Running season has fully arrived! Yay! And at this point, you may have a bunch of kilometers under your belt. But, have you strength trained? Strength training is vital for the sport of running. It tends to be forgotten (especially with the beautiful weather outside) or is the last thing on a runner’s mind. That’s okay! The love of the sport may be at the forefront of your mind but that’s why we are here to remind you.
Have no fear, the physios are here!
When it comes to strength training for running, you want to focus on lower repetitions with a heavier weight. But, why is that? Well, when you run, there is a high chance of overuse injuries because of the repetitive motion of the movement. The impact frequency is high, so when we train we need to ensure our muscles (specifically the quadriceps, glutes, calves, and adductors) are strong enough to allow us to keep on moving forward.
When it comes to strength training, we generally want to focus on a repetition scheme of 3-6 and RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) weight of 6-10 out of 10.
So now that we got the programming logistics out of the way, here are our four favorite running specific exercises:
- Squats
Squats are an excellent exercise to strengthen our quadricep and gluteal muscles. For running, we would prefer to have a slightly more quadricep dominant squat. Which means your torso is more upright and think drive your butt down allowing the knees to go past your toes.
You can use a barbell for this, or perform a goblet squat with a dumbbell or anything you have accessible to you.
- Loaded Step-Ups
Step-ups are an amazing single leg exercise that helps you focus on pushing your foot into the box, forcing you to completely extend your knee with zero momentum from the back leg.
These can be done goblet style, but we think two dumbbells on either side of you is best.
Don’t forget to let your knee go past your toes and to fully extend at the very top of the step-up!
- Single Leg Deadlifts
Of course regular deadlifts are a great exercise, but what’s nice about single leg deadlifts is the fact that it is not only a unilateral exercise but that it works on balance and helps teach you how to keep your torso and hips square forward just like when we’re running. We do not want to waste energy while on our runs and swinging your body side to side with no core and hip strength will cause us to fatigue faster.
With this exercise we are more focused on the hamstring and gluteal muscles. When performing the exercise make sure you start with a small hinge and then push your butt back as far as possible while keeping your hips and torso fairly square to the floor. Think like you are an airplane staying up in the air.
- Calf Raises
Oh the famous calf raises! Such a simple and highly forgotten exercise since it is such a specific isolated area of the body. Don’t forget about working your lower legs! Calves are not just for aesthetics, they are functional for our everyday living and is critical to help you run faster. Super easy exercise to do anywhere, but if you want to load it, you can for sure use dumbbells. But, another way we can load it is by changing how the muscles contract by focusing on the eccentric portion of this exercise. What does that mean you ask? Well, you would go up onto your toes like normal, but, on the way down you would take your time and slow this part of the lift down making it more difficult. You can lower your heels for 3-5 seconds to start and then to make it more difficult simply add more time to the eccentric portion of this exercise.
I hope these exercises help you become a better and stronger runner!
If you would like to improve your running form, we do running assessments so come check us out!
