Running is complicated. It takes years to master the art of fitness, to learn your body, what it likes and doesn’t like, what it needs and when it needs it. When it comes to staying healthy and doing prehab, we need simple, easy to remember rules, not overly technical advice that we can’t use. We’re not bodybuilders. Prehab is a means to keeping us on the roads and the trails. Here we’ll boil down how the body responds to different sets, reps, and weight, so we can choose the right prehab exercises for any given challenge, injury, or situation.
Should runners lift low weight high rep?
Running is basically a few thousand small reps, so low weight, high rep makes the most sense right? Well, not exactly. Preventing and fixing running injuries is all about gaining strength. More strength = more training tolerance = being able to run more miles without pain. So, we actually need to pick a weight + rep strategy that gives us the maximum strength gain. Interestingly enough, low weight high rep is less effective at building strength than high weight low rep (study ; study *note: these studies are both done on men with experience doing some form of resistance training, so it’s not perfect, but it’s safe to assume we need to lift heavy to get stronger!)
Here is an easy to remember set of rules on how the muscles + other tissues respond to different weights + reps
Heavy weight, low reps = increase in muscle strength
Comfortable weight, lots of reps = muscle growth
Note: What do we mean by “heavy?” Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you need a barbell with 300lbs of iron on it! Heavy just means 60-80% of a weight that you could only do once. Runners are not strength athletes, and shouldn’t feel pressured to lift like them. In many cases bodyweight plus a small dumbbell will get you to that 60% threshold!
What weight & rep count to prevent injury?
If we want to get rid of pain and prevent injury, strength is most important. Choose a heavier and target 3-4 sets of 5 reps (recommendation from the British Journal of Sports Medicine). If you want to introduce one heavy exercise into your prehab routine, we recommend heavy squats. Squats fix the quads, the lower back, the upper back, the glutes, the core, the neck, and the soul. If every runner squatted with heavy weight a few times per week, the running injury stats might look a lot different.
When does high repetition exercise make sense for runners?
If we want to help our muscles get back to baseline after extended time off, an injury, or even a surgery we should select exercises and weights we can do for 10-20 reps. 3 sets of comfortably challenging weight for about 15 reps is a great place to start with a muscle that’s had some time off. High repetitions with medium load are promising for muscle growth (review).
Quad extensions with a band, for example, are not the heaviest exercise, but they can be an amazing way to get lots of solid reps in and stimulate a muscle to regenerate / grow.
In summary, it’s best to use different sets and reps to maximize the effectiveness of our prehab relative to our goals. “No brain, no gain” is our motto. If you want to get faster to race a 5k or a Mile, it’s important to pick the right intervals, pace, and volume of intervals. If you want to get stronger and more injury resistant, picking the right weight and volume of prehab exercise is key! Comfortable weight, high rep for muscle size ; high weight, low rep for muscle strength!
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