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Expand your running knowledge, identify running misconceptions and become a faster, healthier, SMARTER runner. Let Brodie Sharpe become your new running guide as he teaches you powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist while also interviewing the best running gurus in the world. This is ideal for injured runners & runners looking for injury prevention and elevated performance. So, take full advantage by starting at season 1 where Brodie teaches you THE TOP PRINCIPLES TO OVERCOME ANY RUNNING INJURY and let’s begin your run smarter journey.
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On today's episode, unlocking running potential through strength training. Welcome to the only podcast delivering and deciphering the latest running research to help you run smarter. My name is Brodie. I'm an online physiotherapist treating runners all over the world, but I'm also an advert runner who just like you have been through vicious injury cycles and when searching for answers, struggled to decipher between common myths and real evidence-based guidance. But this podcast is changing that. So join me as a run smarter scholar and raise your running IQ so we can break through the injury cycles and achieve running feats you never thought possible. doing something a little bit different today. was featured as a guest on the Rambling Runner podcast with Matt Chidham. Amazing podcast if you haven't listened to it already, go search it, go have a look through the previous episodes that have been done. And my guess is you're going to find a title that really excites you and you really want to listen to. And if you find multiple, make sure you subscribe to that podcast alongside this one. But Matt reached out to me and wanted to get my take on strength training for running performance and injury prevention. And we dive. into all things strength training, where does the research lie and what are some practical ways you can adjust your current strength training. So I hope you enjoy. All right, Brody Sharp, welcome back to the show. Glad to be back. I'm excited. This is going to be a lot of fun. People who already heard the intro know exactly what we're going to talk about and I cannot wait to dive in. But before we do Brody, how do you describe yourself and what you are currently doing? in the running community. Okay. So, uh, by way of profession, I'm a physiotherapist and most North Americans kind of recognize that as a physical therapist and I treat runners and I educate runners and I do so through various means. Um, typically through my podcast, the run smarter podcast and YouTube channel of the same name, but, uh, I'm there to try to help educate people so they can train smarter. It's about. Running smarter, training smarter to reduce risk of injuries, increase running performance if that's your goal. And then if you're so injured and need extra assistance, I provide online services to help. love it. having, know, having running focused physical therapists in the running community is just so vital. I'm sure that every sport can say the same thing because every sport has their own little differences and nuances and forces and injuries and lingo. And I think that having someone ingrained in the running community who's talking to runners is a huge benefit. I love having running focused PTs on the show. That is for sure. And you mentioned YouTube. Your YouTube is blowing up. So kudos to you for making it happen. I was, I'm embarrassed to say, I didn't know you had a YouTube channel, but it did come across like my algorithm over the summer. And I was like, bro, he's killing it. This is great. Like I knew about your show. I knew about your book. I was unaware of the YouTube. expansion, but kudos to you for doing such a good job over there. Excellent, mate. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. I've just tried different, like I say, various means. ah I tried the podcast stuff and it's worked really well. And then it's like, Hey, how do I expand? Wanted to write a book. So did that. And then YouTube was the next extension. Actually, it was probably about a week or two after publishing my book that I'm like, all right, let's give YouTube a go and having a lot of fun with that. I love it. Multimedia maven. That is for sure. So. I contacted you after one of the videos that you put out and I watched a bunch of them, but one of them in particular, you just absolutely nailed it. You really distilled strength training exercises that essentially all runners should do. Obviously there's caveats to that kind of statement, but you really did a great job of diving into the research and showing us along the way which exercise you'd considered and why you chose the ones that you chose and why they complement each other. It's a very, very good video. And I'm gonna... provide a link in the show notes to this podcast to go in there. So we're not gonna do, Lacey, a verbatim rendition of something you've already done. But I do wanna touch on this topic because it's, you know, there's a reason why it became incredibly popular. A lot of people in the running community know that they need to do more strength work. And they hear someone of your esteem say, you only gotta do five things. It's like, oh gosh, music to my ears. That is for sure. When you think about strength training for runners, how much of this for you is injury prevention and how much of this for you is increasing running performance? There's other factors as well. I guess I'm assuming that those are the two main ones, but how do you measure these two against each other when deciding upon this sort of endeavor? Yeah, usually