This is episode 429 with physical therapist, author and trainer who's worked with Olympic gold medalists and athletes across eight pro sports leagues, Dr John Rusin.
Welcome to the Strength Running Podcast.
We surround you with the same experts as pro runners.
So keep listening to hear coaches, physical therapists, strength experts dieticians, sports psychologists and other thought leaders give you the best guidance possible to take your running to the next level.
I'm your host, Coach Jason Fitzgerald.
I'm a former cross country and track athlete for Connecticut College.
I've been coaching runners since 2010, and I'm a former columnist for Trail Runner Magazine.
You can learn more about me and strength running at strengthrunning.com.
And, you know, guys, I'm just feeling a little sentimental about running right now.
I had a coaching call with a high school senior and his mom the other day just to talk about racing and mindset strategy and pre-race anxiety and all the things that are hard to learn about running when you first start.
And it just brought me back to my days running high school cross country and track the excitement, the intensity, the unknown and novel feeling of pushing your body to its limits.
It just made me think about the decades of memories I've made as both a runner and a coach, and it's making me so incredibly grateful for running.
I love this sport, and hopefully this podcast helps you fall in love with running a little bit too.
All right, let's also support our sponsors who help make this podcast sustainable.
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My guest today is a prolific personal trainer and physical therapist who's worked with nearly every imaginable professional sport, as well as Olympians Dr John Rusin.
His new book is also now available.
Pain-Free Performance.
Move Better, Train Smarter and Build an Unbreakable Body.
John's goal is to help every athlete compete in their sport with good movement patterns and no pain.
Thank you so much for having me. and when to know if you're putting in too much effort in the gym.
I'm such a strong proponent of strength training that I don't think we should consider it cross-training.
It's just part of the normal training process.
Learn how to incorporate periodized runner-specific strength training in your running at strengthrunningcom strength.
I want you to have every advantage with your training, and that starts with being a strong, injury-resilient athlete.
Get started today at strengthrunning.com strength.
And now without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. John Rusin.
Hey, John, thanks for being here.
Jason, thank you so much.
Well, I am excited to speak with you, but I wanted to start with some of your background, because it sure is interesting.
Can you tell us a bit more about your work and how you got to where you are today?
19 years ago I got started as a personal trainer and a strength coach, coaching my first client poorly.
And that was a JV football player.
And 19 years later, I find myself as an educator.
Um, a couple of degrees under my belt and looking at sports performance, injury prevention and health and longevity is my focus.
But somewhere along the way um, this idea of being healthy and having injury prevention and being well-rounded with training came from a lot of my distinct background between physical therapy school being a division one strength conditioning coach, coaching all the way into professional sports and Olympic sports, and then figuring out that there's a lot more commonalities between general fitness populations and high performance populations than a majority of the industry likes to admit to.
So hybridizing those two things together.
The name of the game just turned into how do we keep people healthy?
How do we keep them progressing and trying to pull from a lot of different areas of health and performance in order to create this pseudo hybridized programming style that I've become known for?
Yeah, I do love those well-rounded, more comprehensive type approaches because, like you, I do think we're much more similar than we're different.
And I'm usually saying that in the context of running.
And how runners kind of respond similarly to different training stimuli.
And it's interesting to hear that, even across very different sports, a lot of the same principles are the same.
And you've worked with, like you said, a lot of pro athletes organizations.
You've worked with Olympic sports.
Can you talk about some of the different sport disciplines that you've worked with?
Sport disciplines.
I was a baseball player.
So automatically I got thrown into the overhead throwing sport athletes.
That was like my first cutting of my teeth in the industry at a higher level.
So I had some injury histories of my own.
I have torn UCLs on both elbows, which is a serious accomplishment.
One was a throwing injury.
One was a non-throwing injury.
But that turned me into, hey, how do I rehab myself to get back onto the playing field?
How do I master the shoulder?
Complex and looking at a lot of the diversity of movement abilities of the shoulder and the upper body.
And then that interest in my own body led to an expertise in other people's bodies, specifically to that population.
So I started off working with a lot of quarterbacks.
Tennis players and a vast majority of my clients early on in my career, throughout my first decade or so, were baseball players, major league baseball players, minor league baseball players and collegiate baseball players managing them in their off-season training programs.
It's really interesting.
It's always so interesting talking to people who have this kind of coaching and strength training experience in a variety of different sports and then bringing a lot of those learnings into practice.
The sport we're talking about, which is running.
And one of the reasons why I want to speak with you is not only are you helping all these different kinds of athletes with their strength training, there is this big focus on getting to a pain-free state and doing these movement patterns without any pain.
And I've come to believe that there are only two ways to run without pain.
You can regularly strength train or you can be 18 years old.
There's not really too many other options out there.
You could maybe just be blessed with good genetics.
But I also recognize that, look, the weight room is not every runner's preferred environment.
I know for me I would rather go out in the mountains here in Colorado and do some trail running than spend 20 minutes in a gym.
We often don't know what to do, John.
And I think a good place to start is first figuring out what not to do.
So what are some of the like common training errors you see runners make in the weight room?
That if you could sort of go in and guide that person and maybe say hey, instead of that, let's do this.
I see two common mistakes amongst the runners when it comes to their strength and their weight room work.
It's one is like, Hey, I am so ingrained in running that I don't want to be here.
I'm going to do nothing that is going to actually transfer into keeping me healthy and strong while running.
And I'm just going to go in and do random things that kind of feel like running, but not necessarily that sports specific.
So it turns into, hey, I'm going to turn every single strength and conditioning session into cardio.
I'm really going to be gravitated towards cross training, CrossFit training.
Hyrox is the new one.
