Surely the notion of including a weightlifting or resistance training routine in a programme for athletes where weight (or a lack thereof) is fundamental for maximising performance, is laughable.

Ironically the opposite is true. Strength training, when done properly doesn’t make you heavier or increase the size of your muscles, and therefore overall weight, but instead teaches your body to recruit (innervate) more muscle fibres and hence become stronger.

Let me use this analogy involving an eight-person rowing boat team where only two rowers are working. If you can recruit more rowers to work rather than making those two rowers bigger (and heavier) you will increase the pulling power of that team, in theory by double.

Where runners, especially endurance runners are concerned the stronger your body is, the more physical stress it can handle, the more efficient your running becomes (you become faster) and the chances of injury are greatly reduced. In order to achieve this we essentially pull and push very heavy things, for only a few repetitions (no more than five) but with plenty of rest in between each set.

It is not, however as simple as picking up Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopaedia of Bodybuilding and repping out huge quantities of heavy exercises. A strength training programme needs to consider the following:

1. Exercise choice - exercises that target a large proportion of muscle groups are best for strength adaptations. The greater the stress loaded onto the body, the greater the strength adaptations will be. Compound movements such as deadlifts, back squats, bench press and pull ups form the basis of many a successful strength programme.
2. Rep range - think of a sliding scale of effort, where a weight so heavy that you can only lift it once has the greatest strength stimulus but also the highest risk of injury. If the weight is so light that you can repeat the movement 30 times then the risk of injury is very low but the strength adaptations will be minimal (unless you are a complete beginner where any stimulus will be of benefit for a limited time).
   
   Initially loading the body moderately and practising good form with relatively light resistance will help prepare you for heavier loads, but also help reduce the risk of injuring yourself. A light, warm up set of 10 repetitions (reps) will set you up nicely for a couple more sets (rounds) of 5 reps with heavier loads.
3. Progressive overload - practice with the lighter loads described in point 2 above for 4 - 5 weeks, before slowly adding progressively more weight over the coming months. Once your body becomes used to these potentially new movement patterns you can start to incrementally increase the resistance you use. Avoid low resistance, high rep, cardio-based movements.
4. Rest - for strength training, we don’t want to be limited by our cardio-vascular system, and we need time for our neuro-muscular system to recover. We are deliberately trying to recruit (innervate) as many muscle fibres as possible, and we can not achieve this properly if we are fatigued. The hardest part of strength training is getting adequate rest between each set of movements, but adequate time for recovery between sets is vital in order that we can keep challenging the body with heavier loads. Ideally we want 3-5 minutes rest between each set.
5. Volume - this is the total amount of work that we do ie sets x reps. So if we have 2 warm up sets followed by 3 working (heavier) sets our total volume might look something like this:
   
   Set 1: 10 reps at 60% max weight + 2 minutes rest (warm up)
   Set 2: 8 reps at 75% max weight + 3 minutes rest (warm up)
   Set 3: 5 reps at 85% max weight + 3 minutes rest (working)
   Set 4: 5 reps at 95 % max weight + 4 minutes rest
   Set 5: 3-5 reps at 100% max weight + 5 minutes rest
   
   So, you would be looking at approximately 30+ movements over about 20 minutes. If you did this for all four movements described earlier, your total training volume would be around 120 movements over 20 sets, lasting approximately 1hr 20 mins.
6. Frequency - ideally 2-3 strength sessions a week can be achieved, but realistically one session near the beginning of your training week is easy to fit into most athletes’ training programme. If performed correctly, strength training should have little or no interference effect on the rest of your week’s training (we will cover this in a later article).
7. Instability - unilateral movement (balancing on one leg) should also form a small part of your strength programme to help with your proprioception, coordination and balance. This could be in the form of lunge variations, step up variations, side plank variations, single leg calf raises etc
8. Plyometrics - a type of exercise training that uses speed and force of different movements to build muscle power. Plyometric training also increases tendon stiffness, which allows for greater storage and release of elastic energy and therefore less work from the muscles. Over time during an endurance type event, this increased reliance on ‘free’ tendon energy delays the onset of muscular fatigue.

In conclusion: strength training is a fantastic way of helping increase your overall strength, power and speed, whilst helping reduce the chance of picking up an injury. Therefore it should form part of your training programme.

Food for thought: Mo Farrah used to squat with 90kg on his shoulders and he only weighed 60kg!!