Strength Training for Runners: What Sex Differences Research Shows

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. In this show, we are covering a journal article from the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research called Sex Differences and Resistance Training, a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Now, some of these, I'm going to boil this down as simple as I can. Obviously, getting into the nuances of the research can be a little bit daunting, but I'm going to make it as simple as I can. You are invited to look at it on your own. I'll put a link in the description for the podcast, and I want you to look at it, so you make sure that you do your due diligence and make sure not take the advice of some guy on a podcast. So just to know as well that strength and conditioning is, or resistance training is something which is overlooked in many sports. Running, golf are ones that I can definitely think of, ballet or dance or other ones, and obviously strength training or resistance training is going to be under different pretenses and different goals within each sport as well.

But just to let you know, strength is helpful in all the sports. I know it's more classically trained in like football and it's come around to be in baseball and things like that, but it can be helpful in all the sports, but it also needs to be tailored for that athlete too. So in this one, we're going to cover the differences of sexes because I think that's something that has been on the minds of some of you. It's like, should I do you in this if I'm a woman or a man? Should I do upper body? Should I do lower body? And so on. And so this one, this article outlines the differences in upper and lower body and potentially the reasons why they may be different or not.

And so, you know, guys know as well, the research this is from, it's called a systematic review and meta-analysis, though those are the highest levels of research. It's not like you're just looking at 20 people one time in a poorly done study. Usually the people who put these papers together, they're looking at many, many different articles and screening out for the ones that are a little bit too biased or poor systems in the actual study itself. So at least in this one, when we're talking about muscle size gain or hypertrophy, they use 10 studies. If for upper body strength references, they're talking about 17 studies and for lower body, they're talking about 23.

Stay around to the very end of the podcast as I'm going to share some of my favorite strength training exercises that you guys may not already know about and should be put into your program very soon. Now, the first bullet point we're going to cover is, was there any differences in muscle size and lower body strength? Remember, this is mainly just lower body we're talking about here. So the finding was, men and women build muscle and gain lower body strength at the same rate as when, when they follow the same workout program. So let's just boil that down first, because we're going to get into these tangents a little bit, a little later in the podcast too.

Building muscles, not the same as strength, although they can be related. Like generally, if you get stronger, bigger muscles, a lot of times strength comes along with it, but that doesn't mean you need to actually build muscle to get strong either. So they're a little bit different and usually the exercise prescription or the program is tailored towards either one of those goals if one needed to be prioritized. So practical application here is this means that men and women can use the same basic workout routine to build muscle and strengthen their legs. You don't need to worry about gender differences when it comes to lower body workouts as there's similar muscle protein synthesis and muscle damage responses between sexes.

Bullet point two, this is where women have the upper hand and women may have an edge in upper body strength. Interestingly, women showed bigger increase in upper body strength gains in comparison to men in this study. Why is this? Well, it may be potentially because they were looking at untrained individuals. So, and they did note that there, this was mainly seen in untrained individuals. And I'll get into the reason why in that in the first place, but I think moral of the story is I don't think women should be afraid of training their upper body. You can get strong as well. Remember, strong does not equal bulky, but you may be surprised by the amount of gains that you have if you haven't previously spent time doing upper body strength work.

Now, potential reasons for the untrained individual, the untrained women getting stronger is they have a quicker neurological adaptation because they're, it's like a newer pathway to them. They also have possible hormonal influences that we can't, that men may not have, but also motor learning. So there is something in weight training or, or even like bodybuilding where they say that it's, it's the beginner gains, the newbie gains. And so generally, if you're, if we're talking to somebody and you say, Hey, how much did you squat today? And they say, Oh, I squatted like 50 pounds. Right. And then you see him like two weeks later and like, how much you squat now?

I'm doing like a hundred pounds now. It's like, okay, like you're a beginner is what's happening. So either number one, you didn't have the confidence to go up in weight or your body's neurological system, not the muscles adapted in that time to make that gain possible. When you get into like the novice or the expert scenario where you've spent a lot of time weight training, you won't have, you won't have jumps like that. You'll have like, you know, five pounds, 10 pounds over the course of, you know, months and sometimes even years, but you won't have that big of a change. People can increase their strength dramatically over the course of about two to four weeks.

If they have, are there an untrained individual? And, but again, this does not come down. This does not make you big. And muscles do not have that much time to adapt in that timeframe. It literally takes like months and months and months and years to create large muscles. Although there, there can be some findings over the course of months, but it's, it's minuscule. So we attribute most of that to just more firing of neurological input into that pattern of movement. And we're not even saying necessarily it's only just the lat. Like say we're talking about pull-ups, like it's not like only the lat gets the, gets the increased neurological input.

It's everything of the shoulder girl and even the core. So there, there's more coordination to optimize the pattern, but also there is more firing into the prime mover as well, which in this case would be the lat. So we think that women potentially, especially the untrained individuals may have a little bit more of an edge on that, but it's too TBD to know if the novice would still have the same types of gains compared to men. Another bullet point they had was they were talking about how researchers looking to the difference between men and women's brains controlling their muscles. Maybe it could explain the upper body differences and they didn't really find any clear answers on that.

So they said more, more research needed to be performed to figure that out. But the nervous system does play a big role in strength gains. They found out that men and women actually had a slightly difference in muscle fiber differences as well. So men and women had differences in muscle fibers. Women tended to have higher proportions of type one fibers, which are good for endurance. But even with the differences of the muscle fibers, muscle growth or muscle size was similar amongst men and women, meaning that muscle fibers may play a role in how the person performs with different types of sports.