It kind of still feels metabolically demanding, so they're gravitating towards that, but that's not necessarily what they need.
So that's the one avatar.
The second avatar is like, hey, I heard that in order to run pain-free, I need to get stronger.
Everyone's talking about how strong you need to be to run, how strong you need to be to withstand this mileage on a weekly and a training block basis.
And they turn themselves into wannabe powerlifters.
So on one day they're running and on the opposite day they're squat, benching and deadlifting, like they're going into a powerlifting competition, having a misunderstanding of what strength, in terms of a physical characteristic, actually is that can help them stay healthy with the undue stress that they are putting on their body via their sport.
So, I think, a blend between both of those things in a more well-rounded approach and utilizing the rule of opposites in terms of what does your sport naturally give you, what does your activity of choice naturally give you, and then picking up the pieces and putting them back together in a more hybridized strain and conditioning program that happens off the road.
That's the secret that is the least sexy thing that I could possibly say with that answer.
Well, no, I think that's really helpful.
And maybe we can drill down a little bit into each one of these avatars, as you said.
So our first avatar, you know, I've been there too myself.
I walk into the gym on my lunch hour.
I remember this day clearly in 2007.
And you know I look at all those machines and all the free weights and I spend an hour doing some stuff John, but not a lot of good stuff.
And I'm just kind of flailing around doing some things that maybe I saw on a YouTube video somewhere.
Can you talk a little more about this idea of doing a whole bunch of things that aren't actually helping you?
What are some examples of that?
Examples of that are are being able to just punch the clock and have a misunderstanding of some of the characteristics that do put us in the best possible position to be healthy, but also trying to identify weak links and being able to strengthen them in a more direct way as opposed to a more general way.
I think jumping in and doing any sort of movement-based training is a great starting point.
But in order to be able to stay healthy for the long run no pun intended we need to be able to have a more calculated approach.
So I think random workouts, more HIIT style workouts, more metabolic conditioning, it's gonna feel good to the average runner because like, who has a better metabolic system than a runner?
Like, yeah, it's gonna be a huge victory lap when you go to the gym.
But your strength and conditioning, if you're a runner, isn't about having a victory lap in the gym.
You should be worried about that victory lap when you're going into your races or on your runs on the weekend.
What we need to be thinking about is again, just more having a mindset of identifying weak links and giving yourself mobility, stability and skill sets under load that you wouldn't otherwise have without that hybridized practice in the gym.
Runners are often somewhat one-dimensional because we spend a lot of time doing a very specific movement pattern.
Let's be honest, we love that movement pattern.
We love to run.
We don't really want to do too many other things.
It's often just because we have to, whether that's cross-training or strength training.
And so that does lead us to have a lot of these weaknesses or imbalances, or just weak areas, especially compared with a more well-rounded athlete who might – have different demands on their body.
So what are some of those unique weaknesses that us runners have that you would love to see us address?
Well, let's first identify the six core characteristics of physicality that I believe that every person, and specifically every athlete, needs to have in terms of having health and longevity within their training practice, within their sports specific practices.
That is our starting point.
So we're talking about power strength, cardio and conditioning mobility, athleticism and degrees of body composition, muscular hypertrophy, reducing body fat.
So, when you look at being a well-rounded human being, I think that that is the starting point for being a healthy runner that has longevity within their running practice.
And I think we got cardio and conditioning on lock in terms of sports specificity in runners.
But a lot of those other things really fall to the wayside.
In terms of prioritization, I tend to see that working on mobility, working on athleticism and then working on base strength are going to be the highest yielding characteristics for runners.
And when I say strength I really mean putting load on the system, getting strong through full and complete ranges of motion that we don't necessarily have a huge amount of exposure to with the running practice itself.
But really I believe that every single one of my runners that I currently manage in coaching, They need to be well-rounded.
They need to have all six physical characteristics.
And they have to have a movement system that stands up to the test and the strain that we're putting on ourselves via that sport.
How would you define athleticism separately from mobility, strength, cardiovascular ability?
What in your mind is athleticism?
Athleticism, you can't define a word by saying the same word again.
We learned that the hard way.
Athleticism is essentially moving like an athlete.
So what is moving like an athlete?
It's being able to add a base mechanical position, take a step or locomote your body through space.
It's the ability to cut accelerate, decelerate and, more than anything, it's to coordinate the upper and lower body together in degrees of lateralization, so moving to the side or moving obliquely, or degrees of rotation through the trunk, or what we call the pillar complex, which are the shoulders, the hips, the core, integrating together as a functional unit.
So as soon as we start to do that Training athletic feels a little bit faster.
It feels a little bit more explosive.
It feels more skilled.
It feels more coordinated.
It feels like you would be able to go in and do something that is challenging your athleticism whether that be going out and playing pickleball, or whether that be going in and doing a Tough Mudder, whether that be going pick up basketball for the first time in a while and being able to withstand the stress because you've actually trained some of these unique positions and skill sets.
Yeah, it's athleticism.
It's sort of like hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
And I've had the pleasure of seeing elite runners warm up for races and go through a bunch of drills and then actually get on a track and run really fast.
And it's such a wonderful example of athleticism specific to running.
But the way that they move is so graceful.
It's so smooth.
There's no wasted movement.
How can we start building that skill in the weight room?
Because we admittedly don't have to move laterally too much.
We don't have to decelerate.
I would even argue we don't really need to work too much on our acceleration.
Most of us are not starting 400 or 800 meter races on a track where you might need some good acceleration.
Most adults are running...
10Ks, half marathons, marathons.
So a lot of these skills, I love.
I love to have them.
You know, it's just fun to be athletic.
But I also recognize that they're not... as necessary for runners.
