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If you want to become a stronger runner during this off season, these are the three things you will want to prioritize through fall and winter training.
Runners approach the off season in many different ways, but in general, you will want to take this time to strengthen your body, increase your muscle mass, and focus on recovery, mobility, and fueling for your activities.
With the primary goal of increasing your strength over the off season, here are the three things you will want to prioritize.
In general, you will want to take the off season to increase your strength training volume and decrease your cardiovascular training volume. This follows the typical hybrid training cycle of having higher cardiovascular training volume and lower strength training volume during the in season, which is usually late spring to early fall, and then lower cardiovascular training volume and higher strength training volume during the off season, which is usually late fall to early spring. This annual training cycle is representative of those who usually sign up for running races between spring and fall.
A common misconception is that when you finish a race and enter the off season, you completely stop running, cross training, and cardiovascular training in general. This is not true and is not recommended. You will want to maintain your cardiovascular fitness at lower volumes while your strength training increases. As they say, you can have it all, just not all at the same time.
For example, if you were strength training one or two times leading up to your race, now you might increase to two to four sessions per week. This will allow you time for your hypertrophy (muscle building) and/or strength phases that you are wanting to complete in order to be stronger and faster on the trails once race season comes around again.
If you plan to increase your strength training frequency up to four sessions per week, you could consider keeping all of your sessions as a full body workout split, or you could split your days up into upper/lower/upper/lower. Read our Hybrid Training Workout Split blog to see what type of schedule works best for you and your goals. Aiming for two to four strength training sessions per week will allow you to recover in between sessions and maintain your cardiovascular training, as well. When you are completing your strength sessions, aim to do four to six exercises per session. Although you are adding strength training volume in the off season, this does not mean you are suddenly adding 12 to 16 exercises per session. Keep it focused for four to six movements of relatively heavy lifting to keep things manageable for progressive overload. Of course, if you need to identify and add any extra exercises to address weaknesses, that might be the appropriate time to add those in, as well.
What did you learn from your race season? Did you have any flare ups, minor injuries, major injuries, or nagging bits? Hopefully you were able to manage them during the in season, but the off season is a great time to really focus on any weaknesses that could be causing any issues while running or in day to day life. Consider visiting with a physical therapist to hone in on what is going on and address the root cause so you can move forward and come back next season feeling stronger and better than ever.
For example, if your ankle, hip, knee, back, or one or all of those areas were bothering you at some point during your training, now is the time to focus on where it is coming from and how you can strengthen to get better. If you have already been working with a physical therapist and/or if this is a recurring weakness, take the off season to act on your game plan. Let's find a way to manage it and hopefully prepare in a way that it doesn’t happen again in the future.
If you are new to strength training or hybrid training, you will want to understand that you need more than just strengthening your lower body in order to succeed in running. You will want to make sure that you are including rotational exercises that enter different planes of motion, because you are rotating when you are running. When you run, the opposite sides of your body are working together. Think: right leg + left arm, and vice versa.
You will want to make sure that you are strengthening your upper body, because, yes, you do use your upper body while running.
You also will want to make sure that you are strengthening your legs. Not just your glutes and quads, but also your entire hip complex, hamstrings, hip flexors, calves, anterior tibialis (shins)
You will want to make sure that all of these areas are being addressed in one way or another throughout your strength training program. As mentioned earlier, this doesn’t mean that you need to do eight different calf raise exercises, but you do want to make sure you are moving in multiple planes of motion and addressing the body as a whole.
Of course, you are going to have phases throughout the off season (i.e., hypertrophy, strength) and even smaller training cycles within each phase. For some people, the off season is generally three or four months, give or take. Again, it depends on what your race schedule is like or if you have any specific events coming up. But in general, you want to take this time to really focus on building the resistance training base you need in strength, power, and endurance. Then, when you switch gears from your off season training over to focusing more on running, you can just maintain your strength with one to two or three sessions per week. At that point, you will already have a great foundation to build off of and you can just focus on running as your main sport and have your strength training be a support for you.
If you have a race coming up in spring, now is the time to be focusing on strength training and aerobic base building. If that is you, join one of our hybrid training programs so you are set up for success when it comes race time.
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