A sound strength training program 2-3x a week will improve your running, not take away from it, or as trainer Meghan Callaway puts it, “you don’t run to get strong, you have to be strong to run.”
Running is one of the all time great aerobic activities. It bridges the gap between strength training days, it can be performed anywhere, and often times you get a rush of endorphins during or after a run. With all the great benefits of running there can also be a downside if your strength training takes a backseat.
Proper strength training will help your body prevent injury when running. As we know, running, with it’s impact, can be taxing on the body over time; however, when trained correctly your lower body plays a helpful role in seeing that running is done efficiently. For example, one of the roles your glutes play is the absorption of shock during impact. When your glutes, quads, hamstrings and calves are weak or not firing the way they should, your hips, knees and ankles may take a lot of that impact resulting in possible injury over time. I have seen plenty of lifelong runners run into (no pun intended) knee or hip issues after years of impact on the asphalt road, but when they add proper strength training to their weekly routine, they often notice pain in the joints subside.
To ensure that my running, and that of my clients’ stays optimal, I like to implement unilateral (single leg) lower body strength work into our training programs. We don’t hop down the road on two feet when we run, we run on one leg at a time; therefore we have to strength-train the legs separately. This will ensure we don’t create any imbalances and that each leg gets its fair share of the workload. We also want to make sure that we are not over doing it in any one-movement pattern. For example, if we only did split squats, which are a knee or quad dominant exercise, and neglected single leg deadlifts, which are a hip dominant exercise, then the quads would be over trained and the hamstrings under trained. This could lead to overuse of a muscle group and injury over time. We want the muscles involved with running to be working synergistically, which means we need to train both anteriorly and posteriorly (front and back) as well as train in all three planes of motion (forward and back, side to side, rotationally).
Now, let’s get into some exercise selection examples that I like to implement with my clients.
Split Squats
Split starts are a great starting place for beginners who have never squatted before but they can also be a brutal exercise for more developed lifters. You can start with bodyweight then progress to reverse lunges, Bulgarian split squats, or adding load during the movement. Split squats will help fine-tune any imbalances that you may have by improving stability and mobility in each leg separately. This exercise primarily recruits your quad and glute muscles while also forcing your core to engage in order to maintain stability throughout the movement. The combination of training all three-muscle groups in this fashion will have a tremendous carry over to running. As a byproduct, spilt squats will also help improve your bilateral squats (two legs).
Single Leg Deadlifts
We can’t neglect the back of the legs. If split squats target the quads, then single leg deadlifts are a great way to strengthen the hamstrings. Oftentimes runners spent too much time doing traditional hamstring stretches when what they really need is to strengthen them. I have seen many people mistake weak hamstrings for tight hamstrings. The single leg deadlift will help with this problem. Hamstrings are a very common muscle group that get injured over time when running. I like to try to stay ahead of the problem by keeping the back of the legs strong and healthy. When performing the single leg deadlift it is perfectly ok to use a hand support (video below.) The hand support will assist in keeping you stable so that you can simply focus on strengthening one leg at a time without wobbling. Try progressing to a dual dumbbell single leg deadlift or a rear foot elevated variation once you get the hang of the hand supported ones.
Rotational Lunge
We move in all three planes of motion in everyday life and when we run we never know when we might need to change direction or react to our environment and surroundings. Therefore, we have to train in different planes of motion. The rotational lunge trains your body in the transverse plane (rotational). This movement is a hybrid between a knee and hip dominant movement, which will hammer your glutes big time. Training in this plane of motion is a great way to keep injury at bay. If you are only training forward and backwards and not laterally or rotationally you may run into some problems down the road (no pun intended).
I love when clients “feel” their glutes, hamstrings, adductors and quads working during squats, deadlifts or lunges, but I like it even more when they say they felt them during the run they had over the weekend. Having the right muscles firing during a run tells me that you are protecting your knees, hips and low back during the run. The carryover of the strength training to the running is where the magic happens. If you enjoy running but have knee issues, are worried about impact over time or just want to be a more efficient runner, I wouldn’t neglect doing single leg strength training. It will only assist with your running, not take away from it.
