Ready, set, go! This is episode 411 with professor of bioenergetics, author, and high -performance coach, Andy Galpin.
Welcome to the Strength Running Podcast. We surround you with the same experts as pro runners, so keep listening to hear coaches, is.
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 used to write for Trail Runner Magazine and Runner's World.
Today, I'm the head coach of Strength Running, host of this podcast, and I work with a small handful of startups in the running space.
You can learn more about me and strength running at strengthrunning .com.
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All right, our conversation today is so important and it was so popular when it was first published that I'm reposting it.
Originally Originally airing more than three years ago, this episode features Professor Andy Galpin.
Andy has been an assistant professor at California State University, Fullerton for more than a decade.
He formally won a Division III National Football Championship while earning his exercise science degree at Linfield College.
He then got his master's in human movement sciences and his PhD in human bioenergetics.
He serves on many advisory boards in the area of human performance, wrote the 2017 book Unplugged, and is a sought -after speaker and high -performance coach. In this conversation, we're focusing on the principles that influence the strength workouts of endurance runners, how we can train power during our strength sessions, common mistakes in this area, how to lessen the risk of injuries during power -oriented training, and his favorite at -home pieces of equipment.
For even more, don't miss our complimentary email training all about strength training for runners at strengthrunning .com slash strength.
Now, without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Professor Andy Galpin.
Andy, thanks for making the time today.
I'm excited you're here.
Yeah, man. Nice to join you.
Excited to talk about some stuff far outside of my field like running and endurance running on top of that.
Yeah, absolutely. So, I would love to start with maybe the academic side of strength training.
You have a really interesting career.
You're a professor.
You teach quite a few courses about the physiology, the principles, and the application of strength training.
So maybe we can start fairly broad here.
I'd love to hear how you'd respond to a runner who asks you, what are my goals in the weight room?
What principles should I be paying attention when I get in there and start lifting weights?
That's a really good question to start with um you know it's actually totally crazy you can't see this at home but jason you can maybe see can you see the the shirt that i'm wearing today yeah it says lhrl cool this was totally random i had drawers of t -shirts right and i just every morning i just reach in and grab a random one when i happen to pull this out i didn't think two seconds about it this shirt says lift heavy run long so it's a it's a little company my friend von started about um basically basically the need for long distance.
And this is mostly ultra marathon folks to, uh, to lift heavy.
So I swore to you, this was like total accident.
I wear the shirt like once every seven months or something.
And, uh, I just happened to grab it out and it leads in perfectly to my answer.
So, um, in terms of distance athletes and endurance athletes in general in the weight room, um, my philosophy is a couple of things.
So the biggest principle is you want to do things in the weight room that you simply can't get when you're running.
And this is generally the approach I take with all sports, but running, it works nicely here.
So if we think about things like, we probably don't need to work on muscular endurance a ton, right?
So I don't need to be doing sets of 15 or 20 or 25 past that.
A little bit of that's okay, but it's just not the biggest need.
The biggest bang for your buck certainly are things like range of motion so obviously running is a very limited range of motion for many of your joints very high for some of your joints ankle knee but very low for hips and and things like that so you'll want to work on range of motion but you're not going to get in your running you're going to want to work on strength training and by that i mean heavy force production so again not sets of eight not sets of 10 like very low end of the spectrum so you want very low volume very heavy resistance you can make an argument for some power development
which would be fine too maybe some speed but a lot of runners are going to get that kind of on the track and they're running if that's what you're into but the last thing that i'll say is it's correction of any movement dysfunction or structural imbalances so if you simply have a overactive, uh, lumbar spine musculature and underactive glutes.
The weight room would be very effective at retraining your glutes to take the load as opposed to your low back.
And that's, what's causing your positional errors.
It could be really nice about increasing strength of particular segments of your torso, which allow your diaphragm to sit in the right spot when you're actually running.
And so you're actually getting more effective endurance capability while also mitigating, again, things like low back pain, um, correcting, correcting like if you're getting any shoulder neck gunk and those are just those are muscular imbalances effectively and uh you can correct a lot of those when you're in so those would be the bent the general categories of what you should be going after when you're you're lifting as an endurance runner i love that andy i i think i'm particularly drawn to your statement that we should be looking at force production i love that phrase and it's something that a lot
of runners runners, especially runners who don't have a lot of experience with sprinters and hanging out with that crew of very specific types of runners.
Can you talk a little bit more about what force production really means and how you would train for it in the weight room?
Because I think a lot of runners, you know, we kind of think of that and we think about, okay, is that just lifting heavy weight?
