In this podcast, we review a recent article on the effect of strength training on running economy and performance.
Many people have been advocating for incorporating more strength training into the routine of runners for some time. It’s nice to see research emerging to continue supporting this.
A simple strength training program can improve running performance.
To view more episodes, subscribe, and ask your questions, go to mikereinold.com/askmikereinold.
#AskMikeReinold Episode 366: Does Strength Training Improve Running Performance?
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Show Notes
Transcript
Mike Reinold:
Welcome back, everybody, to the latest episode of the Ask Mike Reinold Show. We are here, Champion PT and Performance up in Boston, answering your questions. Kevin Coughlin, Lisa Lowe, Lenny Macrina, Dan Pope, Anthony Videtto, Dave Tilley all here answering your questions. And you know, what we’re going to do this episode again is what we started to do in the past recently, was do a little bit of some journal article reviews.
And again, we’re kind of testing this format. Because we’ve actually looked at this, we’ve been doing this podcast for almost 10 years. That’s freaking weird, that’s crazy. Who does a podcast for 10 years? That’s weird. But anyway, so we’ve been answering so many questions for 10 years that we’ve answered a lot of questions, and I don’t want to say we’ve answered every question, but we’ve answered a lot of questions. So the other thing we do quite a bit at Champion is we talk about research as it comes out, when we read stuff.
So we thought we would share some of the articles that we’ve been sharing to each other and talking about, and go over them with you. So the first one we have here, let me get the actual name, I want to make sure I say this right here, but I know Kevin Coughlin is going to come in here and dominate this article, and I have to scroll back up, I apologize, but we have it. The article is Strength Training… Strength Training Improves Running Economy Durability and Fatigued High-Intensity Performance in Well-Trained Male Runners: A Randomized Control Trial. So Kevin, what do you got? What was this article about? What do you think about it? And let’s all discuss. What do you think?
Kevin Coughlin:
Yeah, no, this was a great article to read. I guess aside from being a physical therapist, my other big passion is running. So I think this hits home for me, and it’s something that is always good to see, and when you’re working with runners in this profession, it’s important to get them to do strength training for a myriad of reasons that we’ll talk about. But this study did a pretty good job. So, just a little background that I think is important. When we’re talking about improving running performance, there’s a lot of different levers we can pull, and it kind of depends on what race distance you’re doing and what the person’s strengths and weaknesses are. But running economy, which this article focuses on, is one of those levers, so I wanted to define a few different parameters that we look at in runners to predict performance.
So VO2 max is the big one that we all hear about. It’s getting a lot of press for improving longevity and stuff like that. But VO2 max, if you look at longer race distances from, say, half marathon, marathon, even like 5K and 10K, doesn’t reliably predict performance. So you could line up a bunch of runners, and if you stratify them by their VO2 max, it doesn’t predict who’s going to win the race, so there’s a lot of other factors at play. Another one that’s very popular is lactate threshold. So lactate threshold, when they’re measuring it in endurance athletes, is the effort that you can sustain for somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes. And what happens is your body’s producing lactate at different paces. As you’re running faster, and faster, and faster, there becomes a point where lactate accumulation overrides how quickly you can use that lactate for fuel, so you end up getting yourself in kind of a hole.
That’s super important for performance. There’s also psychological things, but running economy, which this article focuses on, is another super important one. And what running economy is… You think about it like a car’s fuel economy. Very similar. So it’s how much effort does it take for someone to run at a certain pace? So if you take two runners who are different running economies, I think of Lenny, because he’s an endurance monster, so if I’m running an eight-minute mile pace and Lenny’s running an eight-minute mile pace, and Lenny’s an incredible endurance athlete, it’s costing him less energy to run that pace. So the units that they would use to measure that is milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per meters run. So you’re using less oxygen in the amount of time you’re running, and you’re more efficient, so that’s kind of the big thing that they’re looking at here.
And the reason why they’re looking at it is because it’s been studied in other studies, and it’s been shown that as running economy improves, we can predict performance a little bit better. Then, there are other things, like I’ll get into the methods and stuff, but we know other studies have shown strength training improves running economy. It improves economy on the bike for cyclists. I’m sure Lisa probably knows, I’m sure it improves economy on the erg and rowing. So strength training has been very helpful for that in the literature. There are other things that reliably improve running economy when they measure it, so running more mileage improves running economy a lot. So if you take a bunch of runners and you have someone who runs 70 miles a week, 50 miles a week, 30 miles per week, invariably, the runner who runs the most miles probably has the best running economy, so that’s a huge thing.
