Strength Training for Runners: What Actually Matters and What Does Not

Episode: S6E27 | Guest: Natalie LaMendola, PT, DPT | Aired September 3, 2026 | 47 min

Author: Nick Klastava

Podcast Hosts: Nick Klastava & Amanda Katz

Listen: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Strength training for runners is the part of the week that gets cut first and defended last. The run is non negotiable. The lift is what happens if there is time, and there is never time. I understand the logic. Running feels like the thing that makes you a better runner, and lifting feels like the thing that makes you tired for tomorrow. In this episode Coach Amanda and I sat down with Natalie LaMendola, a running specific physical therapist in the Kansas City area and one of our Running Explained coaches, to take that assumption apart. What came out of it was not a list of exercises to copy. It was a clear explanation of what lifting actually does for a runner, what it does not do no matter how badly you want it to, and how little of it you need before the benefit shows up.

Key Takeaways

• Strength training is any movement against external resistance, from a bodyweight squat to a barbell with five plates a side, performed with parameters set to build muscular strength, mass, or power. The movement does not have to be complicated to count.

• The two returns that matter most for runners are running economy, meaning you hold the same pace at a lower cost, and tissue durability, meaning your bones, tendons, muscles, and ligaments handle the forces of running better.

• Two to three sessions a week covers the vast majority of runners. Every session should be built out of five patterns: squat, hinge, push, pull, and carry.

• Structure beats variety. One or two heavy double leg compound lifts, then two or three heavy single leg movements, then upper body and core if time remains.

• Plyometrics are the cheapest thing in the session. One to two rounds of roughly 40 to 60 ground contacts is enough to support tendon health, and it takes almost no time.

• Progress is the signal, not soreness. Adding roughly 5 to 10 pounds every one to two weeks on lower body lifts, and 2.5 to 5 pounds on upper body, means the plan is working. Soreness and sweat tell you nothing.

• Masters runners have three specific priorities: consistency, direct calf work, and tendon loading. Calf muscle loss is the fastest and most significant age related decline, and it shows up in the gait cycle.

• Strength training for runners is not an injury fix. The biggest risk factor for a running injury is running. Lifting supports injury risk reduction by building tissue capacity, and it is not the thing that takes the pain away.

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What Strength Training for Runners Actually Means

Amanda started where every one of these conversations should start, which is the definition. Natalie's is broad on purpose. Strength training is any movement that uses some form of external resistance, with the lowest rung being gravity and your own bodyweight and the top being something genuinely heavy like a loaded barbell, performed with parameters set to increase muscular strength, muscular mass, or muscular power. There are specific set and rep schemes better suited to each of those goals, but at the base level, if you are moving against resistance, you are strength training. Some modalities are more efficient than others. None of that changes the definition.

That matters because a lot of runners disqualify themselves before they begin. They picture a barbell and a rack and a coach, decide that is not them, and skip the whole category. The definition Natalie uses puts a set of dumbbells in a garage and a kettlebell on a kitchen floor inside the tent.

She also made the case for lifting that has nothing to do with racing. Everyone is aging. Father time is coming for all of us, as she put it about six times over the hour, and the goal is to keep doing the functional things that matter to you for as long as possible without pain and without injury. That is reason enough on its own. On top of it, research in recent years has pointed hard at the value of carrying more muscle mass for specific health outcomes, insulin resistance among them. Strength training is a health intervention that happens to also make you a better runner.

Why Strength Training for Runners Works

For runners specifically, Natalie put running economy at the top of the list. Think of it as efficiency, how well the machine of your body moves through space. Better economy means you run farther, you run faster, and you hold the same paces at less effort. There is no runner alive who does not want that, and there is no gel or shoe that delivers it the way consistent lifting does.

The second benefit is durability. Strength training hardens up the tissues, meaning the bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and every associated structure in the musculoskeletal system, so they withstand the forces of running and the forces of hard training and racing on top of that.

Natalie sees the difference in her clinic in a pattern worth sitting with. Some runners specialized young, honing in on running in junior high or high school and running year round from that point forward. Others came to the sport later as adults, after a more varied athletic history that almost always included more lifting. That second group tends to get injured less and to show a different injury pattern, particularly around bone density. They built durability over years without ever calling it that. If you are in the first group, or if you came to running with no resistance training background at all, the weight room is where you go to build what you missed.