And how does that relate to our running too?
Yeah. So a handful of really separate but important questions.
When I'm done with this big explanation, remind me of which sections I didn't cover and I'll go back and hit them.
But first and foremost, if you think about force production as going back to middle school physics class, right?
So you remember our very basic principles of physics.
One of them is equal and opposite reaction.
So in other words, if you want to go left, you have to push right.
So the equal opposite reaction is displaying you in the other direction right so if you want to propel yourself either forward you have to push backwards and in this particular case since there's not a wall behind you but there's a floor below you you lean slightly forward you put push backwards at a backwards down angle and that propels you forward so the more force you can put into the ground per stride the farther you go per stride or the less effort you have to actually put into the movement to produce the same result of propel thing forward so the need to have more force production as a runner
is a simple fact that can make you move faster with the same effort or you can move at the same speed with less effort however you want to think about it right so we see they're running velocity or running a car it's going to help pull if let's just give random numbers let's say that with your leg extension on your during your gait the most amount of force you could put to the ground is 10, a number that doesn't make sense.
But let's just say 10, right?
And 10 is allows you to kind of fall forward, catch yourself and propel forward as soon as you need to do in running.
Well, if I can take your maximum force production from 10 to 20, well, now, when you actually run at eight, you're actually only using the amount of effort is only 40 % rather than 80 percent.
Those are exaggerated numbers, but you're getting the point here.
So you could say, boy, I can run that exact same speed at a 40 percent effort instead of an 80 percent effort.
Or I can now cruise at 15 instead of cruising at eight, which means I'm going to run a whole lot faster.
So the ability to produce force in the ground is going to, again, enhance speed or improve efficiency.
The second big piece is force absorption.
So you know probably the The numbers that, you know, when you're running, you're going to be in single stance support almost exclusively, right?
You almost never have two feet on the ground at the same time, unless you're probably not running, right?
Like we would call that walking or something, right?
So you have to have the strength, and you can translate strength into force production, and you can almost use those two things interchangeably.
So you have to have the strength to be able to handle that eccentric load or that landing of your entire body weight onto one foot at a time, now repeated thousands of times over.
Well, again, if your eccentric strength of that one leg, let's say I put you on a 10 -foot box and you stepped off that 10 -foot box and you used both feet to land.
Well, now if I jumped you off that 10 -foot box and used one foot to land, you could see what happens, right?
You You step off that box during the one -legged example, you're going to probably collapse and probably hurt a knee or something else because you're not going to be able to absorb the force.
So again, that's an exaggerated example, but the point is, if you can't handle force absorption on a single leg, you're going to have a big problem when that, instead of landing on a 10 -foot drop, it's a two -foot drop, but again, you're repeating it thousands of times.
So, we need to have eccentric force production or force absorption abilities throughout our entire kinetic chain, mostly lower half, but it does lead to the upper half.
So, if you're very stable through the ankle, knee, and hip, and even low back, which you're what we'll call leaking, so you're not quite strong enough in your upper body to handle that, you're going to get these very small movements in the upper body.
it. Well, no big deal until you repeat this thing thousands and thousands of times and you're doing 50 miles a week and we're doing a 10k here and there.
Well, they'll start to cause problems. It's inefficient and it's going to lead to these overuse injuries.
And this is where we see a lot of like, God, why is my neck killing?
Like, why is my shoulder blade just always irritated when I run this much?
That's when you get all that leaky stuff.
It's because something down below isn't absorbing things properly.
And so you're having this kind of movement compensation.
and it just results in one spot of serious.
So those are the big reasons why you need to be able to produce an absorbed force, even for endurance runners.
Yeah, I love the discussion of how it's both helpful for performance, but then also helpful for keeping runners healthy and being able to absorb those forces and properly mitigate those.
And hearing you talk about how, you know, if this arbitrary strength number goes up, you're essentially running at a much lower effort.
it. The parallels with the run training itself are really fascinating to me, because I'm always telling marathoners, get fast in the 5k, the 10k, other shorter distances first, because then your marathon pace, even an aspirational goal marathon pace seems a lot easier when your shorter distance race times go down.
And I feel like that's a very parallel phenomenon to increasing your strength.
I remember as a doctoral student, I was in the lab and everyone in the lab, the other students and the staff, the faculty, they're all endurance athletes, right?
I'm the only non thing.
So they're all runners basically.
And then when it comes to the winter time, they start to go to the pool and they become swimmers.
And then the summer they'll switch back to cycling.
So it's very, very traditional cycling, swimming, running.