when I talk about a certain topic, I like to fall back on research and there is a ton of research with strength training for recreational runners, long distance runners of all abilities in relation to performance. Strength training will get you faster, make you faster. There's robust research to prove that. Um, but it's a bit skimpy on the injury prevention side of things. Unfortunately, like I would love to have a really well-structured, robust, systematic review, looking at these strength exercises following these groups. And this group showed to get less injured. have a few small randomized control trials, looking at strength training and saying, oh, this group doesn't get injured as much, but there's nowhere near as much data because it's a lot easier to test performance. You can give someone a 5k time trial. can give someone a time to exhaustion test. can do VO2 max testing. can do a lot when it comes to performance and you know, isolating groups and controlling those parameters. When it comes to injury prevention, it's very, very hard to quantify sometimes very hard to measure, very hard to allow for all factors. Like a lot of my podcast episodes revolve around injury prevention and how multifactorial it is. It's not just as simple as getting stronger and, you know, expecting to reduce your risk of injury. The theory is there. Definitely the theory is there because most running related injuries are overuse injuries. sort of push out tissues capacity to exceed whatever training load we put upon our bodies. so theoretically, if we can elevate that whole stimulus, if we can elevate the capacity to tolerate more load, then theoretically you can train a bit more load and do so successfully without exceeding any of those limits. And so the theory is there. doesn't quite hold up in the research, not because it's not there, but it's very hard to design a study to do that and allow for all factors. But when it comes to performance, definitely there's a lot of robust research. Yeah, I can imagine trying to do research on injury prevention in running, it would be like kind of like trying to do like a nutrition-based research study where like there's so many factors here, you'd have to have it like be an enormous study in order to actually like, gain the kind of data that you would need to synthesize into the relevant pieces if for no other reason than people have such quirks of their human body, like we all have the thing that bothers us from either because of genetics or because of some freak injury when we were four years old that has now persisted to when we're 24 or a handful of other things that I would think that getting that normal 18 to 25 person study, even if it's done rigorously and with the best of intentions, would ultimately provide not We would not provide the kind of data that would be useful to someone like you. Yeah. mean, look at sleep, stress, nutrition, hydration, like just general fatigue status, women's, menstrual cycles, all of these are like real compounding, real effects that increase and decrease our risk of injuries. And so like, do we have to factor all those things in when it comes to doing a strength training study to see if it minimizes risk of injury? It's just, yeah, it'd be a headache. For sure, but I think this is one of those things where it might not be scientific, but the whole N of one anecdotal information, like a great example is me, right? Like if I don't do glute focused work, not a lot, but just the minimum standard, I'm going to develop knee pain on my left side and I'll probably develop a little bit of Achilles calf stuff. Now, if I do the work, I don't develop those things. But like, Again, I'm just one person, but I think we all have, I all of us as runners are either dealing with that sort of thing or have done it in the past where we know like, hey, if we don't keep up with a certain thing, then we know the domino effect that will result. Yep, totally agree. All right, so what about strength training improves performance? What do we wanna start with? Yeah, let's just start with just generally speaking, why is someone being stronger or getting stronger? How does, how does that help them become a faster runner? Just, just, you know, 10,000 feet broad based. we go back to the research, mean, uh, Richard Blake Grove was the kind of the pioneer of this. He released and published probably the first systematic review on strength training for running performance in long distance or, you know, yeah. Five K and beyond to marathon distance runners and saw that. runners are improving and then has to kind of extrapolate or through theory kind of guess why they are getting faster. Like their uh VO2 max isn't changing. Their ah overall body physique, like their makeup isn't changing, like their composition. They're not really increasing a lot of muscle mass. ah So what's actually happening here? And most of the theories are that you become more efficient. Definitely your running economy improves. And so this is like at sub maximal speeds, how efficient are you at translating through space? So as you plant your foot on the ground, and as you push off, how much energy and oxygen is that taking? And it seems like you become more efficient in that stride and therefore you're more economical when you run. so theoretically, you six weeks into a training cycle versus you not six weeks into a training cycle or strength training, I should say, um, you are running at the same speed, but your strengthened up self is using less energy and less oxygen. And that's allowing you to, you know, perform better. But if you were to both travel at the same effort, that one who's gone through six weeks or more of