Strength for runners: four lifts, twice a week

What it does, and what it does not

Across the trials, runners who added strength work became between two and eight per cent more efficient at the same pace. In well trained runners that shows up in time trials, not only in the laboratory.

It does not raise your VO2 max. That has been looked at repeatedly and it does not move. The gain is in economy, which is what holding a pace costs you, and in how long you can hold it once you are tired.

And it does not make you heavier. Across programmes running from ten weeks to forty, body mass, fat mass and lean mass did not change while performance did. Nothing here raises your ceiling. It lowers what it costs to get near it.

The four lifts

Heavy squat, 3 to 5 sets of 3 to 6, at a weight where the sixth would be a struggle. Loads above eighty per cent were the only ones that improved economy across the whole range of speeds.

Single leg calf raise, 3 to 4 sets of 6 to 8, three seconds up and three down, off a step. The calf takes the highest forces in running. Add weight rather than repetitions.

Slow eccentric hamstring, twice a week, building from one set of 5 to three sets of 8. The one exercise here with a direct effect on injury, roughly halving hamstring injuries across sports.

Jumps and bounds, up to about 200 contacts a week across two sessions, starting at fifty. Helps most at paces up to about twelve kilometres an hour. Stop when the landings get noisy.

Two sessions a week was what the trials used. More was not better.

The test

The guide uses the single leg bridge hold. In healthy adults the average hold was about 65 seconds a side. Take that figure lightly. The spread around it is wide, and the people tested were young, mostly female and mostly students.

The two things worth watching are the difference between your two sides, and what your own number does over eight weeks. A change under about 25 seconds sits inside the margin of error, so do not chase small gains.

The honest part about injuries

You will have read that strength training cuts sports injuries to about a third. That number is real and it is not from runners. It comes from pooling football, handball and military trials.

When somebody pooled the trials in runners alone, nine studies and more than nineteen hundred people, the effect on injury risk did not reach significance. Seven of the nine were low quality.

So we are not going to tell you this prevents injuries. What it does is well established: you get more efficient, you hold pace longer when tired, and you get stronger without getting heavier. That is a good enough case on its own.