So for years, I spent in this lab sort of, you know, like with all these people trying trying to pull me in to you should run and you should do all this well i remember one of them got excited and she was a decent runner uh probably i want to say like uh she was sub three hour marathoner you know for just a rec runner like decent that's pretty good right um she said hey i want to there's there's okay i'm sorry i forgot the critical part of the story there's another person in the lab and i would say he was uh he would be lumped in with me but But I wouldn't, I wouldn't take him as my family in terms
of he was like a recreational bodybuilder kind of things.
Like he would, he would go to the gym and do like the bro workouts.
And I'm like, I'm a competitive fighter.
I am a competitive Olympic weightlifter, right?
I'm trying for national championships of weightlifting and all this stuff.
And he's just like going to the gym, doing curls and like quarter squats and stuff.
Right. So I'm like, don't call him a lifter.
He's not, that guy is not a lifter.
Right. Like, well, the girl in this guy, like they kind of playfully were just getting back and do it one day.
And she was like, you know, I bet you can't do a marathon. He's like, I bet you can't do a pull -up.
And they're both right, of course, right?
And so they can't come up with this bet.
And they're like, he said, okay, I'll make a deal.
If you can do 26 pull -ups by the end of the year, I'll run a marathon. And she said, okay, okay, deal.
And then he left the room and she ran over to me.
She's like, how am I going to do 26 pull -ups?
And I'm like, can you do one?
one she's like no and i'm like cool so i put her this program together and she came back like a week later i'm like all right what'd you do and she's like i started doing lap pulldowns and assisted pull -ups and i was doing sets of 20 and 25 and i was like timeout that is not the approach she's like what do you mean i'm like i told you you can't do one so we have to give you maximum strength because if you can't have the strength to do one you're never going to do 26 it doesn't matter if you have the endurance to do 100 assisted pull -ups you don't have the strength to do one.
So we need to improve your pure strength as much as we can.
So you can do one. Cool.
And then we'll improve your strength endurance.
And so now you have the maximal strength to do one.
You can physically do that.
Now it's a simple problem of maintaining that strength ability over time.
You can't go the other direction because having more endurance is not going to matter when you simply can't do the act one time.
So she, of course, didn't listen, and then the end of the semester comes and i'm like okay great like what's your going over your pure strength numbers i'm like they didn't budge at all and she's like yeah well now i can do you know blah blah blah blah i'm like can you do one yet she's like nope and i'm like you wasted a semester what are you doing like you're never going to get there well eventually she quits doesn't do it because you realize she's never going to get one done because she's doing nothing but sets of 15 and 20 and 25 and trying to do sets of 30 at very low resistance right 10 10
pound pull downs and things like that.
I'm like, you're never going to get anywhere.
So she learned that lesson pretty quickly.
When it comes to needing strength, you need strength first that will allow you to then build on endurance.
And you're going to have a very difficult time improving strength endurance.
If you don't have the pure strength to do the metric in the first place.
So you have to be able to do the task one time before you can do it 26 six times the second thing is i remember when um you know of course everyone in this community knows that two -hour marathon like that got broke you know depending on how you if you count or if you don't count it i'll let you all debate on that but the point is somebody technically officially ran sub two now so i remember teaching my students when that happened i'm like did you realize how fast that is and if you break it down into not only like a 400 meter dash interval or even in a hundred meter dash they're like holy shit
and i'm like yeah so first of all don't ever think these these elite marathoners are slow like there's not a single thing about them that is slow they are you're talking like easily they could do sub 60 second 400 meter dashes and almost like i don't remember what the numbers were but it's like a 63 or second 400 dash repeated 100 times like something like that right so we're like if you think these are slow every single one of these marathoners who are going sub 230 are going to torch all of you in a 200 meter dash like they're going to bury you most likely unless you're a very very high level
sprinter so they had to get fast first um it didn't matter if they could run an ultra marathon if they can't run a 65 second 400 dash they're never going to get close to those records in the marathon because they're not going to be fast enough yeah for sure i love that example because it's so true you know when you break down some of these really fast performances into you know very short distances and then you know this is exactly why you go to a major marathon and they have those huge treadmills where you can see how long you can run at kipchoge's you know world record marathon pace and most
people can only run it for a couple seconds before they get thrown off the back totally totally i didn't know they had those but yeah that's great yeah it's it's a great example of that phenomenon that, look, if you want to be fast in any event, you pretty much have to be fast in all the other events as well.
And you're going to have these equivalent performances across all of them.
And I'd love to talk more about long -term adaptations.
