A deep dive into the research on strength training, performance, and injury risk - and why added gym work may distract from what actually improves race results.
This is a thoughtful and well-researched article, Niki, and I agree with its central premise: running performance is primarily driven by running, and for athletes with limited time, consistency and volume should take precedence over any supplementary work.
To play devil’s advocate, though, I don’t see this as an “either/or” question. Running volume should absolutely remain the priority, but strength training—appropriately designed, dosed, and timed—may be less about chasing the final 2–3% and more about protecting the ability to keep accumulating the stimulus that matters most: mileage.
Mileage itself, however, isn’t just a programming choice; it’s constrained by tissue tolerance, recovery capacity, and durability over months and years. In practice, many runners don’t plateau because they lack aerobic stimulus, but because their musculoskeletal system becomes the limiting factor. That’s where I think resistance training really shines.
Thank you for your comment Steven! I don't think that your comment is "devil's advocate" but rather the reality.
The core premise of my article is, as you put it perfectly yourself, that "running performance is primarily driven by running, and for athletes with limited time, consistency and volume should take precedence over any supplementary work." What I definitely don't want the message to be is that runners should never do strength training in any capacity at all. I tried to mention this in the conclusion but I think that I needed to dedicate more space for it.
What you are mentioning is the "next step", the jump from theory to application. Now that we understand what dictates running performance, and the benefits and applicability of each intervention, what should I prescribe for the athlete in front of me (or myself)? What are this athlete's strengths and limitations? What, and when, should I apply each intervention? What to leave on the table? If I have an athlete who is indeed limited by tissue tolerance and durability, then they should absolutely be looking at strength training as an intervention to improve their performance.
What I wanted to do is help athletes be a bit more critical about how to structure their 2026 training rather than mindlessly going for strength training because it is "cool" and they heard it on some podcast.
In all seriousness, this is where science becomes art and individual programming becomes paramount.
By the way, I purposely used the term resistance training rather than strength training, as I think the latter often takes people down the wrong path. Tissues and joints don’t know exercises or labels — they only know force, the rate at which that force is applied, and how often it’s applied.
Once those variables are understood, the real question becomes which intervention best addresses the athlete’s current limitation - e.g. hip rotation, ankle dorsiflexion, femoral adduction, etc.
We - strength coaches - have to move beyond defaulting to squat, bench, and deadlift and start thinking more deliberately about how we’re applying load to serve the athlete in front of us.
I think the title is fine, but what you should do instead is publish an article called Why You Should S̶t̶r̶e̶n̶g̶t̶h̶ Resistance Train in 2026 and write about the benefits of resistance training for runners 😉
But I agree, individual programming is important, and coaching should always look to meet the needs and requirements of each athlete, not only physiologically, but also how it fits into their overall life and their long-term goals.
This is in depth review of about the importance & significance of strength training and totally dissecting what is going one with strength training in the overall media.
First of all a very happy new year Niki brother.! <3
We often overestimate what we can accomplish in a day or a week and underestimate what we can accomplish in a year. Runners will try to run 100 mile weeks for a couple of months in order to get faster not knowing that this thing is all about SHOWING UP for years on end & not just a couple of weeks or months. The adaptation a person's body goes through can't be fastened like AI can summarize a book in a couple of pages. Consistency is the name of the game & not a couple of bouts of intensity workouts even though intensity plays its role in making anaerobic adaptations in our bodies. It is all about gradual build up & nailing the basics.
But 90% people don’t know it first hand as you itself know that there is a lot of fluff around running/physiology content. Everybody just wants to buy the latest pair of shoes/gadgets/clothing but what about reading books and blogs and what about sleep, nutrition, mobility/strength/conditioning exercises? What about keeping 70% of activities in Zone-1 or low intensity where the central nervous system isn’t fatigued to moderate or maximal level on daily basis.
We need to focus on what is the best we can do for our future selves irrespective of how the result pans out. 100% of shots are missed that are not taken, sho why not take the shot by keep showing up & give ourselves chance to be the best version of ourselves.
