Most runners skip the gym because they assume time spent lifting is time stolen from running. It's one of the few places in fitness where the evidence is clear enough to argue back: strength training makes you a more economical runner, and runners who do it get hurt less often. If you only add one thing to your week, add this.
What the evidence actually supports
Two claims here stand on solid ground.
Running economy improves. Adding heavy resistance training or plyometrics to an endurance programme reduces the oxygen cost of running at a given pace — you cover the same ground for less energy. This shows up consistently across trained and recreational runners, and it translates into better performance over distance. It happens mainly through the nervous system and tendon stiffness, not through added muscle bulk, which is why runners who worry about "getting heavy" from lifting generally don't.
Injury risk drops. Strength training is one of the more effective single interventions for reducing sports injuries in general, and there is reasonable evidence for running specifically. Loaded tissue tolerates load better — tendon, bone, and muscle all adapt to what you ask of them.
What strength work does not do is guarantee you'll stay healthy. Most running injuries are load-management problems: mileage climbing faster than tissue can adapt. Strength training raises the ceiling. Sensible progression keeps you under it. You need both.
Lift heavy, not long
This is where most runners get the dose wrong. The instinct is to do high-rep, light-weight circuits because it feels more "endurance-like." The economy benefits, though, come mostly from heavy resistance work and explosive movements — low to moderate reps with real load, taken close to but not to failure, and plyometrics like hops, bounds, and skips. Endurance is what your running already trains. Use the gym for what running can't give you.
Twice a week is enough. Two sessions of 30 to 45 minutes, four to six exercises, a handful of hard sets each. That's the whole prescription. I'm deliberately not giving you percentages of your one-rep max — most runners have never tested one, and the number varies enough between people and lifts that it's a poor universal instruction. Load that lets you finish a set with two or three reps left in reserve, increased when it gets easy, works better in practice.
On scheduling: put hard lifting on the same day as a hard run — after it, or several hours later — and keep easy days genuinely easy. This preserves whole recovery days rather than scattering fatigue through the week. If that's not workable, separate them, and never put a heavy session the day before a key long run or race.
The movements worth your time
- Squats or split squats. The foundation. Split squats and rear-foot-elevated variations are especially useful because running is a single-leg activity and most people have a clear side-to-side difference. Depth over cues about knee position — knees travelling forward over the toes is normal and safe for most people.
- Deadlifts or Romanian deadlifts. Loads the hamstrings and glutes through a hip hinge. Hamstring strength through lengthened positions is one of the better-supported pieces of hamstring injury prevention in running sports.
- Calf raises, straight and bent knee. The calf-Achilles complex absorbs and returns more force per stride than anything else in the leg, and it's chronically undertrained. Do them slowly, with load, both knee positions, and take them to a genuinely hard place.
- Step-ups and single-leg work. Builds strength and control in the position you actually run in.
- Hip thrusts or bridges. Good glute loading. They build strength in hip extension — a useful thing on its own. Whether they fix anyone's knee or back pain is another question, and not one to assume.
- Trunk work that resists movement. Planks, side planks, dead bugs, carries. The trunk's job in running is to resist rotation and side-bend, so train it that way rather than with sit-ups.
- Plyometrics. Pogo hops, skips, bounds. Small doses, quality over volume, and build in slowly — these are high-force and easy to overdo.
Where to start
If you're new to this, start lighter than you think for two or three weeks. Lifting produces soreness that will make your runs feel dreadful for a fortnight, and that's the point at which most runners quit and conclude it doesn't work. It settles.
Keep running volume flat while you introduce lifting. Change one thing at a time — adding mileage and strength work in the same week is how you end up injured and blaming the wrong culprit.
If you're already carrying a niggle — an Achilles that complains on the first kilometre, a knee that shows up at 8 km — don't try to strengthen through it blind. Get it looked at, because the loading that helps a healthy tendon differs from what an irritated one needs. Our physiotherapy team works with runners on exactly that.
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