How to Start Running as a Lifter
Are you an experienced lifter, but new to running?
If so, this is the article for you.
More and more, people are embracing the concept of hybrid training.
Commonly, this simply refers to building your strength & endurance at the same time.
Arguably the most common and most accessible form of endurance training is running.
The problem is running can be a trickier form of endurance training to combine with lifting compared to others.
So, the aim of this article is to provide practical strategies on how to begin running without it interfering with your strength training.
First things first: how to structure your lifting
When undergoing any hybrid program, you need to make sure that your lifting is structured in a way that you can still reliably make progress but also allows for the pursuit of other fitness goals.
In line with this, not all strength splits are equal.
Before we get into my specific recommendations, let’s point a few things out.
First, if the total volume of strength training you do in a week is equated, it does not seem to matter how many times you train a muscle in a week. [1]
In other words, if you are training your chest with 9 sets per week, it won’t make much difference if it is done in 1, 2, or 3 different sessions in the week.
There can be an argument made for training a muscle 2 or more times per week as opposed to one, but there is a modest benefit found here at best.
The reason I bring this up is to say that you have a lot of flexibility with how you split up your strength training; provided you are performing enough total volume.
Second, it’s always worth acknowledging that life will happen over the course of a program or training block.
There will be instances where something comes up and you need to miss a session.
Therefore, training splits that provide a higher frequency of training to each muscle can be more advantageous.
This is true for strength training programs of any kind, but is especially true for hybrid programs.
For instance, let’s say you allocated all of your chest volume to one session in the week and something came up where you had to miss that session. In this case, you would have lost all of your chest volume for that week.
Now, imagine that chest volume was split up over three different sessions.
You could miss a session and still have enough chest volume elsewhere in the week to produce results.
For this reason, I tend to only recommend full body workouts or upper body & lower body splits for hybrid training programs.
In regard to how much volume of strength training you should perform, there is no short way for me to answer this.
Typically, I find people do best with somewhere between 6-12 sets per muscle group per week; this is based on the evidence and my experience with clients. [2]
If you’re interested, I cover the topic of resistance training volume at large in another article, which you can find here.
Certainly, much more can be said on this topic.
For the sake of this article, though, I’m going to end this discussion here and move on.
Consider this before you start running (first 4 weeks)
In regard to any athletic pursuit, there is an important concept to consider: your aerobic base.
Basically, this means developing a “base” level of aerobic fitness before you begin implementing anything fancy or adding in any big progressions.
The idea is that it can be easy to feel “overtrained” if you jump right into a full-fledged, full-complexity run program; especially with lifting along side it.
This can realistically be accomplished by performing ~60 minutes of steady state aerobic exercise, split into 2-3 sessions, at a 5/10 effort for 4 weeks or so.
When your new to endurance of any kind, my typical recommendation is to perform this work on a bike (road, trail, or stationary), AirDyne, or by incline walking on a treadmill. I choose these modes of exercise because they tend to be less fatiguing than others such as rowing, skiing (SkiErg), or running itself.
This can be done with running itself; it’s just that running as a modality of exercise may feel overly fatiguing until you develop an aerobic base. The other listed modes of exercise will help you focus on your aerobic energy systems a bit more specifically.
Typically, I do not recommend combining strength and endurance work into the same session, as that tends to lead to worse results than if you perform them in different sessions. [1]
However, at this point in the process, I do not think it will matter much if you add a 15-, 20-, or 30-minute bout onto the end of a strength session if that works better with your schedule.
I would just recommend that you perform the strength first and the aerobic work afterward.
Going forward, I would not recommend you combine strength and endurance into the same session.
Beginning to run: what it should look like at the start (second 4 weeks)
Now, let’s assume you have spent 4 weeks performing 60 minutes per week of steady state work at a 5/10 effort on any of the previously listed modes of exercise.
What next?
Well, now you start running.
Running is a bit of a unique form of endurance, though, insofar that the demands in terms of tissue capacity are higher compared to other means of endurance training.
It takes time, especially in the beginning and especially when you are simultaneously pursuing strength or muscle growth, to build this tissue capacity.
The biggest mistake you could make is rushing the process.
My recommendation would be to choose a distance that feels ‘manageable’ and run this distance 2-3x/week.
What is ‘manageable’ will look different for everyone. It might mean 1 mile, 1.5 miles, 2 miles, etc.
Whatever distance you deem appropriate for you, you should perform it at the same intensity you approached the aerobic base training with: 5/10 subjective effort.
Similarly, I would recommend you run in this fashion, and do not progress the distance, for ~4 weeks or so.
The idea here is not to start building your running.
Rather, it is to get your body accustomed to how running feels and how to adapt to it alongside your strength training.
How to start progressing
Everything done up to this point has been to ensure that you can make progress in your running while still making progress in your strength/hypertrophy.
Now, it is time to start building toward some progress with running.
The classic recommendation for how to start progressing your running is to add 10% of volume each week.
To be clear, this is in regard to running done at that 5/10 subjective effort (~zone 2). High intensity running is different and will come later.
So, let’s say that you decided to do 2 mile runs three times per week: 6 miles per week total.
This rule would call for you to run 6.6 miles the next week (you can call it 6.5 miles per week if that’s a more satisfying number).
The next week, you would run 7.25 miles total. The week after: 8 miles total per week.
In my opinion, it does not matter too much how you distribute this volume, whether you distribute it evenly across all your runs or add it all to one run.
I would rather that you distribute it more evenly across the week, but making fit with your schedule most easily should take priority.
Now, the “add 10% per week” rule will eventually become inappropriate.
As you can imagine, 10% of your weekly volume may eventually become an amount that is too large of a weekly progression to make sense.
However, I’d go as far to say that it can be reliably used up to ~15 miles per week or so; which gives you a lot of run room with it.
Moving forward
Once you build up to a decent enough volume as has been described, there are many different paths you can take.
You may look to start incorporating fancier sessions such as intervals, fartlek runs, tempo runs, targeted cross-training, etc.
What this will look like in practice will vary depending on what you want to pursue within running.
Covering such topics are beyond the scope of what this article is meant to cover.
For further help on how to combine lifting & running past what has been covered here, check out this article for some ideas.
Conclusion
It’s worth noting that good programming is as much an art as it is a science.
There are best practices, but self-experimentation should not be discounted.
Point is: be willing to modify the guidelines I have outlined here to best fit your preferences, goals, or fitness level.
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