Strength training for running fitness

I’ll steal an adage right off the front page of The Natural Running Center’s website, a great resource for me that I visit whenever I can. “You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe” what does this mean? You could take it a number of ways, but I’ll use it to launch an argument for strength training when honestly, all you really wanted to do was run. I’ll say this, that real horsepower comes from whole body training for what you want to achieve. If what you want to achieve is a lifelong pattern of injury free running, then you have to balance the body in order to fully support the legs that carry you down the road. Core muscles, supporting muscles, areas that are often in imbalance or asymmetry must be tuned so that your movement pattern is at its best and you can support what you’re going to pull off. That’s where I am going with the cannon from a canoe analogy.

We look in the mirror and typically see symmetry and that looks good enough, right? Tim Noakes gives us a rundown on the most frequent running injuries from his analysis of the research. (Noakes p 788)

knee – 19% to 44% of folks see this one
tibia and fibular bone strain – 15% to 18% of folks see this one
Achilles tendinosis – 5% to 11% of folks see this one
plantar fasciitis – 5% to 14% of folks see this one
stress fractures – 5% to 6% of folks see this one
muscle injuries – 5% to 6% of folks see this one

Add up his highest percentages and you get to 99%, while the number gets bantered around all the time that 60-80% of all runners in this country are injured annually. So 19% of us at any one time are doing OK. Seriously though, the number of injuries, from major to minor, is staggering and many of these can be traced back to asymmetry and imbalance. You have to know what is under the hood so to speak and work to align, “pre-habilitate” and strengthen what is yours to best fire off your best running. 

Dr. Tim Noakes is one of the leading authorities on all things running and his fourth edition of The Lore of Running offers several interesting arguments for strength training. He argues that “there is clear evidence to suggest that acute muscle injuries can be prevented by strengthening muscles and eliminating imbalances between opposing muscles (Garrett et al. 1987; Safran et al. 1989)” (Noakes, p 783) He cites a study where the Nebraska football team was first assessed for imbalances with specific muscle testing and then given strengthening programs according to these results. In this study hamstring tears fell from 8% to 1%, and what is better is that recurrence of injury fell from 32% to 1%. (Heiser et al. 1984 – Noakes p. 783)

Noakes also teases out a key point from a 1979 study by Costill when he says that “the more runners train, the less their ability to jump” (Noakes, p 783) or put another way, we have so much specificity of movement at the same intensity – that some muscles actually weaken and both our speed and fast twitch muscle power is lost. Bad deal for me, come race time when I want to pick it up a notch. Keeping this unseen architecture in shape is one more argument for mixing it up a bit and staying strong enough to hold form and have some speed as well.

The text Run Less, Run Faster points to two studies about running and weight training. The first shows that 6 weeks of strength training with proper techniques was sufficient to reduce or correct chronic injury or activity related pain such as runner’s knee. I have anecdotally seen this work wonders with shin splints and low back pain as well. The second study showed that with 10 weeks of strength training the participants 10k times improved 2-3 percent. To put that in context, a 3% increase might mean that my winning Forrest Festival race time could be 1:32:00 faster – putting me in 1^st or 2^nd place instead of third. It also means that I would run with greater economy, and would carry that economy into my later years. Keeping me more injury free and reducing severity of injury when it may occur. I consider this a great return on investment for two or three hours a week.

Regardless of your chosen route to hypertrophy – research regularly suggests that performance increases follow weight training. One study cited on BenGreenfieldfitness.com suggests that the single greatest contributor to running economy as a runner ages is their maintenance of muscle mass, which typically declines as we age. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21982960) Another article in Ultrarunner magazine pointed to a study showing that folks who weight trained for a period in their training saw speed increases of 5-15%.

So we have talked a bit about why to do it, let’s look at how to do it. Everybody has a different approach to strength training and sometimes it just depends on how excited they get about iron and the gym. Most runners I know find the gym a really hard sell, and they want to run. Many folks think that a gym workout will make them big like a Hollywood action hero and have an aversion to that also. I feel that a lean runner is less weight to carry around so I do not want to see anyone too muscle bound and I want an injury free runner who is compliant with the protocol. The strength program therefore, must be targeted, and not too much time away from running, but should complement healthy running.  There are two ways to go about this strength thing for runners. First, and likely the best, is to have you assessed by a professional to look at imbalance and asymmetry before problems begin. Functional strength and flexibility assessment is something that a Physical Therapist would do for you and determine where imbalances lie and then they prescribe flexibility for where you need loosening and strength exercises for where you need tightening. Folks like Danny Dryer, Mark Cucuzzella, and Jay Dicharry have tried to make this very easy for us in generously designing, ingenious assessment drills or exercises for runners. Often the activity points to an area that needs polishing and then the activity becomes the exercise or drill to practice and improve us. Sounds easy, so there must be a catch – I think there is in that many of these activities require another set of eyes or a mirror to keep you on track and some may require movement patterns that are very different for you. They are still one of the best tools out there in the list of resources. Those who are less motivated to do this one on their own should use a Physical therapist and attain a prescribed series of drills as a great starting point.

