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At this point, you know the importance of strength training for runners. But knowing and doing are two different things, right? It’s hard to make time for strength training when what you really want to do is clock more miles.
A mere two sessions a week, though, is all you need to get stronger, according to a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in October 2020. Plus, “a high-quality, full-body workout that supports running performance can be done in as little as 20 minutes,” says Stephanie Hnatiuk, a Winnepeg, Manitoba-based certified personal trainer and registered dietitian who specializes in running.
To maximize the time you do spend in the gym, total-body workouts are the way to go. Here’s how to approach them in a way that will boost your running performance and bulletproof your body against injury without taking too much time out of your day.
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What moves should you include in total-body training?
Time-efficient strength training should focus on incorporating six main exercise movement categories: push, pull, squat, hinge, carry, and rotate. “These are all complex or compound exercise movements, meaning that they involve multiple major muscle groups, and typically multiple joints, per exercise,” explains Heather Hart, an ACSM-certified exercise physiologist and RRCA- and UESCA-certified running coach.
By including at least one exercise from each of these movement groups (think: bench press, bent-over row, front squat, deadlift, farmer’s carry, landmine twists), you’ll get a solid total-body workout without spending all day in the gym. You can even combine them—think: deadlift with bent-over row, squat to shoulder press, glute bridge with chest fly—to maximize your time further, says Hnatiuk.
Runners should pay extra attention to running-specific movement patterns, i.e. the hinge and squat, says Hart. “The major muscle groups used in these movements are your quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes, which are also the major muscles used in running,” she explains. “If you think of the motion of the leg through the gait cycle, you are moving through both hip flexion and hip extension, as well as concentric and eccentric contractions of the quads and hamstrings, just as you do during these two movement pattern exercises.”
That doesn’t mean you should only focus on those two movement patterns, though; after all, running isn’t just about the lower body. “Rotational (and anti-rotational) exercises, for example, strengthen a runner’s core, helping them to minimize unnecessary rotational movements while running, which increases efficiency,” says Hart.
Carry exercises, on the other hand, “strengthen your core while standing in an upright position, teaching you to brace and stabilize your spine effectively, which can build strength and help improve posture,” she explains—something that will pay off at the end of long-distance races.
Runners should also prioritize unilateral movements. “Single-leg exercises—single-leg deadlifts, lunges, pistol squats, step-ups, single-leg glute bridges—all directly translate to better running form and mechanics, as those are our primary movers and stabilizers during the running motion,” explains Hnatiuk. These types of moves force both sides of your body to work equally, minimizing chances of any sort of muscular imbalance, adds Hart. “As an added bonus, they challenge your balance and increase strength and stability in the lower musculature (calf, ankles, even feet), which can be very beneficial for runners,” she says.
How do you set up a total-body strength-training routine?
You could, as suggested above, just take one move from each movement category and do two to 3 set of 6 to 12 reps, with 30 seconds to two minutes of rest in between sets. FYI: That rest time matters, the same way it does when you’re running intervals! You might want to rush through it to get the workout over with, but taking a breather ensures you’ll be able to perform a movement again at the same load during the next set, says Hart.
If you really hate standing around during workout time, there are other ways to structure your workout. “Often, I’ll use ‘tri-sets’ or circuit training that includes an upper body, lower body, and core move in a set, which is repeated two to three times before you move on to the next tri-set,” says Hnatiuk. “It’s far more efficient than a set-rest-set-rest approach.”
Supersets are another way to maximize your time. “A superset is simply a pair of exercises done back to back with no rest break between,” says Hnatiuk. “Using this method, you would pair up exercises using two opposing muscle groups (for example, a push exercise and pull exercise, or an upper body and lower body exercise), which allows one muscle group to rest while you work the other—and can shave a few minutes off your total workout time.”