strength training would run faster at given efforts. And so. Why is this the case? Maybe they sort of speculate more stiffness in the body. And so when you commit to a bout of strength training, and we can talk about what strength training actually is and what parameters that actually entails, your tendons get stiffer, your muscles kind of get stiffer. And when you think stiffness, a lot of people don't attribute stiffness to like a good thing. They think like, if I'm stiff, like, you know, want to be more mobile. But like joint mobility is a different thing. When we talk about tendon stiffness, when the tendons are stiff, they're operating at their best. We want the tendons to be stiff because we want them to load and we want to absorb and produce force in the most efficient way possible. And if you can imagine like a spring, the more rigid a spring is, the more it can absorb and produce force without losing a lot of energy. And so when tendons are stiff, they're more like an efficient spring and it seems like that's what's happening when we commit to strength training. Things stiffen up, you become more efficient. A few other things that are going on in the background as well, but that seems to be one of the most uh common theories that's showing up in the research. Yeah, and now with the rise and proliferation of super shoes, I think the other comparison here is just is a carbon plate, right? Like a stiff carbon plate is going to be more responsive. Exactly. Yep. Yep. You're returning more energy. Like if If you look at a super shoe, is absorbing load and then returning load or returning energy to the runner with the, in the most efficient way possible with less loss of energy. And so that's what we're seeing. It's like, yes, it's the, the carbon fiber itself as well, but it's also the high tech foam in that super shoe. There's not a lot of, there's not a lot of moving parts. There's not a lot of bounce. There's not a lot of squishiness that you. often gets lost in terms of energy. so yeah, just becoming more efficient. Yeah. And it's interesting because when you think about getting stronger, and for a lot of people, they're going to think about some of the key strength exercises that they know of like, you know, that, you know, they increase general strength. We're going to get into this in a second. It's interesting because I think we can also, if we think about like the stride of a runner, there isn't a huge amount of flex leading into the ground contact, right? And people aren't going like, you know, knee below, you know, like they're their butt below 90 degrees on a squat, right? Like leading into like their strength, leading into their stride, right? There isn't going to be this massive amount of flexion in their, um in their hip, in their knee from, you know, the top of their stride down through the ground, which is like, all right, so like, where exactly is this? Why do I need to get stronger? And where exactly is this strength going? Because, and then I feel like I've had these conversations with people and when I'm, you know, rationalizing my own know, inability to do strength training. I'll say this to myself. It's kind of like, all right, like, I know a million people who don't work on their strength, who are incredibly fast, way faster than me, people who run less than me. I I've more than them and I've done more strength work than them. And that they're faster than me. And these outliers, I feel like can tend to maybe muddy the waters for those of us who maybe aren't as inclined or motivated to do the work that we know deep down that we should be doing. Yeah. And I guess what's, uh, guess reassuring about these studies is they take the same runner, put them through strength training and see what the outcome is after that, rather than comparing you to someone else and being like, yeah, but they're not doing the things I'm doing or what are they doing? That's different. Uh, because everyone has individual like, uh, makeups, like their tendons might be naturally stiff off through genetics. They might have a little bit more ability to produce force, recruit more. uh, muscle units, motor units per stride, they might have longer femurs. Uh, they might have longer tendons, uh, like the Achilles tendon. If that's more, if that's longer, you technically are more efficient as a runner up that can sometimes happen through your ethnicity through, um, like age is another thing. Height is another thing. Like all these different factors will, you know, influence how easy or hard it is to run, but then also trainability, uh, you know, hundreds of factors. But what we're even seeing in the research is you can take what they call like highly trained runners and put them through a strength training regime. And they seem to get faster as well. It's like all the way from the recreational runner to the, uh, well, they were called well-trained to the highly trained. And this is like kind of your professionals, uh, representing nations representing. you know, states and those sorts of things. Um, they seem to be getting faster as well. And so it's, it's good to compare apples for apples and, you know, instill our confidence that strength training is a uh pretty good intervention. So what are the things that you look for in that people who are doing studies look forward to identify exercises that are going to be, um, germane to the running stride and to runners that are going to maximize. Um, not only their time in the gym, that the exercises they're doing are the most bang for the buck. Love bang for your buck exercises. Love time efficiency, uh, when going to the gym, because it is a bit of resistance and a lot to convince a lot