As an NCAA Division I strength and conditioning coach and the strength coach for Empire Elite Track Club, I’ve witnessed the evolving role of strength training among distance runners.
Misconceptions once limited the adoption of strength training for distance runners, but more and more coaches and athletes now understand its positive impact on performance.
Still, though, some areas of the running community hold outdated views.
In this article, I aim to address these old stigmas, discuss the role of strength training in a runner’s development, and share my progressive strength training approach to enhancing distance running performance.
A Quick History of Strength Training in Distance Running
Strength training in distance running has a complex history shaped by shifting perceptions and evolving practices.
Initially, many people often associated strength training with weightlifting and bodybuilding, leading to concerns that it would cause runners to bulk up and slow down. These misconceptions persisted for many years.
Today, we understand that gaining significant muscle mass requires very specific conditions, such as high volumes of muscular tension and a large caloric surplus.
But despite these early misconceptions, some coaches and athletes began to see the potential benefits of strength training and started including it in their training programs.
The Low Weight, High Rep Method
While holding to the previous precautions, lifting light weights for high repetitions became commonplace for developing baseline general strength in distance runners.
Some of the greats, like Haile Gebrselassie and Paula Radcliffe, were known to include this method of strength training 1-2 times per week.
As such, the use of the repetition method remained the dominant form of strength training with distance runners through the latter half of the 20th century.
Progressive Strength Training & the Nike Oregon Project
Beginning in the late-2000s, the use of systematic and progressive strength training with distance runners entered the mainstream, popularized by the Nike Oregon Project.
To his credit, the founding coach of the group, Alberto Salazar, was an early adopter of leveraging strength training to improve run training and performance. This, to me, was a watershed period in which strength training within the professional distance running world leapt forward.
In popular videos at the time, the likes of Galen Rupp and Mo Farah were seen prioritizing work in the weight room to enhance their power output and running mechanics on the track. Their simultaneous praise of lifting and presence on the world stage granted immediate credibility to the practice of including higher-intensity strength training within a runner’s overall training regime.
The Popularity of Strength Training Today
Many of the best professional running groups around the country now employ strength coaches who work closely with their distance runners.
Between the increased acceptance from the professional ranks and the rise of fitness influencers on social media, targeted lifting has become much more pervasive throughout the running community.
So how, then, can we best understand where strength training fits into the larger picture of running performance, especially amidst varying degrees of authoritative information?
Strength Training: A Complementary Tool for Distance Runners
To become a great runner, an athlete must run. One cannot solely lift weights and become a high-achieving runner. Thus, strength training should always be a secondary modality for developing distance running performance.
An often-cited analogy used to describe the relationship between strength training and running is the makeup of a car.
Just as the chassis of a car provides the support for the engine to do mechanical work, the musculo-skeletal system provides the framework for the cardio-respiratory system to do biomechanical work.
This comparison allows us to draw logical inferences about the importance of refining the musculo-skelatal system itself regarding an athlete’s long-term athletic development (LTAD).
Long-Term Athletic Development, Training Age & Sport Mastery
LTAD is an athlete’s position on an individual spectrum between novice and the upper limits of their genetic potential. An important concept within that paradigm is training age.
Different from chronological age, training age signifies the amount of time an athlete has spent undertaking a specific training modality.
For example, there are professional runners who, despite having great running potential, have spent little time in the weight room, and thus have a low weight room training age. With the understanding of the individual nature of training, coaches must meet athletes where they’re at to move them along in their pursuit of sport mastery.
Sport mastery can be defined as the combination of technical and physical mastery.
Technical mastery refers to optimized technique, sport-specific IQ, and mental fortitude.
Physical mastery refers to the physical development of all human motor qualities, including the neurological, muscular, and cardio-respiratory systems.
If an athlete wants to reach sport mastery, they must employ the use of systematic and progressive strength training means to improve their physical development.
Training Phases & Exercise Selection
Part of the difficulty in understanding how runners should strength train is in deciding what exercises to do and when. I approach this problem by thinking about low-hanging fruit:
What is the most immediate stimulus that elicits a positive training adaptation while leaving room for future growth?
In training, it’s understood that you need a wide base if you want a high peak. In other words, an athlete cannot hope to maximize their motor abilities if they haven’t first mastered the fundamentals.
Only through sequential development will the highest attainment of physical mastery be achieved. This theory forms the foundation of my strength training system.
Global Athleticism, Durability, & Repeat Power Ability
My system categorizes strength training into three phases: global athleticism, durability, and repeat power ability.
The training in each category is not mutually exclusive from the others. Work from the previous phase(s) is maintained as an athlete progresses through each domain.
During different periods of the year, one phase may take prevalence over the others. It’s through the intentional superimposition of stress that we’re able to move an athlete toward sport mastery.
1. Global Athleticism
The first phase isn’t about training runners – it’s about training humans.
Consider how people can move; we can push, pull, squat, and hinge. Rather than training muscle groups, I focus on foundational movement patterns that hit all of an athlete’s prime movers to improve muscular coordination.
I believe that movement proficiency, or the ability to move with stability through proper alignment, is the bedrock of athletic performance.
Once an athlete displays proficient movement through foundational patterns, they’re ready to move on to the next phase.
2. Durability
One measure of an effective strength training program is whether or not it reduces an athlete’s incidence of injury. The better an athlete tolerates the stresses of their sport, the less likely they are to get injured and the better they can recover from training.
Peak performance comes from the succession of many weeks, months, and years of uninterrupted training. A hallmark of the durability phase is increasing an athlete’s max strength. Strong runners are harder to hurt.
Additionally, the ability to express high levels of force is a component of power, i.e. the ability to express high levels of force in a limited window of time. For example, I want my athletes to hit two strength standards before we shift our focus to power development:
- the ability to front squat at least their body weight for three repetitions, and
- to hex bar deadlift at least 1.5 times their body weight for three repetitions.
3. Repeat Power Ability
The first two phases are about upgrading an athlete’s motor potential. The key word there is potential.
For the time spent improving an athlete’s athleticism and durability to transfer to high-level running performance, we need to bridge the gap between the weight room and track or road.
The two main qualities that we’re trying to improve during this phase are the rate of force development (RFD) and an athlete’s elastic ability. RFD is an expression of how quickly an athlete can produce force.
Before, I mentioned a limited window of time to produce force. That limited window is the time an athlete’s foot is in contact with the ground. For elite runners, that could be as short as a mere tenths of a second. To improve RFD, an athlete needs to spend time training for power and speed-strength, or the act of moving lighter weights with maximum velocity.
Concurrently, an athlete must train their elastic ability, which is the reactivity of their connective tissues. In doing so, a runner is better able to return free energy from ground contact into the push-off of their next stride.
The primary modality for achieving that is through plyometrics. Plyometrics are characterized by double-leg and single-leg jumping with an emphasis on being quick off of the ground between jumps.
In Conclusion
Strength training is a multifaceted methodology that evolves as an athlete does. When the previous training phases are implemented with sound principles of periodization and long-term planning, a distance runner’s physical development is enhanced, ultimately ushering them along in the mastery of their sport.
As the tides continue to change around the at-large acceptance of strength training within a distance runner’s overall training regime, I believe we’ll continue to witness the evolution of the sport in profound ways.