One can't get faster in just a couple of months in any sport. Even Nils Van Der Poel (Swedish Speed Skater) put up 30 hour cycling weeks to prepare for speed skating which means he was working on building a huge aerobic base to perform at his peak even though he needed a pretty good anaerobic engine as well. As it is said- Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Right now as I told you I am preparing for a 100 KM Stadium Run(250 laps of 400 meter). I am hoping to run it under 7 hours 30 minutes in order to get a qualifier for Team India for 100 KM World Championships 2026.
I ran a training run on 30th November(201*300M)=60,300 m in 4 hours 26 minutes. I never felt fatigue much and the aftermath of this training run wasn't much but just a couple of blood blisters. No high level fatigue felt in Central Nervous System, no quads blow up. I was pretty confident that heck yeah I can do it now as I have done simulation but after that on 23rd December I felt some knee pain and I took a couple of days off. After that I came back to running 12 KM for 2 days then 15 KM for 1 day, 18 KM for 1 day, 21 KM for 1 day & now for the last 2 days I have been running 28 KM(all of this in a single run). Today I averaged 5:25 pace per KM for 28 KM. And I am targeting 4:30 pace per KM for 100 KM on 24th January.
I on personal level do minimum amount of strength training.
I still believe I can do it but can't bring my ego to training as I would want the results right now and in order to achieve that I will increase both the volume & intensity for just a couple of weeks which can hamper. I have said to myself that it is better to be healthy at the starting line then burying my body into the ground. I want results, I want a spot in Team India but what's the point of spot when I will be injured. So, just keeping things into perspective is what I am doing right now. I am in it for the FUN and for the long haul & can't SELL MYSELF SHORT for this particular race.
Happy New Year to you too Sudhanshu! I hope that 2026 gives you gives you you hope it will!
You hit the nail on the head with the consistency bit. What I didn't add and probably should have added, is that people should look at their training variance. They will probably find that they have some 10 hour weeks and a lot of sub 2 hour weeks. If those 2 hour weeks can become 4, and even maybe reduce the big weeks to 9 hours (and have multiple back to back weeks - you would have to plan this right) then I think a lot of people would get better results.
100% agree on the more consistency approach , many of us fall into the 3 weeks hard 1 week easy format of training but if you drop the hard weeks a touch you won’t need the easy week , and can amass a lot more volume each year - having a truly easy week every 4th week means 3 months of very easy training per year .
The rest of the article was also great and mirrors my thoughts on strenght training - especially for ultra runners . Love your work
Glad you like it! Salzburg is very beautiful indeed and the mountains have the perfect height for summiting them also on normal day's runs. Where I live, the mountains are much higher, so I had to do a Long Run every time I wanted to summit them 😅
One more note on your article: Do you think cycling and skimo could actually count as strength training since the muscles get strengthened in different manors compared to running alone which might lead to stronger legs overall? I found that cycling is especially helpful to develop strong legs for steep uphills (much better than Squats because of the more similiar motion to actual running).
This is a very niche question and one which you can never really get a 100% answer for but I will try to break it down.
Will strength training, skimo and cycling strengthen your legs? Yes.
Do they strengthen your legs to the same degree? Probably not, and it is all down to the weight.
If you squat 60kg, there is no way that you will get the same effect if you skimo or cycle. The stress on your legs, from a pure strength/power perspective, is just not there. However, as you said, the modality of skimo resembles a lot running without the impact of hitting the ground, so arguably, the training intervention is more specific. Cycling is somewhere in between, but like skimo, the stress from the 'weight' is lower than in strength training and the benefit you get is more through the repetition. Strength training lacks the cardio aspect though, unlike skimo and cycling.
You have to look at a specific intervention and determine what you want to get out of it. For example this paper https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2023/01000/elite_road_vs__trail_runners__comparing_economy,.25.aspx found that trail runners were stronger than road runners despite road runners typically performing more formal strength training. What I take from this study is that the coaches of the road runners are doing the strength intervention wrong. How is it that trail runners, who are not strength training, are stronger? The takeaway is that you need to link an intervention with an expected result and design the intervention with that goal in mind. Do you want to get stronger? Then strength train. The jump from "I will get stronger" to "I will get faster because I am stronger" is something entirely different.
