But maybe you’re the complete opposite and you love going to the gym but have found that no matter how much strength work you do, you still get those niggles and quite simply, you’re not getting any faster. 

As a runner, if you do a quick search on the Internet for reducing your injury risk and/or improving your performance, you’ll discover very quickly that “getting stronger” is the top tip from almost anyone. And I’ve got to agree with all of them: getting stronger is one of the outputs we need to develop to keep us running for longer and working towards our running goals.

Strength Is An Output

You see, strength is an output from your system. It’s the result of a whole bunch of stuff coming together and allowing your muscle fibres to contract to whatever level is needed to achieve the task. That task might be lifting a kettlebell or handling the forces of running. In all cases though, one huge element in strength is stabilising a joint as you lift, move and run. In fact, I would even argue that in our day to day lives outside of an experimental lab, joint stabilisation is one of the main things our expression of strength is doing.

They all start with trying to activate the muscles themselves. You’re given squats, lunges, deadlifts, landmine lifts, single leg exercises and much more. This can work for some people, but if the rest of your system won’t allow your muscles to activate and contract well, at best doing these exercises will just take a very long time to get any results. More often than not though, they simply won’t help you get any closer to your running goals at all.

You Are Already Superhuman!

You already have so much strength within your muscles already. Your strength, or “expression of strength” as I prefer to call it, is controlled by your brain. It’s not just to do with muscle size. You have neural inhibitors that actually block and reduce the amount of strength you can use. This is primarily a protection mechanism so you don’t injure yourself if the rest of your body and system can’t handle the forces you are generating.

A good example of this is when you have a limited quality of movement around a joint. If you can’t move well and control a joint, your brain will not allow you to exert or try to handle large forces across that joint. In other words, your ability to generate strength around that joint will be limited. This can have a cascading effect throughout the whole kinetic chain – all the other joints in your body, even if they are nowhere near the weaker joint.

Traditional strength training can work, but it usually takes a long time and a lot of patience because you are forcing the development of a skill (how to stabilise a joint) by working at the sharp end and hoping that your system will respond without you getting injured. To me, this is inefficient and completely backwards.

There Is A Better Way

The RunTeach system uses the following process to help you develop the strength and resilience you need as a runner:

Strength is the final output of the process and often doesn’t even need to be trained directly, depending on your running goals and current ability level.

By first developing the skill of joint stabilisation through working directly with your brain and nervous system, you can unlock the neural inhibitors and unlock your strength. This often happens very quickly: we’re talking minutes or hours of training as opposed to months and years of training! Longer term results will take longer, but it’s all relative to your goals and how much strength you need to be a resilient runner. 

Having developed the appropriate level of skill you need, adding endurance to that skill will enable you to run longer and faster without increasing your injury risk – essentially, you’ll be able to keep being strong for longer distances, more sessions, and at higher speeds.  Once you’ve got that strength, keeping it tends to have a very low requirement in terms of exercise and time. In fact, running just by itself can be the main maintenance factor.

If you want to find out more about this really quite jaw dropping approach to getting stronger, I would recommend attending one of our Resilient Runner Workshops. You’ll not only learn more, but will be able to actually apply it to your running right away.

The post Stop! Does Strength Work, Work? appeared first on RunTeach.

Do you love going to the gym? Or perhaps you’re like me and just don’t enjoy it at all; it seems way too much hassle carving out the time for a strength routine when you could be out running. Sound familiar?

The problem is, whatever we hear and read about reducing injury risk, injury prevention, prehab and rehab, getting stronger is something that almost always tops the list. And in many ways the phrase…

…is absolutely correct. We do tend to be more robust and more resilient when we are stronger. We are also able to develop more power and have greater stability – two things that go hand in hand in helping us run faster. Furthermore, if you are a runner over the age of 40, research implies that we should pay even more attention to staying strong in order to improve our performance and reduce our injury risk.

So essentially, you’ve got to get stronger! But hang on a minute… What does that actually mean? Does it mean you need to make time for two or three weight training sessions per week? Does it mean you need to drop one run per week to focus on strength work?

If the very thought of it is making you anxious, the good news is that you may not have to do this at all. There are ways to help you get stronger without lugging giant weights about, or spending numerous hours per month doing resistance training. Actually, some of that might still be necessary, but as it will be super targeted it will be shorter in duration and you’ll see results far quicker and they’ll last far longer.

What Is Strength?