The Five Patterns Behind Strength Training for Runners

Here is where Natalie pushed back on the internet. There is a mountain of noise out there, a million exercises pitched by fitness professionals chasing views, most of them complicated and most of them not serving you at all. Runners need efficiency more than novelty, because runners are almost universally crunched for time and fitting the gym in around training, work, and kids.

So the framework is five movement patterns, and every session should include them: squat, hinge, push, pull, and carry. Squat and hinge are the lower body work. Push and pull are the upper body work. Carry is essentially full body.

The definitions are simple enough to remember without a chart. Squatting is anything where your hips move closer to the ground. Hinging is anything where your hips move backward. Pushing is moving a weight away from you, or moving your body away from a weight. Pulling is the reverse, bringing a weight toward you or pulling yourself toward a weight. Carrying is exactly what it sounds like, moving something heavy across a distance.

Most runners will get the most out of a lower body focus, though Natalie is clear there is room for upper body work, both for general function and as a sneaky way to load the core.

How to Structure a Session So It Actually Fits

The formula she uses with her runners is built for time efficiency as much as for results. Start the session with one bigger, heavier compound movement done on two legs, something like a trap bar deadlift or a barbell squat or deadlift variation, where you can genuinely lift heavy and load the whole body. Follow that with two or three single leg exercises that are still heavy and still challenging. Some people prefer all hinge movements one day and all squat movements another. Others like a bit of both in every session. Either works, as long as single leg stimulus is in there, because that is where a large share of the benefit for runners lives. Then, if you have time and the appetite for it, add your upper body and core work at the end.

One to two heavy compound lifts. Two to three heavy single leg movements. Everything else is a bonus.

Then there is the piece almost nobody does, which is plyometrics. The research on their effect on tendon health is strong, and we need robust tendons to run. The important part is how little you need. Despite what the internet suggests, about one to two rounds of 40 to 60 ground contacts per strength session is enough to see benefit. That can be simple hops or box jumps, or something more complex if you enjoy it. Natalie calls it the icing on the cake, and it is icing that costs you a couple of minutes.

How to Know Your Strength Training Is Working

The measure is progression. If you are dosing your exercises properly and lifting heavy enough, you should be able to add weight over time, generally in the range of 5 to 10 pounds every one to two weeks for lower body movements and 2.5 to 5 pounds for upper body movements, performing the same exercise the same way. The other signal is that the same weight starts to feel easier.

What is not a signal is soreness. What is also not a signal is sweat. Certain exercises make you sweat more than others and that has nothing to do with whether the session did its job. Runners tend to grade a workout by how destroyed they feel afterward, and that instinct is worth unlearning here.

Amanda added the necessary caveat from the personal training side, and it is an important one. Those numbers are general guidelines, not a prescription. Different areas of your body progress at different rates, and your upper body in particular may not add weight every two weeks. At a certain point you may not be able to increase load at all, and that is normal rather than a failure. Pay attention to your own rate of perceived exertion. Natalie is a professional, but she is not the professional who knows your specific situation.

The Real Barriers to Strength Training for Runners

Amanda asked what actually stops runners, and Natalie's answer matched her own life exactly. Time is the barrier, by a wide margin. Fitting lifting in around race training, parenting, and a full time job is hard, and lifting at 8:30 at night after the kids go to bed does not sound appealing on most days. She also raised something worth flagging. If you do not have the recovery tools in place, including adequate energy availability, then heavy lifting may not be the thing to chase right now.

Accessibility is second. Home gym equipment has gotten expensive since the pandemic, and plenty of people do not have the space for it even if they could afford it. The nearest gym might be a twenty minute drive that does not exist in your schedule, or there may not be a safe way to get there at all.

The third barrier is the one Natalie sees most often in the clinic, and it is not the runner's fault. There is a ton of misinformation out there, and there is also an overload of correct information, which is its own problem. Everything you could want to know about lifting is at your fingertips. Sorting out which parts are true and how any of it applies to your schedule and your training is a different job entirely. What weights do I use? Which exercises? How many? The overwhelm is enough to make people decide not to bother, because they would rather do nothing than do it wrong and waste their time.

Trading a Few Running Minutes for the Weight Room

My advice on this has been consistent for years. Your run can be a little shorter. If the plan says an hour and you do not have time to lift afterward, run forty minutes and get the strength session in. You are not doing this every day, because strength training is a couple of times a week. Cutting a bit of running on one or two days to protect the lift is better than maximizing every mile and never fitting the other things in. A recovery day is often the perfect place for it. The alternative is that the session slides to 9 p.m., you have not eaten, it wrecks your sleep, and you dig a hole instead of building something.