So how might we work on them?
This is why we talk about pain-free performance right here, because it's the misunderstanding that just because something doesn't look like the sport that you're about to do, or something that doesn't have a directional functional transference into that specific sport, doesn't mean that it's not useless.
The name of the game for running is to be able to be healthy and pain-free enough to go out and be able to test your limits in terms of the capacities that you've built.
And that's where a vast majority of people struggle.
So when we're talking about power or athleticism acceleration deceleration, change of direction work, we're really looking at trying to train the brain in order to learn how to restabilize these positions and learn how to actually function in these different variances.
And when we look at running injury rates, they are fairly high, or they're on point with any other locomotive-based sport.
But when we see an injury, most times it's going to be aches, pains, injuries.
It's not going to be huge catastrophic events like we'd see in some contact sports.
So we're talking about a vast majority of the injuries happening in the tendons, the musculotendinous junctions, things that just sit around for a while.
Tendinitis tendinosis, chronic aches and pains at the joints, and those are all things that can be mitigated against by going through and training at different force velocities.
So training faster, decelerating harder.
We put strategic load on these musculotendinous junctions and it essentially calluses our system to be able to withstand load when we go into a different sport or when we go into our specific sport, which is going out and running.
So this is essentially making us more well-rounded in terms of the variability of stress that we put on the unique structures that tend to break down over time with volumes.
Yeah, so if I'm understanding that right, it seems like it's almost the same reason why you would train by running workouts faster than your actual race pace is because you're just building extra capacity.
And so if you're in the weight room, if you're doing drills, you're warming up for even a type of workout and you're doing these kinds of movement patterns, It's not because you're going to experience them in the workout or on the race course.
It's so that when you're running 5K race pace, it's not stressful for your joints, for your tendons, for those connective tissues.
Is that right?
The overreach principle.
We wanna have varied amounts of training in terms of variability, because the more that we can expose our bodies to, the more that we can withstand stress.
And it is never a linear approach when it comes to putting stress on the body, or one 5K doesn't equal another 5K.
Conditions could be totally different.
The more varied that we can create in terms of force velocities acceleration deceleration, the more protective we can be around those tendons and those joints the best possible position we can put ourselves in in terms of being able to perform at our highest rate.
But what I'm really focused on is you perform at your highest rate and then the next day you feel great and you can get right back into training without having a pitfall after.
Yeah, that's actually a really good point.
It's not necessarily to help you stay healthy doing the thing, but it's also helpful after you've done with the race or the workout so that you can bounce back from it a little bit faster.
Yeah, I mean, I manage clients that do half marathons, that do full marathons some crazy people here in Madison Wisconsin, where I live.
They do the Ironman here, Ironman Wisconsin.
And there's a big difference between going in and completing a race.
And like, hey, I really did it.
I pushed through mentally on that.
And there's a difference between an athlete that is prepared in such a way that they're able to compete in that race, be able to exceed their expectations of performance and then continue on their race schedule without pain or injuries or burnout.
Those are huge things that we can mitigate against by simply training a little bit more intelligently and a little bit more well-rounded, above and beyond just the sport.
One of the other big aspects of your philosophy that I really like is your emphasis on the movement itself.
And the way I think about weightlifting for runners is that the movement itself is also beneficial, not necessarily beneficial.
The weight that you're lifting yes, you're building strength, you're building some power, but the movement you're going through is so much different than what you're gonna experience with running.
Even if you're not actually lifting a lot of weight and let's be honest, most runners you know, comparatively speaking, probably not going to be setting any records lifting weight.
But how do you think about that aspect of movement training for runners?
Loaded movement training is going to be the goal.
So you have squat, hinge, lunge, push, pull and carry, which is locomotion.
Those are the patterns that we want to be able to learn.
We want to be able to maintain for a lifetime and then load over time in order to get into those ranges of motion, get into those integrated movement patterns in those positions that we don't naturally get through our sport.
So it seems like a very simple entry point for many runners, but that is a well-rounded movement system.
That is essentially everything a human body can be able to do.
And because everything is so sagittal playing dominant and running everything is a little bit more anterior chain dominant, quadriceps dominant we tend to place a huge amount of emphasis on the posterior line of stability and strength.
So we're training a lot of backside movements for posture at the upper body rows, pull downs, things like that.
We tend to trend at a three to one ratio between the anterior chain and the posterior chain at the lower body.
So a lot of hinging, a lot of hamstring and glute work.
And we tend to really mobilize the front side of the body a vast majority of the time to be able to again equalize our positions, to make sure that we have a human movement system that isn't necessarily specific to running in the gym but then transfers really nicely to running outside of the gym.
Isn't this an aspect of athleticism too?
Like if you can do these movement patterns really effectively, really efficiently, then well, you're.
Aren't you by definition more athletic than someone who can't?
Absolutely.
I think you move better.
Moving well is a trait of athleticism, but moving well doesn't just mean your gates dried.
It means that you're able to pick up new skills, learn about motor control and being able to load and withstand stress on a myriad of these different movement patterns.
That's somebody that is able to again learn new skills, transfer those skills and then, once we have that movement system on lock and we're stressing it strategically in the gym, then we can worry about some of those core capacities that we spoke previously of.
Sort of like that kid we all knew when we were in high school who could pick up any sport.
You could give him any ball and he could do like conference leading movements with that ball.
And it's like, man, how does that kid move so well?
Like that's kind of.
The goal is to be able to have the capacity to hop in a trail race even if you haven't done any trail running.
Or, you know, go take a different fitness class with a friend during you know, your break from running and not have that, you know, either get you injured or you're so sore the next day that you can't then go for your run.
I see so much functional usefulness to these ideas.
