Strength training is an essential supplement to a runners track and road work. If you want to perform to your full potential you must take a comprehensive look at your approach to running. This means paying attention to other areas of your fitness that you may normally disregard.
The benefits of strength training for runners for both performance and injury prevention are just too good to ignore.
Here are the top five reasons why you should be hitting the weights room.
1. Injury Prevention
Strength training will help get rid of those niggling injuries and chronic pain while preventing future injuries. It does this by correcting imbalances in runners due to improper motor patterns. For example, our non-dominant side of the body is often weaker, this in turn will throw our stride off and cause problems.
Weak quad and calf muscles can lead to shin pain as well as knee issues. Strengthening these muscles with weight training will prevent and correct these issues.
2. It will make you faster
A good weights program will increase leg strength which will improve our bodies efficiency to use energy and oxygen. If we can decrease the amount of oxygen we need to run at certain speeds we can sustain a faster pace for longer, thus giving us faster race times.
3. You will generate more force
Having stronger legs will enable us to generate more force when we kick off the ground. This is achieved by building up the fast twitch muscle fibres that produce power. This not only benefits long distance runners, but is essential for shorter distance runners and sprinters.
4. Corrects Posture
Good running is not just about strong leg muscles. Strengthening our upper body is just as important. Our running improves when we can efficiently pump oxygenated blood around our body and expel the waste products quickly. Having a greater lung capacity will allow deeper breaths and a more efficient oxygen transfer. However, bad posture will hinder this.
In order for our lungs to inflate fully our ribcage must be fully upright, if we slump due to bad posture our lungs won’t have enough room to expand, this affects oxygen transfer, making it much harder to breathe.
Strengthening our upper back, shoulders and core muscles will eliminate postural problems, allowing a much more efficient run.
5. Increases Antioxidants
Long distance running produces high levels of oxidative stress that leads to chronic inflammation. Strength training has been shown to increase the antioxidants that counter oxidative stress. This in turn counters the muscle weakening effect of long distance running minimising inflammation.
If you are serious about your running, strength training has to be part of your training program.
