Strength training for distance runners: lessons from a 40-week study

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 Journalist 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. Today, we are going over the details and findings of a research paper which covered 40 weeks of strength training for competitive distance runners. You'll never believe the effects.

I'll give you a hint. They all improved. Now, I can say with a lot of certainty that a lot of recreational runners that I see of various different distances tend to decrease the value of the resistance training program. It's more of an afterthought, and to be fair, resistance training is complementary to most sports, such as if you're playing baseball, you won't become a better baseball player if you are a stronger person, but you potentially will be a better hitter than another hitter who has less strength. So, it's important to have strength, not only for performance, but also for injury prevention.

We do know a lot of runners out there have problems associated to weakness of their hips, their quads, their intrinsic foot muscles or small foot muscles in association to conditions like patellofemoral pain syndrome, plantar fasciitis, groin symptoms, or overactive hip flexors, and much, much more. Now, in the article today, I will cover some details of things that they did, but I'm also going to cover basically generalities of things that you should be aware of when it comes to the benefits of strength conditioning, when it comes to your sport of running. Now, in the paper, the program was designed by an accredited strength coach from the UK, and it was performed over the course of 40 weeks.

The program included exercises to help improve maximum force development through high load, low velocity. So, that's high loads, lower movement, such as an example would be a back squat. It would also include explosive strengths, which would be medium to high load with high velocity movements. An example would be jump squats. It also had some activities that were for reactive strength that targets muscular tendonist stiffness and the slower or fast stretch shortening cycle characteristics. This is usually done through low load, high velocities, such as pogo hops and drop jumps. During the first 20 weeks or the preseason, this was December through March, it focused primarily on maximum strength development with the secondary focus of reactive strength training.

There were two strength sessions per week, with at least 48 hours of recovery between sessions during the preseason period. During in-season racing periods, weeks 20 through 40, that's April through July, after an increased level of maximum strength had been attained, the primary emphasis of the program changed to reactive and explosive strength development. With the secondary focus on maintenance of the maximum strength adaptations that the athletes had once gained. The frequency of strength sessions during the week dropped down to one, and remember, it was two times a week in the off-season.

Assistance work throughout 40 weeks consisted of either single-leg squats, examples would be split squats, reverse lunges, and single-leg squats, or single-leg deadlift variations, examples would be single-leg Romanian deadlifts in the 5 to 12 rep range. One reason for this was to develop glute strength and femoral control for knee stability. Now, just as a side note, we do know that knee stability or knee injuries have a high correlation to control of the femur to eccentrically control or to control the inward drift, inward rotation of the femur, mainly from the hip. So, glute strength, mainly glute max strength, is a big, big factor, as well as hip drop or core stability for people to develop knee injuries in the first place.

And if you have looked at other research papers or even pictures on the internet that show what you look like when you have a hip drop or when you have knee cave, when you're in single-leg stance, it shows how the foot or plantar fasciitis and knee conditions and hip ones all have things in common. These mechanics can carry over to all three types of conditions, like hip impingement, patellofemoral pain, as well as plantar fasciitis. And so, as a preventative measure, glute strength is always super important. And just a tip of the trade, most of the time I see people doing subpar core strength.

They do more glute endurance. They do things like clamshells and leg lifts and things like that. When we're talking about strength, remember we're talking more in the rep range of under 10. All right? As we covered in one of the other podcasts, we have a saying that strong people can't count above 10. So, if you're trying to get strength, don't do reps above 10. Or if you are doing reps above 10, then it's not actually strength. It's more so kind of like a toning effect or something of that nature. Like it's more muscle building, which is not the same thing as strength either. It's called a hypertrophy.

So, if you want to get strong, it needs to be in the lower rep range. In that case, clamshells and stuff like that won't cut it. Not unless someone's sitting on your knees and you're trying to push them up to the ceiling. But that little circle band that you have between your knees ain't going to cut it either. So, it's going to be something else, more like a single leg activity or a deadlift or something like that. Now, I want to put in the description for the show or the show notes. I'm going to put a link to this article so you guys can read it on your own. And I do strongly encourage you to do so.

So, don't take my information at, take it at surface deep. I want you to do your own research. Now, just a couple key points on this. The things I think I've noticed over the years of people being worried about when they're adding strength training is they're worried about getting bulky. Which can make them feel like they're not going to run as fast. This actually showed that people in this program actually didn't get any bulkier. And so, strength training can make you stronger and faster without making you heavier. And I will explain the reasons for this. I've covered it in different podcasts.

But I think this is a very big topic that people tend to be worried about, which stops them from doing strength training in the first place. Is that your body is basically in a resource fight. And so, if you were to only try to grow like your right quad muscle, your right quad muscle would be the priority. You would do a lot of exercises for that. Try to build its size by doing more reps to failure. You'd probably be above 10. You'd probably be around the 20 rep range or so. And you'd get to more reps in reserve. So, you're going to go more towards failure. Which is not the case with some of this strength training.

Strength training is you may feel, we're not going to really go to failure on all of them. But you're going to stay heavier within a lower than 10 rep range. So, also on that same note of being bulky, your body can only grow if it gets the resources to grow. So, if you're an endurance athlete, you're using a lot of resources to recover from your endurance endeavors. And that's not really possible to grow your right quad if that was the case. Also, if you are working the other quad, if you're working both sides, it's hard to grow that one area because both quads are in a resource fight to grow larger.

And something we're going to cover in another podcast to come is about exercise selection. Now, if you change your exercises too often, you may end up reducing some of your strength. But there's a chance that you may actually reduce some of the risk with getting too bulky as well. So, there is some artistry into designing programs for runners that are not trying to get too bulky. But again, just from the overall population, based upon what you do in your time not at the gym, it's very hard to get bulky in the first place. So, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Now, we have a saying in strength conditioning that we don't want to hurt anybody in the gym.

So, you don't want to break an athlete in the gym. And there's no faster way to having bad performance and having an upset athlete is to hurt them while they're doing weight training. So, weight training is helpful, but again, it's supplemental. And so, as you can see, these runners in this study, they were runners already. Like, they were high caliber runners already. They just got better by adding something to their program. Now, if you have time to add strength training to your program, by all means, do so and get coached. Form is really important, as I said. It's not in our best interest to hurt you so you can't run.

We don't want anyone to do a deadlift and hurt their back, but deadlifting can be helpful for glute strength. So, making sure you do it right is really important and making sure that you have the right goals in mind. I'm sure that a lot of you who potentially have running coaches already, we're not running coaches, by the way. We don't, we're not trying to program your mileage and your intensities, but as we know that if you've been working with a running coach, like, there's a reason for things like tapers and builds. And so, it's the same thing with weight training as well. And we need to keep a certain amount of weight and heaviness on you to keep and maintain the strength that you need to perform at your highest level and prevent the chance of injuries, as I mentioned before.

So, make sure that you do know what you're doing, but if you don't know what you're doing, I think at the very least, go into our YouTube channel and refresh yourself with good form and good exercise selection. We do have videos on our channel which cover some of the basic hinge patterns, squat patterns that people fare very well with. And worst case, if you don't do it heavy enough to build quote-unquote strength, that's okay. For a lot of people with early lifting ages where they don't really know too much what they're doing at the gym, it really comes down to really getting the movements down first.

You add a little bit of weight, build some confidence, and over time you can increase the weight. It's not like we're trying to push you too hard in the beginning. So, hope this was helpful to everybody and please look at that study. I think it'll really interest you. It's a little bit of an older one, but I think it really holds true to the concepts that I think that make people into better, more resilient runners. 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'll 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.