Spot on, Jason.
We call this physical autonomy, meaning that you have earned the right to do whatever the hell you want to do because you've trained intelligently for it.
So you're going to go out there and you're not only going to participate, but you're going to thrive in that activity.
And you're not going to have the next day have pain, injuries, or burnout in the process.
That's where I want to get a vast majority of my clients to physical autonomy.
Like this came full circle last weekend because I was out in Venice Beach doing some work out there and I took my son with me.
And Venice Beach you know we're going to be tourists.
We're going to go right to Muscle Beach.
So we roll into Muscle Beach and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, there's gymnasts doing the rings.
I've never done rings in my entire life, but I was like, you know what?
I've trained for this.
I trained for this.
This is my chance at physical autonomy.
And I was able to go down and back on moving rings.
I've never done anything like that in my life.
And a lot of people are like dang, that was pretty good for a big guy that doesn't train gymnastics or any of that stuff.
And I was like, yeah, but I've been training the overhead movement patterns and push and pull.
I've stabilized my posterior chain.
I've been able to really unlock my movement abilities.
And then, after I did that, I jumped into a pickup basketball game on Venice Beach like white man can't jump style with my son.
And I was able to withstand that the next day flying home.
And it was like, that's why you train.
So you can live a life of physicality.
And I think it's cool that I was able to go out and do those things uniquely and not be the next day like, oh man, I just tore my lat or you know what.
I just tweaked my ACL on the basketball court.
I don't necessarily train those two specialties but I think the transference of having a well-rounded, structured training approach allows you to go in and simply perform when you have that challenge in front of you.
Yeah, for sure.
And let's be honest, it's more fun too.
It sounds like you were having a great time, John.
It was the best.
It was the best.
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Related to that is something that I've discovered over the last maybe 12 to 15 months of my journey with being a lot more consistent with weightlifting.
Is this level of mindfulness that I'm sort of discovering is necessary to lift weights?
How important is it to be mindful of the practice of lifting weights and to really just be aware of how your muscles are contracting, how your body is moving through space.
It's almost an issue of you know that mind, muscle connection and proprioception, of understanding how you're moving through space.
How important is it to pay attention to those things.
And I ask because I feel like a lot of runners get in the gym and we go through the motions.
We kind of just throw the weight around a little bit.
Oh, coach says do two sets of 10, and I'm going to just bang it out, and now I'm out of here.
And I feel like a little bit more engagement with the, with the movements themselves, psychologically can be really powerful.
If you're a runner and you're heading into the gym for the first time or the first time in a while, the movement mastery mindset should be.
The focus is that you're engaging in movement as a skill and you're trying to set yourself up for success with movement quality.
And I think that when we take away all of the machoist meathead stuff which is like oh, just stack weight on the bar and let's go, or let's get the heart rate up and see how much we can withstand, we pull back and say hey, this is a movement practice that is dependent on quality and consistency.
And if we can do those two things, if we can hold those two metrics, then we have the ability to again transfer all the benefits back into the thing that we love the most, which is running.
So we tend to really focus in on building the base of human movement competency in those six foundational movement patterns.
That is square one.
But most people can progress fairly quickly through having a level of movement mastery mindset that can start stacking wins.
Within 8, 12, maybe 16 weeks, you're no longer novel and green every time you hit the gym.
You're now learning about your movement, able to take that parking brake off your movement system and be able to start performing very similarly to when you start working on your gait and on your running stride.
So I think that engaging mentally is huge.
It's not always about the mind-muscle connection, but it's about the intent to move well, because the practice of moving well is the protective mechanism that we're after.
Protective mechanism.
I love that phrase and sort of I'll put all weightlifting strength training in that bucket of.
This is a protective thing that you can do as a runner.
It's going to give you more options, give you more flexibility and give you that protection from running injuries.
You know, kind of in a related question, is you know, what would you say to the runner who's worried about getting hurt in the weight room because they're just not sure about their running form?
Yeah, it sounds like the number one goal should be to master the movement, rather than I'm going to bench this amount of weight.
Like it's not really performance oriented at this point.
It's more let's get the movement down.
But what if you're not really sure about the movement at first?
What would be your advice in that situation?
Starting simple and being able to build a base off the foundation is huge.
There's a big difference between hey, we need to train the hip hinge pattern today and going straight to a barbell deadlift with a max load or working something like a lateral pull through with a band to be able to grease the groove of the hip hinge pattern and start learning how to use your hips for the first time.
I think that square one we need to start having.
Hey, we're gonna unlock these movement patterns, knowing very well that we have to relearn them.
A big secret out there is that we have dysfunctional movement patterns.
We have people that have disused multiple of their movement system patterns throughout months years, decades.
So just the process of going in and not trying to do too much too quickly and going in and making sure you're hitting squat hinge lunge push, pull and carry.
And making sure that you're starting in simple exercises that can scale in terms of your motor control and the and also your load capacity, slowly moving up with progressive overload over time.
Those two things don't put too much pressure on yourself to perform these crazy Instagram workouts or these exercises that you've never seen that are the magic pill to health for runners that we all get put in front of our face on social media.
Go back to the basics.
And if we can take our strength training and we can define it as this is the way in which we're going to callous our system to stay healthier in the sport that I love to do, this gives us the ability to withstand the stresses over an amount of time, to give us longevity within that sport.
But start slow.
Start simple.
And the body is amazing, especially when you start putting load on the body and unique positions for the first time.
It is going to be able to build skill sets very quickly, build capacities very quickly, and it's be able to unlock a lot of things that you haven't felt before.
I really like that phrase, callousing the system.
I may borrow that and use it to describe sort of the injury resilience benefits that you get from lifting weights.