But overall, the size of muscle growth with a basic strength training program was the same. We already know about the hormonal differences between men and women. Obviously, not everybody is the same. So hormones like testosterone play a pretty major role in muscle growth. And men have more testosterone than women and can build significantly more muscle and strength. But for women out there, don't let that deter you. As you can see, you can build strength with upper and lower body and it would help out with your sport. So in past podcasts that we've discussed about how strength can help out with precursor factors or risk factors associated to different types of musculoskeletal conditions like knee pain, patellofemoral knee pain, really common one amongst female runners.

And that would be inner knee pain a lot of times that would come on with mileage, not really associated to trauma. We know that hip extension strength is a big, big factor in that. And so is quad strength. And so developing a strength conditioning program to help address those risk factors, if we already knew that they were deficient, would be a big win in making it. So you have a longer, healthier, more resilient running career. So we also know that plantar fasciitis, weakness of the foot muscles, the intrinsic foot muscles, it's a big player in plantar fasciitis. So that, again, comes along with some forms of force development from the floor.

So imagine part of your strength conditioning program, you were supposed to be pushing a sled. So pushing a sled has the toes cocked back. It puts a ton of force through the foot. And it's hard to really push a sled if your foot's weak, right? So your foot has to adapt a little bit. And loading the foot in a toes cocked back position, such as pushing a sled or even sprinting up hills, can be helpful with building strength of the foot, which can decrease the potential risk factors associated to reoccurrence of plantar fasciitis or heel pain. We also know that groin pain associated to runners, and this goes for men and women alike, also have something of a risk factor called anterior pelvic tilt.

And so with running, it is an anterior tilted position most of the time or a sway back position. And depending upon the amount of mileage that you do, it's your time changes in that position. So if someone were to run 100 miles a week would be very much different time spent than someone who is running 20 miles a week in that position. So it's not really the problem that the anterior tilt in the lumbar extension is evil. It's not. It's just the time spent in excess or not being able to have the robustness of the hip and the core to tolerate that amount of time. So something that can be done in a resistance training program is strengthening the hip, which can help out with anterior posterior pelvic tilt.

It'll draw it more into a neutral. And also intra-abdominal pressure or even core strength can help out a ton with decreasing how much anterior tilt is happening. Now, and this is going to get a little bit into the weeds a little bit, and this was not covered in this research article, but personally, I think that loading in the frontal plane is way more neglected than sagittal plane loading. Sagittal plane is the forward and backwards plane, such as back squat, dead lifting. I would put single leg RDLs in there as well, just because you're moving up and down in the same pane of glass, the same plane of movement.

But now if you were to be walking in a grocery store and then you see someone in front of you in an aisle and you have to sidestep them, stepping directly to the side is a frontal plane movement. So it's a different plane of movement. It still requires strength and coordination to do it. But a lot of times people, especially in sports where they're moving forward, like running, cycling, swimming, they don't tend to get a lot of frontal plane loading basics. Now, that's not to say they don't have to stabilize in the frontal and the transverse plane or the rotational plane either. They do, but the movement doesn't happen in it quite as much.

Now, other sports like soccer, way more frontal plane loading, and they get that type of adaptation from the sport itself. But a lot of times if we're going to design a strength conditioning program to help out not only with strength, but also decrease the potential of overuse injuries and things of that nature, I think mixing up your exercise repertoire a little bit and loading the different planes is helpful. If you guys are wondering what all this is, we do have videos on our YouTube channel about this, which cover things like the lateral squat pattern and how to load into different planes of movements.

We also have things like different types of squat patterns, goblet squats, back squats, front squats, and also other hip dominant patterns like deadlifting with a barbell, deadlifting from blocks, hex bar deadlifting, single leg RDLs, and so on. So they all hold some merit, but I think if we're talking about from an overall strength perspective, yeah, you'll get strong with a general strength training program as it says in the research. But does it make you a better runner? Does it make it so we are decreasing risk factors that are associated to running? Not always. Like we need to make sure that your program is specific for any deficiencies that you may have.

And deficiencies would be unique to the individual. That's why having an assessment ahead of time to figure out where your stiffnesses are, where your weaknesses are, is very important before you start moving forward with training in the wrong or less optimal direction. I don't want to say going general is wrong. It's just less optimal. So, but I think as a general starting point for most people, doing some form of squat is helpful. Doing some form of hip hinge or hip dominant pattern, even hip thrusters can be helpful. Doing a pull pattern, such as a pull-up can be helpful. A push pattern, like a push-up or a dip, those can be helpful.

As well as a loaded carry, which sled push does count for this, sled push or pull. If you have a hole in your program and one of those sounds kind of foreign to you or you're afraid of doing it because of a past injury, like I know a lot of runners who, they don't really want to squat too much anymore because their knee bothers them. So, part of this solution is finding a good knee pattern where you can keep strength or maintain strength in the quad, even if we're not going to build it up and challenge it too much. You have to maintain what you have. Because if your quad is weak, then there's potential of re-injury of that knee anyways.

So, that endless cycle just continues. So, we need to make sure that we're decreasing the potential of reoccurrence and making you a more robust runner and making you have a long, healthy running career. So, one way we may be able to do that is we double down on some of the hip dominant patterns, which is going to be deadlifting, single leg RDLs and so on. And make sure form is good, first off and foremost, because we don't want you to hurt your back with it. And then we maybe regress the squatting pattern, do an isometric exercise to load the quad until it's ready to actually load like a squat pattern.

But everybody needs all those patterns. If they don't have it, they tend to find that there are, sometimes there's odd injuries that come up down the leg. And there's no reason for it. A lot of these are very preventable if you do a good strength conditioning program. So, hope this was helpful to everybody. And you can see all the references I talked about in the description for the podcast. So, I have the link for the article in there. And we have a link for some of our YouTube videos as well that may help you find some really easy resistance training options or strength training options as a starting point.

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. 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.