However you build your workout, you want to make sure you’re not rushing through the exercises. “At a slower pace, your form will likely improve, which means you can get more quality work done, and you won’t rely on momentum to help you through your reps, which increases the actual load your muscles need to lift, push, or pull,” explains Hnatiuk. Aliphine
As a general rule of thumb, you want to perform the eccentric part of a movement (when the length of a muscle increases, like when your quad stretches as you lower down into a squat) for a two-second count, and the concentric part of a movement (when the length of a muscle decreases, like when your quad shortens as you push back up to stand from the bottom of a squat) for another two-second count.
Yes, you should grab heavy weights for a total-body workout
Obviously, running can make you stronger. But those repetitive movements are a very different kind of strength training than lifting weights—and it isn’t really effective in building muscle mass. In order to build muscle, you need to progressively overload your muscles in order to force them to get stronger, says Hnatiuk. Translation: You have to lift heavy.
Muscular hypertrophy is the increase and growth of muscle cells, and it occurs when you’re working your muscles until close to fatigue or failure, explains Hnatiuk. “This causes small tears or damage to our muscle fibers, which our body then repairs in such a way that those fibers get stronger and larger over time.” Using lighter weights, even at very high repetitions, isn’t as effective or efficient at doing that.
The National Strength and Conditioning Association recommends one to three sets of about six reps using a weight greater than or equal to 85 percent of your one rep max (or the max weight you can lift for a single repetition of a given exercise), says Hart. If you don’t want to do that work to figure that out, that’s totally fine.
“What I often suggest to runners is to find a weight that rides that fine line between feeling really, really hard at the end of the number of repetitions but is not so heavy that it compromises your form in any way,” says Hart. “If your form starts falling apart before your reps in a given set are over, it’s too heavy—vice versa, if you feel like you could lift that weight all day without taking a break, it's too light!”
What you don’t want to do is lift so heavy you’re experiencing delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS, which can interfere with your running, says Hnatiuk; when that happens, “you’re just piling muscle damage on top of muscle damage and you can wind up overtrained and injured.”
A note about bodyweight exercises: “Bodyweight is a fantastic place to start, and is absolutely better than nothing,” says Hart. But the key to developing strength is progressive overload—or gradually increasing the weight, frequency, or number of repetitions in your strength training routine. “At some point, bodyweight is no longer going to be a great enough stimulus to elicit any sort of response in building strength.”
You can make bodyweight exercises more difficult by increasing your muscles’ time under tension (i.e. slooooowly lowering down in a pushup), changing the angle of your body (doing a decline pushup, where your legs are higher than your head), or adding a plyometric element (picture a clap pushup). But, eventually, you’re going to plateau. “If you can do more than 12 reps of an exercise without reaching muscle failure, it’s too easy and you need to add a new challenge,” says Hnatiuk.
But how do I fit total-body training into my run schedule?
It can be hard to find the time for everything you’re supposed to do to supplement your running. “A good way to plan it out is to keep your hard days hard, and your easy days easy,” says Hnatiuk. For example, if you do your running workouts on Mondays and Thursdays, that’s when you should do your strength training, too.
That might sound intense, but the idea is that you’re getting the tough work done all at once. “It’s very important for athletes to remember that our bodies view stress as stress, no matter where it’s coming from,” says Hart. If you run hard on Monday and use Tuesday as a rest day but then schedule a strength workout, that’s not restful—you’re adding muscle damage on top of muscle damage, which doesn’t allow for full recovery.
Your muscles need anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to fully repair themselves after a hard workout (running or otherwise). “I space my own and my clients’ strength workouts out at least 36 to 48 hours before another workout,” says Hart. “This gives your body appropriate time to rest and recover, and ensures there will be no impact on the next workout from lifting.”
That doesn’t mean you can’t run the day after a hard workout. “You can definitely do an easy run the day after you strength train,” says Hnatiuk. This kind of active recovery improves blood flow and circulation to help you get back to 100 percent faster.
The bottom line: Don’t overthink it! Even if all you realistically have time for is a 20-minute postrun workout where you do some squats, pushups, and planks, your body will thank you for that.