This is something that I think is part of your research. And I'm just curious if there are long -term adaptations to strength training that might be different than some of the short to medium term adaptations.
So in other words, if a runner starts lifting weights today, what might they experience in one to six months and what might they experience in two to three years?
Yeah, okay. When you look at physiology, some things are extremely transient and some things are very chronic.
So if you look at the transient ones, what you will notice are You might feel faster within a couple of days.
That is like you might feel a difference in force production in a few weeks.
So, in fact, if we actually looked and measured you on a force plate, we can see changes in, say, peak vertical jump, peak strength, certainly within a month.
And those are very real changes.
And depending on the athlete, you can feel those again in a couple of weeks.
actual structural changes take a far longer time so the building of muscle okay that can happen in the first four weeks if you're fairly untrained and if your volume is low and your calories are high if you're burning a bunch of energy though it's going to take you probably several months to really put on measurable and noticeable amounts of muscle mass especially in the lower body right if you come in and you start doing some shoulder work and some tricep kickbacks you You might notice your tricep popping pretty quickly, but that's because you're not really burning much gas in the tricep on your
runs. You're trying to add some mass to your quads, and you're still putting 45 miles in a week, which is not even a crazy number.
I don't know what the average listener here, what do you think the average listener is doing for week mileage?
Is 50 probably a good starting place?
That might be a little aggressive.
I would say probably the average runner is probably running anywhere between 20 and 40 miles a week.
okay okay so if you're doing 20 to 40 uh and you're trying to put on a lot of muscle mass your lower backs you better expect that to take several months or you better expect to put a lot of calories in that's just gonna happen because you kind of have two competing interests in terms of energy balance right so the growth of muscle takes excessive energy but if you're using all that energy to run your mileage there's just no extra fuel left to build to support the building it.
So that's going to take a long time.
Again, you're probably looking at several months.
Even further down the line, you have things like conversion of fiber type.
So you have metabolic changes within each muscle cell that can give it more mitochondria, can give it more phosphocreatine, can make the connection stronger so that it produces more force independent of growth.
So the muscles can produce more force without getting any bigger.
They just get more barf efficient is one way to think about it.
Those can probably go to take a little bit longer.
You get outside of the muscle and you start looking at the connective tissue or even the connective tissue within the muscle fibers.
And then you start going to the tendons and ligaments.
Now you're probably talking several years before the adaptations are really going to be cemented.
And those, those things don't have a lot of blood or any blood flow.
So adaptations take a long time.
Muscle is very plastic.
So it responds almost within seconds.
genetically and molecularly, but adaptations take days to weeks to months, uh, tissue.
It's going to be a lot longer.
Um, then you, the last one, of course, is bone.
So bone will take a very long time.
And you'll certainly see that over many, many years, runners will have high bone density in their legs, tend to be low bone density in the upper body.
Not always, but it can be.
So your adaptations are going to run the gamut of minutes to years.
Yeah. And I think the the adaptations for bone tissue are particularly attractive to runners because of our risk of stress fractures and stress reactions, especially if we're pushing the envelope with the intensity or the volume of our run training.
And, you know, strength training is one of those things that I think is one of the better strategies for addressing potential future bone injuries that runners might come down with.
Would you say that at what point do those adaptations start to be realized?
I think it's one of the last adaptations to really happen, but it's also one of those things that can be very protective.
So I'm curious, you know, is it a couple months?
Is it six months, 12 months?
How does that work?
It's going to be hard to pin a number on that inside of that range because there's it's multifactorial right it's going to depend on total stress load it's going to depend on caloric intake it's going to depend on hormonal milieu how healthy your internal physiology is your sleep quality all that stuff so i think you ballparked it but i couldn't differentiate you any closer than that probably a good lesson in taking care of your stress levels and making sure you're sleeping a lot and all of of those things that are going to help you better adapt to your training, no matter if it's strength or running?
Yeah. So think about it this way.
One of the metrics we run on all of our athletes is their adaptability score.
So this is their ability to put in an insult, like a training stimulus or something, and then get a response.
And in our case, that means something's better now, right?
For running purposes.
Well, that's a number you can calculate your adaptability score.
If you You've run a bunch of internal physiology metrics, but really it comes down to the way we branch it is you have hidden and you have visible stressors.
You take those two things, you combine them together, you divide that by your recovery capacity.
And any sides of these equations can alter your total adaptability.
So if your recovery capacity is extremely high, then you can handle, say, poor sleep a little bit better.
You can handle maybe higher training volume.
volume. You can handle, maybe you've got some lower testosterone.
