Weight lifting-Completed Version.

I received the question that follows and decided that it deserves its own post.

"What is your stance on weight lifting? How often? What tyoe? Core work? Types of reps? When to do it? How long into the season to hold it? ect. ect." - Winter Lifter

Joey: My stance on weight lifting is that it is not necessary, but I know its not harmful and may even be helpful. As my high school coach, Chuck Woolridge described it, the point is to teach your muscles to all fire at once. I was skeptical when he first started giving us light-weight training and I really didn't believe in it. The weight training is really more for speed, it helps far more with sprinting than it does distance running, as you want your muscles to all fire effectively in order to produce a powerful stride. The idea as I understand it, with distance running, is that it would possibly make your stride more efficient because top speed and explosive muscle make you more efficient at all distances. It also helps with your kick. The idea is also that it helps your form stay together and having upper body strength at the end of a race helps you to drive your arms to kick harder.

Personally, I do not believe it really has any positive benefits that doing core work and top-speed work don't give. As Wetmore says "Why borrow from Peter to pay Paul?" He also says that death tastes like pennies, so I don't know how right he is. He has coached several national championship teams and multiple individual national champions, so I'll take his word that weight lifting is unnecessary for the distance runner. Another person who doesn't make distance runners do weight lifting is my coach, Gary Towne. Though not as mainstream successful as Wetmore, Towne's methods work really well. I can also vouch for the fact that Scott Bauhs has never done any sort of weight lifting or even core work for that matter, but my intuitive mind tells me that he would be even faster if he did do core. And strides. How he is fast is beyond me.

Anyways, what I do know about weight lifting is what actually does help running. Squats, and just about everything to do with your hamstrings and quads. In low weight. High reps, low weights. Calf work is unnecessary. Being powered by your quads is the most effective way to go.

High reps, low weights. If you dont do them at all, whatever. Dont skimp on the core work though.

How long to keep doing weights? Until your taper for your peak race starts, about 2-4 weeks out from target race.

Calvin: I agree with Joey on the most part, and it definitely depends on what sort of event you are training for. Middle distance and shorter events, in my opinion, can find beneficial gains in strength by doing actual weight-room lifting. But the way we do it for the long-distance runners at Davis is a regimen of strength and core exercises, the vast majority of which can be done with a medicine ball, swiss ball, a bench, and a dumbbell. In fact, many of the exercise we do don't require equipment at all. In regards to reps, at Davis we keep it fairly small, but we definitely are looking to progress. So at the beginning of the season we are looking at around 10 reps per exercise, to be increased as we improve. As Joey said, you want to keep the weights low, you aren't looking to gain a whole lot of muscle mass.

The exercises we do range from squats to pushups and planks to pull-ups to abs. I would look online, I actually found a pretty good set of core/strength stuff at various sites that I incorporated into my high school on my own. Here's a plyometric workout regimen, a circuit training regimen, and another circuit training regimen. Personally, I used the last link, as I thought the article was pretty informative and it's a pretty good way to get in an aerobic effort and some strength/core in a fairly limited amount of time. I actually added thirty minute jog loops after each exercise and then immediately started the next one, in addition to the prescribed 400 meters at 5k pace. They mentioned in the article that adding these jogs would be beneficial, and believe me, my heart rate was really high after the deceivingly difficult circuit. Also, I would definitely not launch into this sort of stuff without already having a good base of fitness, it is surprisingly hard.

Back to the topic - At UC Davis we have several different "programs," which are basically a set of a dozen or so core and strength exercises, that we do throughout the week. So, if you had three "programs," you would do the first one on monday, the second on wednesday, and the third on friday, and then repeat the following week. So to answer your question about the duration and timing, I would recommend doing it all year, and only skipping one of your programs to all for a better taper for an important race. Near the end of the season, for the peak races, I would suggest dropping weight/strength altogether until you start all over with another season.