That's the number one reason that I would have a runner strength train.
Every single time I have this conversation with an athlete that comes to me that is more running-centric.
So, whether it be running, whether it be triathlon, they don't want to do it, just like you alluded to.
You know, this is probably the last thing on their list, because they're like man, how many hours am i already spending on the road?
I have to do this on top of everything else, and it's like hey, This is earning the right to be able to go and do this forever.
Because I think the worst day in a runner's life is when they have to sit on the couch and put on Netflix instead of going for a run.
And that happens because of injuries.
That happens because of burnout.
And that happens because of frustrations, of performance plateaus, that they feel like they can't be where they used to be.
And most likely that's because of pain, injuries, and burnout.
So the biggest thing is that we avoid that at all costs.
Random shit's going to happen.
We're going to have pain and injuries throughout our career.
But there are certain things that we can hold within our control.
And being able to have a well-rounded program that hybridizes your running with more strength and all the other capacities.
That's a non-negotiable for any runner that I'm currently managing.
And I have seen the emotions go from hey, I don't really want to do this to as soon as you click in and you see injury risk mitigation.
You see people healthier than ever before or they performed at a PR rate.
They're like, man.
This is a physical practice that I'm going to be doing for the rest of my running career.
And that's where we want to get people is the buy-in needs to be via results.
So the result is you're going to feel better, you're going to function better and you're going to perform at top rate.
We wouldn't be doing it if we weren't getting those results.
And I'll be the first one to say it can be slightly addicting.
The feeling of competence in the gym is something that I didn't think I was going to experience.
I wasn't expecting it.
And so when I started feeling A lot better doing the movements.
I started seeing progress in the amount that I could lift.
But I think more importantly, I just started like feeling better in my own body on a day to day basis.
And it reminded me very much of like when running started to click.
Because I think every runner understands that the first couple weeks that you start running some of the worst weeks of your life you feel like you've been run over by a truck.
I remember asking my cross country coach when I first started running am I always going to feel this way?
Because if that's the case, like, coach, I'm out.
I'm not participating.
This feels terrible.
But once you get over that initial hump, you start feeling aerobically powerful.
My God, you don't really get tired in the same way.
Day to day that you do.
How long does it take someone without any weight room experience to start feeling the results of their work in the weight room?
Because I think if we can get runners to that level.
The rate of adherence is going to be higher.
They're just going to be much more likely to make it that long-term habit.
I think if you can click in in a four-week period, it is going to be a lifelong endeavor in terms of mixing your running with a practice in the weight room.
And the first week's gonna suck.
You know you think about doing anything new for the first time.
It's always gonna be a challenge, it's gonna be frustrating.
It's the land of the unknown and we just gotta get past that.
Week two and three is usually about okay, like I'm feeling a little bit better here, like I'm not goblet squatting for the first time ever, so that's a plus.
And then week four is like, hey, now we're online for making this a habit.
And as soon as we make it a habit, then I think that month two three four, that turns into hey.
Now I'm starting to see tangible benefits in terms of my body composition, the way that my body's feeling, in terms of getting rid of those chronic aches and pains.
And I think at month four, all the way through month six, we start to see the performance enhancement of you being able to turn around quicker in terms of recovery between runs, but also then your top end performance being a little bit more robust.
So I think that it is a little bit longer form result base.
I would say that people are going to be hitting their peak at about six months, and probably six months to about three or four years is where they can continue to again chase these newbie gains, so to say.
But I see that people really lock in within that first four to six weeks.
They are feeling a difference.
Maybe their muscle mass is not, maybe their body fat isn't down.
Maybe they haven't added any structural changes to their tendons yet.
But they are locking in a physical practice that I think the endorphin rush that high is not just the runner's high.
It's the high of getting under load.
It's the high of training different capacities.
And from my coaching experience I've seen that people can get that similar high training, different capacities, in different ways.
So obviously you get that runner's high.
It's like, boom, you're going through, you zone out and you're like, man, I'm performing amazingly.
You can get that same thing when you strain a heavy weight and you hit a heavy set of something.
You can get that same thing when you get that muscular burn, when you're looking at muscular hypertrophy as the end goal.
You can get that same feeling when you lock in a movement skill, athleticism and power that you're like holy shit, I feel like I'm 20 and I'm 50.
I think that high is gained from different spots.
And it doesn't always have to be focal pointed on one central characteristic.
We tend to get that across the board.
And we want to give people these wins.
We want to give people these stimuli because it hits so much differently when you can actually compound all that stuff together than depending on one central thing.
Yeah, and I think it's really important to note too the power of those small wins, like you mentioned, because I think that is one of the ways in which runners can better adhere to a strength training program, is feeling like they're actually making progress.
And in running it's maybe you run a new distance that you've never run before, or you finish a run with a lower heart rate at the same pace than you have before.
And there's so many different ways to build in these small wins into your training, because it's all of a sudden you're more motivated.
You feel more confident in what you're doing because you see that it's working.
And I feel like if you can build some of those small wins into a lifting practice, then well, that's the thing we struggle with right.
So it becomes even more important in that practice.
For the runner, it's like, hey, it's a PR or ER in terms of the timestamp of your race.
And in the weight room, for many people making the mistake of like hey, it's just the weight on the bar.
That's all that matters.
And both of those things are silly because there's so many different ways to get those wins, not even small wins, but big wins.
And I think that, because running is such a lifelong practice, we have to be looking different areas to be able to find those wins as we get older.
It's not going to be correct to say when you're in your 60s or 70s, you should be hitting race pace as you were in your 40s or your 30s.
It's probably not going to happen.
But where do we get those wins from then?