Strength training definitely does, but we can’t forget that the actual sport improves running economy a lot. And then, there have been many studies that have shown that. So one that I was looking at that was interesting was men who run, for one of these studies, who run 50 miles per week training for a marathon, versus 30 miles per week, had about 25-minute better race times, so that’s huge. And that’s probably a combination of lactate threshold, running economy, some other things. And then, in the same study, women who run 50 miles per week versus 30 had a 31-minute better race time. So I think we can’t ignore that. That’s just important. The more years you run, you get better running economy. So it’s interesting in race distances like the half marathon and marathon. We see runners who are in their 30s, oftentimes, win these races versus runners who have the highest VO2 max, which are often people in their late teens or early 20s, so running economy gets better the longer that we train.
Carbon-plated shoes are another thing that’s been really helpful for improving running economy. And then, what this article focused on was strength training and plyometric training. So, in terms of the methods, what they decided to do is they recruited 28 male runners. Unfortunately, this is only males, but there are some studies in females, and hopefully more coming out, but they were between the ages of 18 and 45, and they were good runners, so I would say they’re on the competitive side of recreational runners. They’re definitely far from elite, but they’re good runners. They’re people who… Their times are fairly impressive. So the average 10K time of these runners was about 39 minutes, that’s something close to like a 6:20 mile, so that’s pretty good for a 10K, and their average VO2 max was 58.6.
Some of the inclusion criteria is they had to not be dealing with a current injury, they had to be able to run at least 90 minutes a few times a month, and they had to be running at least 20 kilometers per week. So they had some inclusion criteria there that was good. The duration of the study was 10 weeks long. And what they were looking at is they had the runners do a 90-minute run, and what they called it in the study was the pace that they ran was the delta between LT1 and LT2. So they would measure their lactate threshold, and then they found what’s 10% more than their lower lactate threshold out of the two, and they had them run that pace for 90 minutes. So what was cool about this, this was different than other studies that look at running economy, is this is a pace that, for a lot of runners, correlates to marathon race pace.
So, rather than just go out and run your easy pace and see if running economy’s better, this is a race that is meaningful to runners. So you know, “Is strength training going to improve my races, not just my easy run pace?” because that’s not really what we care about. So they did that, and then they would measure running economy every 15 minutes. And then, the other important and interesting part here was, after they did that 90-minute test, they did a time-to-exhaustion test. So the researchers said… They’re running about their VO2 max pace, and they said, “Run as far as you can, as long as you can, and when you voluntarily quit, that’s the end of the test there.” And then, they also got some baseline strength measurements, because the strength training group and the control group were going to retest these things.
So they tested counter movement jump, one rep max leg press, and one rep max isometric contraction of the plantar flexors, and then they would go ahead and retest these things down the road. So there were 14 people in each group. The strength training group performed two strength training sessions per week that lasted for about 45 minutes. This was three lower-body exercises and two plyometric exercises. And then, just to note a little bit about what that strength looked like, I think in being in this profession, we always pick these apart and think they could do better, but I think they’re trying, which is good. So the plyometrics they did were pogo jumps and drop jumps. It kind of had a weekly progression. So every three weeks, they would progress the intensity of these jumps. They had a hop and stick in stiff leg bounds for horizontal plyos.
And then they did a back squat, a single leg press, and a seated isometric calf raise. And I think a good piece of this strength that they did do was it was lower volume and very high intensity, which is… They’ve done studies where they look at higher volume, lower intensity in runners. You think you’re training for endurance, so you should maybe be doing an endurance lift, but that doesn’t improve running economy. It’s been shown to not be as helpful. So the high intensity, lower volume seems to be better, and that’s the protocol they use for this, which I thought was great. One thing I did want to mention about the methods is they didn’t prescribe, and I think this is a limitation that we could talk about more, but they didn’t prescribe a standardized running program to both groups, so they weren’t following a standardized program.
