Type I and Type IIa which are more fatigue resistant and can sustain longer contractions.
Increased stiffness and elasticity - like I said earlier, stiffness is good (insert lame joke here)! It improves their ability to store and return energy, thereby reducing the energy cost of each running stride.
Better uphill AND downhill performance
This ones an easy one! Running uphill requires more power from the muscles, particularly the calves, glutes and quads. By strength training you’ll improve your uphill performance just by making these major muscles groups stronger and more powerful!
Downhill running is a little more complicated. Running downhill involves eccentric loading - this means the muscles are producing force while they are lengthening. Particularly the quad muscles - they are firing just as you impact the ground (this is why you get bad DOMs after a big downhill session or run).
Similar to what we spoke about in point 1 - strength training increases the overall capacity of the muscles - this will allow your quads and calves to handle more & faster downhills before they break down enough that it impacts your performance. Eccentric exercises especially will help with this as they mimic those eccentric loads and make the muscles more resilient.
Summary
Its pretty clear that strength training is going help almost any runner. Whether its reducing your injury risk by increasing your capacity to handle training stress, making you faster or allowing you to run further into your ultra you really should be jumping on the bandwagon!
In Part 2 we’ll delve deeper into how to structure a strength program for runners and give some key exercises that give you bang for buck. As always, reach out if you want to talk to one of our coaches about how to improve your strength training!
Runner: “Do I really need strength training?”
Coach: “No. You can just keep getting injured the old-fashioned way.”
Comments