How to add Running to your Lifting

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: running.

The problem: running is 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 combine these two disciplines and effectively improve at each.

As always, if throughout this article you feel you have questions left unanswered, you are welcome to email me at info@fitnesssimplified.org.

What to do before you start running:

(First 6 weeks)

If you don’t have running experience, my advice would be not to start out with running specifically (yet, at least).

You certainly can jump right into running and make progress. I’d just argue the following would serve you better.

At this point what you really need are to do the following two things:

• Build your aerobic base

• Build running economy

Building your aerobic base

Your aerobic base is a common term used in sport to define a base level of cardiovascular fitness.

This can be done with running as the modality, however, I’d argue there’s a better way.

There’s two components to running that make it more fatiguing than another modalities of exercise: impact and eccentric loading. Impact, of course, refers to the impact of each foot with the ground with every stride of your legs. ‘Eccentric loading’ refers to the lowering of a weight. In this case, it refers to the slight, squat-like action each leg takes as you use it to propel forward.

Without your aerobic base built, running will feel more fatiguing than it needs to feel and it may take longer to recover from. So, what should you do instead?

I’d recommend cycling to start with instead.

Start with 1 hour per week. This can be split up however you want as long as the sessions are at least 20 minutes. In other words, this can be done as three 20-minute sessions or it can be done as two 30-minute sessions.

Keep this to a lower, zone 2 intensity. Specifically, this refers to 60-70% of your max heart rate (roughly). If you don’t have a heart rate monitor, there’s two other ways you can ensure you are within the right intensity.

• Keep it conversational: push to the point where you can still hold a 20-word sentence, but if you pushed any harder you would be unable to do so.

• Nasal breathing: push to the point where you can still breath out of your nose during the exercise, but if you pushed any harder you’d be unable to

Add 10 minutes per week of this sort of work until you hit 2 hours of total work per week. This will total a 6-week progression. Then, you will begin adding in running. More on how to do this later.

Building running economy

Running economy refers to how much energy you spend with every step of your foot. For instance, say two people were going to spend 500 calories on a run. Everything about them is the same, except one has 2x the running economy of the other. The person with 2x running economy will likely go double the distance as the other person.

An improved running economy will also make each run cause less muscle damage, less fatigue, and ultimately make your runs easier to mesh with strength training.

So, how do you improve running economy?

Plyometrics

Plyometrics are exercises that involve a rapid stretch and subsequent contraction of the muscle that results in you leaving the ground. Jumping up and down repeatedly would be an example.

Why is this helpful?

Your muscles and tendons are elastic, like rubber bands. When they stretch rapidly, they want to rebound and to contract rapidly. This is known as the stretch shortening cycle (SSC). The rate of this rebound can be increased by with plyometric training, which results in you becoming more “bouncy” for lack of a better word.

How does this translate to running?

This makes more of the propulsion of each step caused by this rebounding effect, and less of it from your muscle contracting. As a result, you spend less energy and cause less muscle damage with each step.

What are some examples of good plyometric exercises for running?

Here’s two examples:

Programming and progressing these varies depending on your specific training status at the current moment and on the specific plyometric exercise at hand.

However, my general rule of thumb is this:

Perform 1-2 sets of this type of training before workouts where you train your legs.

This should result in plyometrics being trained 2-3x/week, resulting in anywhere from 2-6 sets per week.

Incorporating running; how to start:

(Second 6 weeks)

Remember, you started with 1 hour per week at a zone 2 intensity on a no impact modality. You progressed this to 2 hours per week by adding 10 minutes per week each week. You are incorporating plyometrics into the workouts in which are you training legs while doing this.

This comes out to a 6-week block.

After completing this 6-week block, you will find running to be much easier to recover from, and therefore easier to mix in with lifting.

So, now it’s time to start running. What does this look like?

We are going to keep the zone 2 cardio on a no-impact modality in, but we are going to drop that back down to 1 hour per week. The plyometrics are going to stay in as part of your lifting regimen as well. I recommend making the 1 hour per week of zone 2 work out to either one 1-hour session per week or two 30-minute sessions per week.

In addition to this, you are going to add one day of running per week to start. This is going to take the form of a run/walk interval with a 1:1 work/rest ratio. This means you are going to alternate between equal times of running and walking.

In deciding how long your intervals should last, I recommend the following method:

• run or jog while only breathing through your nose until you reach the point where you can’t sustain the work breathing only through your nose

• At this point, note how long that run interval was and walk for the same duration of time

• Repeat this pattern for the prescribed duration for the day’s workout

In your first week, spend 20 minutes doing this workout. Add 5 minutes of duration each week. You will progress your running in this fashion for 6 weeks until you are performing 50 minutes of volume during this session.

Progressing your running:

(Third 6 weeks)

The purposes of the previous twelve weeks were the following:

• Build your aerboic base

• Improve the stretch-shortening cycle

• Build tolerance and recoverability to running specifically

Now, you’re at a point where we can really increase the running volume, and recovering from said running volume should be no problem for you.

