How Your Strength Training Should Change During the Running Season
The snow has melted, the sun is out (sort of?), and the spring running season has begun. The last article outlined how you can use strength training to prepare yourself for the running season before getting out for your first outdoor run - which is an “off-season” approach. With any luck, you’ve been using the workout template from the article, have been training for a little over a month now, and have started to layer in a couple of weekly runs. Your off-season is over, and you should now be taking an in-season approach to your training.When is the “in-” and “off-” season for a runner?
If running is currently your number one goal - specifically increasing your running mileage week after week - you can consider yourself in-season. If you’ve recently started a marathon training plan, the 12 week training program to run the Tely 10, or if you’re running more often just for enjoyment, then you’re in-season. Your off-season can be any period of time when running is not the main focus, and you are not actively trying to increase your mileage. Although the typical runners I’ve worked with seem to be intolerant to anything that mildly resembles a break from running, the off-season is crucial to setting the stage for a good running season. How the off-season sets the foundation.
To better understand what to do in-season, we should first really quickly cover what the goal of the off-season is.Think of a full training year like building a big pyramid. You want your pyramid to be as tall as possible. The off-season is when you build the foundation of the pyramid - with the goal of making it as wide as possible. A wider base won't directly make the pyramid higher, but the pyramid with the widest base has to most potential to be the highest later on. 
In running terms, building a wide base in your off-season means building a wide range of general physical preparedness; things that won’t directly make you a better runner on their own, but will make you a healthier and better functioning human being, which gives you more potential to build higher performance. These are the things that would usually get swept under the rug during the in-season like taking care of nagging injuries, building strength, flexibility, and increasing the work capacity of muscles and tendons. Your off-season builds the wide range of capabilities of the human body, which set the foundation for when your focus shifts to training that will directly improve and support your running during the season.How does the focus of strength training change for runners in-season?
Off-season strength training is about building new capacity and foundation, whereas in-season strength training is mostly about: 1) Maintaining the foundation you’ve built in the off-season.
2) Taking care of aches and pains that come with increasing your mileage.
Maintaining takes far less time and work than building from scratch, which frees up time and resources to be spent on more running (which is the only thing that will directly make you a better runner). It is totally possible to get stronger in-season, pushing to build max strength and max running distance at the same time increases the total amount of stress on your body, which (if you haven’t built up to it) comes with a higher risk of interfering with running, or developing injury. In my experience, striving to maintain strength, and treating any strength gains that do happen as a bonus allows you to keep the main thing the main thing - which is running. 5 changes to make to your strength training in-season.
1. Do gradually less, down to the bare minimum.
As you run more and more, gradually turn the dial towards doing only what is necessary to keep your body healthy, running, and maintaining your strength (in that order). You want to gradually free up energy and time to spend on more running, while still doing enough to keep your foundation strong. The main way of doing this is gradually decreasing how much strength training you are doing, which can be done in a bunch of different ways.
If you end your off-season doing 4 workouts a week, this could mean decreasing to 3 when you add in your first weekly run, then decreasing to 1-2 strength training sessions per week once you add more weekly runs and mileage gets higher.
This could also mean doing less per workout by cutting out some accessory exercises, cutting out sets, or cutting weekly strength sessions down to 45 mins from an hour.2. Get gradually more specific.
Gradually doing less and less strength training means the stuff you do keep around should be very specific to what you need.To find what these things are for you, think about what tends to hold you back at higher mileages, or what nagging pains you tend to get with daily life. The exercises that help these areas are usually a good starting place for what you should keep in your program. If you don't have anything specific to you that jumps out, the most common problem areas for runners tend to be the major muscles of the lower body (surprise!) - glutes, hamstrings, calves, and quads. So these can be a good place to start. So if you always seem to get hamstring cramps at the 15km mark of your long runs, that’s a good sign you should keep in some hamstring strength work. If you’ve had success during your off-season building strength in your hamstrings with RDLs and hamstring curls, those should be the movements you keep in your program during the in-season to help maintain hamstring strength. Just not the same amount, which plays in to the next point:3. Keep the weight high, but gradually let go of sets and reps.