They kind of said, “You’re similar at baseline, continue to do your normal run training.” I think that’s a bit of an issue we could talk about, but… And then, they didn’t match workloads, either. So they didn’t say like, “Hey, this other group, you’re adding the strength training for two sessions per week, that’s about an hour and a half more of training. Why don’t you do an hour and a half more of running, or cross training, or something?” So I think that could play around with the results, so we could talk about that. I wonder what other people think. But getting into the results here, so running economy durability was shown to improve a lot in the strength training group, so that’s important, the word durability there. What that’s saying is that their baseline running economy at the end of the 10 weeks wasn’t necessarily better, but once they got to 30 minutes and longer in that 90-minute run, they had a lot less of a drop-off in their running economy. Their running economy stayed more or less consistent.
So that control group, or the experiment group, they had a 4.7% drop-off on that initial test in their running economy, and it only dropped by 2.1% in the follow-up, so that was a pretty good improvement. And then, I think the biggest part of what this study showed was that after the 90-minute run, during the time to exhaustion test, they had a 35% improvement in time to exhaustion, where the endurance-only group had an 8% decrease in their time to exhaustion. So not only did the running-only group not improve, they had a small decrease. And then, I think what the practical takeaway of that is that if you have a runner who’s really interested in getting stronger in their kick at the end of a race, it seems like strength training can really help that. So that’s what this replicated. They were trying to replicate, “You’ve just run 90 minutes, you’re fairly fatigued, now run as hard as you can for as long as you can,” and they were able to do that with 35% improvement, which could definitely shave minutes or seconds off a race of longer duration, so I think that’s super important.
And then, I think of course the group that did strength training also, they improved their one rep max, leg press… Their plantar flexor strength improved. They were jumping higher. Their jump had a little bit better peak power. And I think the last thing I’ll say that’s really cool, because runners kind of freak out about body weight and they’re afraid to strength train to get heavier, because you look at those VO2 max and running economy equations, and kilograms of body weight’s always involved. So you think, “Hey, how can I play around with this number? If I just lose weight, I can maintain my power and stuff.” But this group of people who were strength training, they had a small decrease in fat mass and they increased their lean body mass, but their total body weight didn’t change. I think it actually went down one kilogram by the end of 10 weeks.
So I think that’s pretty cool too, because that’s an easier sell to a lot of runners who, on the more competitive side, are afraid of gaining a little bit. We know that if you’re training very high-strength intensity without a ton of volume that you’re not necessarily going to gain weight, so I thought that was pretty cool. And then, I guess I’ll open it up now. I mean, I mentioned a couple of the limitations I thought that they had. The biggest one for me was not matching workloads. I don’t know why they don’t do that.
And a lot of running and running economy studies, when they add strength training, they don’t add something else for the control group, and it would just be nice to see how much of a difference would there have been. I’m sure that time to exhaustion would probably still be pretty different. I think you’d have to train high-intensity running towards the end of your runs to see some change there. But that was one limitation I just wanted to point out. But overall, I thought it was a good study. It was very, very interesting, and I think the researchers did a good job.
Mike Reinold:
Awesome. Thanks, Kev. So here’s the real question. So great study, great outcomes. What are we going to do different based on this? So, what do you guys think? What are your thoughts on how does this apply to the people that you work with every day, and what are some of the takeaways that we can do clinically? Who wants to jump in on that? Dave?
Dave Tilley:
Yeah, my 2 cents. I mean, I felt like this article did a really good job of measuring and looking at what specifically matters for competitive runners. So I mean, obviously, the lingo and the language of how they define a lot of this stuff is a little overwhelming for someone who’s not as technically savvy as Kevin is. But I felt like when I looked through the methods, I was like, “Oh, they’re actually measuring something that matters. They’re measuring something that people care about, especially that 35% is massive.” That’s a huge amount of benefit.
And so it’s good to have things to point to in the research that are specific to what people care about when they come to you for highly competitive goals, versus you have someone who wants to go more of the couch to 5K. It’s pretty easy to give that person a basic running program and say, “Hey, it’s probably good to do some strength training.” Whereas, when you talk to somebody, elite running, elite baseball, elite gymnastics, elite rowing, you got to sell them pretty hard on what they need to change and why it matters. So, when you can pull up stats like 35% or this time to exhaustion, this kick that they care about, I think those are really meaningful things to apply to the clinic. It’s a big deal to them. It’s not just a random study of 5K people.