Before we get into that though, we need to look at what strength actually is. Here are some dictionary definitions:

The ability to do things that need a lot of physical or mental effort

Cambridge Dictionary

The Merriam Webster dictionary has these definitions:

Looking through each of those, I can apply them in my mind to running. But is that what most of us really think of when considering doing strength work in connection with running? Although it seems logical that we need to be strong to run, do we really think “I’m going to make myself impregnable, solid and tough!” Or do we just think “I wish I could run faster and longer without my knee hurting! I better make sure it’s strong enough”.

So dictionary definitions of strength don’t actually help us at all in a practical sense. And I’m pretty sure most of us think we’re robust enough already, until we aren’t of course.

Be honest here, how many of us would skip strength work if we didn’t really need to do it? What’s that – you are already skipping it?… Yeah, I hear that all the time from runners.

But that’s OK. To me, strength is like fitness. It changes in the different areas of your life. If your goal is to sit on the couch all day and watch TV, and you can achieve that goal, then you are both fit and strong enough to do that. Equally, if your goal is to run a 20 minute 5k, but you’re currently running a 25 minute 5k, then you are neither fit enough nor strong enough to achieve that goal. We can split this down a bit further to be more helpful.

If we leave fitness to one side for now – mainly because I view strength as just one aspect of fitness and this could get very complicated – and just focus on strength. We can view strength in a similar way in which I view resilience:

The ability for your body’s tissues to withstand the forces applied to them, in the intensity, duration and frequency which your activity demands.

So basically, you are strong enough if your body’s tissues can handle all the forces you chuck at them without either giving up (injury) or forcing your nervous system to introduce some red flags such as fatigue, niggles and the warning experience of pain.

To complicate it slightly, strength is also linked to your ability to produce power, which in turn helps you run faster. But let’s just keep this simple for now, as your nervous system won’t let you express high levels of power without first having a powerful expression of strength. If you just went “uh?”, then let me explain:

Strength can be expressed in two different ways:

When you run, your feet will typically only be in contact with the ground for between 220 milliseconds and 350 milliseconds. At the more elite end of running, the number is lower as the foot turnover (cadence) tends to be a little higher. And I know, we are all told to improve our cadence.

But the trick with improving cadence is also keeping good form and not just turning what may have been a half-decent heel lift at a slower cadence into something that resembles a fast shuffle, just to get your feet turning over faster. There is also the challenge of being able to put down enough power in a shorter amount of time, but I’m kind of moving away from the point here and these are topics for different articles. Back to strength…

With your feet being on the ground for such a short period with every step, you don’t have enough time to voluntarily think about keeping your joints stable in your feet, ankles, knees, hips, pelvis, back, shoulders and neck. This all needs to happen automatically or reflexively. It also needs to be coordinated across the different areas for improved movement efficiency. And while you may think that only being on the ground for a fraction of a second means that there isn’t enough time to even bother with joint stability because you essentially hop or lunge from one foot to the other continuously, the forces of running are such (up to 3 times bodyweight – possibly more depending on what you read) that stability in each step is critical. 

Many of us get away with less than ideal reflexive stability over short distances and when we are not tired, but ramp it all up and suddenly the impacts are amplified and before long we certainly know about it. The same is true if you start to push the pace. More pace generally means more force both into the ground and back up from the ground (ground reaction force), so your body’s tissues need to be able to handle the greater demands and the need for even better reflexive stability.

One great example that we can all observe is the classic hip drop. The next time you are running behind someone, look at the movement of their pelvis. If their hip drops down to the opposite side of their stance leg, then they are likely to have some reflexive stability issues. Ordinarily, if you have hip drop, you will be told to do lots of glute (maximus and medius) and core strengthening and integration exercises (hopefully), but if your reflexive stability is poor, you are still unlikely to be able to build or use that strength properly.

Mastering the skill of reflexive stability is, in my opinion, a relatively quick and highly efficient way to improve your overall expression of strength for running – far better than just lifting weights and hoping it will all work. You will feel more stable, be able to put more power into your running, and run longer distances more comfortably than you’ve been able to before. 

You will also be teaching your nervous system how to identify, activate and control your muscles (these are all individual skills by the way). This then forms a fantastic foundation for you to carry on with any other strength work you may enjoy doing, and it will have much more of a positive impact and the benefits are likely to stick around for longer.

For clarity, to improve your reflexive stability, you do need to do voluntary neural drive exercises (i.e. resistance training), but they need to be well designed so they stimulate and upregulate the parts of your brain and nervous system that control reflexive stability.

