STRENGTH DEVELOPMENT IN RUNNING

What does it mean to have strength in running? Does it affect your ability to run longer or faster? Is weight lifting a necessarily part of training in running? Those are not simple questions. There are tons of questions like these, if we start thinking in this direction: What level of strength is enough for running? What is this strength about? Is it about muscle size or something else? How many exercises and which ones of them are enough to keep strength condition on a level facilitating your running ability.

I am not going to answer all these questions now, but I'll get to them in much more detail in the future and probably in a separate book. But for now I'll try to give you a general idea about this problem, some basic approach and conceptual guidance for your training.

One more remark about strength and force and the difference between them. Sometimes they look like almost the same thing. A force is a mechanical characteristic, a magnitude of interaction between physical bodies with a vector of application. Strength is a scalar characteristic (strength of the bone), describing a general ability to resist or overcome something but without a direction of application.

I'll start from a simple notion that when we are talking about muscle strength, we mean that this is an ability of our muscles to resist or overcome an external resistance, which on earth is gravity, appearing as a body weight (your own or somebody else's). But when we are talking about muscle force, then we mean the direction of application of muscle strength. But there is one more "hidden" thing about using muscle strength. We can't use it without using our body weight. You can check this very easily, if you try to push something, when someone else will simultaneously push your body in the opposite direction.

So our muscles "deal with" or serve our body weight no matter what kind of movement our body goes through. Therefore the use of our muscle force is really about how much of our body weight we are able to apply. Then our strength level can be defined by our ability to use our body weight in a certain direction in movement or in exercise we are doing. In different events it is a different direction and different level of course, like in running and weight lifting.

In running, as in any other movement, application of the body weight goes in many directions, so the strength development must follow the same needs. First, we need to develop an interaction with gravity, which happens on support during ground contact. In this case muscle force goes in the vertical direction. But this force is not produced by one muscle and doesn't go through one joint. Basically involves all muscles attached to many bones, and goes through many joints. Therefore all these muscles should be proportionally developed and coordinated. It is not enough to have separate strong muscles. They are supposed to be connected in order to produce a common force.

This point is a very common mistake in strength development not only in running, but in many other sport events as well. We generally could paraphrase it like this: it is not enough to have strong muscles, you must also know how to apply them right. In this context it is very important to know where to direct our muscle force in running.

If we have no muscle strength to keep our body against gravity, then it is our first priority to develop our general ability to interact with gravity. After that the next level will come - how to interact? It is all about time and space of interaction. Where are the breaking points of this interaction? In the Pose Method it was identified as hips and hamstrings strength and muscle elasticity.

Hips strength is about the application of the body weight in the horizontal direction - during the fall forward. Hamstrings strength is about the application of the body weight to pulling the foot from the ground under the hips and making the body fall forward more efficient every time. Muscle elasticity it is an application of strength (body weight) in a short time in the vertical direction. This is a general structure for strength conditioning in running.

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