However, for everyday athletes like us, the question is not what will give us the biggest benefit, but what can we do consistently while having fun. Pretty much all my Austrian friends do skimo because they enjoy it. Is it the intervention which will make you the strongest (from a pure strength perspective)? No, but it will make you strongER and you will enjoy it while you do it, so just do it, especially since good skimo conditions happen for maybe 30 days a year. Same for cycling. Maybe you need to prioritise your running in the 12-16 weeks leading up to your event, but in the transition phase that can change. For example in January 40% of your training time can be running, 50% ski and 10% cycling. In April maybe its 50% running, 40% cycling and 10% ski, and in August 80% running 20% cycling.
I guess it might be similar to the muscular endurance discussion you had with Scott Johnston on your podcast: The terms "strength" and "endurance" as often thrown around pretty chaotically in the fitness space and the body actually isn't too strict about doing either only the one or only the other. It is like with training zones as well: They are helpful terms but the body is actually working in a continuum. It is just that it is either closer or further away from 1RM and it is basically only for practicability that we as humans call the one strength and the other one endurance. It is all just the muscles producing force but through slightly varying concentration/percentages of energy systems.
You are right and I should have thought about it this way too: If I want to get "stronger" in terms of improving my 1RM, then I should hit the gym, but if I just want to strengthen my legs in a more specific way to running, I should hop on the bike, skis, or take a heavy backpack and hike up a mountain as Scott's athletes do 😊
I was doing some research for a future article and I encountered a Koopcast episode where they talk about cross training (you can listen to that section here https://youtu.be/gqAcYhY2Q6M?si=ZOdb7EiR6up50xer&t=1981). Really, the take home quote is at 50:58. "...I like using [cross training] for this, and the for this part you have to be very specific and directive and make sure it actually has an impact on the athletes." I mean, this philosophy applies for all the training interventions, but even more so for cross training.
This nuance about training load vs training specificity is crucial. The reallocation studies make it obvious that improvements weren't from strength per se but from higher intensity running that came with the protocol. I've noticed same pattern in my own trainin where adding gym sessions mostly just cut into recovery bandwidth. What stands out is Casado's finding that volume alone explained 59% of performance variance, which is a huge effect size that basically screams "run more before worrying about ancillary stuff."
Exactly! And this is the message I am trying to get across. If your training time is very limited, focus on your running first before anything else. When you start hitting the point of diminishing returns in running, then start looking at other training modalities, but don't ignore the primary goal which should be your running volume.
I really liked the article but (just for the sake of conversation... you know me 😅), I'd like to challenge slightly the conclusion.
While strength training did not reduce the incidence of overuse injury (which is kinda expected), I wouldn't trivialize the fact that what looked as small improvements occurred on athletes with very high VO2max. The space for improvement was narrow and they did manage!
While I also agree that consistency, volume and intensity are the key predictors of performance in most disciplines, we don't really know what kind of growth a varied training regime would do on the average Joe, because it is rarely studied and it would be way more difficult to classify.
You mentioned other factors like work and time available for training. I would also mention age. A 20yo athlete can survive just with volume and intensity, a 40yo or 50yo might need more rest and start thinking of way to preserve their lean mass.
I think that trying something new at least for a cycle or a better a couple (3 to 6 months) is always a way to understand what works on you and keep things varied. Beating monotony is sometimes another way to keep going and being consistent.
I think your comment is absolutely on point because you perfectly outlined the complexity. You went from people with high VO2max, the average Joe, to 20 year old athletes and finally to 40 to 50 year olds.
Just like with every intervention (and that includes long runs, yearly volume, runs per week...everything) you need to look at the athlete in front of you. What intervention will give THEM the most benefit? I tried to capture this complexity by giving a sort of cut off (10 hours per week) and some additional caveats (athletes living in a flat area training for a mountainous race, for example) but even those are not nearly enough. The drawback of publishing something to the general audience is that I kind of have to cut out some of the complexity.
The vast majority of my running friends have around 1500km for the year (less than 30k a week average). Of course there is a lot of variance in that; high weeks of 70km+ a week, but also a lot of 0 weeks. If these types of runners aim to eliminate the down weeks and try to have a base of 20km a week throughout the year (3 hours of running a week), I am convinced that they will perform better during that year/season. Of course if you have a 50+ year old athlete who had years of 4000km+ per year then the situation is different. In fact, in the Steve Magness video, he says that to perform at your best you need to have a few years at high mileage and then you can actually reduce it a bit because you will not get as much adaptation.
