Hi,
I run long distance 5-6 times a week and I also lift. I was wondering if you guys have some perspectives on how it should be done, or how you do it if you are active at both sports. Thanks in advance:)
Sincerely,
JOE:)
It depends on what your goals are. Are you trying to gain size or are you a competitive runner who wants to increase distance or reduce your times? How long are the runs you do, middle or long distance? T
These two goals are pretty much opposed to each other, they will cancel each other out if you try to do both at the same time plus they would likely cause you to overtrain. This is because on the lifting side of things you are telling your body to use mostly the fast twitch muscle fibres and to put all your effort into a short period of time. When you run for a long distance you are using the slow twitch fibres and telling your body to use energy over a long period of time. Your CNS will end up getting all confused and most likely crash and burn! The other problem is that for long distance endurance activities your body will burn muscle preferentially to fat as it is easier to convert to energy, and the body will always try to adapt to make the task you are doing easier, in this case it will do the easiest thing possible to lighten the load it has to carry over a long distance, hence why so many runners are skinny!
If you are focused on running you should probably lift no more than twice per week, and even then the parameters that you use should be conducive to preventing overtraining and to helping you run faster. There is an old article here called “Gym To Road”, which was written for triathletes wanting to use weights to prepare for their season. You could adapt this to your running program.
If you want to put on muscle you need to cut back on the running and change it to shorter, more intense running sessions such as interval training or hill sprints. This will cause the body to increase the use of fast twitch fibres and stop confusing your CNS for when you do heavy weight training. See CT’s “Running Man” article for more info on this. If you want to maintain more endurance for when you go back to long distance running I would focus more on 400m running, you maintain great endurance, still cover a fair bit of distance, but you won’t lose muscle.
Sorry for the long post, hope this helps!
Ben
Quantify “long distance.” This phrase means waaaay different things to members of this site.
And while you’re at it, tell us what your goals are (as bg100 mentioned). Your question is WAY too broad to answer. Do you enjoy running for the sake of running or do you compete? Do you like lifting to help with sprints, etc. or are you just trying to look decent?
There are many great articles on lifting and running on this site. For example (based on absolutely no knowlege of your goals),
http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=459414
Also, search on HIIT.