Maybe you've got some sort of parasite that's going on that you don't even really realize.
You've got some heavy metal toxicity, all these things that would drag you down, but your recovery capacity is so high, you're still getting adaptation.
Now, if total stress gets too low, then there's no driver of adaptation.
And so you don't get anything, right?
So there's no adaptability there.
So what you want to make sure is that your stress load is coming from the exact right things.
It's coming from, you don't want them coming from these HIT stressors.
So micronutrient deficiency.
Yeah, you've got white blood cells in your urine.
You've got all these things going on that you may not even feel.
They tend to be asymptomatic a lot of the time, but they're adding to your stress bucket.
So when you run 20 miles a week, you're actually only recovering for that 20 because half of your stress load is coming from things you don't even realize, where you could, if you remove those hidden stressors, maybe you could do 40 miles a week and feel the exact same.
So your recovery capacity could handle 40 and therefore your adaptation.
Sorry, because the higher the stress, the higher the adaptation.
But if you're getting blocked by other stressors that are filling up your stress bucket too quickly, and the stress is coming from that and not training, the adaptations are not coming from training, which is exactly what you're looking for.
So you want non -specific stress down high specific stress, and then high recovery.
That's how you get your maximum adaptation.
So you just have to look at that entire circle.
From the visible stressor side, it is the stuff that we talk about, right?
It is body composition.
It is stress, psychological stress.
It is emotional stress.
It is sleep stress.
It is diet quality.
It is all these things you see and feel, and you probably know better about.
you don't know much about the hidden stressor side you have to have somebody like me that can run your saliva and urine and stool and blood and run all your analytics in the background right and figure out what's happening internally that you may or might not even have symptoms of but you for sure know the hidden or the visible ones there's almost no there's no secrets on that for the most part so if you want to really maximize your performance and i have to go to spend a ton of money on labs and stuff make sure you dial those visible stressors in that way your training stressors can be the only
stressors coming in your recovery capacity goes up if you can and then your total adaptations get there and that's that's honestly that's the difference between people who will say you have a friend and you both go in the exact same running program and your friend is just just getting better and better and you're like what the hell and you're just spinning your wheels the same spot or you're getting worse it's all it comes down to is either that their recovery capacity is higher.
They've got their visible stressors under control better than you do.
Or if not, if you're the type where you're like, dude, my friend eats like shit, doesn't ever sleep and is still getting better than me.
Well, then it's almost a guaranteed their hidden stressors are fantastic and yours are probably in the tank or something on the recovery side.
So yeah, that's how you control getting the most adaptation, which you're looking for.
Yeah, I love that because I think it's almost just as important as the training that we're doing.
Because if you're not recovering properly, and if you have too many other stressors in your life, you know, the training that you're doing isn't going to be doing all of those beneficial things that you really want it to be doing.
And I frequently tell my athletes, you know, let's not schedule that big goal marathon, when, you know, you might be going through some relationship troubles, and you're switching jobs, and you have all these other things going on in your life, because your body has a hard time differentiating between a lot of of different types of stresses.
And it can certainly be challenging to to do it all, you know, to have the stress in your training life, the stress in your personal life, your professional life, something has to break at a certain point.
And it's usually it's usually the runner that breaks at that point.
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Andy, I'd love to transition a little bit and talk about the differences between strength and power, which I know is something that is part of your work and I think is a really attractive idea.
Why would a runner care about this distinction?
And can you talk a little bit more about the two different concepts?
Yep. So basic physics of force production, again, we can use force and strength interchangeably here, is mass times acceleration.
acceleration. And if you look at power, power is strength multiplied by velocity.
And so what you can say is strength is a part of power, but power is not necessarily a part of strength.
So one can be powerful.
It'd be tough to be powerful and super weak though, right?
You can a little bit, but you can be very strong and not very powerful.
It's not, it's not always the same.
So here's the differentiation.
Two key components to power, strength and velocity.
So one can be extremely powerful with one of three strategies.
So you can either be, I think I said this backwards a second ago, by the way, but this will clarify.
So if you want to be powerful, you can either be really, really, really, really strong.
You can be extremely fast, or you can have some sort of combination of strength and power.
And typically what we see happen is those are the most powerful individuals who have some minimal amount of strength and some minimal amount of velocity.
And here's a couple of examples.
If you had to stand in front of me and I got to throw something at you and hit you in the face with it, and I let you choose the item, right?
You could choose a pencil, right?
