When Should I Stop Strength Training At The Gym Before The Marathon

Audio Transcript

Today, we have a question from Amy about strength training. Amyasks, “I’m running the Boston Marathon this year, and thanks to the excellent advice from your blog, I’m incorporating a lot more strength training to make sure that I stay healthy. My question is,when should I stop strength training at the gym before the marathon?” Amy, that’s a great question because this is something that I think a lot of runners get wrong, when they choose to incorporate strength training in their schedules. It’s actually one of the reasons that I created the strength training for this product, because it was something that I was getting a lot of questions on, and also see people getting wrong a lot.

When preparing for the race, you need to balance two things when it comes to strength training: recovery and being fresh and ready to run the race, and not doing too little. You do this to make sure that you keep the strength gains that you’ve worked so hard to achieve throughout your training cycle. It’s really the same balance that we strike with the running part of the taper. You don’t want to do too much and feel flat on the race day, but if you do too much then you’ll feel tired. It’s really the same kind of balance. The way that I suggest doing it is,you’ll want to cut out the most difficult strength training stuff two weeks before. So two weeks before your marathon, if you’re doing anything super heavy: squats, deadlifts, anything like that, then you’re going to want to cut that out of the training cycle that second week.

Now, a lot of people are going to question if those benefits that you’ve gained: the power, the strength etcetera, that comes with doing this type of strength work, if that’s going to translate all the way into a race day. We actually did some research on that. Part of it was for building our strength training for this program, but we looked at a lot of the research papers that studied how quickly athletes lose the gains from their strength training when they took time off. When we looked at it, the research showed that you actually get stronger, anywhere from five to ten days, after you stopped strength training. And part of thatcomes from the fact that your muscles are recovering and you’re able to carry the gains that you made from that strength training. With that research in mind, the fact that you’re cutting out your strength training anywhere about 10 days before, is fine.

Again, you’re not cutting out all of your strength training in this particular case. We’re just cutting out the most difficult stufftwo weeks before. And a big part of that too, is that it’s pretty easy to injure yourself, or go a little overboard and get really sore or pull something, when you’re doing heavy squats, heavy deadlifts, or big compound movements. We’re eliminating that risk because when we looked at the research, there’s not a lot of research to support that you need to be doing that stuff at that point. Why not take it out, if we know that you’re going to keep the benefits, eliminate any of the risk and then obviously eliminate the risk of getting tired; that’s the first step.

The second step is the week of your race. The first three days, you’re actually going to keep your strength training relatively normal, in the sense that you’re going to keep doing what I call, “easier strength exercises”. But usually that’s more of the injury preventative type of work, so core work, hip work or anything like that, where it’s not super difficult. It’s just more of injury prevention or maintenance work. Core work,planks, double eagles, fire hydrants. Any of those typeof donkey kicks and any of those types of exercises where it’s mainly focused on the core and hips. We have to keep those in the training schedule.

Like I said with the research before, even if you don’t do any strength training that week, you wouldn’t lose any of the benefits. But the reason that you want to keep them in the training schedule is that it helps keep you in a good routine. The most common reason why people have a really difficult taper, leading to bad races, is they get completely off the routine. If you think about it, for the last 12, 16,or 20 weeks, depending on how long you’ve been training, you’ve been putting your body through a lot of work. A lot of runs, long runs, core workouts, strength workouts, etcetera.

When you start to eliminate those, the body naturally starts to freak out and that’s why a lot of people, at the end of their taper, start to feel flat. Your body is an amazingly adaptable organism and it will adapt very quickly to a lot of the things that you’re putting it through. If you go from doing all this work to basically doing nothing, your body’s going to freak out, and that’s what throws off your training; your fitness. By keeping those workouts in, you stay on a routine.

Obviously, you’ve cut your miles because you’re in the taper. You’ve cut the intensity. And we’re just taking out a little bit of the strength training part, by keeping in certain components; the hip and the core work, etcetera, so that your body stays on that rhythm. That way, it’s not a shock to the system that all of a sudden you’re not doing anything. I recommend runners to keep that work in, for the first three or four days, that is Monday to Thursday, and then you can eliminate the strength training on the final half of the week.

If you’re doing the marathon, you’re going into an energy conservation mode. You want to be conserving as much energy as possible and so removing those workouts really helps with that. Secondly, you want to eliminate anything that could potentially tweak something. Obviously, at this point, that strength is going to stay with you, so it’s not going to make a big difference towards race day. That’s how I advise runners to remove the strength training.

Now, to quickly recap without all the research and tangents. Two weeks before, cut out any heavy or difficult strength work that you’re doing. But the first three to four days of your race week, you can do light strength training core work, hips, or anything that’s not too difficult; typically bodyweight exercises. And then the last two to three days before your race, you’re going to cut out all strength training work just to ensure that you are maximally recovered and ready to go on race day. So Amy, I hope that helped with your question, and that I answered it for you and for anybody else that had questions about when they should start removing the strength training from their running schedule.

If you have your own question, feel free to head to runnersconnect.net/daily and go ahead and click the button there and leave us a voicemail. And if you’re interested, we sell the Strength Training for Runners Program, which as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, each race distance comes with a specific prescription on how to incorporate it into your training. So in this example, during the taper, we would be giving you exactly what workouts to do. For example, two weeks before the week of your race, I would say Monday, this is the work that you do Tuesday.

If you’re interested in that, head on over to runnersconnect.net/training-runners or you can just Google “strength training for runnersconnect” and it should come up. Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

I hope you enjoyed the answer to this question and I hope you keep listening. We’ll be doing this podcast five days a week. Thanks once again.