So, in regard to the running component of your training, here’s what I’d recommend your routine look like:

• 3 days per week of running

• One of which spent performing the nasal breathing guided run/walk interval previously outlined for 30 minutes

• How to perform the other two days of running:

  • Take note of the total number of miles completed during the 50-minute run/walk of the previous 6-week training block

  • Divide that number of miles by 2

  • Run this halved number of miles straight on each day to an intensity of 6-7/10 (RPE ~6.5)

    • In other words: it’s okay if this pushes you past the point of nasal breathing alone, but you shouldn’t push to the point of feeling dead after these runs

  • Increase the total weekly mileage on these runs by 10% each week

What to do after all of that:

(In regard to running)

At this point, how you structure your running is entirely dependent on what you want to get out of running.

If you want to just build up to running as far of a distance as you can, then you can just increase weekly mileage by 10% each week ongoing. Eventually, a 10% increase in weekly mileage will be too much, but it will last you for a while.

If there’s a specific race distance you want to complete or compete in, then you may begin incorporating other types of run workouts including tempo or speed runs. However, what these look like will depend entirely on the distance.

How to structure your strength workouts:

(When combined with running)

There are only two different workout splits I would recommend when combining lifting with running:

• 2-3 full body workouts per week

• 2 upper body workouts & 2 lower body workouts per week

Which one you pick depends on your training status, time available per week to train, preference, or perhaps what point you’re at in the run progression previously outlined.

If you use full body workouts, then you will perform your plyometric training before all workouts. If you are using upper/lower workouts, then you will only do plyometric training before training your legs.

99% of the time I have clients perform three full body workouts per week. From the third 6-week block on, I recommend you run three times per week (at least). That combined with this lifting regimen allows for one rest day each week, which I find to be important for most people. Plus: if life happens and you have to miss one of your lifting days in a week, then you don’t lose half of the weekly stimulus for your upper or lower body when utilizing full body workouts.

However, say you are in the first or second block of the run progression outlined in this article. Those periods will likely come out to two days of endurance work. If we are still aiming for one rest day per week, then the upper/lower split will work here.

You certainly can use an upper/lower body split and still run three days per week. This just results in you training every day, which would require 1) you have the time to do so and 2) you are able to recover sufficiently from 7 days/week of training.

To put this into practice, let’s outline a sample of what this might look like:

• Day 1

  • Pogo jumps

    • 1-2 sets

  • Romanian deadlifts

    • 2-4 sets

  • Flat barbell bench press

    • 2-4 sets

  • Cossack squats

    • 2-4 sets

  • shoulder press

    • 2-4 sets

  • Torso rotations

    • 2-4 sets

• Day 2

  • Run/walk intervals

• Day 3

  • Lateral pogo jumps

    • 1-2 sets

  • Hip Thrust

    • 2-4 sets

  • Chin-ups (or pulldowns) superset with push-ups

    • 2-4 sets each

  • Leg curls superset with reverse nordic

    • 2-4 sets each

  • Dumbbell side raise superset with crunches

    • 2-4 sets each

• Day 4

  • Steady state run

• Day 5

  • Repeated vertical jumps

    • 1-2 sets

  • Front squat

    • 2-4 sets

  • Flat dumbbell bench press superset with dumbbell rows

    • 2-4 sets each

  • Glute-Ham Developer (GHD) (or 45-degree hyper-ext)

    • 2-4 sets

  • Pull-ups (or pulldowns) superset with staggered foot side planks

    • 2-4 sets each

• Day 6

  • Steady state run

• Day 7

  • rest

In this routine, and others I would create like it, there’s a few points I focus on:

• Use mostly compound movements to avoid the need for an excessive # of exercises

• Train the lower body in all three planes of motion (frontal, sagittal, and transverse)

• Train each muscle’s relevant movements

• Spread volume out to avoid spikes in fatigue and mesh well with running

• Avoid repetitive movement patterns

• Place plyometrics at the beginning of each workout to ensure sufficient power production and technique

It should be noted that I did not include warm ups in that specific routine for the purposes of this article. That is not to say one is not needed. I would always program warm-ups in full programs I write for clients. May be obvious but worth pointing out.

Conclusion (+ some final tips)

My aim of this article was to provide you with some practical guidance on how to effectively improve your strength & running at the same time. If you have questions you feel are unanswered, you are welcome to email me at info@fitnesssimplified.org.

Of course, there are many pieces of nuance that might change my mind about various points of this article. There’s rarely one right way to do this for everyone with these sorts of things. However, the concepts covered in this article will likely apply to the majority of people reading this.

Although I only intended to cover the training aspect of this article, some other points that are important to hit include:

• Eating enough total calories each day (especially carbohydrate)

• Eating enough protein each day

• Hydrating properly

• Sleeping enough

• etc.