Developing Leg Strength

Audio Transcript

Coach Claire Bartholic: Welcome back to the Xtra Kick podcast, brought to you by Runners Connect.

I am halfway through my week here behind the mic, and I am having a great time answering your running and training questions. Today’s question comes from Debra.

“One of my weaknesses in marathons has been leg strength – legs, particularly head flexors getting tired towards the end. Would hill work help with this? Are there any good hill workouts to develop leg strength and endurance?”

Coach Claire Bartholic: Thanks for your question Debra. Tired legs at the end of the marathon pretty much happen to everyone, provided that you’re running hard enough for your ability and experience.

But if your legs and hips are feeling so tired that your pace starts to drop dramatically, then yes, improving your strength can certainly help, although that might not be the entire answer.

What you need to improve is not just pure strength, but durability. Hills are one way to help with that, and I’ll cover those in a minute. But all runners should be lifting weights to build strength, and to prevent injury.

Squats, lunges and deadlifts are classic exercises that will help improve the strength of your quadriceps, glutes and hamstrings. Not only will they help you strengthen your legs for running, strong legs are less injury prone, so you can spend more time on your feet than on the couch.

To strengthen hips, try glut bridges, donkey kicks, clamshells and planks. All are great choices and they don’t require a gym.

While the fatigue you are feeling at the end of a race seems to be coming from your hardworking legs and hips, the stabilizing muscles in the rest of your core are taking a beating in the marathon as well.

Developing strong abs, back muscles, and even shoulder muscles all contribute to keeping your posture strong and stable, which keeps your stride efficient.

The longer that you can efficiently with good form, the longer you can push away that fatigue. If you are new to strength training, begin with a lighter weight and more repetitions.

Two or three sets using a weight that you can lift for 12 – 15 repetitions before you can lift any more is a great beginner weight workout. As you grow stronger, you’ll want to increase the weight. But drop the number of reps so that you can only do about 6 or 8 repetitions for two or three sets.

Running before weight training is the ideal way to schedule your strength training. By running and then weight training on the same day, you are simulating the end-of-the marathon fatigue while also giving your legs true recovery the next day.

If you lift on easy days or rest days, your legs don’t get a break. You never truly recover, which means your muscles don’t get a chance to build before they’re broken down again.

But for everyone out there who is a little time crunched – and aren’t we all – and maybe you can’t fit in 30 – 60 minutes of strength training on the same day as a hard run, that’s okay too.

Simply do a short 5 – 10 minute session right after your cool down. It’ll be short enough not to tire you out to run well the next day, and you’ll still get in all the benefits.

After all, we don’t want you to do so much strength training that you turn into a bodybuilder. Strength training is a compliment to your running, so a little goes a long way.

Now let’s talk about hills. Hills are a great way of building leg strength, and they can simulate the heart pounding or robot work of a track workout at a much slower speed.

Running hill repeats forces you to create explosive power to push yourself up the hill. And because you need to lift your knees higher with each step, you’re building strength.

If you’ve never done hill repeats, start slowly. After a good warmup, the first session should be just one or two eight seconds sprints on a 6 – 8% gradient, at about 90 – 95% of your top effort.

It might seem silly to start out with just a couple of sprints, but if you’ve never done them, this is a huge stimulus change. Start with once or twice a week, and after a few weeks, you can add more reps or longer distances at a slightly lower intensity.

Along with high intensity repeats, simply choosing hilly courses for your regular easy runs are a great way to toughen up the legs.

Make sure you keep the easy days easy. You might have to slow down to a walk to do this on a steep hill. But adding rolling terrain is a big strength builder.

Now let’s talk about some of the other reasons for fatigue in a marathon. How’s your mileage? Sure, you can run a marathon on only 30 miles per week, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

There is no ideal set distance that everyone should run in a week. But if you have a solid base of miles, and you could add just a couple more here and there to gradually take up that weekly mileage while staying healthy, it will go a long way to reduce fatigue.

The safest way to run lots of miles is to run the vast majority of them very slowly. Your easy days should be so easy that you can sing along to your music. Or breathe only out of your nose the whole way if you wanted to.

My next question is how long is your long run? The length of your long run depends on the athlete, and how fast you run.

Because the marathon is so long, only the very fastest runners should even attempt to actually run the marathon distance in training.

But the vast majority of elite runners don’t even do that. Three hours is typically the sweet spot for your longest runs, no matter what your pace. Because it’s long enough to build durable legs, but not so long that you need to miss days of training to recover.

Since you’re not running the entire distance in training, how do you simulate the fatigue that you’ll experience in the race? Especially if your finishing time is longer than three hours? To accomplish this, we can do two things.

The first is taking advantage of the principle of accumulated fatigue. This is building fatigue in a workout one day, then running a workout or long run the next day, a little tired from your previous training.

This type of training helps you develop the muscular endurance without needing to run the full marathon in training. An example of accumulated fatigue will be running a steady run the day before a marathon-specific long run.

Second, you can use specific workouts that are designed to purposely fatigue your legs and muscle. Then have you train and run at marathon pace.

Some example workouts include a healthy tempo run – where you run, at first, a few tempo miles after your legs are tired from hill repeats.

Secondly, a lactic clearance workout where you run hard, and then switch gears from fast to faster to teach your body to use lactic as fuel.

And my personal favorite, the 2 X 6 mile, where you run two sets of 6 miles at marathon pace with a muscle numbing 10 minute standing break in between.

Tailoring your marathon training to include accumulated fatigue and specific workouts can make a dramatic difference in how you feel during the later stages of the race.

Last, but certainly not least, one area you want to look at is your race nutrition. If you’re not taking in enough fuel, your brain will send signals to slow down at the end of the race to preserve its favorite fuel, glycogen.

Taking in carbohydrates early and often may help you stave off fatigue. But obviously, taking in too much leads to all sorts of issues, so practice your nutrition plan in training.

Debra, to summarize, pure leg strength does play a role in the fatigue you feel at the end of a marathon, but it’s not the only factor. Otherwise, all the marathon champions of the world would look like bodybuilders. Strength is important, but durability is the key.

Thanks again for your question Debra. I’ll be back tomorrow with another episode of the Xtra Kick. Have a great run today.