Mike Reinold:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I like that. And I was thinking the same thing, too. I mean, we can extrapolate this data and apply it to a lot of things. Sprinting to first base in baseball? Nope, not this study, but maybe a field athlete that plays soccer for 90 minutes. I think you can extrapolate some of that stuff. So Dan, what do you think? Did you have something?
Dan Pope:
Yeah, I think I was going to say kind of the same thing as you, is that it seems like strength training is complementary to some of the endurance training, which is kind of nice, because I don’t work with a ton of runners. I do see a decent amount, but a lot of them go to Kevin. But I work with a lot of folks that like to strength train and run. They just really like both of them. It’s not like they’re just specifically runners, and it’s nice to know that the two are complementary. I think, just like Kevin said, it’s very frustrating too, because if you do work with a runner, what is the best thing for that runner to do? Should they just run more, or should they weight train?
And I think you could very easily look at this study, and Kevin was talking about this yesterday, and say, “Oh, it’s a no-brainer, you need to strength train if you’re runner.” But think about the opportunity cost of not running for another hour and a half. That additional hour and a half of running may actually be even better, or maybe you do some high-intensity interval stuff, whatever it is, but I guess that’s for future studies. It did seem like this study did validate the thought that basically strength training can be beneficial for runners, and that’s a good thing.
Mike Reinold:
Yeah, you know what I thought too is we always talk about injury prevention for runners, and I think now we can talk about strength training that’s potentially good for injury prevention, but also enhancing some resilience almost. Like, actually enhancing performance and resilience, kind of put together. So yeah, I agree with that. Anthony, I think I saw your hand, then maybe Lisa, right? I think Lisa had one, too. Anthony, I saw you first.
Anthony Videtto:
Yeah, I was just going to talk about the strength training piece of this, just because I thought it was pretty fascinating that there were such great gains with just three strength exercises. That was pretty remarkable. I think when we think, or at least when I think of trying to improve someone’s strength, I might be aiming for like 16 to 20 working sets per muscle group per week, and they hit like three sets of back squat, three sets of single leg press per week, maybe twice a week, so let’s say that’s…
Mike Reinold:
Twice, yeah.
Anthony Videtto:
12, right? So then, that’s just for the quads. They didn’t even mix in maybe some posterior chain, hinging, stuff like that. They hit that calf raises, that was isometric. So I thought it was pretty remarkable they could see this much improvement in just a minimal workload in terms of strength training. And I’d be curious to see what would happen if you increased the amount of working sets per week, whether that would be beneficial or maybe detrimental, if that would be too much of a workload in terms of how many miles they’re putting in on the pavement. So I don’t know if, Kevin, if you have thoughts on that, if you’ve seen there’s kind of like a trade-off where there’s too much strength training. Does that kind of reduce the benefits?
Kevin Coughlin:
Yeah, I think that’s a good point, Anthony. I think that it does show that it doesn’t take a lot for these people to get a lot of benefit if the intensity is really high. I think what you’d start to run into if someone’s running a lot of miles is that the more tissue damage that you’re getting with the strength training is probably going to bleed into running. And whether it improves performance or not, the runner’s not going to feel great. They might be a little overly fatigued, and nothing feels worse than going out for a run when you’re really sore from lifting. So I wonder if compliance would drop off, but I do think it would be a cool study to see that, with a little bit higher-volume strength training program, what the results would be. But just knowing runners and knowing myself, I think if I started getting too sore from doing too much volume in the gym, it would be unlikely I would continue to do the program, but you know me. You know me, Anthony.
Anthony Videtto:
Yeah. We know that, Kev.
Mike Reinold:
And I hate to say it, but in our experience, these people were probably fairly untrained for strength, like had a poor training age. They just started a 10-week program, and the other group didn’t do anything. So maybe this was such a new stimulus for them that they saw it, Anthony. But the other thing, just jump in now on the strength, because Anthony and I think looked at it similar. I’m looking at the strength program. I still don’t get this infatuation with isometrics that we have going on right now on social media.
