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Benefits of strength training for runners

This is an excerpt from Running Past 50 by Caolan MacMahon.

For older runners, I do not consider strength training to be cross-training in the traditional sense of offering different activities that mimic or balance out running. Cross-training is not essential for good running. You can train for running without any cross-training. However, while it may offer you some other options and you may reap some training benefits, I don’t see strength training as optional, at least for runners 50 and over. Strength training is crucial to counteract the natural process of muscle mass and strength loss. As you get older, running is no longer enough to maintain muscle.

There’s lots of debate concerning what type of strength training is best, such as high repetitions and low weight versus low repetitions and high weight. My feeling is that both are beneficial for different reasons, but ultimately, it’s heavy lifting that will offer more bang for the buck. Heavy lifting recruits all the muscle fibers and demands joint stabilization. Also, as you get older, your anabolic hormones decrease. Heavy lifting makes the most of what you have. For women in particular, who experience a sharp drop in estrogen, heavy lifting maximizes the estrogen you do have.

Heavy lifting is also good for your bones, not just your muscles. Bone, like all other tissues in the body, only maintains the strength it needs. Demand determines strength. Bones that are stressed, but not overstressed, remain strong. Remove the stress, and bones no longer maintain their density and strength. Like with muscles, tendons, and ligaments, you either use them or lose them. Bones require force to remain strong. This means that muscles must pull on them—forcefully. While body-weight impact activities like walking and running can help, heavy lifting is even better for bones because the force is greater.

There’s one important caveat concerning heavy lifting: You must lift correctly. Form matters, and there’s really no wiggle room on this. Lifting using poor form is much worse than not lifting at all. As a NASM-certified personal trainer, I recommend doing several sessions with a trainer who is experienced working with older athletes or female athletes (if that applies to you). They will take you through a developmental progression based on your current fitness level. Starting off with too many weighted squats or lunges when you have not mastered the mechanics is a recipe for injury.

There are seven fundamental movement patterns that should all be incorporated into your strength training. Let’s look at each one.

Pull

Pulling exercises involve contracting muscles to bring a resistance toward your body. Most pull exercises target the back, biceps, and forearms, but exercises such as hamstring curls are also pull exercises. Other examples of pull exercises are pull-ups, chin-ups, lat pull-downs, bent-over rows, bicep curls, and hamstring curls.

Press or Push

Press or push exercises involve extending your arms against a resistance and moving the resistance away from your body. Examples of press or push exercises are push-ups, bench presses, overhead presses, shoulder presses, dumbbell chest presses, dips, and leg presses.

Carry

Carry exercises involve holding a weight and walking with it. These are very beneficial functional exercises. Examples of carry exercises include the farmer’s carry, suitcase carry, and sandbag carry.

Lunge

Lunges involve stepping forward, backward, or sideways and bending at the knees with an upright torso. They are similar to squats but are a bit more balanced and knee-dominant. You can do these with or without weight.

Squat

Squats involve bending at the knees and hips while keeping your torso upright. Squats primarily strengthen the quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes. Squatting exercises include front squats, back squats, goblet squats, and overhead squats. Bulgarian split squats are a variation of single-leg squats. Because running is a one-legged action, Bulgarian split squats are very beneficial for runners.

Rotation

Rotational movements involve twisting your limbs and torso around the center axis of the body. While many activities are either frontal or lateral, running actually involves all planes, since the movement between the upper body and lower body involves a rotation that helps to move you forward. Rotational exercises involve both the rotation and the control (antirotation) of that rotation. Examples of rotational exercises are medicine ball throws and woodchoppers; antirotational exercises include dead bug, bird dog plank pull-throughs, and single-leg deadlifts.

Hinge

Hinge movements are lower-body movements that involve bending at the hips while maintaining a straight spine. Hinge movements target the posterior chain, including the hamstrings, glutes, and lower back. These are the muscles that move you in a forward direction. With hinges, the knees are soft with a slight bend, but the main action is at the hips. Examples of hinge exercises are bridges, hip thrusts, deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, and kettlebell swings.

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