Just Running Doesn’t Get Your Legs Strong

The Common Myth Of Running
I recently talked to somebody during a free consult, going over his goals, and he mentioned that he was good with his legs as he ran and hiked. Many people have the mistaken idea that running and hiking will get you strong legs. You see, the body will respond to the different directions that you move and the various ways you load it. To keep it simple: running uses one way of moving and one way of loading your body. This will lead to not fully training your body, overuse injuries, and eventually other injuries. If your goal is to fully prepare your body for a long and healthy life, you have to hit your body in many different ways.

What General Exercise Running Is

Let’s go over the above example and show you how. I am going to keep it simple, so all you nitpickers chill homie. Running is a global move done mainly in two planes of motion and can be done for endurance, some strength, and power. This means it incorporates all the body to move in one of the three planes of motion and 3 of the 6 bio-motor abilities (body actions).

Because it is global, it doesn’t target each muscle because to do so takes training that muscle segments and focusing on it. This is important. Because your body moves as one and because you are only as strong as your weakest link, if you have a weak or tight segment, it will compromise the entire movement and hence your whole body. To prevent this requires segmental strengthening and myofacial stretching of the muscles you need and then incorporating them together.

Running, walking hiking is mainly working in the sagittal plane and transverse plane but in only one type of activity. There are three central planes of motion and a tone of combinations. There are also 7 major primal moves, and your legs are used in 4, but this doesn’t count when you work the primal movements together. This is important because if you don’t work with all the available plains of motion and primal moves, you will be off-balance and increase (in a bad way) the gradient of strength between the weak muscles and strong muscles.

And finally, people generally do distance running, and that type of loading will mainly give you endurance and some strength. To get more complete strength, speed and power, different types of running speeds and different activities and intensities need to happen.

All these aspects need to be considered when thinking about “training your legs” or whatever area you desire. And the above list is not exhaustive. There is also proprioception work, circulatory work, respiratory work, and oh yeah, THE REST OF YOUR BODY.

I know this is a lot and is only slightly less confusing than the number of galaxies in the constantly expanding and contracting universe, but that is why you ask for help.