I am delighted to have Sam Somers from @nextlevelperform contribute to the monthly email and produce a thorough and interesting look at the importance of including strength training around your running schedule. Sam has been successfully working with all types of sports athlete including athletics. She previously competed in athletics for Scotland and combining her experience with her thirst for knowledge. Sam has taken her experience and has created a four part trial of efficient strength training for the any athlete but for the instance of this platform, the running athlete.
This can be signed up to here. https://mailchi.mp/next-level-performance/free-4-part-series
Let me leave you here in Sams capable and experienced hands….
Who am I and why should you be listening to me?! I would like to believe I have a little merit to be talking about strength training for athletes, although you can be the judge of that. I’m going to tell you why I believe so anyway. Firstly, I have always had my life centred around sports. From a very young age I nose-dived into as many different sports as my parents would allow me to: athletics, football, swimming, golf, karate, food… if you count eating as a sport?!
But anyway, as I became older, I focussed my training and attention on athletics, where I found my love specifically for sprinting and pole vaulting for Aberdeen Amateur Athletics Club. After approximately ten years of training and competing, gaining some caps for Scotland, adult work got involved in my life and this is where I realised, I could use my experience as an athlete to help others! I decided I was doing a degree in Applied Sports and Exercise Science and then once successfully graduated, I embarked on my Master’s in Research subsequently working with Aberdeen Football Club as a Graduate Sport Scientist for 3 years within their Youth Academy.
Again, once I successfully graduated, it was time to move on, and that leads me to where I am now within my career. Currently, I work for the Scottish Football Association as a ‘Football Scientist’ within their youth women programme and coach within the Scottish Rugby Union as a Strength and Conditioning Coach for their senior women.
Whilst studying, I started my own coaching business, Next Level Performance, where I have worked with many amateur athletes across the city. Work has varied in sports including running and football predominantly, but also working with golf, martial arts, triathlon, snow sports, hockey, and rugby.
The runners I have coached, mainly from Metro Aberdeen Running Club, have varied in distance from 10k to Marathon. It has been an area of Strength and Conditioning I have loved coaching into the runners, and why I am delighted today to be doing a write-up for this newsletter to you all, aiming to give you a little more insight into why strength training is so important for you ladies and gents out there on the track or road! So, let’s get going…
What is Strength Training?
Excuse me if this is very common knowledge to some of you, however for those of you who don’t really know – strength training or resistance training as it is also known, is a form of exercise completed to improve the strength and robustness of your muscles, tendons ligaments and soft tissue living in your body. Strength training can be completed through various methods using just your own bodyweight or adding in external resistance in the form of resistance bands and weights such as dumbbells, kettlebells and barbells. By overloading the body with additional weight and ‘stress’ than it is commonly used to, it forces an adaptation in the muscles to occur, that allows them to deal with a higher impact of force and load throughout the body – specifically talking to you guys – this can be in the form of running! The way I look at it: a strong and robust body = a more successful athlete!
Why is Strength Important for Runners?
Every runner I have worked with has come to me for S&C coaching due to the demand for it in their training schedule. The demand has been for many reasons: physio referral to assist in the rehab of an injury and prevent further re-occurring injuries; struggling to reach a qualifying time and looking for that missing piece of the puzzle; improve running mechanics and running economy and just generally feeling ‘weak’ running throughout their training sessions. I’d like to talk about those reasons with a little more detail to explain why strength training has a huge benefit in towards your running performance.
Injury management something I could talk about all day given that both of my dissertations focussed on it, so I’ll try and keep it to the point! Now firstly, you can never completely prevent an injury from occurring, there can be too many contributing factors, depending on the injury mechanics, to completely avoid it happening throughout your running career. So, please don’t come away thinking this is going to make all your injuries disappear forever. However, there is no hiding from the statistics that lower-limb injuries are massively common in beginner and amateur runners especially.
One example of this in recent research has shown us that of 720 participants who were running in the 2017 New York Marathon as their first marathon race, 48.5% of these runners suffered a minor injury throughout the race, and another 8.9% of runners occurred a major injury. 52/64 major injuries came from an overuse injury. Within the 720 participants, they were randomly split into a strength training and non-strength training group. The strength training group completed a 12-week basic strength training programme targeting lower-limb training in their quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, hip abductors, and core muscle groups.