Summary

To summarise then, first think about reflexive stability when you think about strength in running. Once you have mastered this through well designed and personalised exercises, you may or may not need more strength work of the normal “just lift weights” kind. You may find that your running sessions already provide you with enough stimulus to keep improving your resilience and neural drive strength. Of course that does depend on your goals, but that’s a topic for another article…

The post What Is Strength In Running? appeared first on RunTeach.

Earning The Injury – A Bigger Problem Than Just Knees

Along with the monumental growth of recreational running over the past 10 years or so, there has also been a huge increase in the number of runners getting injured. You may think that’s logical and it does make sense that if the total number of runners increases, so does the total number of injuries. So far so obvious.

But I think the ratio of injuries to runners has got all skewed and the same runners are getting more and more injuries in a shorter and shorter time. In fact, I think that running related injuries in some sectors of recreational running are so common that they are almost worn as a badge of honour! Injuries almost seem to be an inevitable part of being a runner.

This may be common, but it’s NOT NORMAL!

When is it alright to just accept that we get injured? Never! But that’s what seems to be happening and I get disheartened whenever I read about runners getting injured over and over again and often ask myself the question “why?”.

Back To Knees

OK, mini rant over.

So, why does your knee hurt? To answer this question we need to put injuries into two distinct camps:

1. Acute injuries that have just happened. For example, you’ve slipped off a curb (or stepped off the promenade which I witnessed an unfortunate gentleman do the other day on the beach) and twisted your knee and ankle. Or, two days ago you banged your knee really hard on the table leg and it’s swollen right up. Or, you’ve unfortunately tripped on a tree root and face planted like a good’un.
   
   I used to split the above type of injuries from the more common running injuries that tend to sneak up on you over time. But in this context it’s more useful to keep them together as ultimately if there are tissue issues, it’s a single point in time where the threshold has been breached and led to those issues – even if it’s been a slow burn to get to that point.
   
   All these are examples of an acute injury that may or may not have resulted in some tissue related issues (strains, tears, breaks etc). In all these cases, your brain thinks you’re pretty stupid and in order to punish you releases huge amounts of pain… No, not really – but your brain does think the behaviour that led to the acute injury was a bit uncalled for and creates a small packet of data called a Neurotag that it can push in front of you next time, just to remind you that doing it again may be a little silly and this can trigger caution – a good thing.
   
   What actually happens at the brain level is that the area that received the physical injury goes on heightened alert and special threat sensors in the tissues send signals to your brain alerting it that there’s either an issue or a possibility of an issue.
   
   If your brain thinks the situation is important enough (based on a lot of past and current data), it will produce an output to get you to change your behaviour. In the case of acute injuries it’s normally quite a bit of pain so you pay attention to not using the injured area until it’s had time to heal.
   
   The threat sensors, called nociceptors, stay at a high sensitivity until such a time that the tissue has recovered enough that you can go back to using it. Essentially, the nociceptors create a buffer zone around the injured area that if you try to access (i.e. move, put weight on, put force through, etc) the brain’s response is to create an experience of pain to remind you to back off.
   
   Under normal circumstances, most injuries will have recovered to a state where the sensitivity of the nociceptors has gone almost back to normal within six weeks. Under certain conditions this can take longer, but rarely more than 12 weeks for most of the common injuries. Of course, there are always exceptions so it’s always a good idea to get things checked out by medically trained bods if you are in any doubt at all.
   
   So, in summary: acute injuries, whether they actually result in tissue issues or not, are injuries that have happened somewhere in the last 6 weeks. They usually cause an increase in sensitivity in your threat receptors (nociceptors) that in turn triggers the creation of a buffer zone. This buffer zone is closely monitored by the nociceptors and they inform the brain if you try to breach it. In response, your brain creates the experience of pain to remind you to reign it in. Usually, but not always, this buffer zone shrinks as the tissues recover and the sensitivity of the nociceptors returns to normal.
2. “But I’ve had my pain for months!” I hear you cry. I know, I know, we’re coming to that now. The second category or injury was what used to be called chronic injury. This is the pain and apparent injuries that just go on and on and on. So what’s happening here?
   