Natalie agreed and named the populations where that trade is almost always correct. A runner with a history of bone stress injuries, or anyone whose bone density is being monitored, should be treating strength as the priority rather than mileage. So should a masters runner, who benefits enormously from two to three consistent days of heavy lifting a week even at the cost of some volume.

Then there is the runner on the other end, the high mileage or ultra athlete who genuinely needs the volume and has no room left. Her answer for that runner is the most useful thing in the episode. You get back to the house at 5:50 in the morning and you have five to ten minutes before the kids are up. Keep a set of heavy dumbbells and one heavy kettlebell in the garage. Do two or three rounds of heavy goblet squats and two or three rounds of heavy farmers carries. That is better than nothing, and better than nothing is the entire game. As she framed it, think of it as a scale that keeps shifting depending on what your life demands at any given moment.

Strength Training for Runners Over 40

We defined masters as 40 and older for the conversation, while acknowledging that track and field uses 35, which is where a lot of the internet confusion comes from. Somewhere in that 35 to 40 window, and certainly after 40, expected age related decline begins in both cardiovascular function and the musculoskeletal system. Muscle strength, power, and mass all start to trend down. The important part is that they do not disappear, and neither does your ability to improve them. Strength training and continued endurance running both slow the process down.

Natalie has three priorities for masters runners. The first is consistency. Two to three days a week, held over years, aimed at overall health and longevity more than at a marathon personal best. You can still chase the personal best. The focus just shifts.

The second is the calf complex, and this one surprised me. Of all the musculature in the body, the calves show the most atrophy with age, and the decline is more rapid and more significant there than anywhere else. Nobody knows exactly why, and nobody knows why it appears more pronounced in men than in women. What is clear is that the gastrocnemius and soleus are what push you off the ground, so losing them changes the gait cycle and opens the door to a list of injury patterns. Every masters runner should have direct calf work in every strength session, in whatever heavy variation of calf raises suits them.

The third is tendon health, specifically tendon stiffness, which is the ability of the tendon to act like a spring and propel you forward. That capacity declines with age too. Natalie described the aging tendon as becoming a little more limp and a little more sad, which is a phrase I will not be able to unhear. Two things counter it. Plyometrics that load the foot and ankle, and heavy slow eccentric work where you deliberately control the lowering portion of the movement.

I have spent a lot of time in the masters research recently and consistency is the theme that runs through all of it. Runners who keep training lose roughly half the fitness of runners who stop. That is the whole story. And the structural changes masters runners make anyway, an extra rest day, a down week every third week instead of every fourth, slightly lower mileage, all create room for the lifting that protects them. If you build the habit in your thirties and carry it into your forties, the drop off is minimal and a whole new age group opens up in front of you.

Natalie added the recovery piece. Masters runners are often surprised by how much a hard track session or a long weekend run takes out of them, even when they do everything right afterward. We recover more slowly as we get older. That is normal. It is also the argument for spending some of that reclaimed time in the weight room.

What Changes for Women

Amanda asked whether men and women need different approaches, and the short answer is no. There is just as much reason for women to strength train as men, no reason for women to avoid lifting heavy, and no reason to lift less often. Natalie's summary was blunt in the best way. Just lift heavy, everyone.

The one caveat is hormonal. For perimenopausal, menopausal, and postmenopausal women, the drop in estrogen has a real effect on tendon health and tendon quality. Natalie sees the consequence in her clinic as a higher frequency of tendon issues, the proximal hamstring being a common one. So the tendon focus that masters men need for age related reasons, women in that stage need for hormonal ones. The work looks similar. The reason behind it is different.

Fueling and Recovery Around the Lift

Amanda made a point that connects this episode to nearly every other one we have done. If you are adding load, be honest with yourself and with your coach about how well you are actually recovering, and be honest about whether you are doing the work around the sessions. She channeled her dietitian on the window after a hard effort, meaning the bagel and the 40 grams of protein after the track workout rather than sprinting straight to the car for school pickup. If there is no time to fuel the session, something in the plan has to change. Either the run moves or the fueling does.

Her line about it was the one I keep repeating to people. Oatmeal cream pies, two hours of sleep, and vibes are not going to carry you at 45. They carried some of us at 22. That window closes.

