Free Weights vs. Machines: Strength Training for Runners

You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement podcast, where movement experts discuss the latest evidence-based practices to help you and your clients move with mastery. Hey everybody, it's your co-host Sebastian with the Restoring Human Movement podcast. Thanks for joining the show. Over the next few episodes, we're going to do some special topics or some research updates that we periodically do here at Performance Place to make sure that our virtual telehealth sessions and our in-person ones are the most efficient they can possibly be when we're working with people with knee conditions and hips and low backs and feet and so on.

Now, I can tell you right now that I was actually surprised by some of the findings in these research papers from the Journal of Strength and Conditioning, so I'm going to give you some of the updates and bullet points as I find them. If you guys ever want to work with us, we do have virtual and consultation options, and you just need to call us at 714-502-4243 or email us, info at p2sportscare.com. Let's get into the show. Runners, have you wondered how to run stronger, stay free of injuries? Well, we're going to cover how weights and testosterone levels can help out with that a little bit today and how we can use stuff like resistance training to do so.

Now, we're going to be covering some information from a research article today. This is from 2020 from the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. It's called the effects of training with free weights versus machine on muscle mass, strength, and free testosterone and free cortisol levels. Now, remember, a lot of these strength conditioning journals are based upon not just runners. This is for people of all types. Now, I don't want you to think that you're any different than these people in this study. People are people. People will adapt to the stimuli that you throw at them. And strength training is one where all we have to do is create strength.

And that is a basis of injury prevention or prehab for many different athletes of different sports. Now, what we found here in this study, there were a few basic takeaways. I'm going to boil them down a little bit as we go more into the podcast. But the major finding was that free weights and machine weights were generally equal in increasing muscle thickness and strength. We're talking about testosterone levels, though. We found that free weights, at least with men, showed significant increase in free testosterone levels after a workout. Machine-based men were shown to only have a small and non-significant increase in free testosterone.

Women, for both free weights and machines, did not experience any significant change in free testosterone levels. Now, I know this may be a little bit unfair. It feels like it's different between men and women. But this is just what the paper found. Now, we all probably kind of know the benefits of having some muscle. And that goes with various different sports. But let's dive into first what the effects of even transient testosterone spikes may do, at least in regards to injury prevention and bone health. Now, a lot of people who run, they do experience injuries, especially of the heel, the knee, the hip, the low back, are very common locations.

And stuff like weight training can really help out with that. Now, what we know the benefits of even transient-free testosterone spikes in endurance athletes could be is muscle protein synthesis, which is basically protein promotes muscle protein synthesis, which can aid in muscle repair and recover after strenuous endurance workouts. This can also help maintain muscle mass, which is critical for stability and support and thus contributing to injury prevention. Testosterone can also play a role in bone mineral density. Even transient spikes contribute to maintaining or improving bone health, which is important for endurance athletes who put a lot of stress on their skeletal system as well.

And obviously, stronger bones reduce the risk of fractures and stress fractures. It also aids in muscle repair. Testosterone can contribute to faster recovery times, so you can recover a lot faster and maybe train more consistently. And it can also have a positive effect on mood, which can obviously impact how many training sessions you can do per week, too. If you guys follow things like HRV, there's a lot more to changing your training frequency than just what your potential linear progression can be. In regards to overall injury prevention, we know that maintaining muscle mass and bone density are critical for injury prevention.

Stronger muscles provide joint stability and reducing the risk of strains and sprains. Improving bone density obviously reduces the risk of stress fractures. Now, the things that the testosterone spike doesn't really do, and I want to make sure that you guys realize it doesn't do all things, is it obviously doesn't change your aerobic capacity. It doesn't change your muscular endurance. And it's not really an instantaneous boost in performance like you think, like you take an energy drink. So, these are more like long-term plays and building a more resilient body around the sport that you have.

And doing weight training and encouraging more testosterone spikes can be helpful with that. Now, I'm by no means encouraging people to inject themselves with testosterone, but the training, the effects of training, at least in the weight room can be helpful for not just the muscular and skeletal system, but also for the hormonal one too. Now, I should probably cover as well that there is often a belief that you'll get bulky by doing weight training. And that's not always the case, and I think that is misunderstood based upon the lack of knowledge about the resource fight that's happening in your body.

Now, in order to get big and bulky, you have to have building blocks. You have to have, just think energy, food, protein. You need to have basically all your intake going towards building, which is called catabolic. Now, in the scenario where you're trying to build a lot of muscle to be a bodybuilder, a lot of times they'll prioritize the weightlifting or resistance training aspect of it versus the cardiovascular or endurance aspect of overall fitness, mainly because they're prioritizing the building blocks or the catabolic effect on muscles. So, I remember a book that I read, they said that your body is basically in a resource fight.

And so, if you were to train only your right quad, and that is it, you, and the goal was to grow the right quad as fast as you can, you would actually not train your left quad. You would not train your foot. You would not train your shoulders. You would not walk, essentially. And it's mainly because all those other things you're doing pull away from the resources that you're trying to put towards building that one right quad. And because you are an endurance athlete, you have a lot of other resources going towards your recovery of your actual runs. So, that's why it's very, very, very, very hard for endurance athletes to get bulky, which is not a bad thing because the heavier you get, the more mass you have to move to, and that will make it harder on you as well.