   At this point it’s really useful to separate out injuries from pain. You may have gathered from the acute injuries section that injuries and pain aren’t necessarily linked. “Whoa!!! Wait, what???!”. That’s right, injuries and pain don’t need to be bed buddies – you can have one without the other. I know, mind-blowing isn’t it. But you actually already knew that. Here are some examples:
   1. Military personnel injured on a battlefield that don’t feel any pain until they are in a hospital.
   2. The guy in Australia who walked down the high street with an axe in his head, even stopping to buy a sandwich from a convenience store on his way to the hospital – didn’t feel a thing.
   3. That cut you just noticed on your finger and now hurts because you’ve seen the blood.
   4. Phantom limb pain where the pain is somewhere in the limb that’s no longer there.
   5. And countless other examples, both major and minor.
      

So what we are really talking about in this section is chronic pain rather than injury, now often referred to as long-term pain. This will make more sense in a minute, I promise.

Remember in the acute injury section I mentioned that usually, the buffer zone reduces within six weeks? Well, sometimes the system just doesn’t work very well for one reason or another. This means the buffer zone stays put and the sensitivity stays high. In fact, the sensitivity can even increase and this can become a real problem. The key thing here is that while the buffer zone stays where it is and the nociceptive sensitivity stays high, the actual tissues themselves are recovering exactly as they should. This results in…dun, dun, dun…..

Pain without injury.

So it is completely feasible, and actually very, very common, that if you’ve had pain for more than at least six weeks, your are moving into a chronic pain state where the injury (if there even was one at all – don’t worry, that’s for a different day) is recovering well but the system isn’t resetting. This results in your brain being tricked into thinking it needs to keep giving you the experience of pain so you avoid using the now non-injured area. 

Does that mean you should just push through the pain if you’ve had it longer than six weeks? NO! STOP! DON’T EVER DO THAT!

Pain MUST Be Paid Attention To

Even if you’ve had the same pain for many weeks, months or years, you should always pay attention to it. Pain is an output from your brain to let you know something isn’t right and you need to take action. Even if your nociceptive sensitivity and buffer system hasn’t reset properly, you still need to pay attention to the pain experience.

There are many things that could be triggering the threat levels in your nociceptors and stopping the system from resetting. Often, I find this is connected with a poor sensory or motor map of a joint at one side (or both sides) of the painful area.

If, as part of the original injury (even if it was years ago) some of your sensory ability may have been affected, the joint maps may be incomplete. Your brain uses this sensory input to help determine where a joint is, and how to activate and control the muscles and connective tissue in supporting the functioning of that joint.

This can also impact your ability to stabilise your joints when running, and you can probably guess that this itself presents a huge threat to the brain. In turn, your brain produces a pain experience to get you to stop doing the actions leading to the threat, and you get in a cycle of threat-pain-threat-pain etc.

This can be hard to break, particularly with traditional strength-type training and rehab as they almost completely miss the mark of how your system needs to be treated for those sensory systems to be up-regulated and stimulated.

Paying attention to your pain experience can give many clues as to the underlying cause(s) and is often not directly related to the painful area at all. Ignoring your pain experience can lead to unhelpful compensations that can then lead to other acute injuries, whether of the immediate kind or the slow burn kind.

So, Why Does My Knee Hurt?

Hopefully, this article has helped you to understand that injury and pain aren’t necessarily linked, and you can have one without the other. You will also appreciate that sometimes your system doesn’t reset correctly following an injury (or perceived injury), and this can lead to long-term pain because something is still causing a threat to your brain and until you deal with that something, it can be a very long road back. This is often the reason why you may get recurring pain in the same or a similar area.

So the real answer to “Why Does My Knee Hurt? AKA Runner’s Knee” is:

It Depends…

Over the next few weeks I’m going to write up some of the case studies of runners that I’ve worked with where we’ve approached their knee pain, as well as other “injuries”, at the level of the nervous system rather than just always going for “strengthen, strengthen, strengthen” in the traditional way.

This means that I’ve assessed how and why their nociceptive system isn’t resetting as it should, and we’ve designed specific drills and exercises, as well as things like specific taping strategies, to make incredible progress – even when they have already seen everyone else and done everything else.

I hope you’ve found this article interesting and it’s raised some questions about how you currently approach your running injuries and pain. As for the answers… you’ll need to open your mind and stay tuned for more articles.

The post Why Does My Knee Hurt? AKA Runner’s Knee appeared first on RunTeach.

I then take you through a full progression of balance skills and some strategies for helping you to improve your balance.

Finally, I tell you about my “in-development” balance app that you are very welcome to use for FREE. You can register for a FREE account here.

You can also find the video over on my Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/RunTeachUK/videos/244990659957344/

I would love it if you could go over to my Facebook page afterwards and like the video. Also, please share with as many people as you like – thank you!

