How to Schedule Strength Training

Audio Transcript

Coach Sinead: Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining me today.

We have a question from Ben about how to schedule your weight training around your workouts.

Ben: I am currently training for the Chicago Marathon and I have two days a week that I do hard workouts, tempo or track workouts, and on my hard days, I normally want to do my weights.

I keep my hard days hard and my easy days easy. I’m wondering, should you do your weight workout before you run, or after?

Sinead: This is a fantastic question, Ben, and one that we get often at Runners Connect.

First things first, I will say it’s great that you are reserving all your hard sessions for your workout days, and all your easy stuff for your recovery days.

This is how we structure all our trainings at Runners Connect, and we do so because it just does help you recover on your recovery days.

You never want to do a hard session of weights on a recovery day, because it’s just going to make it harder for your body to recover from your last workout, and it’s going to inhibit your ability to hit your times in your next workout.

It’s great that you have already structured your training in this way. But as for your question, the short answer is that you should always schedule your weight sessions after your workouts on hard days.

This is because you want your weight training to help your running, and not detract from it. There have been multiple studies to show that doing a weight session before your workout, can significantly reduce your time to exhaustion.

In other words, you will become fatigued more quickly during the workout and not really be able to finish and achieve the purpose of the workout the way you really want to.

There is one study that just recently came out of Australia, and it shows that the best way to combine weight sessions with your running is to do the weight session after your workout.

The study included 15 runners of multiple skill levels and average weekly mileage, and it did some different strength training sessions on three different occasions.

One session was a high intensity whole-body workout, another was a high intensity session but for the legs only, and the last session was low intensity and whole body.

Six hours after each workout, the runners would do a treadmill test of 10 minutes, running at 70% of their threshold pace.

This is a very easy, very relaxed pace. After that, they would do 10 minutes at 90% of their threshold pace, which is roughly close to your half marathon pace. It’s a good bit more strenuous than the first pace.

Then after those 20 minutes of running total, the runners would do 110% of their threshold pace for as long as possible.

This pace would be more akin to 5k pace, but keep in mind this is after the runners have already done 20minutes of running and the weight session, six hours prior to this.

At this point in the study, the runners aren’t exactly feeling fresh doing this pace. It would feel pretty hard after everything else they’ve done.

The runners also did a treadmill test at the outset of the study, and got a benchmark for how they would perform when fresh.

The results showed that the high intensity strength workouts significantly reduced the runner’s time to exhaustion at the end of the treadmill tests.

In the benchmark tests, the runners would last an average of close to five minutes at 110% of their threshold pace.

But after each of the high intensity strength sessions, time to exhaustion was almost a minute less.

This did suggest that the hard weight workouts, six hours earlier, significantly decreased the runner’s ability to sustain a fast pace.

What this tells us is that you never want to schedule a hard, running workout later in the day of a weight session. You just can’t recover in time after doing a weight session like that.

This is especially true if you are incorporating any sort of lower extremity resistance training within your weights session. Anything to do with the upper and lower legs, is really going to impair your body’s ability to run fast, later in the day.

You’re probably wondering, well, what if I wait longer than six hours, what if I wait 10 hours?

The study showed that your body’s ability to run a fast pace is still impaired 24 hours after a weight session.

What this means is that you do need more than a day to recover from a weight session.

This is why you want to make sure you are doing the weight session on the same day as your workout, but after your workout, if you are going to implement weight training into your schedule.

Usually, you want to arrange it so that you are doing your workout in the morning, and your weight session in the afternoon, just so that you can give yourself about six to eight hours of time to recover before that second session of the day.

I realize that a lot of our listeners have schedules that don’t always permit this, so you have to kind of pancake these two sessions and do your running session right before your weight training session.

Just make sure that you get some fuel in between the two sessions.

I would say a little bit of carbs and protein, and that’s going to help you facilitate recovery from training session, kind of building up your glycogen stores, and help you perform more efficiently and with better form in your weight training.

Weight training is great for all runners. It can really help to correct muscle imbalances and weaknesses that are common in the average person, which can lead to injuries.

So, it’s great as a preventative measure, but also helps your performance on race day as well.

It is a great idea to implement some weight training into your schedule, so long as you do it in the way I have described in this podcast.

You always want your weight training to be supplementary and more of a second priority to your running.

It’s always supposed to help your running but never detract from your running.

Ben, thank you so much for submitting that question. It was a great question and I really enjoyed answering it for you today.

If you have a question you would like one of our coaches to answer in an upcoming episode, you can submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

We would love to answer any questions you have on training, racing, nutrition or anything in between. We are happy to help with whatever has you curious.

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Thanks again for tuning in and I hope you have a fantastic run today.