So, I just want to make sure to reassure you guys that getting bulky is not really going to happen. And I don't even need you to focus on lower weights or anything like that. You can actually do more standard resistance training or strength training as normal people would. And this is just a side note, too. And I'll talk about some of my favorite exercises a little bit later in this podcast. But not every exercise needs to look like a running movement. I can say, at least from working with a lot of runners, I feel like a lot of the bulk of their program that they end up having are things in split stances and single leg RDLs.

And the weight generally seems to be kind of light. And they tend to go for a lot of reps. Now, I don't want to pigeonhole everybody here, but it's a common thing that I do see. And I think it's an easy thing to readdress. I don't know who's making these programs, but I feel like there's a lot of holes that we can fill. They have a saying is strong people can't count above 10. And that's generally because if you're trying to get strong, and if we know that strong helps out with decreasing the amount of injuries and increasing running efficiency or running economy, and it decreases ground contact time and all that type of stuff, strength training is what we want.

We don't want toning. We want strength training. And if you're doing 20 reps of something, you're not actually strength training. You're just going through movements. Now, it's not to say those don't have any value either, but they're not strength training. So generally, it should be reps that are kind of hard before 10. Now, some people default to a standard five reps by five sets. That's not necessarily needed either. I tend to run into the range of suggesting eight reps and then trying to get a challenging 25 or so. So that's going to be eight reps by like three sets or so. That's, what is it, 24?

So that is a good starting point for people. That way, it's not too heavy, or if your form is suspicious that it's going to hurt you. Because we don't want to be doing things like single leg RDLs with a round in the spine, because it'll probably hurt your back. And at least when it comes in the strength conditioning world, there's a non-negotiable aspect where you don't break an athlete in the weight room. The strength training is supplemental. It's helpful to make it so you prevent injuries and you perform better, but we're not making you into a weightlifter. The weightlifter will take different risks in the gym because that is their sport.

This is not your sport. So before we go into some of the exercises, let me just talk about some of the syndromes or conditions that actually benefit from strength. And so that we know knee pain, the most common one that renders patellofemoral pain, we know that exercising the quad and the hip can be very helpful. So the stronger the hip and the quad is, and even the soleus muscle, which has a lot of, it kind of works as a secondary ACL to decrease shear force on the knee, can be very, very helpful. So if you're not doing those already, adding some strength training in for those can be super helpful.

Heel pain or plantar fasciitis, we know that a similar thing, we know the soleus is one of the ones that are deficient in there as well. The gastroc can be, but usually it's the soleus. And we also know that there's forces above, such as the glute max, which are usually offline. And a lot of times people lack internal core support, which is called interdominal pressure. So those things carry their effects down the chain and they can reduce the amount of activity in the foot. Which if you have plantar fasciitis for a long time, a lot of times the foot, it becomes a little bit lazy, we'll just call it.

So the intrinsic foot muscles get a little bit lazy. Now, one way to strengthen the foot, and this kind of carries back full circle, is doing something which requires the toes to be cocked back. And so something that would be more of a strength training exercise that would help out with plantar fasciitis, weakness of the foot, but also strengthen the hip and the quad, is a sled push. And it'd probably be a pretty heavy sled push, right? So if we're going to go under those rules of eight or so, it should be hard to take eight steps per side. So it can't just be one that you're running willy-nilly across 50 to 100 yards.

It has to be a little bit heavier than that. Now, for people with hip impingement, we know that the anterior pelvic tilt is a part of this, which tends to go along with weak glutes and weak abdominal muscles. So strength is important with not only recovering from these problems, but also preventing them. We know that from a lot of research surrounding these types of conditions that plague runners, that there are risk factors involved. You can see these things still hanging around despite them being in pain or not. And so it's really commonplace just to put a sleeve on your knee and just go running and assume that's as good as it's going to get.

And that's not necessarily the case. So if you do stuff like resistance training, and in the study they mentioned that doing free weights are going to be better than machines, that would be a good start. So let's cover some of my favorite exercises and I'll cover a few different categories of weight training just so you guys can get an idea of a well-rounded program. And this is working on the assumption that you also know kind of what you're doing in the gym and you have good form. Now, if you're a beginner, you have something called a low movement literacy. So you just haven't done it enough.

It doesn't mean that you can't do it, but don't expect to go heavy. I would assume if you were a first time driver of a car, we probably wouldn't put you in the freeway right away. We'd probably teach you to change gears and stuff. So there's a little bit more educational parts of it. We'd take on surface streets, which is basically taking you through exercise movement without really any weight. And it's not to say that you can't get to the strength part of it, but for now, let's just start on baby steps. Let's put some training wheels on you. So one of my favorite exercises for runners in the squat category is actually not the back squat.