Where do we get those wins from?
It's recovering.
It's being able to manage your heart rates.
It's being able to be pain-free after your run and go and take your grandkids out for a day at the park.
It's those wins that transfer into a lifestyle.
And it reminds us why we're doing this in the first place.
Yes, we love to run.
Yes, we love to train.
But I guarantee you that we love the feeling of how that transfers into the other 23 hours of our life even more.
Yeah, for sure.
Like I said before, I love the feeling of being in really good running shape because I could help someone move.
I could do all these things and just not really get too tired from it.
John, I'd love to speak about the foundational movements that you listed prior and talk about.
Are there any that you think runners typically ignore specifically?
Because maybe we simply don't really get that kind of stimulus with our running, or most runners tend to ignore a certain movement in the gym.
What might be a movement pattern that us runners typically ignore?
The hip hinge.
Number one is going to be the most neglected movement pattern.
And it's because we have a misunderstanding of what a hip hinge is.
We think, oh man, I've never really weight trained before.
And now somebody is saying that I have to go out and deadlift with a barbell.
Like that seems like it's risky because I've heard people have hurt their backs deadlifting before.
And all of a sudden we get into the emotional play of what a movement pattern would be in the gym.
But I see that the hip hinge is the highest yielding strength movement pattern for runners and, I would argue, any sport that runs, because the line of stability throughout the posterior chain is something that we need to build in terms of muscular hypertrophy bigger, stronger glutes bigger, stronger hamstrings bigger, stronger calves and supporting structures of the lower back.
These are just centrally things that keep us upright against gravity as we locomote through space.
And this is going to be the highest yielding movement pattern of all six foundational movement patterns specific to a running sport athlete or a runner specifically, but it's most likely the one that gets neglected the most.
People gravitate in towards really kind of pseudo squats bilateral, and they neglect single leg work as well.
So it turns into hey, we're really not doing two out of the three foundational movement patterns for the lower body that we really need to be able to withstand the stress.
How can we hip hinge without doing the deadlift?
Is there an option to do that that maybe will not strike so much fear into the hearts of runners?
Absolutely.
So at Pain-Free Performance, we don't start people on deadlifts.
Deadlifts are an advanced variation of the hip hinge pattern.
They have the most skill required and they also have the most load capacity.
When you put both of those things together, that's why it's advanced.
But not everyone has to get there.
I would say 50 of my clients never touch a barbell off the ground and that's totally fine because we're getting the results.
So where we end up going is more of a progression play on rebuilding the hip hinge that many people can go through in a step-by-step approach.
The first thing that we start doing is isolating out the components of the hip hinge.
Working the hamstrings directly is super, super awesome.
Whether that be physio ball leg curls, whether that machine leg curls out of seated or lying position or simply going in and doing things like reverse Nordics or Nordic curls with assistance.
That is awesome because we're able to again pump the hamstrings up, strengthen the hamstrings.
That is a key driver of long-term knee health and hip health.
So from there, we look at direct glute work.
Glute is the central line of performance and stability for any locomotion sport.
So we're looking at trying to three-dimensionalize our glutes with not only hip thrusts and glute bridges, but abduction, moving out to the side, but also external rotation.
Any movement that trains all of those together is gonna be preferred.
But I really like single leg hip thrusts, I really like glute bridges and we can put load on those very quickly and very safely.
And then from there we have the isolated parts.
We start to integrate the parts, things like horizontal vectors of movement.
I was talking about a band pull through before, but that's essentially anchoring a band close to the ground, having the band between your legs and then pulling it through in a hip hinge pattern to be able to keep a neutral spine, have the hips posterior translate, push them back, bring them forward and have the feet interacting with the ground.
So these are all great variations.
And the best thing about as we start to integrate the hip hinge pattern is we get...
Glute strength at the top.
With that solid uh flex we get hamstring mobility at the bottom when we're stretching the hamstrings under load, which is super helpful.
And then we also have a lower back isometric that is able to strengthen a position that looks very similar to the isometric that we would be having as we're actually going through our gate stride.
So that is where we tend to have the most amount of success quickly.
But from there people progress into my number one exercise for strengthening the posterior chain, which is a Romanian deadlift.
Essentially taking weight from the top whether it's dumbbells or kettlebells or bands or even a barbell and starting in an upright position, being able to breathe, being able to brace and then hinging the hips back and being able to again load the entire posterior chain.
Mobility at the hamstrings, strength at the glutes, isometric at the lower back, and we have a huge amount of load capacity there.
But we go through a lowering, a raising and a full range of motion there.
And I would say that that is going to be the highest yielding movement for any runner out there.
It's because it gives you exactly what you need and exactly the opposite of what you're not getting with running.
Yeah, that's super helpful.
And I really like how accessible you've made this.
I mean, you can start with some of these beginner oriented exercises with just your body weight doing a bridge or a single leg bridge.
You can add some variation to that and do some like thrusting movements in that position.
So you don't have to necessarily start with, you know, 300 pound deadlift.
Absolutely not.
And when we look at trying to again look at the movement system and trying to practice within this movement system, progressions will happen over time.
And I think that as long as we're training under load through quality movement with a close to a complete range of motion, that is the stimulus that our brain is after in terms of that injury protection when we actually get out on the road.
Now sort of on the other side of the spectrum, when is it clear that a runner might be spending too much time in the gym or that they're just they're lifting the way that they're lifting is interfering with their running you'll see a performance reduction.
Performance reduction and the number one will be an inability to recover between runs.
That is gonna be the clear indication that there is just too much overall stress and load on the body.
You know, stress on the body can happen from multiple different ways.
Stress in the gym isn't that much different than stress from the road, and it's not that much different than stress from a poor night's sleep or stress from poor nutrition.