To be clear, I am absolutely not against strength training or cross training AT ALL. But if you have been doing 1000km a year (no other training) and looking to run 100k-100 mile races, the best bang for your buck will be getting that mileage up to 1500km during the year (and then 2000km the year after). But if your main sport is cycling, and you want to dabble in running ultras, then the conversation once again changes. If you live in a very cold climate and treadmill running + indoor cycling + gym are your only options, then again the considerations are different.
Anyway, it is a complex discussion and you outlined the complexity perfectly. I'm glad you enjoyed the article though and I can promise that there is a lot more to come in 2026 :)
Thank you for the article and all the work you are doing for the running community! It feels good for me to know there are people out there on the Internet whose advice I can trust and whose messages I can read without the fear of short-lived hypes that currently overflow all media.
I completely agree that strength training has a lot of benefits, but when it comes to running performance there are other things of higher importance that have to be nailed first. Once they are established and you are looking for the next 2 or 3%, it might be beneficial to take a look at weight training regimes, as long as the basics remain unaffected.
For me personally, recovery from my running volume is difficult enough next to having a job, which is why I don't want too add another stress into my life and what I call my "stress-bucket" (I don't want it to swap over, if you know what I mean).
On the other hand, something I truly believe every runner should do on a frequent basis are plyometrics, short strides and form drills. I view them as the most specific "strength" exercises for runners out there and also the ones with the most direct benefits for performance and the least amount of danger/excessive CNS-fatigue.
You perfectly outlined the opportunity cost equation. In your case, recovery is more beneficial than strength training , so while it would be theoretically possible to do strength training, the added stress would be counter-productive to performance.
Interesting point on plyometrics. I have never done them but would be interested to potentially try them out. Do you do them at home or do you go to some sort of gym to do them? Also, are you at the point where you add weight to the workout or do you just use body weight?
I do them almost daily in the evening, but only in very short sessions and not too intense. The word plyometrics is probably even a little bit too much: I think of it rather as some light jumping exercises and running-drills, so nothing with added weights because my goal isn't necessarily to strengthen the muscles, but rather the tendons and the neuromuscular adaptions. A common misconception around trail runners I see is that they focus too much on the pure endurance side of performance and they neglect running economy. While this might work for races and runs with a lot of elevation gain, for flatter terrain running economy gets more and more important.
You see this when comparing elite cyclists and elite runners, for example: The runners aren't nearly as well trained in "endurance" as the cyclists and the cyclists, vice versa, while having a much higher developed cardiovascular system completely lack the neuromuscular adaptions for being efficient and economic at running.
I hope this makes sense and you understand what I mean with that (English isn't my mother tongue, since I am from Austria).
I gathered my inspiration for the exercises I do from elite runners doing some light skipping exercises, running drills and progressions for warming up before intervals on the track or a short road race. And, as funny as it might sound, from Muhammad Ali doing a lot of "dancing around" in his training to work on foot strength and tendon stiffness/springiness.
Something I also like to do specifically for trail running is using a balance board 10-15min per day which isn't too strenuous for the body either, but has a lot of benefits for feet strength, coordination and core/posture strength. I alternate both and single legged stances while listening to some podcasts, for example.
The biggest issue I see is to keep training simple yet effective enough and to stay focused on finding out what works for one personally and not get lost in too many studies or what other people are doing :D
Hi Tobias. Your English is perfectly fine...better than my German/Austrian 😂 I'm originally from Malta and moved to Austria 4 years ago and it's so hard to learn!
I also do some balance board every day because I have a tendency to twist my ankle way too often and it seems to help. Yeah, these small stuff really make a difference but the opportunity cost question is always on the back of my mind, even just from a time perspective. Between work, life, Born on the Trail and run training, I don't have time to do much else!
Love it, much better than Malta for running! I'm based just outside of Salzburg and I'm lucky to have some nice trails and small mountains very close to my house so I can get on trails as often as I want.
This is a thoughtful and well-researched article, Niki, and I agree with its central premise: running performance is primarily driven by running, and for athletes with limited time, consistency and volume should take precedence over any supplementary work.
