Ready, set, go!
Happy New Year, runners.
This is episode 439, featuring five training strategies to help you make 2026 your best year.
Welcome to the Strength Running Podcast.
I'm Coach Jason Fitzgerald, and I want to help you become a better runner.
Don't miss our award-winning website at strengthrunningcom, our YouTube channel with more than 100000 subscribers, or feel free to connect with me on Instagram at JasonFitz1.
My singular goal is to help you become a better runner.
So if there's anything I can ever do to help your running, please let me know.
I hope you enjoyed some New Year's Eve festivities last night and are ready to tackle 2026 with energy and excitement.
I've got incredible guests and topics lined up for this year.
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All right, my friends, today's episode is practical.
I want you to get faster in 2026, and I'm going to share five training interventions that are impactful and effective at driving improvement.
Let's dive in.
Our first training intervention is hill sprints.
Hill sprints are one of my favorite ways for endurance runners to develop speed, power and injury resilience.
So a hill sprint is an 8 to 10 second max intensity sprint up the steepest hill that you can find provided, of course, that it's not so steep that you can actually run fast up this hill.
The idea is to maximally recruit as many muscle fibers as possible and to work on the neuromuscular connection between your brain and your muscle.
So the idea is to work on 100% max effort sprinting in a way that also builds strength.
So you do get a lot of injury resilience benefits from it.
So I would definitely start a hill sprint at only eight seconds.
And the first one should not be at 100% effort.
Maybe the first one is a little bit more like a stride, where you will accelerate into that top end speed.
And maybe you'll touch a full sprint at the very end of that eight second hill sprint.
But you're going to spend a lot of that time accelerating into that effort.
But the rest of those hill sprints are at an absolute maximum full speed sprint.
And this is actually very running specific strength training.
You're going to maximally recruit those muscle fibers.
You're going to build strength.
You're training your body to better understand how to turn that strength also into speed.
So hill sprints are incredible.
I would do them after an easy run once a week, basically in place of strides.
So if you often finish an easy run and you do four to six strides, we can replace those strides with hill sprints.
Now, another key to doing hill sprints is the recovery.
First, we don't want a jogging or running recovery.
We want at least 90 seconds, but also up to two minutes of just walking, standing around.
This isn't a real workout like we distance runners really understand it.
It's more of a speed development session.
So make sure you get that maximum recovery at least 90 seconds, but up to a minute.
Two minutes of walking around, of standing, really let your heart rate come down.
We want to allow your nervous system to settle a little bit, because as soon as that next hill sprint starts, we want to be going at max effort.
So this is a great thing to try if you are injury prone.
If you have never really trained for middle distance races and you do a lot of tempo runs, you do a lot of half marathon and marathon races.
It's time to now focus on the other end of the intensity spectrum, the speed and power side, where we are sprinting and really building that neuromuscular fitness and speed.
All right, our second training strategy is focusing on a new monthly mileage personal best.
Now there's a big reason why we are focusing on monthly mileage rather than a shiny new weekly mileage PR.
Monthly mileage is more of a long-term project.
You're not going to be forced to cut corners in the same way, or take a shortcut, or try to cram in a couple extra miles on Sunday, at the very end of the week.
Instead, you have more days to play with.
And the reason why we're focusing on mileage is because your total running volume is arguably the most important aspect of your training.
Exercise scientist Steven Seiler determined that the volume of training you do is the number one training need of endurance runners.
Volume matters.
And monthly mileage is a more long-term metric than weekly mileage just prevents you from making some short-term decisions that might be a little bit riskier, and if you can set two to three monthly mileage records per year, you are in a very good position to keep improving year after year.
Because of all the things that we can do in training, your overall mileage is what is best described as capacity building.
It builds your capacity for future training.
So if you can run a a few monthly mileage PRs, you're going to be able to run more.
You're going to have better running economy.
