Will lifting legs help me in the 800 through 2 mile this spring track season.
Will lifting legs help me in the 800 through 2 mile this spring track season.
yes.
yes
Most definitely. I do squats, dead lifts and lunges to help make me be a better mile/5ker. Even if you gain no strength from it (pretty much impossible but I guess I should say even if you plateau after a couple months) it will help you a ton with making your body more durable to be able to handle more quality and/or miles. It helped me jump from being just barely able to do 70 mi/week to 80 which I had previously never been able to handle for more than an odd week or two. Plus lifting helps a lot with allowing you to hold your form at the end of a race in particular that brutal event know as the 8-hundo.
The biggest objection on this site that you're going to hear about lifting pretty much boils down to the fact that most runners just don't like to lift. People love to cite examples of runners who achieved greatness sans lifting like Shorter, Lindgren etc. and, while it may have worked for them, I would wager 9 out of 10 runners do not have the biomechanics to be able to handle jumping to 100 miles/week. Even if you do, if you think about it in terms of overall workload, getting in something extra in addition to running surely can only help. Obviously you don't want to lift to the point in which it significantly takes away from your mileage but I'd say give it 3-4 weeks especially in a base building period and if you start at a young age, you're going to be vastly better off in the long term.
out cognito wrote:
Most definitely. I do squats, dead lifts and lunges to help make me be a better mile/5ker. Even if you gain no strength from it (pretty much impossible but I guess I should say even if you plateau after a couple months) it will help you a ton with making your body more durable to be able to handle more quality and/or miles. It helped me jump from being just barely able to do 70 mi/week to 80 which I had previously never been able to handle for more than an odd week or two. Plus lifting helps a lot with allowing you to hold your form at the end of a race in particular that brutal event know as the 8-hundo.
The biggest objection on this site that you're going to hear about lifting pretty much boils down to the fact that most runners just don't like to lift. People love to cite examples of runners who achieved greatness sans lifting like Shorter, Lindgren etc. and, while it may have worked for them, I would wager 9 out of 10 runners do not have the biomechanics to be able to handle jumping to 100 miles/week. Even if you do, if you think about it in terms of overall workload, getting in something extra in addition to running surely can only help. Obviously you don't want to lift to the point in which it significantly takes away from your mileage but I'd say give it 3-4 weeks especially in a base building period and if you start at a young age, you're going to be vastly better off in the long term.
AMEN. It's all about general fitness in addition to running. I would suggest though, to perform low weight/high reps. I pick a weight that I am able to do
15-20 reps of for 3 sets. Of course I also try to mix it up. But I noticed that when I starting lifting high reps, along with trying to improve my running form, I became vastly faster and have never been injured. I would say you should steer away from high weight/low reps because of injury risks and bulking up.
low weight/high reps suggested here...another thread has reps of 2-4 with very heavy weight?
Why is this topic so varied on the beliefs?
My friends from Kenya do low weights/high reps, so I figured what works for them works for me. However, I was incorrect when I said low reps will bulk you up. If anything high reps bulk you up, but that gets into the whole bodybuilder physiology thing. Really, you just want to treat weight training as cross training, and just don't go too overboard with it. You want to become lean from lifting, not huge. I've seen kids that get huge and slow down a ton. I've also seen guys slim down and get much faster.