In the off-season you’re trying to build new strength - so doing lots of work in the gym is necessary to give your body a reason to build new muscle and strength. Keeping that same level of training up during the in-season might steal time and energy from running.Compared to building strength, maintaining strength doesn’t take much work at all. A 2021 study showed that as little as one heavy strength session per week can help maintain strength for between 8-32 weeks. The study also showed that using heavy weights was the more important factor than doing lots of sets and reps [1]. So you can maintain your strength by using weights that are heavy for you, but avoid unnecessary fatigue that might conflict with your running by lowering the number of sets and reps. A simple way to do this is to reduce your reps by 1-2 at regular intervals throughout your training program, as long as you adjust the weights you use to stay relatively close to failure within these new lower rep ranges. You can follow a similar pattern with sets, reducing at regular intervals as your mileage increases.
The exact numbers will vary, but getting the larger pattern of keeping weights higher and decreasing sets and reps gradually is the most important thing. A possible example might look like this:Weeks 1-3
Sets of 8 at ~100lbs
Weeks 4-6
Sets of 6 at ~115lbs
Weeks 7-9
Sets of 4 at ~125lbs
Weeks 10-12
Sets of 3 at ~130lbs
4. Fill the cracks that running doesn’t fill.
If you did nothing but bodyweight squats thousands of times every week for a whole summer, you’d probably have really strong quads and glutes at the end, but other parts of your body would be totally neglected and probably cause some problems. It’s the same thing with your running stride - you’ll be doing it thousands of times over a running season, which will make some things really strong (fast and springy movements, mid-range contraction of lower body muscles, linear movement, and moving light loads over high volumes) but other things will get totally left by the roadside. (Get it? Roadside? Running? Moving on.)Your strength training shouldn’t pour more water into these buckets that are already full, but rather should put water in the buckets of the things that are missed when doing lots of running. 
These "missed" things have very little overlap with running, and can help maintain your pyramid’s foundation to extend your running season while you do more and more running.5. Take care of your running body.
This could be the most overlooked aspect of in-season strength training for runners - cranking kilometers is really hard on your body, and strength training can help mitigate some of the inevitable aches and pains. This could include movements that promote a deep stretch like RDL’s for your hamstrings, deficit split squats for your hips, reverse nordic quad extensions for your quads, or paused calf raises for your calves. This could also be including movements that make the areas highly stressed by running feel better. Isometric exercises can be used as an effective way to reduce certain pains in-season [2] so exercises like wall sits, floating heel split squat holds, and leg extension holds could also be great tools for the in-season runner.Wrap Up
It’s easy to get lost in the details of trying to formulate the perfect in-season strength training routine but it all boils down to this: running is your main goal, and everything else should support that. The real work should already have been put in during your off-season, so now it’s just about staying healthy, maintaining your strength, and taking care of the little aches that come along with enjoying the running season. If that sounds similar to your goals this season then I’d love to help you strength train smarter to support your running. Send me an email or DM with any questions and let me know how I can help you out. You can also book a free consultation session either in-person or online to get your in-season strength training pointed in the right direction.References:
[1] Spiering, B. A., Mujika, I., Sharp, M. A., & Foulis, S. A. (2021). Maintaining physical performance: The minimal dose of exercise needed to preserve endurance and strength over time. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 35(5), 1449–1458. https://doi.org/10.1519/jsc.0000000000003964
[2] Lim, H. Y., & Wong, S. H. (2018). Effects of isometric, eccentric, or heavy slow resistance exercises on pain and function in individuals with patellar tendinopathy: A systematic review. Physiotherapy Research International, 23(4). https://doi.org/10.1002/pri.1721
