If you feel your training is becoming stale, you’re getting repetitive niggling injuries, or you’re not getting faster, then strength training is for you. When you think about increasing your running speed there are a few things that come to mind. For instance, going out on the road and doing long slow distance (LSD) work for hours on end, hill running; running on different terrains such as sand or mud, or doing fartlek or interval training is a few examples of increasing speed. It’s likely that you have tried all if not some of these techniques already, and although you can get results with all these techniques there are limitations to just using running to improve speed.
We all have muscle imbalances caused by over used muscles shortening and becoming stronger and underworked muscles lengthening and becoming weaker during running. This can lead to injury. You only need to think about the pain that you experience in the back of your legs if you touch your toes to know that over using a muscle makes it tight. When one muscle becomes short or tight, its because that muscle is now too strong. There will be another muscle in your body around that joint that becomes long and weak. For this reason strength training at least three times a week is great because strengthening the muscles which become weak readdresses the imbalance at the joint, improves core stabilisation, and can prevent injuries like runners knee. However, to improve speed we still need to train the key muscles around the ankle hip and knee joints and not just the ones that will keep us injury free.
Can strength training really help me?
I want you to get away from the myth that weight training builds big muscles and makes you slow and bulky. It may surprise you to know that some of the top runners in the world have been doing strength training for many years. In fact Paula Radcliffe does strength work at least 3 times a week, and she’s a world champion so I want you to think about how you can use strength training to become a better runner. The important thing is to know what type of changes you want to experience from strength training, because the type of adaptation you get from strength training whether it is increased bulk, improved endurance or increase in power is dependent on how many repetitions performed, the intensity and how long you rest for between sets.
Increasing running speed
Your running speed is determined by two things, your stride length and your leg turn over speed. Both of these variables can be improved with coaching and training but at some point you will reach an optimal stride length and leg turn over speed. Once you are at your optimal stride length and leg turnover rate the only thing you can do to increase your running speed is to increase how much force you produce in each stride, which is where weight training comes in. Firstly, it increase the force production of your legs, which means that if you currently use 30% of your maximum force in each stride than increasing your maximum strength will mean that your average force production will increase with every stride you take. On average it takes 1400 steps to complete a mile (this can vary according to stride length and leg turn over speed), so a 5% increase in force production with every stride you take over 5 miles will knock minutes off your time.
Another important change your body experience is an increase in the rate of force development. I want you to picture yourself jumping as high as you can. The first thing you do is bend your knees to lower your body and jump from your bottom position. This is called a counter movement. Now if you produced the same counter movement and held your knee position at the bottom for 5 seconds and then jump you’ll find that you won’t jump as high. This is because your muscles are like an elastic band, and by stretching it before producing a movement you can produce more force called elastic energy. This elastic energy can be trained and like in jumping there are many pre stretches that occur during running at the knees, hips and ankles. Once you train elastic energy through strength training your muscles will be able to produce force faster, and therefore allows the muscle more time to relax causing a more economical running stride. This in turn will lead to better blood flow around the body, which will provide more oxygen and energy to the body leading to a longer time to exhaustion, so that you will feel stronger and last longer. Let’s go over some of the best exercise for strength training.
Exercises to improve Strength
When doing weights you have to decide whether to do free weights or machine weights. The advantage of doing machine weights is that they are easy to use. However many exercises are isolated movement patterns and running is an integrated movement pattern so you won’t get a great amount of transference into your running performance. Free weights takes more skill and knowledge to use, but because of the extra stabilisation required to control the weight you will get better stabilisation at the joints, and dependent on the exercise you will develop better core strength.
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