Winter is a great time to focus on the weight room, building strong muscles that will keep you from injury and help you to become a more dynamic runner.
While I’m a big proponent of pilates for strengthening muscles, especially core muscles, I also like to incorporate weights into my strength training workouts. There are many exercises that are effective in building a stronger you, but below are my:
TOP TEN STRENGTH TRAINING EXERCISES FOR RUNNERS
Goblet Squat -
Push-ups -
Walking Lunge -
Single-Leg Squats -
Single-Leg Deadlifts -
Bulgarian Split-Squat -
Russian Twist -
Pull-ups -
Back Extensions -
Step-Ups -
As I said, there are many more exercises that are wonderful and also effective for runners, but these are a great place to start. These focus on the entire body, but specifically legs and core. There are many different camps in regards to how often, how many reps, and how much weight one should lift, but I would recommend to start with 3 sets x 10 reps of enough weight that you can keep good form for each exercise while still taxing your muscles. If you can do all the reps with ease, you need to increase the weight. (Sidenote: Just last week I was doing the same exercise as a man twice my size but with a heavier weight!)
Happy running!