To play devil’s advocate, though, I don’t see this as an “either/or” question. Running volume should absolutely remain the priority, but strength training—appropriately designed, dosed, and timed—may be less about chasing the final 2–3% and more about protecting the ability to keep accumulating the stimulus that matters most: mileage.
Mileage itself, however, isn’t just a programming choice; it’s constrained by tissue tolerance, recovery capacity, and durability over months and years. In practice, many runners don’t plateau because they lack aerobic stimulus, but because their musculoskeletal system becomes the limiting factor. That’s where I think resistance training really shines.
Thank you for your comment Steven! I don't think that your comment is "devil's advocate" but rather the reality.
The core premise of my article is, as you put it perfectly yourself, that "running performance is primarily driven by running, and for athletes with limited time, consistency and volume should take precedence over any supplementary work." What I definitely don't want the message to be is that runners should never do strength training in any capacity at all. I tried to mention this in the conclusion but I think that I needed to dedicate more space for it.
What you are mentioning is the "next step", the jump from theory to application. Now that we understand what dictates running performance, and the benefits and applicability of each intervention, what should I prescribe for the athlete in front of me (or myself)? What are this athlete's strengths and limitations? What, and when, should I apply each intervention? What to leave on the table? If I have an athlete who is indeed limited by tissue tolerance and durability, then they should absolutely be looking at strength training as an intervention to improve their performance.
What I wanted to do is help athletes be a bit more critical about how to structure their 2026 training rather than mindlessly going for strength training because it is "cool" and they heard it on some podcast.
Perhaps you should change the title then? 😉
In all seriousness, this is where science becomes art and individual programming becomes paramount.
By the way, I purposely used the term resistance training rather than strength training, as I think the latter often takes people down the wrong path. Tissues and joints don’t know exercises or labels — they only know force, the rate at which that force is applied, and how often it’s applied.
Once those variables are understood, the real question becomes which intervention best addresses the athlete’s current limitation - e.g. hip rotation, ankle dorsiflexion, femoral adduction, etc.
We - strength coaches - have to move beyond defaulting to squat, bench, and deadlift and start thinking more deliberately about how we’re applying load to serve the athlete in front of us.
I think the title is fine, but what you should do instead is publish an article called Why You Should S̶t̶r̶e̶n̶g̶t̶h̶ Resistance Train in 2026 and write about the benefits of resistance training for runners 😉
But I agree, individual programming is important, and coaching should always look to meet the needs and requirements of each athlete, not only physiologically, but also how it fits into their overall life and their long-term goals.
This is in depth review of about the importance & significance of strength training and totally dissecting what is going one with strength training in the overall media.
First of all a very happy new year Niki brother.! <3
We often overestimate what we can accomplish in a day or a week and underestimate what we can accomplish in a year. Runners will try to run 100 mile weeks for a couple of months in order to get faster not knowing that this thing is all about SHOWING UP for years on end & not just a couple of weeks or months. The adaptation a person's body goes through can't be fastened like AI can summarize a book in a couple of pages. Consistency is the name of the game & not a couple of bouts of intensity workouts even though intensity plays its role in making anaerobic adaptations in our bodies. It is all about gradual build up & nailing the basics.
But 90% people don’t know it first hand as you itself know that there is a lot of fluff around running/physiology content. Everybody just wants to buy the latest pair of shoes/gadgets/clothing but what about reading books and blogs and what about sleep, nutrition, mobility/strength/conditioning exercises? What about keeping 70% of activities in Zone-1 or low intensity where the central nervous system isn’t fatigued to moderate or maximal level on daily basis.
We need to focus on what is the best we can do for our future selves irrespective of how the result pans out. 100% of shots are missed that are not taken, sho why not take the shot by keep showing up & give ourselves chance to be the best version of ourselves.
One can't get faster in just a couple of months in any sport. Even Nils Van Der Poel (Swedish Speed Skater) put up 30 hour cycling weeks to prepare for speed skating which means he was working on building a huge aerobic base to perform at his peak even though he needed a pretty good anaerobic engine as well. As it is said- Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Right now as I told you I am preparing for a 100 KM Stadium Run(250 laps of 400 meter). I am hoping to run it under 7 hours 30 minutes in order to get a qualifier for Team India for 100 KM World Championships 2026.
