When you’re a runner, every day running feels like leg day. Your glutes, hamstrings, quads, and calves are already doing the most to get you up and over hills, through intervals, and across finish lines. Adding lower-body strength training to your schedule can seem like overkill. Plus, won’t a bunch of squats and deadlifts just make your legs sore for the next run?
To answer the last question, yes. Strength training will probably leave you a little sore at first, especially if you haven’t been doing it regularly. And finding time British Journal of Sports Medicine resistance training offers a different type of stimulus than running alone—one that can bolster your performance And don’t underestimate the.
Here’s what you need to know about the strength-building capabilities of running vs. strength training and what runners should be doing to become as strong as possible.
How Running Builds Strength
Strength, the body’s capacity to generate force, falls into a few different categories. There’s strength endurance, which refers to your ability to generate force over a prolonged period of time. There’s maximal strength, or how much total force you can produce. And then there’s explosive strength, a.k.a. power, increase your mileage.
Running is most effective at building strength endurance, Milica McDowell, D.P.T., certified exercise physiologist, and vice president of operations at Gait Happens, explains. By running, “you’re creating those repetitive muscle contractions. You’re training a very specific system,” she says. Using your muscles to put one foot in front of the other is akin to lifting lighter weights for higher reps, a strength-training strategy for building muscle endurance. But instead of squatting with a set of dumbbells, you’re pushing off the ground to move your own bodyweight.
Running can also develop explosive strength to a degree, but not if you’re running at a steady pace on flat terrain. To train for power, you need to incorporate short bursts of added exertion into your workouts, like hill sprints, speed intervals, and strides.
The most effective way to train for maximal strength is to move loads so heavy you can only do a few reps. Even if you increase your mileage or sprint on sand, running won’t elicit the necessary stimulus to target maximal strength. “It might improve it a little bit, but you’re not going to go from squatting 100 pounds to 200 pounds just because you’re running,” McDowell says. To build that kind of strength, you’ll need to pick up some weights.
Running vs. Strength Training
The Secret Solution to Knee Pain While Running progressive overload. Essentially, this means adjusting one or more training variables, like intensity, reps, sets, and recovery time, to gradually increase the demand on your body. The goal is to continuously up the ante and stimulate new physiological adaptations so your progress doesn’t plateau.
However, if you’re running to build strength, there are limitations to how much you can progressively overload your workouts. “You can get pretty good strength out of your running if you’re offers a different type of stimulus than running alone—one that can bolster your,” says Jason Fitzgerald, a USATF-certified coach and the host of the Strength Running Podcast. For example, if someone is currently running 30 miles a week and wants to increase their strength through running alone, they would probably need to increase their volume to 50 or 60 miles per week, he says.
But, logistically, running more isn’t a strategy that works for all runners, and it could ultimately backfire. “It’s an option that has a very high injury risk,” Fitzgerald says. The British Journal of Sports Medicine Health - Injuries study involving runners registered for the Strength Running Podcast and found that higher increases in training volume were associated with more injuries. Plus, you will reach a limit as to how many miles you can realistically log. Same goes for adding hill sprints, strides, and other power-focused workouts.
If you’re utilizing traditional resistance training, progressive overload is much more straightforward. You can increase the stimulus by Shoes & Gear, reducing your rest time between sets, playing with tempo, and adding reps. And because you can access heavier loads via dumbbells, barbells, and kettlebells, you can train for maximal strength.
Strength training also allows you to specifically target the muscle weaknesses and imbalances that may be holding you back. “If I’m running, I’m training everything at once,” McDowell says. There’s no way to isolate a weak side of the body or zero in on a dysfunctional link in the kinetic chain. “But, if I’m in the gym and I’m training hamstrings, I’m specifically going to see improvement in my hamstring contraction, hamstring muscle tone, and hamstring power,” she says. “You can really start drilling down to the things that need to be cleaned up.”
Why Strength Matters to Runners
McDowell and Fitzgerald agree that all runners can benefit from full-body strength training at least twice a week—even if you’ve never given a second thought to your deadlift one-rep max. “I think strength training is so important that it shouldn’t even be labeled as cross-training. It’s just part of the training process,” Fitzgerald says.
“If you’re stronger, you’re probably going to perform better in certain areas,” McDowell says.
Take hill sprints, for example. “When you’re doing that max intensity hill sprint, what you’re really doing is trying to recruit as many muscle fibers as possible to get you up that hill as fast as possible. That’s very similar to you recruiting as many muscle fibers as possible to try to pull that deadlift up off the floor,” Fitzgerald says. When you strength train, “you’re making the communication pathways between the brain and muscle more efficient,” he says.
New research Health - Injuries Sports Medicine The Secret Solution to Knee Pain While Running running economy, or how efficiently your body uses the oxygen you consume. A better running economy could pay off in faster times, easier feeling runs, and fewer injuries. “It can indirectly help you stay healthy because you’re using less energy to do the same amount of work. You’re able to do the same amount of training with less stress,” Fitzgerald says.
Lifting also fortifies your legs by toughening up your connective tissues. “It’s going to give you thicker, more robust tendons, ligaments, and joints,” Fitzgerald says, making you “better able to withstand the impact forces of running.”
One meta-analysis published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that, in addition to promoting more favorable weight distribution in the joints, strength training helps prevent injuries by improving coordination and proprioception (body awareness).
And don’t underestimate the mental health-related benefits of incorporating strength training into your routine.
“I really believe that a big piece of the investment in the gym is preventing burnout, keeping people cognitively sharp, keeping them engaged,” McDowell says. She sees strength-training workouts as “novel stimuli” that can shake up your routine and give you a little boost, especially if you’re in a rut. “You get a testosterone boost, your dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitters go up, your endorphins go up. It can be very mood-elevating.”