of runners to commit to strength training. And so if you just allow just a little bit of, uh, efficiency, then you tend to get a little bit more buy-in, um, because you don't really need to do a lot, uh, in terms of the amount of exercises, you just need to do the right exercises. with the right dosages. When we say dosages, we usually mean sets and reps and weight and rest periods. that's what we call dosage. And we want to make sure we get them right because a lot of runners get them wrong. They go into the gym or they, you know, buy some equipment for home and they do, you know, rep ranges of three sets of 12, three sets of 15. They're mainly like lighter exercises like your clam shells, your glute bridges, your... resistance band, hamstring curls and crab walks and like those set exercises, um, which, know, can be good if you're starting out and you're just trying to get a feel of the right movements. But the research will show that you need to, when the body is ready and when you're safely, when you can safely do so, start applying more weight and start reducing the rep range so that it starts to feel really tough around about the six. to eight rep range, and even heavier. And when we say heavier, there was a good systematic review that came out in 2022 to look at those who are lifting like near maximum usually get seem to get greater enhancements in their running performance. But that takes experienced people in the gym. When I say heavy, they mainly refer to lifting above 90 % of their one RM. And so if you're one repetition max for say a squat is, you know, 300 pounds, we are looking at 260, 270 pounds and doing five sets of three, five sets of two, like really, really heavy stuff that seems to have an enhanced benefit, but you need to be years in the gym and getting the right technique and doing all those sorts of things, which is why I kind of sit in the middle and say, okay, We're not talking about experience, experienced people in the gym here. Let's try and at least avoid the three sets of 12, three sets of 15 lighter body weight, where you get a really good burn after 12 to 15 reps. Let's find a rep range where it's hard to really lift said weights for six to eight reps. And let's hover around that three sets of six to eight. And you know, we're getting about two to three minutes rest in between sets. um that's an okay buy-in for someone to at least convince them this is the range where we need to expose our body and get our tendons to adapt to a certain stimulus. ah They're the sort of conditions that we wanna put these runners under. Love that. Thank you for sharing that. We're gonna dive into this exercise in a second. I do wanna talk about the timing of the research. There are some areas of research that are done where like it feels like the stuff that gets published is maybe out of date for... like the people at the top end of the spear. Again, just in certain fields because it takes a long time to do these studies and it takes an even longer time to publish in certain journals and all that. It's a lengthy process. There's nothing against the researchers at all. They hate it just as much as anyone else because they're living that life. But it can be this gap in time between what they want to do and then when they're publishing it finally. So what's it like in this area? Is this something where The timing of it is potentially prohibitive from gaining full expertise or is this a genre of study that really isn't handicapped by this because the principles have been so longstanding? Yeah. mean, there's a 2004 systematic review on this. Lagos is the lead author. And when I'm talking about systematic reviews, they're looking for published papers in the past of a certain topic and they're combining and synthesizing. several studies to then come up with certain conclusions. But to your point, those studies that they gather can be decades old. Every systematic review has their own inclusion criteria where they say, okay, we want it to be this certain quality. We want to have this as a certain outcome and these measures and the state and all those sorts of things. There are like, you know, fairly recent smaller RCTs that come out that still show similar effects, but you know, if we have a systematic review come out in 2018, 2022, 2024, which there are robust ones out there, they all tend to show the same thing. so increases our confidence. If you start seeing more and more things show the same and same stuff, um, it does, it does help. It does help with your confidence despite how old they may be. absolutely. I think that it would be, um, to get something that's potentially 15 to 20 years apart, showing the same sort of thing. I think that would develop a lot of confidence and people saying, okay, like I know at worst, this is going to be helpful, right? Maybe it's not like, maybe there's a cutting edge coach who's developed like the best procedures in the world and they're working with, you know, an Olympic champion. That person doesn't want me as a client anyway. So what are we talking about? But ultimately, I think, you know, this sort of thing, the fact that it is so consistent over time really does... I would say would make the listeners to this and the watchers of your videos feel really good about the information that's being provided. So as you were going through the research saying, okay, I wanted to distill this down. What did you have a kind of a working hypothesis of where it was going to go before you kind of started the process? did only because I've been kind of talking about the same thing for so long. Um, like I've interviewed Richard Blackgrove. couple of times on my podcast. Brian Henley was a co-author