I ran a training run on 30th November(201*300M)=60,300 m in 4 hours 26 minutes. I never felt fatigue much and the aftermath of this training run wasn't much but just a couple of blood blisters. No high level fatigue felt in Central Nervous System, no quads blow up. I was pretty confident that heck yeah I can do it now as I have done simulation but after that on 23rd December I felt some knee pain and I took a couple of days off. After that I came back to running 12 KM for 2 days then 15 KM for 1 day, 18 KM for 1 day, 21 KM for 1 day & now for the last 2 days I have been running 28 KM(all of this in a single run). Today I averaged 5:25 pace per KM for 28 KM. And I am targeting 4:30 pace per KM for 100 KM on 24th January.
I on personal level do minimum amount of strength training.
I still believe I can do it but can't bring my ego to training as I would want the results right now and in order to achieve that I will increase both the volume & intensity for just a couple of weeks which can hamper. I have said to myself that it is better to be healthy at the starting line then burying my body into the ground. I want results, I want a spot in Team India but what's the point of spot when I will be injured. So, just keeping things into perspective is what I am doing right now. I am in it for the FUN and for the long haul & can't SELL MYSELF SHORT for this particular race.
Happy New Year to you too Sudhanshu! I hope that 2026 gives you gives you you hope it will!
You hit the nail on the head with the consistency bit. What I didn't add and probably should have added, is that people should look at their training variance. They will probably find that they have some 10 hour weeks and a lot of sub 2 hour weeks. If those 2 hour weeks can become 4, and even maybe reduce the big weeks to 9 hours (and have multiple back to back weeks - you would have to plan this right) then I think a lot of people would get better results.
100% agree on the more consistency approach , many of us fall into the 3 weeks hard 1 week easy format of training but if you drop the hard weeks a touch you won’t need the easy week , and can amass a lot more volume each year - having a truly easy week every 4th week means 3 months of very easy training per year .
The rest of the article was also great and mirrors my thoughts on strenght training - especially for ultra runners . Love your work
Thank you Andy! I appreciate your comments and feedback.
Glad you like it! Salzburg is very beautiful indeed and the mountains have the perfect height for summiting them also on normal day's runs. Where I live, the mountains are much higher, so I had to do a Long Run every time I wanted to summit them 😅
One more note on your article: Do you think cycling and skimo could actually count as strength training since the muscles get strengthened in different manors compared to running alone which might lead to stronger legs overall? I found that cycling is especially helpful to develop strong legs for steep uphills (much better than Squats because of the more similiar motion to actual running).
This is a very niche question and one which you can never really get a 100% answer for but I will try to break it down.
Will strength training, skimo and cycling strengthen your legs? Yes.
Do they strengthen your legs to the same degree? Probably not, and it is all down to the weight.
If you squat 60kg, there is no way that you will get the same effect if you skimo or cycle. The stress on your legs, from a pure strength/power perspective, is just not there. However, as you said, the modality of skimo resembles a lot running without the impact of hitting the ground, so arguably, the training intervention is more specific. Cycling is somewhere in between, but like skimo, the stress from the 'weight' is lower than in strength training and the benefit you get is more through the repetition. Strength training lacks the cardio aspect though, unlike skimo and cycling.
You have to look at a specific intervention and determine what you want to get out of it. For example this paper https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2023/01000/elite_road_vs__trail_runners__comparing_economy,.25.aspx found that trail runners were stronger than road runners despite road runners typically performing more formal strength training. What I take from this study is that the coaches of the road runners are doing the strength intervention wrong. How is it that trail runners, who are not strength training, are stronger? The takeaway is that you need to link an intervention with an expected result and design the intervention with that goal in mind. Do you want to get stronger? Then strength train. The jump from "I will get stronger" to "I will get faster because I am stronger" is something entirely different.
