How to Combine Strength and Endurance in Runners
Strength training is key for runners to improve their performance and prevent injuries. But… do we know how to correctly combine strength and endurance training?
In this article, you will learn the proper techniques to combine strength and endurance workouts so that they don’t negatively interfere with each other. You’ll see that if you don’t perform strength and cardio training in the correct sequence, the benefits of both will be reduced, and you’ll see fewer improvements.
Want to know how to do it correctly?
Let’s get started!
Benefits of Strength Training for Runners
In recent years, strength training with weights has shown multiple benefits for performance and injury prevention in runners.
While many runners still think that strength training is a waste of time or even detrimental to performance, scientific studies increasingly show the benefits for endurance athletes such as runners or trail runners.
The main benefits of strength training for runners are:
- Run Faster: If you have more strength in your legs, you’ll be able to propel your body weight faster when running.
- Improved Running Efficiency and Economy: Having stronger legs will allow you to use less energy to propel your body with each stride. As a result, you’ll save energy and be able to maintain the same speed for more kilometers.
- Increased Endurance: The stronger your legs are, the more kilometers and elevation gain they can handle without fatigue. This will allow you to delay muscle fatigue and run faster in the final part of races, whether on road or trail.
- Greater Sprint Capacity: The stronger you are, the faster you can sprint, which is crucial in the last meters of a race.
- Reduced Risk of Cramps: Most cramps are not due to dehydration or sodium loss but to high muscle fatigue. When a muscle becomes too fatigued to continue generating force to propel your body at a certain speed, it spasms, causing cramps. The stronger your muscles are, the longer they will take to fatigue and the less likely cramps will occur.
- Injury Prevention: Studies have shown that strength training is the best method for preventing injuries. Most injuries in runners occur because the muscles can no longer absorb the impact of each stride or stabilize a joint.
What Is Concurrent Training?
Concurrent training is the combination of strength training and endurance training, such as running, within the same training plan.
This combination can be simultaneous, sequential, or done on the same day or on different days.
Examples:
- Simultaneous Concurrent Training: Running for 1 hour + 45 minutes of strength training.
- Same-Day Concurrent Training: Running for 1 hour in the morning and doing 45 minutes of strength training in the afternoon.
- Different-Day Concurrent Training: Running for 1 hour on Monday, doing 45 minutes of strength training on Tuesday.
The synergy between these two types of exercises creates a solid foundation that improves cardiovascular endurance and muscle strength, leading to optimal performance.
Negative Interferences of Strength Training on Endurance Training
Strength training causes muscle fatigue. It’s common for many runners to notice tired, heavy legs or even muscle soreness a few days after strength training.
This muscle fatigue from strength training can worsen your perception of effort and running performance. As a result, it may prevent you from training as usual in the following days.
If you have heavy legs or soreness, it will be challenging to hit the paces required for an intense running workout. This can hinder your progress and improvement in running.
Negative Interferences of Endurance Training on Strength Training
When it comes to the effects of endurance training on strength training, we encounter a higher level of biochemical complexity, where the enzymes mTOR and AMPK play a crucial role.
The Effect of mTOR and AMPK Enzymes in Concurrent Training
To understand the negative interference of endurance training on strength, it’s essential to examine how the mTOR and AMPK enzymes operate in the context of concurrent training. mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) is an enzyme that triggers protein synthesis and plays a crucial role in muscle hypertrophy, or the increase in muscle size. On the other hand, AMPK (adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase) is an enzyme that is activated during aerobic exercise and triggers processes that improve endurance and energy efficiency.
The Delicate Balance Between Adaptations
When endurance training, such as running, activates AMPK, it leads to a series of beneficial adaptations for cardiovascular endurance and metabolic health. However, the problem arises when AMPK also inhibits the activity of mTOR. Since mTOR is crucial for muscle growth and recovery, this interference can hinder the hypertrophy process, limiting the development of muscle strength and power.
The Importance of Strategic Planning in Concurrent Training
The relationship between mTOR and AMPK is not necessarily a battle for supremacy but rather a complex dance of metabolic signals. As a runner looking to maximize both endurance and strength, it’s essential to plan strategically to mitigate this interference. Separating endurance and strength training sessions on different days, for example, can allow for more complete recovery between modalities, reducing the inhibition of mTOR.
Strategies to Mitigate the Interferences Between Strength and Endurance Training
As we’ve analyzed, both endurance and strength training produce a series of negative interferences on the adaptations of the other.
As runners, we want to preserve the maximum adaptations from both types of training. This way, we can take our performance to the highest possible level.
For this reason, I want to share three strategies you should follow to get the best benefits from concurrent training as a runner:
Separation of Sessions: To avoid the interference of endurance training on strength training, you should separate both training sessions as much as possible.
Studies recommend at least 6 hours of separation between strength and endurance training.
Avoid doing strength and endurance training back-to-back without rest. If you have to do both training sessions on the same day, do one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. This concurrent training combination is more common among elite or advanced runners with a high weekly training volume.
On the other hand, if you don’t run every day, the best option would be to do the strength and endurance sessions on separate days.
Strength Training Methods: If you’re a runner or endurance athlete, you shouldn’t train strength like a bodybuilder or powerlifter. There are different strength training methods that allow you to improve maximal strength while producing different adaptations in terms of hypertrophy and muscle fatigue.
As runners, we want to minimize hypertrophy and muscle fatigue as much as possible, while still gaining muscle strength.
We can achieve this by performing strength training sets far from muscle failure.
If you can do a maximum of 14 repetitions with a certain weight, only do half, 7 reps. But for those 7 reps, perform the concentric phase (lifting the weight) as quickly and explosively as possible.
Current studies show that this training method improves maximal strength just as effectively as performing all possible repetitions with that weight.
What do we achieve? Since we only do half the repetitions, we only get half as tired. The next day, we won’t have heavy legs or muscle soreness.
Additionally, staying far from muscle failure will result in less hypertrophy, which is something we’re interested in as runners to avoid excessive weight gain.
Endurance Training Intensity: If you’re doing concurrent training on different days, following the previous strength training guidelines, you won’t have any problems.
You’ll be able to do strength training today and an interval workout tomorrow without any issues—no heavy legs, no soreness, nothing.
However, if you’re doing both workouts on the same day, the running workout should be low-intensity.
On the one hand, low-intensity running will interfere as little as possible with the adaptations from strength training. On the other hand, even if we’re somewhat fatigued from the strength workout earlier in the day, it won’t prevent us from maintaining the running workout intensity since it’s at a low intensity.
Order of Training
If you’re doing strength and endurance training on the same day, studies recommend doing strength training first.
Example: Do strength training in the morning and endurance training in the afternoon.
This will allow you to do the strength training without any fatigue, enabling you to be explosive in the exercises. This way, you’ll gain the maximum benefits from strength training, making you a faster, more resilient runner with fewer injuries.
In a second session, you can do a low-intensity running workout without any problems.
I hope you found this article helpful and that it helps you better combine your strength and running workouts.
If you’d like personal help to improve your running times and avoid injuries, you can tell me about your situation, and I’ll get in touch with you.
Best regards, and happy running!
