Time-efficient strength training should focus on incorporating six main exercise movement categories: push, pull, squat, hinge, carry, and rotate. “These are all complex or compound exercise movements, meaning that they involve multiple major muscle groups, and typically multiple joints, per exercise,” explains Heather Hart, an ACSM-certified exercise physiologist, and RRCA- and UESCA-certified running coach.
By including at least one exercise from each of these movement groups (think: bench press, bent-over row, front squat, deadlift, farmer’s carry, landmine twists), you’ll get a solid total-body workout without spending all day in the gym. You can even combine them—think: deadlift with bent-over row, squat to shoulder press, glute bridge with chest fly—to maximize your time further, says Hnatiuk.
Runners should pay extra attention to running-specific movement patterns, i.e. the hinge and squat, says Hart. “The major muscle groups used in these movements are your quadriceps, hamstrings, and glutes, which are also the major muscles used in running,” she explains. “If you think of the motion of the leg through the gait cycle, you are moving through both hip flexion and hip extension, as well as concentric and eccentric contractions of the quads and hamstrings, just as you do during these two movement pattern exercises.”
That doesn’t mean you should only focus on those two movement patterns, though; after all, running isn’t just about the lower body. “Rotational (and anti-rotational) exercises, for example, strengthen a runner’s core, helping them to minimize unnecessary rotational movements while running, which increases efficiency,” says Hart.
Carry exercises, on the other hand, “strengthen your core while standing in an upright position, teaching you to brace and stabilize your spine effectively, which can build strength and help improve posture,” she explains—something that will pay off at the end of long-distance races.
Runners should also prioritize unilateral movements. “Single-leg exercises—single-leg deadlifts, lunges, pistol squats, step-ups, single-leg glute bridges—all directly translate to better running form and mechanics, as those are our primary movers and stabilizers during the running motion,” explains Hnatiuk. These types of moves force both sides of your body to work equally, minimizing chances of any sort of muscular imbalance, adds Hart. “As a bonus, they challenge your balance and increase strength and stability in the lower musculature (calf, ankles, even feet), which can be very beneficial for runners,” she says.
How Do You Set up a Total-Body Strength-Training Routine?
You could, as suggested above, just take one move from each movement category and do two to 3 sets of 6 to 12 reps, with 30 seconds to two minutes of rest in between sets. FYI: That rest time matters, the same way it does when you’re running intervals! You might want to rush through it to get the workout over with, but taking a breather ensures you’ll be able to perform a movement again at the same load during the next set, says Hart.
If you hate standing around during workout time, there are other ways to structure your workout. “Often, I’ll use ‘tri-sets’ or circuit training that includes an upper body, lower body, and core move in a set, which is repeated two to three times before you move on to the next tri-set,” says Hnatiuk. “It’s far more efficient than a set-rest-set-rest approach.”
Supersets are another way to maximize your time. “A superset is simply a pair of exercises done back to back with no rest break between,” says Hnatiuk. “Using this method, you would pair up exercises using two opposing muscle groups (for example, a push exercise and pull exercise, or an upper body and lower body exercise), which allows one muscle group to rest while you work the other—and can shave a few minutes off your total workout time.”
However you build your workout, you want to make sure you’re not rushing through the exercises. “At a slower pace, your form will likely improve, which means you can get more quality work done, and you won’t rely on momentum to help you through your reps, which increases the actual load your muscles need to lift, push, or pull,” explains Hnatiuk. Alpine
As a general rule of thumb, you want to perform the eccentric part of a movement (when the length of a muscle increases, like when your quad stretches as you lower down into a squat) for a two-second count, and the concentric part of a movement (when the length of a muscle decreases, like when your quad shortens as you push back up to stand from the bottom of a squat) for another two-second count.
Yes, you should grab heavy weights for a total-body workout
Running can make you stronger. But those repetitive movements are a very different kind of strength training than lifting weights—and it isn’t effective in building muscle mass. To build muscle, you need to progressively overload your muscles to force them to get stronger, says Hnatiuk. Translation: You have to lift heavy.
Muscular hypertrophy is the increase and growth of muscle cells, and it occurs when you’re working your muscles until close to fatigue or failure, explains Hnatiuk. “This causes small tears or damage to our muscle fibers, which our body then repairs in such a way that those fibers get stronger and larger over time.” Using lighter weights, even at very high repetitions, isn’t as effective or efficient at doing that.
The National Strength and Conditioning Association recommends one to three sets of about six reps using a weight greater than or equal to 85 percent of your one rep max (or the max weight you can lift for a single repetition of a given exercise), says Hart. If you don’t want to do that work to figure that out, that’s fine.
“What I often suggest to runners is to find a weight that rides that fine line between feeling real, really hard at the end of the number of repetitions but is not so heavy that it compromises your form in any way,” says Hart. “If your form starts falling apart before your reps in a given set are over, it’s too heavy—vice versa, if you feel like you could lift that weight all day without taking a break, it’s too light!”
