Four Benefits of Strength Training For Runners

Running has always been fairly popular among recreational athletes, but for those who have decided to get a little more serious let’s briefly look at four benefits that adding strength training will have on your running performance.  

• Decreased injury risk by improving both muscle and tendon health and strength.

• Increased endurance by improving neuromuscular pathways, thus improving running economy and lessening the amount of work done to maintain the same pace.

• Improved mobility by working in more than just one plane of motion and developing the less used muscles in running.

• Improved speed, by increasing the maximum force output of the muscles, you’ll be able to run faster throughout the race or at the end during your last sprint.

These are are just the beginning of the benefits that strength training will have for runners, and at this point the research overwhelmingly supports adding strength training to endurance training as a way to get better.  

Sprinting Basics

Most sports have a few things in common, one of these commonalities is that you can never be too fast. In fact being faster than your competitors correlates well with getting more scoring opportunities in games. But before going on any further let’s define what speed is, for most sports it is how fast an athlete can sprint at maximal speed. 

Sprinting, is a highly technical skill that has been determined to be an outcome of stride length and stride frequency. The basic premise is that the longer your stride length, this will allow you to cover more distance and will help you be faster, and for stride frequency, the shorter time you take between each stride, the faster you will be able to sprint. Stride length is primarily determined by limb lengths and motor control and typically is optimized once the athlete begins to learn the skill that is sprinting. So while this is a determinant of speed, there is little to be done to improve it once the pattern has been set. Stride frequency is based on two factors, flight time and ground contact time, and commonly is trained by teaching athletes to quickly “turn over” and move their legs as fast as possible. While this may make sense at first glance, a deeper dive into the subject shows that flight time, no matter if it’s measured from Olympic level athletes or your average grandma remains relatively unchanged. In fact when studies on stride frequency are done, the one commonality among elite level sprinters is that they get on and off the ground the fastest which is the main factor that can be modified to improve maximal sprinting speed. So while it may be common practices to ask your athletes to swing their feet faster to be faster, this actually doesn’t determine sprint speed and instead the focus should be on shortening the ground contact times.

With emphasis being on shortening ground contact times, there are a few ways to do it. First and foremost, proper body positioning must be maintained. The pelvis should be slightly posteriorly rotated (butt tucked down) as this sets the body up for proper positioning at touch down, as well as not allowing the swing leg hip into hyperextension. By being in proper position at touch down, with the stance leg under the hips, the ground contact time is reduced because the leg effectively acts as a spring and gets up and off the ground without any extra time needed to get into position, but when an athlete reaches out in front of them, this may seem like it will increase stride length and will improve sprinting, but in reality it increases braking forces at the foot and increases the amount of time needed to get into proper position and then off the ground. 

A second important training factor for improving sprint performance is to get strong. There are clear correlations of an athletes squat one rep max and their sprint time being faster up to about a strength level of 2x body weight. Another reason this is important is because during sprinting, forces of up to 5x body weight are experienced at every ground contact, and that’s only on one leg, so increasing the amount of force you can put into the ground in a very short period of time is essential to sprinting faster. Strength training also increases the stiffness of your tendons, the ability to withstand deformation, which is essential to being able to withstand the forces associated with sprinting.

Ultimately while sprinting is a highly technical skill, the major determinant of success and running really really fast is how quickly you can get off the ground. Making sure that you are in proper position at touch down, getting strong are some of the best ways to aid the effort of getting fast, instead of spending time trying to move your legs faster or increase your stride length which may ultimately lead to decreases in performance.

Sports Specific Training

Sports specific training has been around for a while now and promises to get an athlete better at their sport by training the positions and actions that they will use in games. While this sounds like a great idea at first, the extent to which it has been taken has reasons to cause concern, as many gyms and fancy equipment merely mimic the sport action, but just add some form of weight or resistance to it. This is all based on the SAID (specific adaptations to imposed demands) principle, or more commonly called the principle of specificity, which shows that we only adapt to the things that we are exposed to. 

However, many of the people pushing sports specific training are there to develop physical capacities, not sports skills and tactical training. Because of this, what is taught during these training sessions may contradict what the athletes sport coach may want. Also, if too much resistance is added, then this can alter the biomechanics of the movement and can ultimately interfere with the learning process and prove to set the athlete back instead of making them better.

To add to this, many of the methods used in sports specific training are primarily focused on moving fast and developing power. While power development should be part of every athlete's strength program, without a sufficient base of strength the athlete will not adapt as well to the power training and will be leaving some chips on the table. In fact, general strength training can raise an athlete's power to a greater extent than just power training, until the athlete has reached sufficient maximal strength levels.

This shows that general preparation is the foundation for specific adaptations. Without this foundation of sound movement skills and strength, the athlete may be at an increased risk of injury. And on the flip side of that, by only training "sports specifically", you put the athlete at risk of overuse injuries by only working through the same motor patterns that they use all the time in competition.

Ultimately, a trainer or performance coach is there to develop the physical capacities so the athlete can be more successful in their sport, not just add weights while blindly thinking that it will transfer better to competition. At the present, the best form of sports specific training is a holistic program that gets an athlete stronger, faster, and more powerful, while minimizing the risk of injuries that could possibly occur from overuse. Outside of this, skill development should be left to the sport coaches to build on top of the general prep that has been done in the gym.