It's going to open up higher levels of aerobic fitness, which then allow you to run faster races, to do faster workouts and essentially, keep improving.
Our aerobic system can theoretically continue to be trained. for years and years and even decades.
So it's something that we should always be focusing on and always working on with progressive overload.
And there are a couple of big milestones to think about.
So just keep a couple numbers in the back of your head, 40 miles per week and 60 miles per week.
Now, of course, we're focusing on monthly mileage records, But if you can start thinking about getting your weekly mileage into these levels and see how that translates to your monthly mileage totals, you will see incredible progress with your finish times, because these levels of mileage tend to produce bigger jumps in performance.
So if you're someone who's been training 25 to 30 miles a week, you rarely get up to say, 35 miles.
Let's try to hit 40 and be consistent with that and set an overall monthly mileage record.
I guarantee you, you will have more progress down the road after these personal bests.
Training strategy number three is let's do some formal heat training.
Now, I just did a great podcast episode with Jonah Rosner where we talked about running in the heat.
We talked about passive heat training.
We talked about its similarities with altitude.
So definitely give that episode a listen if you haven't.
But heat training is something that is, you know, it's often been described as poor man's altitude.
If you don't have access to altitude, you can get a lot of the benefits of altitude with heat training.
And the more we're learning about it, the more that we're discovering that heat training might actually be more effective at driving improvement than running at altitude.
And there's less of a... training risk.
In other words, your training is not going to suffer as much.
Whereas if you go up to altitude, you just can't run as fast.
And so all of your training paces and intensities are slightly suppressed, depending upon the overall altitude that you're traveling to.
So what I would recommend for most runners is if you haven't engaged in any heat training, let's start small and then build from there.
We can wear maybe an extra layer of clothing, maybe a warm hat when we normally wouldn't wear a hat.
And then we can go out for some active heat training, where you're just a little bit warmer than usual.
Now, passive heat training, I think, is a little bit easier on the body.
Again, it's passive.
And using a hot tub or a jacuzzi or some type of sauna, whether that's infrared or your more traditional sauna, which I do prefer.
To be honest, I think the infrared sauna is.
It doesn't feel as hot.
It's harder to get up to a higher temperature.
But if you have access to a traditional sauna, you have, in my mind, one of the best heat training tools, probably that or a hot tub.
And you're going to get a lot of incredible results. physiological benefits.
So you're going to get a higher blood plasma volume.
So it's going to be easier for your body to pump more blood.
You're going to get a higher stroke volume.
So in other words, your heart pumps more blood with every beat of your heart.
You start to sweat earlier, you sweat more.
There's a higher sodium concentration in your sweat which, in other words, in other, It lowers your resting heart rate and even can increase your VO2 max.
So there's a lot to like about heat training.
And what I love about it is that it doesn't really make your training that much harder.
You can focus mostly on passive heat training two or three times a week for 20 to 30 minutes in a sauna or a hot tub and get incredible benefits.
Now just keep in mind that active heat training has a higher recovery cost and because you're essentially making that run a lot more difficult especially if it's summertime you're going out at the heat of the day with additional layers of clothing there is the risk of potentially cooking yourself a little bit more than you'd like.
You don't have to really experience such high levels of discomfort and temperatures to get most of these benefits from heat training, so don't cook yourself too much.
Instead, focus a little bit more on the passive heat training, two to three times a week.
And the great thing about heat training is that it's a quick responder.
In other words, you get these benefits relatively quickly.
Now, the downside of that is that you also lose these benefits relatively quickly.
So you do want to maintain a good heat training stimulus one to two times a week, after an initial period of adjustment where you might be doing heat training three times per week.
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Training strategy number four, we're going to focus on high-volume cross-training.
The idea here is to saturate your physiology in easy endurance work.
And we're doing this for the same reason that we're going to also focus on a monthly mileage record.
We want you to always be building endurance.
And easy cross-training is the easiest and least risky way to do that.
Obviously, I think running is probably the best way of developing running-specific fitness.