The post Live skills – balance appeared first on RunTeach.

But why do glutes play such an important role-in running? And why have you been told they are lazy and not “firing” correctly?

All mammals have glutes, but not all glutes are equal. The structure, shape and size of your glutes will depend on what you want to do. If you are an ape, you want raw power. You want large and powerful gluteus maximus muscles that face outward, in other words: big butt muscles!

Because, as an ape, you spend a lot of your time quadruped (all fours), you need your glutes to power you forwards without much of a requirement to stabilise or stand. When you are quadruped, you have your arms and hands to help stabilise. You can see that a gorilla has large thighs and large gluteus maximus muscles, but the gluteus medius muscle is long and shaped to help with the forward driving power. 

Of course, this means that when you want to walk or stand on two legs, it will only be for a short time because you don’t have stability. Standing on one leg is even more limited, if it’s at all possible. There are exceptions, but walking using four limbs is the prefered option.

Now imagine you are a squirrel or a meerkat. You’ll only really come up on two legs to survey your surroundings, then run and walk on all four limbs. And while some bears, gibbons and reptiles can walk on two legs for a period of time, the structure of their glutes still favours power over stability – the two legged walking bit is limited.

Now go back to being you. On a good day, you can not only walk and run upright, you can balance one leg, hop, skip and bound. Really, walking and running upright are one-legged activities, and as a species you are very special to be able to do that. And it’s how your glutes are designed that allows you to be so skilled at these single leg activities.

As I mentioned when you were being an ape, our buttock muscles are called the Gluteus Maximus (G-Max). While it is critical for apes and all quadrupeds that these are very powerful and mainly rearward facing, it is slightly less important for you. You trade a lot of that power for extra stability. There are two other gluteal muscles that need to work with the G-Max so you can speed around in your running shoes without falling over. These are the Gluteus Medius and the Gluteus Minimus.

All three muscles need to work in concert to provide the stability and power you need to run. In many of us, this simply doesn’t harpen, and the result is an overworking of your calf, hip flexor and low back muscles.

In my experience of assessing and coaching runners, the lack of integration of the glutes is rarely down to strength. In the majority of cases it’s a case of faulty wiring, and the good news is that this is usually simple to fix without lots of weights or gym work.

A word of warning: simple doesn’t mean easy. The exercises are simple and they don’t take special equipment, but they do need persistent practice. Your brain holds a virtual map of your entire body, and it uses this map when interacting with the nervous system to output movement. If the map is out of date due to a lack of regular movement or perhaps poorly learned movement, the entire reference is wrong. This is super important because walking and running are automatic processes; if the reference base is wrong, the movement will be wrong.

Your job is to keep the map up to date and to strengthen the pathways between your brain, nervous system and muscles so the movement patterns are as efficient as possible.

OK, now you know why we need to start with re-coding your movements and keeping that brain map updated, let’s look at my top 5 exercises and build them into a four-week progressive plan:

• Lying glute raises
• Glute pull backs
• Hip hikes
• Banded foot ups
• Synchro-lunges

The aims of the plan are:

• Start off by becoming aware of and feeling your glutes
• Start to control your glutes independently
• Start to control your pelvis independently
• Integrate your hips and core

From this base, you can then build endurance and strength, and then start to put it into practice in your running.

Take the challenge of integrating your brain, nervous system and muscular system and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can improve your running.

The post Glutes, lazy glutes appeared first on RunTeach.

You may come to the same conclusion as many other runners, and look to strength training for the answer:

Get stronger = run faster

Get stronger = less injuries

Get stronger = better endurance

That’s what you’ll often read online or be told by your running buddies or your club/group guru. But are they right?

Conduct a Google search for “strength training for runners” and you’ll get over 30 million results! Where do you start with that lot?

There is no doubt that most runners do need to get stronger in some areas, but just doing squats and static planks won’t cut it. From the mass of search results, you can become very confused about what exercises are actually beneficial for running for most people. So, I want to give you a starting point where you can progress from.

The starting point for any strength programme is to address the imbalances you may have. When you have muscles that are stronger than the other muscles around them, it can cause the stronger muscles to be overworked. Weaknesses can also cause other muscles to take on the job of handling the forces of running they were never designed to do. This can then lead to many of the overuse injuries we see in runners.