You could choose a 1 ,000 -pound boulder, or you could choose a baseball, and I get to throw all three of those objects as hard as I possibly can at your face.
you would probably choose the baseball as your last option that's for sure going to do the most damage because the blossom bound boulder i'm probably going to be able to move it none right if anything it's going to move very slowly there'll be a ton of force behind it there'll be a ton of momentum it's just there's just no velocity there so it won't be powerful and won't be impactful because the velocity is way too low so that represents way down that strength end of the spectrum the pencil is the opposite right so the pencil will fly fast there's no mass behind it there's no force to it won't
be that damaging it'll sting a little bit but assuming it does like the pokey end doesn't stab you in the eye and you know all that stuff so that's enough the velocity the baseball is so damaging because it has a lot more mass than the pencil but way less mass than the boulder but i can throw it at almost the same same speed as I can the pencil.
So the velocity is really high.
It has enough mass, and it starts to become extremely powerful and extremely damaging.
So differentiating then strength training, in fact, I'll just add to your question.
It's really the difference between strength, velocity, and power.
And those are the three things that you need to bracket and understand because that's what's going to help you figure out what do you need to move for.
So if you need to overcome inertia, this is an acceleration issue.
So like 100 meter dash individual, they need to train both acceleration and peak velocity.
A 200 meter dash person needs to train acceleration, but even more so peak velocity, because in 100 meter dash, you're not going to run a peak velocity that much, right?
It's still heavily involved with acceleration.
acceleration but as you start getting to 200 okay now it's really peak velocity and it's maintaining peak velocity 400 it's less about acceleration because the start isn't as critical still critical but not as critical as it is for the 100 meter dash it's now really about peak velocity now we're getting an endurance of velocity for sure you go all the way out to a marathon okay well acceleration is not that big a deal like you're going to walk off the starting line basically who cares it's what velocity you can maintain over endurance right so to come back to all that why that all matters is if you're
thinking about optimizing performance for a marathon or half marathon or something you start to think well i'm not really moving mass differently it's just mere body weight i don't need to worry about a ton of acceleration i need to worry about peak velocity though um so that didn't expect me if i move my peak velocity my power will go up but i have to be able to move that velocity at the at the exact same mass and if i start to lose mass moving abilities because i've hedged too far for peak velocity my power goes down and now my running performance goes down so we have to blend pure strength but obviously
you don't need to have power lifter or weight lifter strength because you don't need to maximize force production but you need enough force production to where it doesn't you're not so weak you can't move the object anymore you can't handle the force load so you put that together Now you start to get peak power adaptations.
So if you want to train for all of these things, the best way is starting at the end of the spectrum over here.
Peak velocity, by definition, this is all what's called force velocity curve, by the way.
So peak velocity requires the least amount of load possible.
This is nothing, this is not not, you know, bench pressing at 30%.
This is not the squats.
This is 100 % max speed.
I like even assisted or overload.
So this is jumping, vertical jump training, where we're using a band to pull you up in the air.
So you jump higher than you could ever jump.
This jumping on a trampoline, this is running, not the parachute behind you that's dragging or a sled that you're dragging.
This is a parachute in front of you that's pulling you forward. This This is a band that's pulling you.
This is running downhill at a 2 % decline.
So you're learning to go faster than you can possibly move right now.
This is 10 % of your training, right?
15%, small number, but you're working on peak velocity right there.
Check mark there. Now we start moving down the force velocity curve and we say, okay, now I want to work on acceleration.
This is overcoming inertia.
This is going to help that force production.
Remember, because mass times acceleration is force production.
So peak velocity is checked off.
Acceleration can now be things like dragging a sled because it's a light load.
It's still very powerful, but there's a little bit of inertia, a little bit of weight to overcome.
And so you're going to have to accelerate that thing.
This could be jump squats.
This could be plyometric.
This could be medicine ball throws.