All this stuff compounds to lead to recoverability problems.
So when we start to see performance taper down, we have to have a look at lifestyle, of course sleep stress nutrition, hydration.
We need to then look at hey, what does our training cycle look like in terms of our sports-specific work, our performances on the road and our training volumes there?
But then the next place you look is, Hey, what does that supporting work look like?
And that's going to be your strength and conditioning work.
That's going to be your off day work.
That's going to be your prehab rehab.
All that stuff is a stress on the body.
And, contrary to popular belief, even within runners, there's a finite amount of stress that we can put on the body for normal people out there where we can start seeing a positive yield from it.
Many times, if we're simply doing too much and we're recovering too little, we're going to see a performance reduction.
And with all those other variables in play, that's where we tend to be the most vulnerable to pain and injuries.
Yeah, I like what you just said.
It alludes to the fact that you can't continue to adapt to something in perpetuity.
I just did another podcast episode on the science behind super shoes, these new racing shoes that runners are wearing.
And part of that discussion was on that, the minimalist trend that was really popular around 2010 2011.
And there was this mistaken idea that as long as you gave yourself enough time, you could adapt to sort of running in the Vibram Five Fingers.
Let's be.
Let's be real.
Most people are never going to be able to race their marathon barefoot or in five fingers.
And I feel like this is a very similar analogy here.
There's only so much stress that we can deal with.
And you know, if it's work-related stress, relationship-related stress, it all kind of adds to the total picture.
One thing that I wanted to ask you more specifically was I will frequently hear from runners who say It almost doesn't matter what I do in the weight room.
I've tried dialing it back.
I just experienced so much muscle soreness after lifting weights that I just don't really want to do it.
And they seem to be consistent with it.
They don't seem to be lifting too much weight or spending just too long in the weight room doing too many sets and exercises.
How would you potentially diagnose this particular issue?
Delayed onset muscle soreness, DOMS, that's what we're talking about here.
And there is going to be levels of when your body is stimulated and it is adapting in terms of strengthening or growing muscle or just simply having a movement pattern that may be a little bit more novel.
There is going to be an effect of being sore throughout the first couple of weeks.
But beyond that, we shouldn't be devastated every single time that we walk into the weight room.
If that's one of my clients and I hear that report, the first thing that I go to is hey, most likely the way that you're fueling and you're eating and you're having your nutritional profile for running only is needs to be altered and it needs to be varied in order to have this more hybridized schedule.
Almost every single time, the nutrition is the culprit of why somebody is unrecoverable in dealing with delayed onset muscle soreness that is debilitating.
Again, natural soreness, it's going to happen anywhere from 24 to 36 hours after.
If you're having these huge 48, 72 hours, holy shit, I had to skip my run today, something's wrong.
Most likely.
If you're new to strength training, you got to be a savage to go in there and do that to yourself.
Like it is very difficult to go in and be like, yo, I need a wheelchair out of this gym today.
Like that's like mentally David Goggins in it at a different level.
But the vast majority of people, they're lagging on refueling.
They're at a caloric deficit that is huge.
And they don't realize that actually training two to three times a week in the gym on top of your running schedule is additive stress and additive volume across the training week.
And many times that's where I'll point to.
But the other thing is that we need to look at being able to minimize this soreness.
And one of the ways that we do that is moving well.
It's moving with competency and capacities that actually stand up to technique and form actually mattering the most.
And being able to look at your training volume, because training volume and running volume it's the same word volume, but they're managed two different ways.
I think that doing a little bit in terms of adapting volume in the weight room is the smart thing to do.
And when I say a little bit, amount of volume goes a long way for runners in the weight room I'm really talking about.
Probably, a workout will have anywhere from four to six hard working sets.
And that's far different than the workouts that you'll see online.
That will have 25 or 30 working sets and they are fake and they are falsified out there.
Just be careful that you don't do too much too quick.
You're not doing novelty every single time that you train.
Most likely, you need to be working on a base program for about four weeks at a time, monitoring your volume, monitoring your intensity and making sure that you're moving with quality.
If you can do all those things plus eat appropriately for the stress that is on your body throughout that training week.
Very rarely do I see this be a problem.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up fueling, because I feel like that can be such a major contributor to this problem.
And it's also one of those things that not all of us think of first, right?
We're always like oh, you're just lifting too much weight or your workout was too long, or you just did too much your first time in the gym.
But a lot of it is likely fueling related too.
I remember when I decided to be committed to strength training.
I went in the gym for the first day.
I purposefully did what I will affectionately call a little baby workout.
I just wanted to stress myself a tiny, tiny bit, see how I felt.
And I was actually a little more sore than I thought I was gonna be, considering that I didn't really do what I might call a real workout.
So it just goes to show, if you haven't been lifting weights that first day, you know it's like the first day you go running.
Let's run for 10 or 15 minutes, see how it affects your body, and then you can progress from there.
Let's put some parameters on this for people, because I think it's like hey well, what should we be doing?
If you're new to the gym and you're a primary runner, really the first 10 to 15 minutes of a session should really be focused on your mobility and your prehab work.
I'm a big fan of soft tissue work stretching, corrective exercise, different activation drills, especially on the posterior chain, just to get you moving in the opposite direction of running.
And then, once you do that, let's take one power or skill work where you can start playing with that new movement and act like an athlete.
Get out of the sagittal plane, rotary, lateralize, anything to get you moving.
Play with the landmine, play with the kettlebell.
Work with some battle ropes, anything that's moving faster than you usually move.
Take 10 minutes, do that.
Then do one strength movement.
One strength movement is all I'm going to be recommending.
