How To Benefit From Strength, Explosive and Plyometric Training

What if there was a way you could improve your running economy by at least 4% without buying a pair of carbon plated shoes and without taking up a bunch of time would it you do it?

As runners we’re all looking for the extra edge, something to help us unlock our potential and keep believing we can get better even as we get older.

Most look to tools like carbon plated shoes or fancy GPS watches feeding us endless data about heart rate, cadence, vertical oscillation etc, etc.

I wonder how much time you could save by stop worrying about all that and instead invest 20-30mins twice a week in SEP training (Strength, Explosive & Plyometrics).

You probably spend an hour uploading your data to Strava and comparing yourself to others, how’s that been going? Getting any real tangible results?

Here’s something I think you’ll find interesting

Even better it’s super easy for you to build into your sustainable training routine and you’ll even get a tangible result!

A study published by the European Journal Of Sports Science looked into the effects of strength, explosive and plyometric training on energy cost of running in ultra-endurance athletes.

Don’t worry you don’t have to be an Ultra endurance athlete to benefit.

The long and short of it is they found after the experiment runners demonstrated a 4% decrease in cost of running improvement – okay so you may not think it’s worth it – but actually you’d be wrong.

Consider what a 4% improvement of your marathon finish time would mean?

Let’s say you can run a marathon in 3hrs well 4% works out at a tad over 7mins!

The athletes used for this study undertook a 12-week home-based protocol performed 3x a week. The sessions were performed on alternate days avoiding days after racing or high intensity and also avoiding after long training sessions.

So basically, do your strength work on your easy days or days you’re not running. The goal of the study was to see if it was possible to improve Maximal Muscle Power (MMP) by performing explosive exercises.

As with any good strength training programme volume and intensity were gradually increased over the duration.

In the first phase they followed a protocol of performing core training followed by strength and then plyometrics and explosive work. The sessions followed this format;

6 sets of basic core (planks, side planks etc)

3 sets of running drills (butt kicks, high knees)

2-6 sets of lower limb strength – (single leg squat, step ups)

This first cycle being all about creating adaptation to avoid any potential injury risk. The reason for beginning with core strength work is the muscles of the core have a critical role for transfer of energy from the larger torso to the extremities. This helps to control the position and motion of the trunk over the pelvis during running allowing for better force transfer.

The benefit of core training

It helps improve endurance performance by reducing the cost of running. I would say there is some argument against the need to focus too much on isolation exercises when you can get a better more translatable effect from doing squats, deadlifts and single leg work.

If you are healthy and injury free I don’t see the need to spend endless time performing isolation core exercises. I’ll always begin with some form of dynamic core exercises for example beast crawls, dead-bugs, dynamic planks or side planks.

The aim is to switch on the ‘guide wires’ of the spine aimed at anti flexion, extension and rotation, after this you’re good to go.

In addition to the core exercises the athletes also performed some drills like high knee’s and butt kicks (stuff you see track sprinters do). This is because they help with running posture which in turn reduces the cost of running by moving the ground reaction force.

You can easily implement these by performing a few drills either before a run or after as you are cooling down.

Following this first phase the next two cycles included;

4-9 sets of strength work (SL squats, lunges, step ups)

2-5 sets of plyo – (skipping rope)

2-6 sets of explosive work (various forms of jumps)

Interestingly, they also included exercises performed on a balance board – the reason they cited was to reduce incidence for low back and extremity injury.

Whilst this may be true, I actually think the bigger benefit is training the brain to make a connection between the big toe and hip stabilisers. As some of you will know I’m a big fan of the Mobo board.

In any case, the athletes performed this training for 25-30mins three times a week and the control group maintained their running training of 5-7x week for 70-140km.

The results showed a slight improvement in MMP and a decrease in cost of running (4%) at sub-max speeds suggesting MMP is an important factor in determining cost of running.

The suggestion therefore is you can improve MMP with SEP and limit the costs of running which can lead to better results.

Another important benefit of strength training

Not tested here, is improved muscle tendon complex stiffness.

If you’ve followed the previous issue for overcoming Achilles tendon injury, strengthening under heavy load creates stiffer springs meaning you get a decrease in the cost of running.

The only real issue I had with this study (and to be fair the authors did acknowledge this) was the training was too light to create a positive neuro-muscular change.

Meaning whilst the athletes experienced a small but tangible adaptation – by lifting heavy and then combining plyometrics and explosive work I would posit there would have been an even better response.

The reason they say for that was they wanted the athletes to be able to perform home-based training. Still, investment in some kettlebells is the way I’d go.