Ok I'll chirp in.
Alot of the stuff on here is excellent, but I feel like I shold elaborate on resistance work:
Only Upper Body Strengthening: What muscles are primarily used in running? The legs. So in order to strengthen the muscles used in running we must primarily strengthen the legs and improve posture.
Olympic Lifts: Specific for one thing, Olympic Lifting. One needs a huge amount of general preparation to perform them correctly, and the joint actions in practice are not what are seen in running, particularly in the upper body. Most athletes are so hamstring dominant and are coached to “stomp” that they do not get full triple extension. But of course when running the legs are the primary muscles being used, so doing something that puts emphasis on the entire body is very draining on the CNS and for no reason. Plyos and jump squats/jump split lunges work much better.
The Kenyans: If you couldn’t afford to feed yourself, would you build a multi-million dollar training facility? Just curious.
So in order to implement a resistance training program for distance runners we must do it with regard to science and current legitimate research. We must prepare the athletes in a specific manner making sure the sequencing is concurrent with the running training.
In order to be a “specific” exercise it must meet these criteria:
1)Replicate the same ROM of the activity.
2)Replicate the same joint actions of the activity.
3)Replicate the muscular contraction and neuromuscular pathway of the activity.
Much like running, before we engage in specific training we must have an adequate base of general training.
GPP- Strengthening of the lower body muscles with upper body as well (emphasizing lower). Free weights should be used, as much standing exercises as possible. Power lifts- Squat, Bench, Deadlift, And rows/pull-ups. To prevent hypertrophy and increase velocity of concentric (positive) portion of lift, a rest pause in between each rep is optimal. Do a rep, rack, shake your legs, repeat. Low reps work best.
SPP- Development of local muscular endurance. Local is in reference to the lactate shuttle of the mitochondria of the skeletal muscles. Even though the kidneys and liver buffer lactate exponentially better than the skeletal muscles, once exercise starts blood flows from the central organs to the periphery. Thus we must rely on the buffering capacity of the mitochondria. VO2MAX increase are marginal and take a long time in trained runners, developing the local abilities is easier, safer, and quicker.
Three Variants:
1)2-3 sets of 1-2’ w/ 30s-1’ rest (steady velocity)
2)6-10 sets of 30s w/30s down to 10s rest (1 rep/s or faster)
3)6-10 sets of 8-12 reps w/1’ down to 10s rest (Maximum speed and power)
This stuff works, promise. I know because I do it. Hopefully it’ll work out in the spring.
Source?
www.verkhoshansky.com
remember he’s talking about doped athletes.
Once again I've put in a long post (I used to go by Lydiard).