of that System Act Review. I've had him on the podcast before like, and that was five years ago. And so like, I kind of knew where the research was going. I guess prior to that, I was in the same camp that okay, strength training would kind of make me a bit more bulky. I put on a bit more weight, like runners are lean, light, fluid that, that kind of like, you know, effortless kind of motion doesn't really seem like strength training and doing really, really heavy stuff and looking like a gym goer would really be, uh, advantageous. But, um, you know, I was Richard Blake Grove has a book on strength training for runners. And I read that, uh, I think when it was released probably about eight years ago and I was convinced ever since it was very highly researched, uh, book there. And so, yeah, I've sort of been convinced in the evidence that continues to emerge and emerge and emerge is pretty much shown the same thing with a few different interpretations here and there. And so it's just trying to allay people's fears. I can obviously dispel a lot of those myths about people who want to put fear they might get too sore or get too bulky, put on too much mass, like those sorts of things. uh But, you know, my mind has pretty much stayed pretty consistent for the last five years or so. I love the, I love the, I don't want to put on too much mask argument. I love that. I love sharing that with people who desperately want to put on a mask. They're like, which runners saying this? Because it's incredibly difficult. Like there's plenty of people out there like who go to the gym with the, with the express wish to get bigger. And it's really hard for those people. And that's their only goal is to get bigger. So the fact that you're not going to just like, I always kid around, like that's like someone like playing like shooting basses in the front yard with their, you know, with their eight year old and be like, hold on. I don't know if I can do that. Cause I don't want to go to the NBA. It's like, this is not going to cost you same reason that doing a couple exercises per week is not going to make you a bulky bodybuilder. Yeah. mean, there's so many factors that need to go into muscle mass. I mean, backstory, I I'm training for high rocks races at the moment. And I've been doing so for about two years, which is a lot of like strength based workouts and running is my, I guess, um, expertise or my advantage, but I need to get better at lifting and pushing really, really heavy stuff. And so I tried for six months to put on muscle mass and I couldn't do it. put on maybe half a kilo to a kilo. And this is your profession. Two to four pounds. had all the right, I knew the right things to do. I knew the right things to do. I still couldn't do it. Um, and so when your diet is the same, when your, most of your weekly structure is evolved around aerobic activity, ah It's gonna be extremely hard. You will get the benefits. You will get strength benefits, but the muscle mass side of things is hard to do. Right, yeah. So everybody, don't worry. You're not gonna have to change like the width of your t-shirts just yet in terms of like the part that goes around your bicep and tricep just because you're, you know, do a couple of things in the gym. All right. So let's get into this. Let's talk about like how you went about trying to make sure that you were getting exercises that compliment each other. When I... Talk about strength training for runners for performance. I like you like to distill it down. Um, in the research, almost every study would show some form of a squat. Um, they, like we say, we're going quite heavy. So like a back squat or like, you know, a barbell or dumbbell squat. Um, people are quite familiar with that sort of action. Uh, it doesn't need to be full range of movement. Some of them used like a, um, touching down to a box or half range of movement. Uh, that seems to be quite typical in the research. Uh, a deadlift is another one that came up quite repeatedly. So we're already sort of with the squats, looking at the front of the legs and the deadlift, mainly looking kind of the back of the legs. So we're looking at glutes, hamstrings, lower back. Um, and then for the squats, more of the quads and glutes. When we're looking at, um, the calves calves are really, really important when it comes to, uh, building up like that stiffness and getting that efficiency going. Your calves and Achilles work six to eight times your body weight to every single step that you take. So it's like, it's the force production when it comes to your stride. uh And so getting heavy with those people are familiar with calf raises. My favorite in terms of efficiency is what I call a standing bent knee calf raise. so hard to describe your standing knees are slightly bent at like 15 degrees and you maintain that 15 degree bend as you come up towards the ceiling onto your toes and then back down. And there's a few slight variations there, but if you can hold onto dumbbells or if you can hold onto a barbell across your shoulders, I like to hold onto a barbell like at my hip crease, kind of like I'm about to do a deadlift, but I come up into onto my toes and back down. And why we do that, why we have that subtle knee bend is because it will recruit more of the muscle fibers in your soleus muscle, which is like the deep part of your calf. And that one, that muscle works harder when you run compared to the gastrocnemius, which is the one on the outside that you can see from the outside. That only works two to three times your body weight. The soleus works six to eight times your body weight when you run. So we probably should have a calf raise variation that recruits