That shouldn't be a shocker, but...
If you can't do that, if you're injury prone, if you have a history of running say, 20 to 30 miles a week, obviously you shouldn't jump up to 60 or 70 miles a week.
That's an easy way to get yourself hurt.
But you can bridge the gap with easy cross-training.
Now, i am personally very much in favor of cycling.
I also really like pool running, although if i had to choose, cycling would be my preferred form of cross training.
And we don't have to keep this very complicated.
We don't have to measure power or watts, we don't need a bike computer, we don't need to do all those fancy things that cyclists do, because The way that we're using cross-training is simply to increase the total volume of aerobic work that our body is experiencing.
So instead of doing workouts on the bike which of course you can do that as well we can focus on staying in mostly zone one or zone two.
But a little bit of zone three is perfectly fine too.
But primarily the biggest base is going to be built with zone one and zone two efforts.
And on the bike, the injury risk is incredibly low.
So even if you haven't been cycling in years, you can start doing one two, three hours of cycling every week with very little injury risk.
When in doubt, keep the effort a little bit easier.
And I think after a couple months of dedication to a few hours of cycling or pool running every week, you're going to feel just stronger.
You're going to feel like you have been running 50 miles a week, even if you've only been running 30.
You're just going to feel like workouts are more manageable, your paces are getting faster, you can push the effort faster in a long run or other kinds of easy distance run and your heart rate doesn't spike nearly as much.
You're going to experience a lot of physiological benefits from this kind of an approach.
And if you haven't run high mileage, if you haven't experimented with consistent cross training in your weekly program, this is a really good opportunity to maybe get a stationary bike or commit to going to the gym so that you can use their facilities and get in this kind of cross training.
I have used this myself, particularly when I was a college athlete, because my senior year of cross country was I really wanted to be on the varsity team, but we had a very competitive team that year.
And I was kind of in the sixth or seventh position.
And I was a little worried about some of the talented freshmen coming in that year.
And so, because I was injury prone, I really couldn't run much more than 80 to 85 miles a week, which I know is kind of a lot in the grand scheme of things.
But For a college cross-country team, it's somewhat average.
And I knew that I needed to do something to change my body and get myself in a position where I could just be faster and make that varsity team.
So all summer long, I committed to three to four hours of cycling and pool running every summer.
So I have direct every week, I mean, and I have direct experience with the progress you can get from this kind of cross training.
I think it's really powerful.
I think the risks are very, very low.
And if you haven't given it a try, this is the time to experiment with this and see for yourself.
And our final training intervention for 2026.
I want you to start strength training regularly in the gym lifting relatively heavy weights.
And of course, We don't want you lifting max rep deadlifts every couple days.
That's not the idea here.
However, a periodized weightlifting program if you haven't yet tried this kind of a training strategy can be a game changer for a lot of runners, especially if you're over 40, especially if you're injury prone or you just have zero experience with lifting weights.
A little bit of weightlifting can go a long way.
But let's talk about some of the things that you should not do in the weight room.
Number one let's not lift for endurance by doing lots of sets at relatively low weight with high reps.
In other words, let's not do five sets of 20 reps with a relatively low weight.
Instead, let's maybe start with three sets of 10.
And then over the course of the season, you can increase the weight.
You can start doing more complicated, complex movements and decrease the rep scheme.
So you can start doing three to six reps rather than eight to 10, but the weight is heavier.
Maybe you're doing a slightly more advanced version of the exercise.
And this is a really great way to mimic the kinds of progressive overload that you experience with running.
Yes, we're going to run gradually higher mileage over the course of your running career.
We're going to maybe run more days per week, we're gonna do faster workouts.
There's lots of things we can progress with running.
Now in the weight room, we can progress frequency, we can progress weight or we can progress the duration of each training session.
But we don't always wanna just do longer strength training workouts.
So one of the more effective ways of continuing to progress with strength training is just adding a little bit more weight.