However, for everyday athletes like us, the question is not what will give us the biggest benefit, but what can we do consistently while having fun. Pretty much all my Austrian friends do skimo because they enjoy it. Is it the intervention which will make you the strongest (from a pure strength perspective)? No, but it will make you strongER and you will enjoy it while you do it, so just do it, especially since good skimo conditions happen for maybe 30 days a year. Same for cycling. Maybe you need to prioritise your running in the 12-16 weeks leading up to your event, but in the transition phase that can change. For example in January 40% of your training time can be running, 50% ski and 10% cycling. In April maybe its 50% running, 40% cycling and 10% ski, and in August 80% running 20% cycling.
That is a great answer, thank you!
I guess it might be similar to the muscular endurance discussion you had with Scott Johnston on your podcast: The terms "strength" and "endurance" as often thrown around pretty chaotically in the fitness space and the body actually isn't too strict about doing either only the one or only the other. It is like with training zones as well: They are helpful terms but the body is actually working in a continuum. It is just that it is either closer or further away from 1RM and it is basically only for practicability that we as humans call the one strength and the other one endurance. It is all just the muscles producing force but through slightly varying concentration/percentages of energy systems.
You are right and I should have thought about it this way too: If I want to get "stronger" in terms of improving my 1RM, then I should hit the gym, but if I just want to strengthen my legs in a more specific way to running, I should hop on the bike, skis, or take a heavy backpack and hike up a mountain as Scott's athletes do 😊
I was doing some research for a future article and I encountered a Koopcast episode where they talk about cross training (you can listen to that section here https://youtu.be/gqAcYhY2Q6M?si=ZOdb7EiR6up50xer&t=1981). Really, the take home quote is at 50:58. "...I like using [cross training] for this, and the for this part you have to be very specific and directive and make sure it actually has an impact on the athletes." I mean, this philosophy applies for all the training interventions, but even more so for cross training.
This nuance about training load vs training specificity is crucial. The reallocation studies make it obvious that improvements weren't from strength per se but from higher intensity running that came with the protocol. I've noticed same pattern in my own trainin where adding gym sessions mostly just cut into recovery bandwidth. What stands out is Casado's finding that volume alone explained 59% of performance variance, which is a huge effect size that basically screams "run more before worrying about ancillary stuff."
Exactly! And this is the message I am trying to get across. If your training time is very limited, focus on your running first before anything else. When you start hitting the point of diminishing returns in running, then start looking at other training modalities, but don't ignore the primary goal which should be your running volume.
I really liked the article but (just for the sake of conversation... you know me 😅), I'd like to challenge slightly the conclusion.
While strength training did not reduce the incidence of overuse injury (which is kinda expected), I wouldn't trivialize the fact that what looked as small improvements occurred on athletes with very high VO2max. The space for improvement was narrow and they did manage!
While I also agree that consistency, volume and intensity are the key predictors of performance in most disciplines, we don't really know what kind of growth a varied training regime would do on the average Joe, because it is rarely studied and it would be way more difficult to classify.
You mentioned other factors like work and time available for training. I would also mention age. A 20yo athlete can survive just with volume and intensity, a 40yo or 50yo might need more rest and start thinking of way to preserve their lean mass.
I think that trying something new at least for a cycle or a better a couple (3 to 6 months) is always a way to understand what works on you and keep things varied. Beating monotony is sometimes another way to keep going and being consistent.
Anyway I mixed a lot because I was on mobile.
Well written and let them come!
I think your comment is absolutely on point because you perfectly outlined the complexity. You went from people with high VO2max, the average Joe, to 20 year old athletes and finally to 40 to 50 year olds.
Just like with every intervention (and that includes long runs, yearly volume, runs per week...everything) you need to look at the athlete in front of you. What intervention will give THEM the most benefit? I tried to capture this complexity by giving a sort of cut off (10 hours per week) and some additional caveats (athletes living in a flat area training for a mountainous race, for example) but even those are not nearly enough. The drawback of publishing something to the general audience is that I kind of have to cut out some of the complexity.
The vast majority of my running friends have around 1500km for the year (less than 30k a week average). Of course there is a lot of variance in that; high weeks of 70km+ a week, but also a lot of 0 weeks. If these types of runners aim to eliminate the down weeks and try to have a base of 20km a week throughout the year (3 hours of running a week), I am convinced that they will perform better during that year/season. Of course if you have a 50+ year old athlete who had years of 4000km+ per year then the situation is different. In fact, in the Steve Magness video, he says that to perform at your best you need to have a few years at high mileage and then you can actually reduce it a bit because you will not get as much adaptation.