Another route is to choose a series of exercises from one of many good authorities on running specific strength training and bust out the moves for 8 weeks using good form and building your base. See where that takes you; a new set of ten exercises that build areas you have not gotten to yet, drills you like better from another author, or now being strong enough to hold up better to one of the above mentioned assessments. I like the simple list of “plug and play exercises that are good for runners” approach also and I’ll tell you why I think this second best option is good enough. Our culture is one of list makers, we already know how to do this – grab 10 -12 good activities for runners and go do ‘em. Most importantly though, while I would not want you to choose strength drills haphazardly, I think it is so important to strength train that I’d rather give you a list of drills to do than have you miss the opportunity. Often a person may be someone who is uneasy, inexperienced or unable to be assessed and as a result, they choose to do no strength training. This may even be a person who down the road falls into one of the injury percentiles Tim Noakes identifies and then, once injured they feel defeated, and suspect that they were not cut out for running. This is simply untrue. We can all ambulate at some speed, for as far as we’d care to go and I fundamentally believe this idea. I also know that we have developed differently than our ancestors of just a generation or two ago related to both our culture and lifestyles. Being less active and less reliant on our bodies - or developing very specialized movement patterns (who of us in America can’t type these days) sometimes comes at the detriment of other parts of our whole. Running uses more of the whole than we realize and thus we have to be strong and pretty well rounded to pull off our best performance without strain or mishap.

Danny Abshire is a strong proponent of whole body strength and emphasizes that running in not enough for the rigors of our sport in saying, “There is a false notion that running is a simple sport and that, since you are always tuning up your legs muscles, you really don’t need to do ancillary training.” (Natural Running, 121)  but Abshire goes on to point out that the better conditioned our core muscles are, as well as hip flexors, and psoas muscles, the better our posture and economy. Better posture allows us to deflect impact from joint structures and better execute our motions with less stress, less ground impact force. Better economy allows us to run faster, longer, with less wattage output. Abshire does not use weights but rather body weight as the resistance for a number of what I commonly call “floor exercises” because all you need is an open space to do most of them. The net result is the same however in that you get stronger, hypertrophy happens on some level, and thus your running feels easier and you are less prone to injury.

Tim Noakes has a different prescription in his text that combines weights and floor exercises to specifically maintain strength in abductor and adductor muscles as well as glute medius muscles and others associated with the iliotibial (IT) band for pelvic stability. Tom Holland’s book The Marathon Method is full of weight lifting routines in beginner, intermediate and advance formulas as well, all sound advice and some routines incorporate plyometrics, moves that increase fast twitch muscle power and are good for bursts of speed. An example of a plyometrics move would be jumping into and off of a low box. Remember the earlier idea that runner who logs a lot of miles, can no longer jump.

Regardless of which program you choose a set of exercise for you will be looking to build upon what we seldom use and what will support your core running posture. Video from experts like Danny Dryer and Mark Cucuzzella, show you what good posture looks like and when you try these drills yourself you can see how important this core strength is to enabling you to move at your best. Further you may find that your everyday wellness is improved by this newly reinforced posture.  

If you are going to choose a sampling of strength exercises off of an experts “menu” of solid suggestions one idea is to strengthen without added bulk and this works well in fitting into the idea that you do not necessarily want to spend all day at the gym either. In an Outside Online article by Nick Heil in the December 2008 issue he discusses Mark Twight’s philosophy of building athletes for their chosen sports, something that Twight has established some notoriety for in the past several years. Heil reports in his article that, “Physiologists also discovered that only certain types of lifting make muscles grow larger specifically, doing eight to 15 reps in (several) sets that end in complete exhaustion. In contrast, slightly modified approaches, like fewer reps with heavier weights, build stronger muscles without making them bigger (which is) particularly appealing to endurance athletes, for whom increased size is considered a liability.” (Heil, 2008, Outside)