Some of those muscles you may or may not know, but all you need to know is that they are your main muscle groups which work hard to keep you upright and striding one foot in front of the other for up to 26.2 miles! Unsurprisingly, with only 12-weeks of training, the strength training group had a reduced injury and non-completion of marathon rate of nearly 7% in comparison to the non-strength training group.
So, it’s clear to see that some form of strength training does benefit you in mitigating overuse injuries. However, it also helps to know where these overuse injuries come from; what factors in your training week can contribute to an injury and where can strength training interject and help this? Prior injury is one of the main contributing factors, alongside inexperience, greater running frequency, higher weekly mileage, and a higher body mass index (BMI).
The main aim of strength training here is to create a stronger foundation in the body, training it to become more robust and responsive to high weekly mileage and greater running frequency. It will also increase your experience, whilst reducing your BMI (if necessary). Strength training can build stronger muscle fibres, more resilient ligaments, tendons, and soft tissue, all of which can better handle a higher running load alongside the impact to the joints when running on various surfaces.
Your body will also cope better with additional mileage every week as well as having the ability to increase the intensity/speed of the run, instead of breaking down and eventually leading to time out of training.
Tied in closely to injury prevention, is the benefit seen to your running mechanics and economy when involved in strength training. It’s all well and good being strong, but are you training that correctly to also compliment your running technique and efficiency? Or are you ‘too heavy’ and immobile? By this I mean carrying a bit too much muscle mass for running up to 26 miles successfully. As well as creating a higher muscle mass index than needed, you may not be agile and mobile enough to create good running mechanics in the first place. Ask yourself this – are you struggling with hip mobility, hamstring mobility, core strength, knee drive or ankle mobility?
These mechanics are crucial to a good running mechanic and if we don’t address this in our strength programme, we are missing a key ingredient in your set-up. Exercise selection is therefore an important consideration in your strength programme to acknowledge these needs and improve on them for everyone.
If you believe me yet that I have some idea of what I’m talking about, you can follow the free workout programme included in the bottom of this article to know exactly what I’m talking about here!
When Should I Be Training for Strength?
One lasting thought that may answer a question you have been thinking about as you are reading this – when is the best time to train for improving my strength? ALL YEAR is your answer. Yes, there are certain points in the season where you can capitalise on this more, for instance in the off-season when races are quieter.
This means you can avoid having to taper off any training, and you can focus on building week-to-week the training load and intensity in which you are able to complete in the gym. In simple terms, lift heavier and progress the stimuli your body must adapt to, without having to cater and conserve your body for a big race at the weekend.
Therefore, if you are a beginner in the realm of strength training, winter/off-season is a great time to introduce your body to this new addition to your weekly schedule. My advice is to improve your strength as much as you can during this period. If you have a low training age (never or rarely trained in the gym to develop strength before) then you need to start off using just your bodyweight.
As you adapt to this, increase some external load and resistance in the form of bands or dumbbells/kettlebells, and as you become stronger and more robust, include barbell work with some more advanced methods of training to improve your power – required for the speed you may need towards the end of a race to catch that rival in front of you or sail past qualifying time!
Lastly and most importantly – you cannot and do not need to forget strength training for the rest of the season! In-season you can focus on maintaining your strength, with smaller increases in strength development, whilst also fine-tuning any individual workings you feel will positively contribute to your running ability (mobility, agility, or speed mechanics for example).
Alongside your running sessions, a maximum of two weekly S&C sessions will help you develop and maintain adequate strength to improve your running performance. Strength training is an all-year essential in my books, you just need a good coach who knows how to periodise it for you, just like your weekly mileage and overall training load.
Workout to Trial
If you want to follow a FREE trial of effective training which will help you in all the areas I have talked about above and more please follow my Instagram and download my 4-Part Athlete Training series to improve your training across: the warm-up; strength training; speed, agility and quickness, and recovery and injury prehab.
I hope this has been of some benefit to you in understanding why strength training is so important to include in your weekly training programme, and how it will benefit your overall running performance. If so, please visit my social media and contact links below if you want to know anything more. Thank you so much for reading and I hope I get to chat to some of you in the near future. Happy Running!
Thanks Sam – Great insight into the requirements and importance of strength in running. You can find all Sam’s details here –
Social links below:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nextlevelperform/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sasfit.co.uk
Website: www.next-level-performance.co.uk
Email: sam@next-level-performance.co.uk
If you have enjoyed this piece or have any questions following reading the article please reach out to Sam, she would be delighted to hear your thoughts.
Run Long and Prosper
James