I think what this actually showed was that doing concentric strengthening was twice as effective as isometric strengthening. That was my other take home here, is the quad got twice as strong, had twice as much improvement as the calf, which just did isometrics for some reason. I don’t know why, but again, still good components. So again, concentric for the win, but Lisa, what were you thinking?
Lisa Lowe:
I have lots of thoughts, but one, I honestly… As I was reading this, I was like, “I got to see if there’s a similar study for rowing,” because many of these… Even what we’re talking about with a super simple strength program, the many concepts of how this study was set up apply very directly to most other endurance athletes. Like, an endurance athlete doesn’t have the capacity to spend a lot of time in the weight room. And so finding ways to work the weight room into their week to improve their resilience and improve their performance is gold.
And I feel like that’s what I talk to the rowers who come through Champion about is like, “Hey, look, you’ve got this really fantastic rowing base program, but whether you don’t have strength training in there or if your strength training is written by someone who doesn’t understand how to program for rowers, we’re missing a huge piece of your potential performance and injury prevention.” And I feel like I really enjoyed the performance improvements that these runners got from something really simple, because it shows that we’re still allowing the athletes’ capacity to mostly be taken up by their sport training.
We’re still allowing running to be what the majority of their body’s work is going towards, but we’re supplementing and affecting their performance, and hopefully their injury resilience, with the most simple program. So it’s not pulling away capacity from what they can do with running, which in that way, Kevin, when you were talking about you wish you had thrown another hour and a half of whatever it was of running at the non-training people, I feel like you would over train that group if you did that in comparison. Like, the simplicity of the strength program and the amount of time they were actually probably physically working during a strength session was probably pretty minimal. Doing that many exercises over the amount of time that they noted, they’re taking full rest, they’re taking… It’s not the same metabolic demand as adding another running workout would be, even if it’s a matched intensity.
So I feel like, in that way, I actually appreciated that the researchers didn’t mess with the running programs of the group, because it was like, “Okay, let’s keep this the same in your system. Let’s not mess with that aspect of your training, but we’re just going to add this little piece…” That the metabolic demand of that is not high. It’s tissue recovery and all that kind of stuff, but you think of calories burned and all that kind of stuff, the nervous system demand is there, which is probably where we’re seeing the benefit on top of the strength change. But yeah, so I really enjoyed the study, and I honestly am going to hunt to see if there’s something out there that’s sort of similar in the rowing world. I just haven’t looked yet. And I will say, from a personal, prior in life running experience, I was becoming my fastest runner when I added in regular, twice a week strength training, like when I was an athlete at Champion back in the day.
So I had put a lot of mileage on my system runner for decades, and I added strength training, and I was starting to see my fastest racing results because of that change, not because of a mileage change. So to your point of running economy improves with time running, there’s definitely that factor, but the real, true change I experienced for improved times was adding strength training. And it wasn’t complicated, it was simple. So I felt like those were my exciting takeaways from this, that it was just like, yes, it’s cool they actually backed all this up with really solid testing, because the performance metrics they chose make a lot of sense. So yeah, I was glad you chose the study, Kevin. It’s solid. It goes for the argument of like, “Keep it simple, and it’s effective, and it’s worth your time.”
Mike Reinold:
And you know what, Lisa, to your point, and you can incorporate it in season too, like while you’re training. These people were still running. So this isn’t just like a complementary strength training program that you do in the off-season. This is simple, complementary, and beneficial all in the same bout. These studies are always hard, and you could find a similar study… It might come out that might show a slightly different answer, and it comes back down to dose. It comes down to dosage. So the researchers guessed the dose for strength training, like how many sets, reps, times a week, that sort of thing. And they found a dose that was beneficial for a certain population.
So, keep that in mind. If you read a study that says something slightly different, look at the dose, and then say, “Okay, maybe that was underdosed, or heck, maybe it was overdosed,” that sort of thing. But at least I think we learned a little bit. To everyone’s point, a simple dosage in season was effective, and that’s pretty cool. So check out the article. We’ll put a link in the show notes so you can check it out on PubMed. But we’ll keep doing these episodes if you guys like them. Give us some comments on social media, let us know if you like this format, and we’ll keep plugging away. Thanks so much, see you in the next episode.