How Resistance Work Can Improve Efficiency and Power
If you’re a runner, perhaps you want to be able to run for longer periods at your current race and workout paces. Perhaps you want to run faster during your competitions and training sessions. Or maybe you just want everything you do now to feel a little easier. Whatever the case, improving your running economy can be the solution to your problem: exercise physiologists tell us that an upgraded economy lowers perceived effort at your current race paces and allows you to run for longer periods at those speeds. Better yet, enhanced economy lets you run faster than your customary competitive speeds, without feeling that the effort is any harder.
In purely physiological terms – an improved economy means using less oxygen to run at a particular pace. No, working on your economy doesn’t mean that you’re preparing yourself to compete in the first Mars Marathon; as your economy improves, you’ll still be dragging oxygen into your lungs and pushing it out to your leg muscles with your heart. It’s just that you need less of that life-giving gas to run at race-relevant speeds, which is great because it puts less pressure on your heart (which is glad to beat more modestly once it learns that your muscles don’t need quite as much oxygen as before) and makes running feel more effortless (there’s a direct relationship between oxygen consumption and perceived effort). As a result, a seemingly insignificant 2-per cent improvement in the economy can carve a nifty 48 seconds from your 10-K time, if you’re currently about a 40-minute 10Ker.
So how do you improve your economy? Traditionally, exercise scientists have believed that strength training might do the trick. In part, the theory has been that strength work improves whole-body stability during the act of running. Thus, less energy is required to correct inappropriate movements (e.g., a wobbly trunk or an ankle that is dorsiflexed to too great a degree), and a particular pace can be sustained with a lower total energy cost.
Enter Hickson’s team
In the first study to explore the link between resistance training and economy, carried out at R.C. Hickson’s famous laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, nine men (aged 18-27) took part in a 10-week, five-workout per week program which was designed to strengthen their quadriceps muscles. The men were described as ‘active’ (e.g., participating regularly in recreational sports), but none were involved in long-term running or cycling training (‘Strength Training Effects on Aerobic Power and Short-Term Endurance,’ Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, vol. 12(5), pp. 336-339, 1980).
Three days per week, the subjects completed parallel squats (5 sets of 5 repetitions), knee flexions (3 x 5), and knee extensions (3 x 5). On the other two days, the men performed leg presses (3 x 5) calf raises (3 x 20), and a few deadlifts and sit-ups to fortify their back and abdominal muscles. All sets were separated by three-minute recovery periods. Although this program may seem to be somewhat minimal, it wasn’t a complete piece of cake – because all of the exercises were performed with as much weight as possible. Initially, the resistance was set at 80 percent of the one-repetition maximum (80 percent of the maximal weight which could be lifted once and only once). As strength increased, additional weight was added to maintain this same relative resistance. The parallel squats and calf raises were conducted with Olympic-style weights, while the knee flexions, extensions, and presses were completed at a Universal Gym. At the beginning and conclusion of the study, strength was measured as the maximum amount of weight that could be lifted for one repetition.
The effect on cycling and running
The 10-week program did have a dramatic impact on muscular strength, which burgeoned by 38 percent for squatting, 42 percent for knee flexion, and 50 percent for knee extension. That was not a big surprise; the big shocker was that even though the subjects had not participated in a single cycling workout during the study, the VO2 max while cycling increased by 4 percent after 10 weeks. However, the VO2 max during running was unchanged at the end of the 10 weeks!
At the beginning and end of the 10-week study, the men took part in an interesting test of endurance: they tried to exercise for as long as possible at their initial VO2max (eg, the cycling intensity or running speed which produced VO2max at the beginning of the research). Of course, this meant they were cycling at an intensity a little below their true VO2 max at the end of the study since cycling VO2 max had risen. Endurance time, as measured by this test, vaulted upward by 47 percent on the bicycle (from 278 to 407 seconds) and increased by 12 percent while running (from 291 to 325 seconds)!
Those large increases in endurance might seem a little unusual to you, especially since the subjects had not taken part in any cycling or running workouts during the research (the increases were certainly a puzzlement to Hickson and his crew, who could offer no real explanation for the gains). So, what should we conclude from this research? What caused the small increase in VO2 max for the bikers? What caused the gains in endurance capacity during both cycling and running?
The easiest conclusion to draw is simply that strength training benefits cyclists and runners (to be more accurate, we should say that the study shows that strength training can help relatively inexperienced cyclists and runners who do not cycle or run regularly). We can also safely conclude that strength training of the type utilized in this study, with an emphasis on quadriceps strengthening, seems to benefit bikers to a greater extent, compared to runners (remember that endurance soared by 47 percent during cycling, but just 12 percent while running and that VO2max increased only on the bike). While the caveat here is again that the athletes were inexperienced at cycling and running, the different responses should not be too surprising. The strength program utilized in this research emphasized the development of quadriceps rather than whole-leg strength, and quadriceps power plays a much larger role in cycling than in running.