To be clear, I am absolutely not against strength training or cross training AT ALL. But if you have been doing 1000km a year (no other training) and looking to run 100k-100 mile races, the best bang for your buck will be getting that mileage up to 1500km during the year (and then 2000km the year after). But if your main sport is cycling, and you want to dabble in running ultras, then the conversation once again changes. If you live in a very cold climate and treadmill running + indoor cycling + gym are your only options, then again the considerations are different.
Anyway, it is a complex discussion and you outlined the complexity perfectly. I'm glad you enjoyed the article though and I can promise that there is a lot more to come in 2026 :)
Thank you for the article and all the work you are doing for the running community! It feels good for me to know there are people out there on the Internet whose advice I can trust and whose messages I can read without the fear of short-lived hypes that currently overflow all media.
I completely agree that strength training has a lot of benefits, but when it comes to running performance there are other things of higher importance that have to be nailed first. Once they are established and you are looking for the next 2 or 3%, it might be beneficial to take a look at weight training regimes, as long as the basics remain unaffected.
For me personally, recovery from my running volume is difficult enough next to having a job, which is why I don't want too add another stress into my life and what I call my "stress-bucket" (I don't want it to swap over, if you know what I mean).
On the other hand, something I truly believe every runner should do on a frequent basis are plyometrics, short strides and form drills. I view them as the most specific "strength" exercises for runners out there and also the ones with the most direct benefits for performance and the least amount of danger/excessive CNS-fatigue.
Thank you for your kind comments Tobias!
You perfectly outlined the opportunity cost equation. In your case, recovery is more beneficial than strength training , so while it would be theoretically possible to do strength training, the added stress would be counter-productive to performance.
Interesting point on plyometrics. I have never done them but would be interested to potentially try them out. Do you do them at home or do you go to some sort of gym to do them? Also, are you at the point where you add weight to the workout or do you just use body weight?
I do them almost daily in the evening, but only in very short sessions and not too intense. The word plyometrics is probably even a little bit too much: I think of it rather as some light jumping exercises and running-drills, so nothing with added weights because my goal isn't necessarily to strengthen the muscles, but rather the tendons and the neuromuscular adaptions. A common misconception around trail runners I see is that they focus too much on the pure endurance side of performance and they neglect running economy. While this might work for races and runs with a lot of elevation gain, for flatter terrain running economy gets more and more important.
You see this when comparing elite cyclists and elite runners, for example: The runners aren't nearly as well trained in "endurance" as the cyclists and the cyclists, vice versa, while having a much higher developed cardiovascular system completely lack the neuromuscular adaptions for being efficient and economic at running.
I hope this makes sense and you understand what I mean with that (English isn't my mother tongue, since I am from Austria).
I gathered my inspiration for the exercises I do from elite runners doing some light skipping exercises, running drills and progressions for warming up before intervals on the track or a short road race. And, as funny as it might sound, from Muhammad Ali doing a lot of "dancing around" in his training to work on foot strength and tendon stiffness/springiness.
Something I also like to do specifically for trail running is using a balance board 10-15min per day which isn't too strenuous for the body either, but has a lot of benefits for feet strength, coordination and core/posture strength. I alternate both and single legged stances while listening to some podcasts, for example.
The biggest issue I see is to keep training simple yet effective enough and to stay focused on finding out what works for one personally and not get lost in too many studies or what other people are doing :D
Hi Tobias. Your English is perfectly fine...better than my German/Austrian 😂 I'm originally from Malta and moved to Austria 4 years ago and it's so hard to learn!
I also do some balance board every day because I have a tendency to twist my ankle way too often and it seems to help. Yeah, these small stuff really make a difference but the opportunity cost question is always on the back of my mind, even just from a time perspective. Between work, life, Born on the Trail and run training, I don't have time to do much else!
How do you like it in Austria? Where are you based and are you on Strava? 😊
Love it, much better than Malta for running! I'm based just outside of Salzburg and I'm lucky to have some nice trails and small mountains very close to my house so I can get on trails as often as I want.
Yes, I'm on Strava https://www.strava.com/athletes/26409757