ah that said muscle. Some people may be familiar with a seated calf raise machine where the knees are bent at 90 degrees in the machine. The sort of weighted pads are on top of your thighs, closer to your knees and you're sort of doing calf raises there. tend to think in that position, you can't really generate high, high loads. Um, it's very hard to get, you know, 150 pounds and put that on top of your knees and try to calf raise. But if you've got your body, then you're not, you're not, you're not creating the angle in your ankle. that would necessitate the kind of soleus work that the bent knee calf raise will do. Because if someone's done that before, they'll feel, if they do like the straight leg calf raise, then they do the bent knee calf raises one after another, you'll feel the, you know, you'll feel the muscle recruitment go down the leg as you shift between the two. Correct. Yeah. And the knee bend as well. Like, you know, when we impact the ground and when we push off your knees, never really completely straight during your running, um, at push off, slight knee bend, uh, which again recruits that, that soleus muscle. so mid stance knee slightly bent. so, uh, it's good to kind of work through that and sort of like get used to that position producing force and being really efficient in that position. um, rather than doing standing straight leg calf raises and bent knee calf raises, I prefer just to combine them into one, like we say, trying to be as efficient as possible. Um, The other one being like a single leg variation. We do like to do some sort of single leg stuff that can be your choice of lunges or weighted step ups or split squats. uh Bulgarian split squats are the one where your back foot is elevated onto a bench or a box or something. And you're doing a lunge looking movement. So that could be quite helpful for you, but I like people just to choose one, pick one. We do three sets of six on each side. And after six reps should feel like you've got maybe one or two reps left in you. You put down the weights or your swap sides. You have two, three minutes of rest and then go again. Um, that can be quite helpful as well. So the YouTube video that you're referring to, I actually mainly talk about four key exercises, uh, which would be those ones that we've talked about, but in that video also mentioned coupling. some strength exercises with a plyometric exercise of choice. A lot of those systematic reviews that I mentioned earlier, they compare a heavy strength group to a plyometric group, sometimes combining the both with a third kind of group. And so I do recognize the importance of plyometric exercises. And so I do mention in that YouTube video, doing some sort of bounding, skipping plyometric looking exercise to help boost Efficiency, um, that 2024 systematic review that I mentioned had a little caveat of, okay, heavy strength training seems to improve performance, but there seems to be a further enhanced performance if it's combined with some other strength training routine, which would be sort of plyometrics or power-based stuff, um, even more so than just doing plyometrics on its own, on their own. And so some exercises. some examples and my favorite plyometric exercises would be like pogo jumps. Um, that would be, you know, as people are familiar just jumping on the spot, but we're, jumping for height, but as you land, we're aiming for stiffness. We're aiming for a very, very short ground contact time and just trying to jump as high as possible, contact the ground, uh, in the least amount of time before you're jumping straight back up. if someone was to see what that looks like, the joints, the knees very stiff, the ankles very stiff, and we're not really having a lot of moving parts, but we're sort of getting that explosive movement. And that can be in the rep ranges of three sets of 15, three sets of 20, sort of higher rep ranges or until the quality of that movement diminishes, followed by a pretty hefty recovery. You can rest for three to four minutes before then repeating that, but we're looking for quality explosiveness. And so, seems to be in addition to the heavy strength training, we can do that. We can do that on our non-gym days as well, just to have a bit more fresh legs. ah But that's another sort of added component in that YouTube video. love that. And please correct me if I'm wrong, but my interpretation of this over time was when you lift heavy, the six rep kind of vibe on the heavy lifting. that that's really overloading the muscles. Whereas when you do the plyometrics, it basically does the same sort of overload, but this time for like the tendons. ah Correct. Yeah. You'd be accurate in saying that it's giving more stimulus to the tendons. mean, tendons love storing, releasing energy. That's what they do. um The heavy strength training still increases tendon stiffness, but we're probably applying a lot more of that stimulus to the plyos. Correct. Gotcha, all right, yeah. So it's not completely siloed, but they kind of have, primary mechanism is slightly different in terms of what they're recruiting. And it's interesting because when we think about running, we often push, when we push back, or when some people will push back on the need to strength train, they'll talk about running in a way that, even though they don't use the phrasing, lends itself to more of a tendon-based mechanism, tendon-based activity. But you never hear the follow up of like, don't lift weights, but I do do a lot of plyometrics to increase my tendon stiffness. Like that part kind of gets left out on the side and never gets included in the argument. Yeah, definitely. That's interesting because I feel like you