rows all these things have a low load a high power production and they're oftentimes requiring you to overcome something quickly which is acceleration then you finish that the third piece here third of four so we peak velocity with an acceleration third piece is probably peak power which is somewhere in between call this at like 30 to 60 percent of your max strength okay as fast as you can so now you are talking about things like um you know a jump squat potentially this could be um some heavy really heavy medicine ball stuff this could be this is where your olympic lifts come in this is kettlebell
snatch and kettlebell cleans and or barbell dumps these are heavy loads you're not moving super fast but the intent is really high but it's it's a kind of a heavy loop that's going to be your typically your best peak power and the fourth one is going going all the way to the other end of the spectrum and disregarding speed uh not intent but actual speed and hedging towards max force production so this is that this is your you know heavy as you can for a set of two or three this is really heavy pull -ups this is deadlifts and rdls and hip thrusts and split squats and bent rows and pull -ups and things
like that you know for 90 90 plus percent of your one rep max so you've hit kind of every part of that force velocity curve and by the way you can do all that in the same training session or that could be done in two training sessions per week right so you could come in and do a little bit of over speed stuff do some of that kind of like 50 one rep max power stuff in a day that might be it a 30 minute workout well the next day you come in and you might do the other two so the peak force production and acceleration or something like that so these don't have to be extremely long things and they
could all be combined in the same day in fact we'll typically do that a lot of our athletes is you'll just come in you'll do the peak velocity stuff once you're thoroughly warmed up you do the acceleration stuff you'll do the heavy power stuff then you'll do the heavy strength stuff you do all four you know one or two exercises each three four sets three four reps each and then gather so they're pretty short workouts um so that would be the training across the entire force velocity curve you do that you're going to be you're going to be really good spot to have all the physiological abilities
that one would need uh to transmit onto the paper i love it you've given us this outline of how to create a speedy super athlete and i hope i hope some of our listeners take this into consideration and start building this into their programs you can do this before your runs too so you know if you're going to go out and you say you got a 25 minute run.
A lot of just get 10 minutes, get warmed up, do 15 minutes of the power stuff and then go on your run.
Like it doesn't have to be this.
Like I got to add three workouts a week, pick one of those things to do for 10 minutes before your run four days a week, and then you're done.
That's it. Yeah. I think the fact that this kind of work doesn't take too much extra time is really attractive, especially for, you know, all of us adult runners who, you know, we're not being paid by the big shoe companies to train.
so we have to fit this in around our otherwise busy lives but i think one of the concerns that a lot of runners have including me sometimes is that a lot of this is much more risky from an injury perspective than just going out for our easy you know three four five mile run and i think that fear of injuries is very real how would you consult an athlete who who might be afraid of getting hurt doing you know these assisted types of sprints or you know very heavy weight lifting things that they might not have too much experience with yep a handful of things uh always start slower than you think and progress
slower than you think fine mitigate your risk right um stay within movement patterns you're extremely comfortable if you don't have a lot of training and squatting don't squat and don't go all the way down right that's that you should be able to get there that's the normal that's the best position for sure but don't do it um stay with a a closed system so start with a machine start with the machine leg press fine is it as good as a squat or no not even close but it's it's much easier to accomplish so stay with a you know know machine lat pull down a machine leg press maybe that's it start with a split
squat uh your rear foot elevated split squats on a you know 12 inch box and don't put your back leg up super high and you know very low range of motion start with the hip thrust these are very simple movements uh bench press bent row like these things are are pretty standard so that would be my number one is is only start um with the movements that are less technically demanding right um start slower give it some tolerance to build up and then just progress you know really really slowly so those would be my biggest things that the other ones are i'd say they're not as risky as you think um you're
running and you're landing on one foot it the entire time so why do you think uh and plus many of you can't jump very high anyways so like a vertical jump what do you get what are you expecting to happen here like don't jump off a 10 -foot box but just do your vertical jump and slam a ball like this is not particularly risky so choose the exercises that are just uh um they're not they don't terrify you as much i guess the recommendation and then you can just build that catalog over time but something is better better than nothing.
So 10 minutes a day, twice a week is going to be better than zero minutes a day.
And that's enough, right?
Again, you get that six months, that stuff will start to matter.
And I've always found that just going into the gym or other area where you're going to be doing some of this kind of work with a mindset of curiosity, that you're just going to play with some of these movements, that it doesn't have to go perfectly, you don't have to perform at some level, you know, you're not trying to reach some arbitrary number on the vertical jump test or deadlift, 2X your body weight, whatever it might be.
You can just get in there and experience the movements, experience the exercises themselves.
Let's not make it super hard. And then you can always build from that very simple foundation that you've built.
And just having fun with it, being curious, trying it out with some good faith humor, I think, especially when runners are lifting heavy weights or throwing medicine balls around, we've got to be able to laugh at ourselves a little bit, especially if we're doing it in split leg short short yeah so there's a couple of things like actually you just maybe think about number one is you can always start with medicine balls it's not going to give you a lot of force production but it gives you some very hard to get hurt throwing a medicine ball in the air slamming at the ground throwing a horizontal
like these are you know pretty safe the other thing to think about is you you can do isometrics now it's it's not the best but you can just get yourself in a comfortable position, whatever you think that is, and just hold it.
Like you're going to see the neurons turn on very quickly.
