STRENGTH TRAINING: THE BENEFITS Podcast episode #142 🎙 . ✅ INJURY PREVENTION: Strength training allows your body to handle your training volume and continue training without injury. Strength training strengthens connective tissue and muscles. It also corrects muscle imbalances in the body that can contribute to injury. If you have muscle imbalances, your body begins to compensate and favor the stronger side, which can lead to injury. Avoiding injury = staying consistent as a runner! Getting specific exercises for YOU from a physical therapist is key to improving your body imbalances/avoiding injury . ✅ FASTER FINISHING KICK: The marathon is 99% aerobic and 1% anaerobic (the final stretch of the race). Strength training is an anaerobic activity. If you strength train, you’re able to target your anaerobic system and improve your ability to finish a marathon strong in the final stretch . ✅ IMPROVES RUNNING ECONOMY: When your muscles are strong, they don’t need to expend as much energy to hit faster paces. This leads to your form staying intact throughout the entirety of a race, allowing you to hold onto that faster pace instead of breaking & slowing down! SMALL improvements in your running economy lead to BIG differences, especially over the course of longer races like half marathon/marathon . ✅ IMPROVES NEUROMUSCULAR CONNECTIONS: Strength training improves your power by strengthening the mind-to-body connection. This allows your body to recruit more muscle fibers more quickly, and do so much easier which makes you more efficient . ✅ IMPROVES BALANCE: When running, you’re either airbound or on one leg. There is potential for landing wrong and hurting ourselves. Our legs have many small stabilizing muscles that can help us navigate uneven terrain when they are strong . TOP TIPS:👇 ✅ Use the progressive overload principle. Start SMALL! Bodyweight only at first and work your way up to weights and then heavier weights ✅ Ideally, strength train on your hard workout days. Keep the hard days hard and the easy days easy ✅ You don’t need to do a lot! Just 20-30 minutes 2x/week will do the trick . Want to see what strength exercises you should be doing for runner-specific strength? Start a free strength training trial with us! www.run4prs.com/strength-training . Follow us for more training tips @run4prs