Now, you don’t necessarily need to get all technical about this, as you can start off by targeting the most common areas. But, if you do want to find out where your imbalances are, I can help you with my RunForm and RunTest assessments. For this article, I’m going to highlight what I believe to be the best place to start.

In my opinion, there are some essential areas that you should always start with, unless you have been told otherwise by a professional. These are:

• Hips
• Core
• Calves
• Single leg
• Feet
• Shins

I am in the process of writing about these areas in-depth, so for now let’s have a quick look at two of these to begin with as they are what I would consider to be a solid base to build upon.

I usually begin at the hips and go up and then down when I’m assessing imbalances. Looking at just your feet and legs means that you miss so much information that can help determine what’s going on.

The hip area plays a crucial role in what is a complex set of movements that allow us to walk and run. In fact, the gait cycle (the motion of walking and running) is automatic. We start it off with an initial movement and it completes without any extra input needed.

On the one hand this is great because we can focus on other things, but the downside is that if the coding of the movement is faulty it often influences poor movement both upwards towards the shoulders and down towards your feet – no matter how strong those other areas may be.

And it’s not simply a question of doing heavy weights or millions of repetitions. If you are not engaging the correct muscles for each part of the cycle, you will be asking other muscles to take the strain. A good example is when a runner is “quad” dominant. This is where they run by using more of the power from their thighs rather than from their glutes (buttocks and side of hips). This often leads to sore and tired thighs, overuse around the front of the hips (hip flexors) and on longer or faster runs, the thighs will tire out quickly. This is the classic “I’m not using my glutes” scenario.

In this instance, many runners will look to squats to help engage their glutes, but this isn’t always the right starting point. I believe you need to learn to feel your glutes to use them properly. And only when you can use them properly is it worth strengthening them. Otherwise, you’ll be strengthening an incorrect movement pattern and unlikely to be targeting the glutes in the way you want.

I have some simple but very effective glute engagement exercises that will get you started. They are about making brain/muscle connections and helping you to become aware of your glutes:

Isometric hip hike video

Isometric glute activation (banded) video 

These two exercises are best done with a little and often frequency. So, three or more times per day, but only a minute or so each time. Put the focus on feeling your glutes rather than just going through the motions. The repetition of good form is creating new pathways between your brain and muscles and with enough practice will begin to spill over into your normal walking and running.

To really do justice to feeling and strengthing your glutes, this excellent 12 week glute course, specifically created for runners, is a great choice. It has been written by James Dunne at Kinetic Revolution.

Like me, he believes in correct movement patterns and will take you through a self-assessment to find those imbalances and then how to correct them.

You can go directly to the course from this link.

In running, when I talk about core, I am referring to everything from neck to thighs. This part of your body is so well connected that when you get it all working together your running will improve amazingly!

The go to core exercises always seem to be the plank. While the plank is a great core exercise, we really want to make it dynamic so it becomes running specific. In fact, you want all of your core exercises to be dynamic so that you can take advantage of harnessing the rotational forces when you run.

You may have seen runners whose shoulders twist and turn with every step, or have run behind someone whose hips are bouncing up in a hypnotic trance. Both of these can stem from your core not being integrated, with each part trying to control movement at a local level. However, this is not how the body is designed. Your physical architecture is such that you need integration. You need your inner corset to synchronise with your outer corset; your low back to work with your glutes and hamstrings; your obliques to work with your hip flexors and glutes. If all this seems a bit too technical, then let’s simplify it:

You need to control the rotation of your hips, back and shoulders so that you create a catapult like power that you release with every step. You do this by engaging your whole core in the exercises you do. Here are some to get you started:

Russian twist

Dead bug

Pallof press (video here)

Dynamic plank variations (here’s Cori Lefkowith’s excellent selection)

 Essentially, any anti-rotation exercise is going to be great for engaging and integrating your core.

This fantastic book by Mary bond looks at an integrated core in terms of posture. I use a lot of the stuff she talks about in my coaching and training. Here is the Amazon link to the book:

In this article we’ve looked at two main areas for you address. But, it’s not just about strengthening them with weights. First, you need to move your hips, glutes and core properly. Then, you add endurance to those movements (i.e. moving correctly over a period of time) and finally you can add strength work.

If you read my previous article about marathon training, you’ll know that you can get a lot stronger just by your nervous system recruiting more muscle fibres without increasing muscle mass. Practicing correct movements is a form of doing this.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to deep dive into the areas above and into the other areas that I beleive are important for marathon and half marathon strength work: watch this space.

The post Strength training for runners appeared first on RunTeach.