So instead of worrying about trying to go through the entire range of motion, just hold the position.
Two, three, four, five seconds, set it down, reset, get comfortable again, hold it.
That's a pretty good stimulus actually.
Yeah, this is great because I think what I'm learning is that it really doesn't matter your your experience level, or your ability, you can get started with some variation of strength training and still get a very effective stimulus.
And no matter where you're starting, there's always somewhere to go from there.
You can always build, you can always progress and move on to a more advanced or complicated version of it.
Now, Andy, what about for the runner who might not really have access to a gym or a well -stocked weight room?
How can you accomplish some of these goals of strength training that we've been discussing if you're at home and you don't really have too much equipment so all you really need is like theoretically a one to two kettlebells would be sufficient if you throw in a medicine ball that's great too but plyometrics are pretty darn effective and that just takes your body weight a spot the land so those would be places to go so you couple those on with your ability to you know have a little bit of resistance like like some bands and a kettlebell there you go that's that's what i do so body weight bands
and like kettlebells left medicine ball or even uh ideally a bow flex or a power blocks where you can kind of interchangeable weight you know so it's a single dumbbell that can go from five to 90 pounds something like that takes up you know this much space that'd be ideal but those those are enough to get a lot of people very far i love it i mean you can start where you're at that you don't need a lot of equipment.
And we can work on skills that typically distance runners tend to ignore.
And so this is all very encouraging for me, as someone who's, I would rather be running than lifting weights, but I recognize the value of it for my running.
So I do it to help enable me to keep doing what I love, which is running.
And I think this is a very attractive idea for a lot of runners.
So Andy, thanks so much for sharing your expertise with us today.
is there anything about strength training and power development for endurance runners that i might have missed that you'd like to add before we wrap i don't think so uh one thing i did mention that i maybe i want to emphasize just a touch more is the need for range of motion through all your joints because running is so myopic and cycling the same thing you tend to to get very high stress loads in the exact same position right over and over and over again so a major need in those groups is just to move in different ways and so I would even say okay strength training but throwing the strength training
out yoga is like a better step up but still it's like kind of bad you need general movement right so you need to be able to move I would even say something like an animal flow is better or something like that where you're just moving in different positions and you're rotating and your hip is not the same exact alignment as your knee and your foot every single second of the day right and your knee can go in this direction and your ankle can rotate and invert and revert and just moves all around i think that's a probably a pretty it's one of the benefits of full range motion strength training but if you're
not comfortable with those ones at least get some of those other movement patterns in so a turkish get up is fantastic right these structural movements like that upside down upside down kettlebell block farmers carries things like this um these actually this is a good answer going back these are some unbelievably effective movement patterns uh wheelbarrow uh farmers carries you don't need like this point you will get a huge stimulus and there's no technical demand at all Oh, just stand up, like keep your posture and carry two dumbbells.
We're talking about drag, sled drags, frontwards and backwards, sled push, front and back.
These are really easy to recover from and very, very, very effective for a lot of things.
So I'd say in general, don't forget about those benefits of our side of the world for your side of the athletes.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I think one of the values of doing a lot of of this type of strength training is just the movements themselves.
Yeah, you're going to get stronger.
Sure, you're going to build some power, and that's really going to help with your performances in a race and your running economy.
But a lot of the injury prevention benefits of strength training do tend to come from the varied movements and the coordination that comes out of practicing those, and really just getting out of the same habit of movement that you get in as a distance runner.
And I know that when I'm personally, much more consistent with the weight training, the dynamic flexibility, warm up routines that we're doing, you know, the form drills, you know, if I'm doing more trail running, there's so many different ways of building in a little bit of extra movement into the training.
And if you haven't started doing all that stuff, then you'll notice a huge difference once you do for sure.
Agreed. All right, Andy.
I so appreciate your time.
If folks want to learn a little bit more about you and your work, is there somewhere they can go online to check that out?
Yeah. Instagram and Twitter are the places I'm most active.
So it's just Dr. Andy Galpin.
So D -R, Andy Galpin.
And then my YouTube page, of course, you mentioned at the beginning, I teach graduate and senior level courses in sports nutrition and strength training, all this stuff.
And all those lectures are up on YouTube for free in five minute, 25 and 55 minute versions, theoretically.
So if you want a little taste or a morsel, or if you want the whole course, those are all up there.
So those are the best places.
Oh, that's awesome.
And we'll include links to all of those resources in the show notes on Strength Running.
But Andy, thanks for being here.
My pleasure. What an episode.
Thank you so much for listening and being part of our community here.
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