It's actually the goblet squat. So the goblet squat is when you have a kettlebell or some people use a dumbbell and then you put it in front of your body and hold it up like it's a goblet of water. By the way, we have some videos on our YouTube channel about how to goblet squat and different types of squatting. I'll put the link in the description and it's going to be held up by holding the weight up. It helps strengthen the shoulder blades and obviously squatting helps strengthen more so the knees. If you get deep enough, then you can get some of the glutes as well. Now, if we talk about squat depth, squat depth should be, in my opinion, I don't want to say necessarily dependent upon the weight, but there's a lot of people out there on social media who say that you should, you know, not round your back during a squat and so on.

And I think it all comes down to context. Now, if you're squatting down to play with your child, yeah, round your back. That's okay. There's a lot of benefits of rounding your back and encouraging that posterior pelvic tilt, which can help out with hip mobility as well. But if you're always in an anterior tilt, like a lot of runners are, because you spend a lot of time in an anterior tilt position while you're running, then maybe doing an anterior tilt with lower body weight, or sorry, with body weight squats or even with nominal weight squats, like something lower, may not be the best thing. So you may want to actually encourage a little bit more of a, I don't want to say a sloppy squat, but allow your butt to wink.

Now, if you get a little bit higher in weight and we start working up it in that five rep range, then yeah, you want to make sure your spine is in a neutral position. So that butt wink thing that is important really comes down to how much weight you're moving. And if you have your spine move with load on it or while under load, it's a risk factor associated to lower back pain and disc injuries, which can create a big problem for runners with various different types of runs. So it can be a long-standing problem, but it's recoverable as well. Now, so the goblet squats I think are great. You follow the five, sorry, the eight reps and three set type of rule and calibrate your weight accordingly.

Make sure your form is good in the beginning. Watch our videos on YouTube and that's a good start. Second thing is deadlifting. Now, single leg deadlifting is what most people end up doing. I have no problem with it, but I would reserve that for people who have a higher movement literacy or have a higher gym age. I would default more to an elevated kettlebell deadlift or a hex bar deadlift. And this is going to be where you're straddling the weight or you're standing between the bars. So the bars are, I mean, it's that hex bar in the gym that you can stand in. Single leg RDLs, again, not bad, but if you look around at some of your colleagues doing this exercise, you're going to notice that a lot of them actually round their back a lot, like a lot.

And they're doing it with really low weights. A single leg RDL should be quite a bit up there. It still follows the same reps and sets as we mentioned before. You shouldn't be able to do like 20, 30 of these things, but the way that people tend to do it to do it is so sloppy and even locking their knee because they're trying to target their hamstrings I think is a big mistake and an easy win that we can change. So I would rather just regress people, make sure they're building strength, build up the weight, build the hip hinge pattern, and get them to move something heavy with a two-legged hinge pattern, which is a kettlebell deadlift or a hex bar deadlift, which we cover in our videos as well.

If you're not doing carries, you should be. There's something called a loaded carry series, which is basically moving away from here to there. Dan John, the great strength coach, has a good saying, don't think about it, just do it. Just do your carries. How do you do it? I don't really care. What weight is it? I don't really care. Just move, wait, walk with it. Put it up by your shoulder. Put it down by your pockets. Carry it like you're an Amazon delivery person by your shoulder. I don't really care. Most people aren't doing them, period, and they don't do them enough. I remember one runner I saw that she had plantar fasciitis, sorry, she had shin splints.

I basically bet her. I said, if you do 20 minutes of carries a week, you will no longer have shin splints. And she has not had shin splints for seven, eight years right now. Okay. Push-ups, most people are doing those, so a push pattern is needed. You should make sure you have a neutral pelvis in that scenario as well because you don't want to encourage an anterior tilt while you're doing basic things like planks or push-ups. Pulling exercises, I think everybody should be doing pull-ups or if you can't do pull-ups, you should be hanging for as long as you can. Your goal should be to develop shoulder strength or lat strength, but also your hands should get absolutely tanked.

Like you should develop calluses on your fifth, fourth, and third finger knuckles in your palm and that's how you know you're starting to get there when those calluses start to harden up. Women should be able to do at least a minute of hanging. Men should be able to do at least two to three pull-ups. I know it's a different grading scale, but that's usually how it goes. And I think those are good starting points for people. Now, if you guys have questions about how to design a program specific to you, please reach out. We do offer customized program design and we try to fill the holes in what program you have essentially and see if we can reduce the possibility of having running injuries.

So we can dive into what machines and what free weights are actually better for you and see if we can blend all these parts together to make sure you do have more productive muscle and productive bone and get a little bit of testosterone boost if that is possible. Great. Thanks for hanging around for the show. I hope you guys learned as much as I did by doing some of these research papers. Remember, if you want help with digesting down what your condition may need to get better and how you can get back to physical activity, just call us or email us for a consultation, which is super affordable.

At this point in time, it's $29 for 30 minutes. That's with me, Mandy or Dawne Costantino and I can't guarantee you to be that price forever, but I think right now it is. So call us 714-502-4243 or email us info at p2sportscare.com. Make sure you go into the description for the show for the links that I talked about in the podcast and subscribe and like the show if you learned anything at all. See you guys next time.