Heil goes on to further explain where this concept comes from. He writes “In 1996, Dr. Tabata discovered that short-duration, high-intensity training enhances anaerobic capacity while simultaneously increasing aerobic endurance. This allows you to shed more fat than with moderate-intensity aerobic exercise, and it also produces a metabolic afterburn as the body works to repair itself. Circuits like those we did at Gym Jones are sometimes referred to in the weight-lifting community simply as "Tabatas."” (Heil, 2008, Outside)

Ross Enamait summarizes this concept reasonably well on his website by explaining that in Dr. Tabata’s study, six weeks of training in these conditioned athletes saw significant increases in anaerobic capacity and VO2 max (oxygen carrying capacity) for the athletes. To produce changes in VO2 max, in conditioned athletes is pretty exceptional stuff, as every person has a finite limit to this metric and it often takes years to increase capacity under prior protocols. But intensity is the key; Tabata used short intervals (20 second bursts, with 10 seconds of rest, repeated 8 times, equaling four minutes total). This translates to more weight, fewer repetitions, and moving through the workout faster. The short rest interval is a key to success. This has another commonality with running dating back to the famous coach Arthur Lydiard. Lydiard’s athletes did so well against the competition in part because Lydiard eschewed interval training and sought to shorten the rest interval for his athletes. Today track coaches who use repeats and ladders for their athletes make the workouts tougher by first shortening the rest interval to raise intensity.  

Here are some less technical pointers for getting you into the gym and getting you to begin enjoying it rather than dreading it. Come up with a routine you can live with; say for example 10 or so exercises, this should take you less than an hour of lifting, and only do this 2-3 days a week maximum. Avoid strength training when you are getting ready to compete or you are doing really difficult running workouts.

Find some inspiring music because this will not be easy for most folks and if we are talking quality instead of quantity, then you’ll need to get in the zone, focus, and bust it out.

Work large muscle groups and then proceed to small muscle groups, staying with a particular order for your routine. In the same way that it would not be best to run before lifting, because many smaller “supportive cast” type muscles are used for running and may be too tired afterwards to safely support the big muscles while lifting weights. When lifting you should strive to work the big groups first and then the accessory muscles last. Work the body globally, including legs and look at a few drills that emphasize range of motion rather than isolating a particular muscle. This is again a trick that is not only holistic in nature but gives you a bigger bang for the buck in terms of both time invested and energy spent. Pushups seem so passé but they work because these principles apply; full range of motion for a group of muscles makes a more useable and globally fit body. Box jumps, walking lunges, and planks are several other examples that fit into this type of new school routine. The drills and exercises I’ve put on the list seek to sample the experts and still keep these concepts in mind.

When using these drills on the list, work with small number of repetitions (reps) and high load for a fast, intense workout without too much muscle bulk

The text Run Less, Run Faster states that the average adult loses half a pound of muscle mass annually as they age, once past the age of twenty. If you understand that muscle mass is associated with a higher metabolic rate you realize that you not only can use more fuel but do so more efficiently if you have this muscle mass on board, rather than leave it in your twenties. As endurance athletes we want to be the high metabolism animal that can burn fats as fuel – enabling us to have hours of fuel on hand at any moment.

“Ok! You’ve convinced me to lift or get stronger, somehow, so give me a list to start with so I don’t have to go get assessed!” Here is your list to get started and there are a ton of new drills you can add and subtract from this as you go.

Core strength workout

2 times weekly, 3 is OK

exercise

sets

reps

hold for

find it

Standing wall slide

one

pg 138

Holland

Single leg squat

one

pg 188

Pierce

walking lunge

one

Pg 190

Pierce

calf raises

one

pg 134

Holland

toe raises

one

pg 139

Holland

push up

one

pg 122

Holland

Dumbbell row

one

pg 123

Holland

Supine bridge

one

Pg 127

Abshire

oblique plank

one

pg 127

Abshire

plank

one

pg 130

Holland

Run in place

one

Pg 131

Abshire

Remember: use enough weight that the last few reps are challenging but you maintain form

every strength session makes your running miles more fluid and easy

lean muscle mass deflects impact from joint structures which are less regenerative

an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure

If you have the gumption to really learn more about improving your supporting musculature related to running, a great video of both assessment and drills was just completed by the Natural Running Center and you can view it here. http://naturalrunningcenter.com/2012/01/19/mobility-stability-video-healthier-natural-running/

"The risk of failure, social or physical, is paramount, because failure and dissatisfaction are the parents of thought," he said. "Success and fulfillment do not inspire or require introspection." Mark Twight