Strength Training Is Not an Injury Fix

This is the section I would print out. Runners come into Natalie's clinic all the time saying their hip started hurting, so they grabbed their resistance bands and started hammering glute work, and it is not any better. She is never surprised. Strength training is not a quick fix for an injury, and it was never going to be.

What lifting does is support injury risk reduction. It improves tendon stiffness and overall tissue resilience, which over time should mean fewer injuries. That is a different mechanism operating on a different timeline than fixing an angry tissue this week. The biggest risk factor for a running related injury is running. It is an inherently demanding activity, a training block pushes you toward and sometimes past your limit, and that is the name of the game. Strength work offsets some of that risk. It does not neutralize it.

The three exercises to fix your Achilles or prevent IT band syndrome genre of content does not work the way it promises. As Natalie put it, if it did, she would not have a job. Some injuries do respond well to changes in gait mechanics, and there are cases where that is the right lever, but lifting is not what resolves those either.

When a runner walks into her clinic injured, half or more of the initial conversation is about adjusting parameters in their training, not about exercises. Not every injury comes from training error, but many do, and there are almost always small things to tweak first. She is not putting an injured runner into strengthening work at all unless the tissue is low irritability and the issue is not concerning. Eventually, though, every runner has to get there, because most injuries trace back to a lack of capacity or durability in a specific tissue, and building that capacity is the only durable answer. It is just not the thing that took the pain away.

The reframe she offered is the useful one. You are not lifting to magically become a better runner. You are lifting to become a more durable, healthier person, and that is what supports the running.

It Is Never Too Late to Start

Natalie did not pick up a weight until the end of her collegiate running career, when her program finally started implementing it. Plenty of runners do not start until their late twenties or thirties, and she is emphatic that this is fine and does not matter.

Amanda topped it. She has an athlete who did not start lifting weights until he was 81. His goals have nothing to do with a race. He wants better balance and coordination, he wants to be sturdy on one leg, and he wants to feel strong and capable moving through his life. That is worth doing if you never run another mile.

When I asked Natalie what she wishes more people understood about strength training, her answer was four words long. Just start. It does not have to be perfect, you can get guidance after you begin, and the version of the program you can actually execute this week beats the perfect one you keep postponing.

Guest Bio

Natalie is a running-specific Doctor of Physical Therapy and certified run coach based in Kansas City. When she's not working with runners in the clinic, you can find her chasing her own goals on the run alongside her husband, twin toddlers, and hound dog. Her passion lies in helping runners of all abilities achieve their goals and get back to the miles they love. You can find her at lamendolapt.com and on Instagram at @runwithnat_DPT.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many days a week of strength training for runners is enough?

Two to three sessions a week is the recommendation for the vast majority of runners who are building a base or training for a race and are not currently injured. Consistency across months matters far more than any single session, and two solid days held all year will do more than four ambitious weeks that collapse.

What exercises should a runner include?

Build every session around five movement patterns: squat, hinge, push, pull, and carry. In practice that means one or two heavy double leg compound lifts such as a trap bar deadlift or a barbell squat, followed by two or three heavy single leg movements, then upper body and core work if time allows. Adding one to two rounds of 40 to 60 plyometric ground contacts supports tendon health at almost no time cost.

How do I know if my strength program is working?

You should be able to add load over time, roughly 5 to 10 pounds every one to two weeks on lower body lifts and 2.5 to 5 pounds on upper body lifts, and the same weight should start to feel easier. Soreness and sweat are not indicators. Progression rates vary by body region and eventually plateau, which is normal.

Does strength training prevent running injuries?

Not directly. Lifting supports injury risk reduction by improving tendon stiffness and overall tissue durability, which lowers risk over time. The biggest risk factor for a running injury is running itself, and an existing injury usually needs training adjustments first rather than more glute work. Strength is what builds the capacity that keeps it from happening again.

What should masters runners do differently?

Prioritize three things. Consistency at two to three days a week, direct calf work in every session because the calf complex shows the fastest age related muscle loss, and tendon loading through foot and ankle plyometrics plus heavy slow eccentric work. Postmenopausal women should treat tendon work as a priority as well, since the drop in estrogen affects tendon quality.

Is it too late to start lifting?

No. Runners commonly start in their thirties or later with no disadvantage, and the benefits of resistance training for balance, coordination, bone density, and everyday capability apply at every age. One of Amanda's athletes started at 81.