To Lift or Not To Lift: Why Runners Should Strength Train

When Weight Training is Appropriate

September 26, 2006

Counterpoint: Jason Karp's Response to Michael Yessis' Article

If you examine almost any sport today, you will see that strength training plays a prominent role. There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that athletes and coaches have found that you can perform better with greater strength.

For years runners have been told to run more in order to get in shape and to improve their performance. One merely has to look in most running magazines and books to see that for the most part they only recommend some form of running. For example, to improve speed they may recommend hill running, tempo running, sprint running, interval training; to improve endurance, they recommend long runs, and so on.

Doing more running training to improve running, however, often leads to injury because the running does not make muscles stronger; its main benefits are in the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. For beginners, running will enhance strength of the muscles as the body adapts to the new activity. Once the runner achieves a steady running pace in his workouts, however, there will not be any further increases in strength.

When runners undertake to run more or to run faster, they often become injured because the muscles are not prepared for the increased intensity of the activity. This is why it is especially important to physically prepare the muscles for any increase in running speed or distance.


In addition to preventing injury, strength training, particularly specialized strength training, has other benefits. If you are a serious runner and would like to run faster or farther you need greater strength endurance—especially of the hip flexor muscles—to be able to drive the thigh forward the same way and through the same range of motion (ROM) on each stride in order to maintain your speed. From analyzing hundreds of runners from the 1500 meters and longer, the number-one reason for slowing down is the inability to continually drive the thigh forward through the same ROM. As a result, stride length decreases and the pace becomes slower. Thus, even doing just one exercise to strengthen the hip flexor muscles as they perform in running will enhance your running greatly. Doing other exercises for some of the other key joint actions will likewise improve your performance.

To run faster and/or farther you should do joint-specific strength exercises. It is not pure strength that you should seek but strength endurance, i.e. the ability to continually execute the joint actions over the distance in the same manner. In this case you do higher numbers of repetitions with ample resistance.

When discussing strength, it is necessary to separate general from specialized strength training. In the former you develop the muscles in a general manner. Your main objective is to strengthen all of the major muscles of the body. General exercises make you more fit and are the ones typically done by runners who go on a strength training program. Many find that it improves their running mainly because of their better fitness.

To have the greatest improvement in your running performance, however, you should do specialized strength training in which the exercises duplicate the same neuromuscular pathways that occur in the running stride. For example, in a forward knee-drive exercise, using rubber tubing for resistance, the thigh moves in the same pathway (movement pattern) as it does during the run, i.e. from behind the body to in front of the body. However, a common general exercise to strengthen the hip flexors is done by raising the thigh directly upward. This strengthens the hip flexors, but not as they are involved in the run.

The exercise must also develop strength over the same range of motion as is displayed in the running stride. For example, development of hip-flexor strength should begin with the thigh behind the body moving to approximately 45 degrees in front of the body. This is the range over which the muscles act in the run. It is also why hill running does not directly improve your running on level ground. It strengthens the hip flexors mostly in a thigh-upward rather than a thigh-forward driving action.

The strength exercise must involve the same type of muscular contraction as that used in the running stride. In the case of the hip flexors, this means that you must drive the thigh forward quickly at the beginning of the movement, after which it moves forward via momentum. It is not slow strength that you need to develop (although this is beneficial in the initial stages of training), but a more powerful muscular contraction at the initiation of the movement.

Strength training can also be used to attain, modify or change running technique. For example, a coach may tell you to assume an erect posture with the chest out. However, if you do not have sufficient lower back strength, it is impossible to maintain an erect running posture, and the recommendation is wasted.

When you do specialized strength training, in particular the conjugate method in which you work on certain aspects of technique together with strength, you get immediate improvement. For example, my analysis shows that Deena Kaster, our premier marathoner, has a flaw in her running technique; a pronounced heel hit in comparison with others of her caliber. If she did the pawback exercise (hip extension), she could develop the strength needed to pull the leg down and back to make contact with the ground as it occurs in effective running. She would also develop a feel for the action so that it could then be more easily incorporated into the total run. In this case, the exercise not only helps with what proper technique feels like, but also the strength needed to execute the movements required to improve your running performance.

If you are not interested in becoming a better runner, then you should just continue doing what you are doing now. If you want to become a better runner, capable of running faster and/or farther without injury, you should strength train. General strength training has value, but specific strength training that enhances the ability of the muscles to perform as they do in running, is the most effective.

Michael Yessis, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus in biomechanics and kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton and author of Explosive Running and Build a Better Athlete.