Strength work is the perfect complement to runner’s training plan. One of the primary benefits is that it’s a superb tool for injury prevention. The stronger you get, the more resilient let you down. When you’ve a strong body, any conditions will be less likely to worsen. This is because strength training helps to improve structural weaknesses in your body, whether in the muscles, joints, or connective tissues. Often, this will diminish the source of many common running injuries.
Strength training helps you run faster! Strength training places stress on your body in the form of resistance (weights), which prompts your body to adapt and make changes in order to increase its ability to withstand that stress. Over time, these physiological adaptations can have a huge impact on your running speed. It’s important to train on a program designed specifically for running performance. This helps to make each stride more powerful, increasing your maximal speed and improving your ability to maintain high submaximal speeds for longer. Strength training also increases your muscular endurance and anaerobic power, making it easier to tackle that final kick in a race.
Strong Bones and Cartilage
The repetitive nature of running leaves runners highly susceptible to injuries especially overuses injuries. In addition to stronger muscles, strength training creates positive adaptations in your bones and connective tissues which can help mitigate and prevent overuse injuries like stress fractures. A quick anatomy recap: muscles attach to bones through tendons. Tendons have little blood flow, which is why they’re white in color illustrations of the musculoskeletal system. Ligaments connect bones together. Cartilage is a dense but flexible connective tissue that helps joints move smoothly and absorbs shock forces through joints. Fascia is a band or sheet of connective tissue that helps stabilize and separate muscles. All these connective tissues are made primarily of collagen, and all respond positively to strength training.
Better Running Economy
Strength training helps to make perfect running form and make your strides more efficient. When you run better, you can train harder by running miles per week, or sustaining faster paces for longer durations. All this adds up to better running economy. It helps to enhance your maximal aerobic capacity and lactate threshold, both measures of aerobic fitness and markers of endurance performance. In short, a better engine makes for a higher-performing car, and the same is true for running.
Better Running Form
The human body is a pretty amazing machine. Most of us have a dominant side that is more muscularly developed, and most of us have stronger on the front of the body and back of the body and these strength imbalances can create some imperfect movement patterns. If you do have some funky movement patterns, your body smart animal that it will use other muscles to help out, like recruiting your left lower back muscles. It helps your weak left glutes extend your hip.
A well-designed strength training plan for runners that will helps strengthen the muscle groups surrounding the most frequently injured joints and make you all-around stronger and more durable. When you’re stronger, your running improves naturally, helps to avoid injury caused by poor running form. you’re better able to withstand all the repetitive ground forces during your runs, without causing injury.