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.

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.

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