see, and for good reason, and my friend Jason Fitzgerald is a great example of this, people advocating for this kind of strength-based routines over and over and again. ad nauseum because they care about runners, but finding people who give the same, um, consistent vociferous support for plyometrics, at least in the endurance running space is not nearly as frequent. Yeah, I agree. I think, um, maybe cause there's not a lot of research. Like I did a YouTube video, uh, probably about six months ago about, uh, uh, a study that came out looking at single egg hopping and seeing if, that seemed to have a really nice carryover to running efficiency, running economy. And it was daily hopping is sort of like the subjects kind of progressed in terms of how many hops they were doing per day. But even just a simple plyometric like that seemed to have that carryover of efficiency, very, very minimalist exercise, very easy to do. You don't need equipment, you don't need a gym membership. Like those sorts of things are really effective, um but not as popular in the research, but It's still there, which is why I want to show it and share it with people because um that can have profound improvements. Yeah. And I think this becomes even more important when people are aging and for very similar reasons, when people start being multi-stop, I'm sorry, when people stop being multi-sport athletes, because oftentimes when we're say engaging in more explosive based sports, say we're doing basketball or things like that. I'm not gonna go through the full list of sports. I was a basketball player, so I'll just stop there. You're gonna have those sorts of exercises just in daily practice, like the constant jumping and those sorts of things. That's just every basketball practice. That's every basketball game. That's just part of the process. But when you distance yourself from those kinds of activities and you focus, you go, say more like all in on the running stuff, you're gonna miss that aspect. And I think this is a key reason why me personally and so many other people, I'm sure you would agree with this, are such staunch advocates for younger athletes being multi-sport athletes. Not only because it may be more fun and enjoyable, they're gonna stick with their sports longer, but also because they're gonna be gaining these ancillary benefits from a strength perspective, especially when their bodies are still growing and maturing. And as we get older, I can't tell you how many times people tell me like, I don't even remember the last time I jumped. Nevermind doing a jumping routine. Like I can't remember the last time I jumped besides jumping into bed. And it's just, that's just part of the deal. And I think it's one those things that can be easy to forget that we're not doing anymore. Once we get used to not doing it. I'm so happy you're bringing this up. Cause this is like the other reminder I like to say to people is the general health benefits of strength training. Beyond like running performance, like if running performance isn't enough of a persuasion to get people on board, like the amount that strength training, like how good it can be for say bone health for your lower back, your hips, your femur, your tibia, like these areas where we're prone to getting stress fractures as runners, like bone health is really, really important. And into older age bone health, really, really important. metabolic health, really important. Insulin sensitivity, really important. Like all of these things just for general health and wellbeing can be significantly enhanced with, you know, getting stronger, maintaining muscle mass. Like this is another thing when it comes to an aging runner, tendons get less stiff, which we don't want, lead you more prone to tendinopathies. Muscles tend to not hold their bulk. We tend to lose muscle mass per decade, which strength training helps preserve or even build upon. And just general metabolic health, like the more muscle mass you can maintain throughout your age, the more you can maintain balance, the more time you can maintain strength, just looking after your grandkids or doing day-to-day activities. Like all of these things we should be considering because when I see injured runners, they say, yeah, I want to get back to pain-free running, but I also want to run for longevity. Running is my mental health outlet. I want to be running for decades and decades to come. And we need to preserve these things. need to re it's. And as much as runners hate to hear it, running isn't great. Isn't a great stimulus for bone health, like maintaining bone mineral density. seems like it should because you're impacting the ground a lot of times and that should help preserve things, but it's not that much better than just sedentary, not sedentary, like, um, somewhat active, but non-runners they seem to have the same bone density, but people who commit to team sports, people who commit to strength training, there's more, a lot more bone density, ah stimulating properties there. ah And so yeah, other reasons for strength training if the increase in performance hasn't convinced you yet. love it. Prodi, thank you so much for coming on the show. You're very welcome. If you are looking for more resources to run Smarter, or you'd like to jump on a free 20 minute injury chat with me, then click on the resources link in the show notes. There you'll find a link to schedule a call, plus free resources like my very popular injury prevention five day course. You'll also find the Run Smarter book and ways you can access my ever growing treasure trove of running research papers. Thanks once again for joining me and well done on prioritising your running wisdom.