This is a commonly-asked question in personal training - when people already do a lot of leg-intensive exercise, they wonder if there’s a need to add extra on top. Surely all of that lower body exercise will take care of any need to do strength training?
In the vast majority of cases, the answer is NO! You still need to do strength training on your legs, for a number of reasons that we’ll discuss in this article.
Strong Muscles Prevent Injuries
Despite what people say, long-duration (or even short duration, high intensity) cardio training doesn't make you stronger. If that was the case, a power lifter or weightlifter would spend more time on the treadmill and less time on the barbell.
A study of habitual runners shows that without strength training there was a loss of knee flexion strength (around 3.6% per year) and extension strength (around 5% per year). This was apparent in both sexes. It’s worth noting that the data comes from runners in the 40’s-60’s age ranges, but the data holds true across the age ranges. We know for example that muscle loss can occur at any age with detraining, so we can’t assume this is merely an age-related strength decline.
You may wonder where I’m going with this, but I promise it’s relevant!
A significant number of injuries in runners can be traced to an issue of muscular activity. By adding weight training to your exercise regime you not only improve muscle strength and overall athleticism, but you also reduce the likelihood of injury in other ways. These benefits aren’t limited to the muscle tissue either - connective tissues such as ligaments and tendons also become stronger during strength training.
There’s a Mixture of Muscle Tissue Types to be Trained
Not all muscle tissue is the same.
We have different fibre types - some are ‘fast twitch’, these are the fibres that help us to generate large amounts of force. They are strong, but tire quickly.
We also have ‘slow twitch’ fibres. These fibres aren’t capable of generating huge amounts of force, but they offer a lot in the way of endurance. They’re the muscle fibres that make a 10km run or a 50km bike ride possible.
In order to truly maximise our training, we have to ensure that we train all of the fibre types. If we rely purely on low intensity, long duration work we neglect our fast-twitch fibres. We lose strength, we lose power (yes, there’s a difference between the two), we potentially lose pace and we certainly lose the additional beneficial effects of strength training (increased overall muscle mass for a start).
There’s a reason professional runners and cyclists strength train.
Iso-lateral Strength Training Improves Technique
One of the benefits of iso-lateral strength training is that it removes (or at very least reduces) strength imbalances. This has a significant knock-on effect for exercise technique - one that might appear subtle but has large impacts further down the line.
Strength imbalances cause an over-reliance on a particular side. This can lead to compromised running technique, cycling technique - in fact in all major sports if there’s a significant muscle imbalance it can cause technique issues. It’s also likely to be a significant contributory factor to injuries further down the line.
By addressing these issues with effective strength training, you prevent them from being an issue in future. You also (as we’ve already mentioned in the article), benefit from enhanced overall athleticism, more power generation capability and reduced injury probability.
I Run/Cycle/play Football etc... Do I Still Need to Train my Legs? Answered…
In this article we hope we’ve put across the reasons that your regular 5 mile runs aren’t the only leg training you need. It might not have been the answer you wanted, but it’s certainly the one you needed - we wouldn’t be doing our job properly if we didn’t tell you the training truth!
Don’t be shy, get under that barbell and start squatting!
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