When to do strength work - easy/hard days?

Anybody?

Depends. But in general easy days are for recovery, so hard days.

Seems like most young athletes I see make the mistake of doing strength work to supplement the lack of intensity on easy days.

Lifting on the hard days, after your running workout is done, is the best idea. The whole point of a recovery day is to recover; lifting is an additional stimulus, and defeats the point of a recovery day.

If you lift on hard days, assuming post run, you are then doing technical work while fatigued. There is a risk for injury with that. I think there are good arguments for either way. Some of it depends on your schedule. If you are a post collegiate I'd say do it on hard days... workout hard in the morning (10am) then come back at 4pm with strength training. If you are in college and are having your workouts at 3pm after classes and then lifting straight after the hard workout this may not be productive. You'd be in training for around 3-4 hours and over stressing the body for a single session. While lifting on recovery days does add work to an easy day lifting on hard days makes the hard day harder. Everything eventually balances out however you do it. It's not about one day, it's about how the whole week, month, etc... comes together. Don't think too hard about it. Just do what works with your schedule. This sport isn't as complicated as people make it.

It depends what type of hard day running you are doing. If it is sprint type training, then you need to do strength work after the workout as you need all your breakdown on the same day. If it is difficult, but largely aerobic type running, then you could do it the next day.

In both cases, I'd recommend two recovery days after. Maybe a hard track workout, followed by length strength exercises, then the next day a moderate or AT Workout, followed the next day by an easier/longer recovery run.

Agree with CanadaCoach.

I've tried every combination and concluded that you have to treat weights as a quality session. If you're doing hard running on Tue/Thu/Sat, there is no space left for weights; you just mess up your recovery. If you just aim for Tue/Sat, you have several options: lift on Wed+Sun for example, or a dedicated session with some lifting and some technical work (strides, hill sprints) on Thursday.

IMHO it would make more sense to phase the weights. For example 2 weeks of higher mileage and hard aerobic work, with one small lifting session somewhere and just 1-2 sets to maintain current strength; then a week of lower mileage and easy running when you do maybe 3 strength sessions (and plenty of mobility too). Or have a couple of 'strength months' per year. There has to be more chance of strength gains when you aren't hammering your legs with double runs in the next 48 hours.

Many thanks all, wise words. I will begin by doing it on the hard days and see if my form is still good. I like the idea of the strength phasing; in fact it is not too far off what I am intending.