That's going to be a squat pattern or a hinge pattern.
We highly recommend the Romanian deadlift, as we said, and then go in and train maybe two or three working sets, which is a hard set where you're like oh, this is pretty hard.
I feel this working.
Call it there.
And you're probably working within the five to 10 rep range there.
And then from there pick two to three other movements and start to train them at a little bit of a higher rep range.
And you're going for the pump here.
You're not going for this huge strain and the soreness.
You're going for pump anywhere from 10, 15 maybe into 20 reps, one or two sets per another, one to two movements, and all of a sudden you have a training day that looks really good.
What I wouldn't be recommending is you go in and pound in terms of multiple strength movements or multiple hypertrophy movements taken to failure.
And then at the end of the training session.
I think it's extraordinarily important to remember that we need to downregulate our sympathetic nervous system.
We need to get back into recoverability mode.
Something that I really like using with all of my athletes and my clients especially my runners that are always like high octane is we're going to use a three-phase cool down, which is I'm going to force you to do two to three minutes of deep, parasympathetic breathing and then we're going to do soft tissue work for another one to two minutes while we continue the deep breathing, and we're going to hold one static stretch for one to two minutes per side if it's a bilateral movement.
And we're going to call it a day there.
You're going to leave that session feeling awesome.
And it's not going to be enough volume to leave you super sore.
It's going to be enough variance to keep you mentally engaged.
And it's enough to get you to that next run because again, that is the primary focus.
Your weight training should support your primary focus.
You can't have two primaries.
And that's where people run into problems.
I really like this cool down approach, and maybe a good takeaway from this podcast, if there's none else is, let's engage in a more intentional cool down after we lift weights.
So here's a couple minutes of deep breathing.
You know, is this four seconds in, four seconds out?
You can do that for two minutes.
Some foam rolling or other type of self-massage and then some static stretching.
I bet you'd feel pretty amazing after that, because it's relaxing, but it's also therapeutic for the body.
I used to run these boot camps 15 years ago in San Diego where I was working.
So between working with like professional athletes, I needed to make some extra cash.
So I was running boot camps on the beach in San Diego.
So it was primary running.
We get like eight to 10 miles in, in a two and a half hour.
And then we do some band work in between.
We play like flag football in between.
But it would be like a session that was pretty well diverse in terms of what we are giving people.
But it was a sweat session.
Like we were running hard all the time.
We go a mile or two, boom, do something.
And at the end of the sessions, we would cool people down on the beach.
And we'd have them lay down, close their eyes, and we do deep extended parasympathetic breathing.
We're really talking about like a five to seven inhale, a seven to nine exhale and a rest at one to two at the top and one to two at the bottom.
And having people chill.
So bringing somebody from like a huge, huge sympathetic stress, whether it be running or whether it be in the gym, all the way down to like the most parasympathetic chill mode possible, it rewires your brain.
It...
Absolutely, it'll feel the difference with it.
And then you have this opportunity window where you can start to get a little bit more emphasis in on the mobility benefit or the recovery benefit that we can get from soft tissue work or from that static stretch and that mobility work after.
And all of a sudden, like I was doing that routinely and people loved it.
And then one day I was running late at the bootcamp and I was like oh, I gotta get these frigging people out of here.
So I skipped the cool down after a number of months of doing it.
And people revolted.
They were like, John, what the heck is this?
Like, we didn't do the cool down.
Like, I need this cool down right now.
I was like, I will never skip another cool down for any program and every client that I ever write.
And it's been a cornerstone ever since, a decade plus later.
But I think that feeling your best after you probably feel your worst in terms of pushing your limits, it's something liberating to you to be able to continue on with your day with momentum.
Yeah, and how many examples are there of this kind of practice where we may be a little hesitant to start it, but once we get involved with it we wonder how we ever went without it?
And I've heard this from runners who start doing a dynamic warmup before they go running, spending 10 minutes.
Maybe they're doing some lunges.
They're doing some mobility movements.
And then they go running.
They're like I feel good right from the first step, rather than needing that 10 minutes of sort of kind of getting the body loose and not feeling very supple.
And as soon as you start feeling those benefits, you never skip that dynamic warmup again.
And there's probably a lot of examples of this.
So John, I'm glad that we finally convinced every runner to start lifting weights after this conversation.
So congrats to both of us.
But no, thank you so much for your time, your expertise, again for your new book Pain-Free Performance.
Is there anything you'd like to add that might help our listeners better organize their strength training or just get started if they're a little bit hesitant?
Pain Free Performance is the ultimate resource because we've toggled on 60 weeks of progressive programming.
And you can go anywhere from three days a week full body all the way up into five days a week of hybridized plan.
And it's something that I do think a vast majority of people need to start with a centralized plan.
So those plans will be there.
The cool downs will be there.
The warm ups will be there for you.
And it will be. really structured on your central running training approach.
But I think that getting started with a system makes a lot of sense for beginners because you can have a checkbox of doing all the things that you know you need to be doing and you don't need to Frankenstein it yourself.
You know, one of the biggest pitfalls in our industry today is we have so much information and we don't know what to do with it all.
If we can just simply go in with a plug and play model and make sure that we're doing all the things that we need to be doing, avoiding the things that are going to lead us to pain, injuries and burnouts, that is going to be huge for a vast majority of people getting started.
And just focusing in on a central plan and taking away the mental burden of trying to put it together yourself.
I think, just structuring in just like you do your running, structure it in your training and you'll be good to go with it.
Awesome.
Well, thanks, John.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks again.
There's going to be links to John's book in the show notes, as well as his website and social media.
John, thank you so much.
Thanks, Jason.
Thank you so much for listening and being part of our community here.
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