A sound strength training program 2-3x a week will improve your running, not take away from it, or as trainer Meghan Callaway puts it, “you don’t run to get strong, you have to be strong to run.”
Running is one of the all time great aerobic activities. It bridges the gap between strength training days, it can be performed anywhere, and often times you get a rush of endorphins during or after a run. With all the great benefits of running there can also be a downside if your strength training takes a backseat.
Proper strength training will help your body prevent injury when running. As we know, running, with it’s impact, can be taxing on the body over time; however, when trained correctly your lower body plays a helpful role in seeing that running is done efficiently. For example, one of the roles your glutes play is the absorption of shock during impact. When your glutes, quads, hamstrings and calves are weak or not firing the way they should, your hips, knees and ankles may take a lot of that impact resulting in possible injury over time. I have seen plenty of lifelong runners run into (no pun intended) knee or hip issues after years of impact on the asphalt road, but when they add proper strength training to their weekly routine, they often notice pain in the joints subside.
To ensure that my running, and that of my clients’ stays optimal, I like to implement unilateral (single leg) lower body strength work into our training programs. We don’t hop down the road on two feet when we run, we run on one leg at a time; therefore we have to strength-train the legs separately. This will ensure we don’t create any imbalances and that each leg gets its fair share of the workload. We also want to make sure that we are not over doing it in any one-movement pattern. For example, if we only did split squats, which are a knee or quad dominant exercise, and neglected single leg deadlifts, which are a hip dominant exercise, then the quads would be over trained and the hamstrings under trained. This could lead to overuse of a muscle group and injury over time. We want the muscles involved with running to be working synergistically, which means we need to train both anteriorly and posteriorly (front and back) as well as train in all three planes of motion (forward and back, side to side, rotationally).
Now, let’s get into some exercise selection examples that I like to implement with my clients.
Split Squats
Split starts are a great starting place for beginners who have never squatted before but they can also be a brutal exercise for more developed lifters. You can start with bodyweight then progress to reverse lunges, Bulgarian split squats, or adding load during the movement. Split squats will help fine-tune any imbalances that you may have by improving stability and mobility in each leg separately. This exercise primarily recruits your quad and glute muscles while also forcing your core to engage in order to maintain stability throughout the movement. The combination of training all three-muscle groups in this fashion will have a tremendous carry over to running. As a byproduct, spilt squats will also help improve your bilateral squats (two legs).
Single Leg Deadlifts
We can’t neglect the back of the legs. If split squats target the quads, then single leg deadlifts are a great way to strengthen the hamstrings. Oftentimes runners spent too much time doing traditional hamstring stretches when what they really need is to strengthen them. I have seen many people mistake weak hamstrings for tight hamstrings. The single leg deadlift will help with this problem. Hamstrings are a very common muscle group that get injured over time when running. I like to try to stay ahead of the problem by keeping the back of the legs strong and healthy. When performing the single leg deadlift it is perfectly ok to use a hand support (video below.) The hand support will assist in keeping you stable so that you can simply focus on strengthening one leg at a time without wobbling. Try progressing to a dual dumbbell single leg deadlift or a rear foot elevated variation once you get the hang of the hand supported ones.
Rotational Lunge
We move in all three planes of motion in everyday life and when we run we never know when we might need to change direction or react to our environment and surroundings. Therefore, we have to train in different planes of motion. The rotational lunge trains your body in the transverse plane (rotational). This movement is a hybrid between a knee and hip dominant movement, which will hammer your glutes big time. Training in this plane of motion is a great way to keep injury at bay. If you are only training forward and backwards and not laterally or rotationally you may run into some problems down the road (no pun intended).
I love when clients “feel” their glutes, hamstrings, adductors and quads working during squats, deadlifts or lunges, but I like it even more when they say they felt them during the run they had over the weekend. Having the right muscles firing during a run tells me that you are protecting your knees, hips and low back during the run. The carryover of the strength training to the running is where the magic happens. If you enjoy running but have knee issues, are worried about impact over time or just want to be a more efficient runner, I wouldn’t neglect doing single leg strength training. It will only assist with your running, not take away from it.