Deeper dive into Core and Strength Routines

What should you be doing?

One of the questions I got a couple weeks ago was around what core and/or strength workouts that I do as part of my running.  I’m going to go into a bit more detail here.  Give you a flavor of how my coach and I mix it in.

At the highest level you need to be strong to execute well as an athlete.  Whether you’re a runner, a triathlete, a golfer or a NASCAR driver – you’ll find the pros all have conditioning routines to stay strong.  If you don’t consciously work on staying strong you run the risk of becoming unbalanced in your chosen discipline.  This can lead to poor performance and injuries.

For people like you and I who are not professionals, we still need to stay strong and balanced for the same reasons.  The older you get the more important it becomes to work some core and strength work in.  As you get older you naturally start to lose muscle mass and if you’re unbalanced this will accelerate.

Like any other discipline if you’ve never done any strengthening as part of your routine you’ll see big benefits up front.  As you build it into part of your practice it will help hold the line against imbalance and strength loss over time.

How much, how long and how intense your strength routine depends on where you are and what your goals and life balance guidelines are.  Like everything else you can go crazy.  If you want to be a cross-fit pro it can take over your life.  For me it’s just part of my routine, more of a maintenance activity that allows me to enjoy my chosen sports.

Currently, because of where I am in my life, and in my training cycle – i.e. I’m older and in a base-building holding pattern right now – I’m running 30-something miles in four runs a week.  The other 3 days are 2 days of core/strength/flexibility and 1 day of rest.

If I was moving into a race specific training cycle I’d drop that rest day and would be getting up into the 40’s of miles per week, but I’d still have those two core/strength/flexibility days.

Endurance athletes – like me – don’t need to be super muscular or fast or power-strong.  Therefor I’m going to avoid fast twitch exercises like box jumps, clean and jerk or burpees. I’m going to focus on lean muscle, mostly bodyweight, core exercises.

That being said, I may make a short term foray into heavier weights or cross-fit type workouts if I’m training for some sort of obstacle race or between training cycles.  Or even just to have something different and break up the routine.

But my core (pun intended) focus for running is a strong and lean core. You can break this into muscle groups.  You’ve got your abs – lower back – upper glutes – hips region which is your core.  Basically draw color in everything between your sternum and your thighs.  The doesn’t include your arms and shoulder and it doesn’t include your legs.  Everything else.

To strengthen this core you can do many types of exercises.  Most of these don’t even require weights or resistance.  Any kind of situp, crunch, leg-lift, leg raise, v-ups, twists, superman’s, bicycles, flutter kicks, bridges and planks.  All of those work this core area.   Pick 10 of those exercises and string them together in a workout.  Try 30 seconds or 45 seconds or 60 seconds.  Cycle through it 3 times.  That will take you 45 minutes and you will be sore for a week.

If you have an exercise ball, there is a whole set of variations you can use that for.

You can search YouTube for 30-minute core workout and find something that suits you.

I’ll do some sort of abs/core workout on one of my two days.  The other day will be more arms and shoulders.  I typically don’t do legs because I’m running 4 days a week already.  I might do squats or lunges because these are basically core exercises if you do it right.

For shoulders and arms it helps if you have a set of dumbbells but it’s not a drop-dead requirement.  You don’t need a gym or even a bench. You can use your exercise ball for any of the seated exercises.  I use a set of 15-pound dumbbells for this stuff.  Can I lift more than that?  Yes.  But that’s not the point.  I’m going for lean fitness not bulk or strength.

With the light dumbbells I can do the exercises fast and do 15 or 20 reps. You get to choose from all the common chest, arm and back exercises.  Bench press, center press and flys – you can do all of these with dumbbells on the exercise ball.   Those are all chest exercises.

Shoulder press, shrugs, front raise, lateral raise, standing row, bent over row are all shoulder and back exercises.  You can do all of these with light dumbbells.  Again fast sets of 15 or more.

Curls, triceps kickbacks, triceps curls, wrist curls, single arm curls – these are all arm exercises and can be done standing or sitting on the exercise ball.

If you don’t have weights there are free-form exercises, pushups, pullups, burpees, and chair dips for example that you can do to work the same chest, arm and back muscle groups.

You can search on YouTube for any of these exercises and get a tutorial on how to do them.

Here’s how you string it all together.  There are probably 100 variants of all the different exercises.  Find 10 or so core exercises that nicely balance each other, i.e. they work different aspects of the same muscle group like a crunch and an oblique crunch, and string them together into a core day.

Do the same for chest, arms, shoulder and back and string those together into that day.  All you’re trying to do is prevent muscles loss here so don’t worry about not doing enough.  If you have time to hit those 2 days a week you’ll get 80% of the benefit.

Finally, you can substitute a good core yoga routine for these workouts.  Or you can do both.  What I like about yoga is it is very functional.  It represents and builds strength in movements you are doing every day – like bending over to pick something up, or getting up from a chair.  Yoga has a nice combination of strength, flexibility and balance.

Again, YouTube is your friend.  You can search for ‘Yoga for Runners’ or any other qualifier and get routines that you’ll like.  Some of Bonnie Kissinger’s old 1-hour core strength yoga sessions are hard workouts.  As are the yoga sessions from Yoga with Adrienne.  I like these because they are not out of reach for non-yoga people.

It’s not hard to work this strength training into your weekly cycle.  It helps to have 4 or 5 variants of the different forms of workout so you can mix and match.  It also helps that most of these workouts are designed as multi-set routines.  Meaning you do these 10 exercise 3 times.  This way if you only have 20 minutes you can still do one set aggressively and get benefit from it.  Or do 2 sets plus a 20 minute yoga.

Once you learn the routines you can mix and match, work them into your weekly schedule and adjust as needed.