It's sort of like adding a little bit more mileage, or doing a workout a little bit faster.
It's a pretty straightforward way of driving adaptation.
Now, not only do we not want to lift for endurance, we also don't want to lift like a bodybuilder.
We're not going for huge muscles.
In fact, we don't really want that as runners because it would just be extra weight that we have to carry around the race course.
So instead, we want to be lifting for strength and power.
So this means a couple things.
Number one, we don't have to do those really long workouts like bodybuilders do.
So instead of spending 90 minutes or two hours in the gym, we can spend about 45 minutes in the gym.
And instead of lifting four or five days a week, we only have to lift twice per week.
That is, I think, the sweet spot of enough strength training to really benefit from it, to really be able to progress and improve.
While at the same time, it's not so often and the workouts aren't so difficult that it's negatively interfering with your running.
That's always something to keep in mind, that weightlifting is additive to your training.
It should be supplemental.
It should not compete with your running.
So if your weightlifting is ever making your running worse, you're so tired that you can't run, or you have to run less, or your workout pace is have to be slower because you're sore from lifting.
If that's the case, we need to make our lifting easier and dial back the intensity so that we can more focus on our running.
That's the important thing.
That is our sports specific exercise and we should always prioritize it.
The weightlifting that we're doing just exists to make our running better.
It's also a really good idea to follow some kind of a plan.
Yes, we have a program at Strength Running.
You can read more about it at strengthrunningcom.
Slash HPL, which stands for High Performance Lifting.
This is our periodized weightlifting program that I created with a USA Weightlifting National Coach.
And one of the big goals of this program was to periodize it.
So we don't want to do the same weightlifting workout every week.
We want that workout to gradually evolve and change over time so that what we're doing say, 16 weeks before a race is different than what we're doing 10 days out from the race.
Just like the workouts that you do with your running.
You don't do the same workout four months before your half marathon that you do the week of the marathon.
There's going to be a different scheme of workouts.
They're going to evolve and change over time and our weightlifting should as well.
So we're going to lift heavier weights.
We might start doing some explosive movements, some power movements, just like you're running faster workouts as you get closer to your goal race.
And by periodizing our weightlifting, we're going to get a lot more out of it.
It's going to be more productive for us.
We're going to build more capacity, more strength early in the season.
And then we're going to turn that strength into speed and power later in the season.
And if you're not sure where to start, if lifting is a little intimidating for you, I get it.
I feel weird waltzing into a weight room with my one inch split leg shorts on.
I do it anyway because, you know, it's fun.
And the gym doesn't just belong to those gym bros, runners.
We can get in there too.
And if you're not sure where to start, go to strengthrunning.com slash strength.
This is our free series where I'll walk you through some of what we just discussed, but also case studies, example exercises, a lot of the other benefits that you can expect to experience from weightlifting.
And one of them that we haven't even discussed yet is improvements to your running economy.
So, if you want to be able to increase your mileage, you want to be able to run a marathon more efficiently and you want to maybe qualify for Boston or get under three hours or four hours or whatever, it might be focusing on running economy through heavier weightlifting, through speed development like hill sprints, through higher volume training, like focusing on a monthly mileage record, all of these things help improve your running economy, which is the oxygen cost of running.
So if you can run the same 10 miles, the same 5k race, whatever it might be, with a lower oxygen cost, you're going to be able to train more.
You're going to be able to feel better with your training and you're going to be a lot more economical.
So that training takes less time.
I'm a huge fan of really focusing on running economy through a wide variety of means, and a lot of these strategies also help with your running economy.
So there we have it, my friends.
Those are five of the most impactful and effective training strategies that I think you can focus on in 2026.
If you want to become a better runner, I want to help you do that.
So I hope this was helpful.
If you have any questions for me, always feel free to email me at support at strengthrunning.com.
Give the show a follow or subscribe if you haven't already.
And happy new year.
