No-Excuses Weight Training for Track and Field

One thing that will almost always fall to the wayside in track and field, especially for distance runners and female athletes, is strength training.  For the most part, distance runners don't go to the weight room because they feel intimidated by the football players or because other sports have priority over the weights and girls rarely have access either way.  Then on the other hand coaches tend to decide that more running is more of a benefit to the athlete than using that time to life weights, and if you are talking about lifting for hypertophy (or in other words, gain in muscle size) you may be right, but I'm not.  I'm talking about getting in the work necessary when running is the focus, but the benefits of ancillary training can't be ignored.  Take a look at Meb here; he isn't big by any standards, but you can tell he takes strength training seriously.

Track athletes need to focus on the entire body.  It may seem counter intuitive, but you need to train your upper body as much as the lower body.  Sure, you want strong legs and a great torso, but remember you need strength in the upper body to maintain posture and help establish your presence in tight packs in the distance races.  Also, none of this training has to an overwhelming amount of time.  Even as little as 5 minutes a day will do far more than nothing.  The fact is that strength training means you are more resistant to injury, you can handle more training, and you are more powerful with each step.  During running, the body feels ground reaction forces equal to several times the runners body weight, so a weak body will not hold up well to extensive training.

So this brings us back to the situation where you don't have a weight room, nor do you have much time to train with weights.  Well two days of the week you could do a core routine that includes planks, Australian crawls, pedestals, mountain climbers, bridges, etc.  You can easily get the work you need with just those exercises, but throw in med ball throws, Russian twists and more if you feel the need to get extra work in.

Now if you are still thinking you don't have the time or space to do this, I want to mention that there is a local team from an all girls school that finds a way to get it done.  They obviously can't get into the weight room at school, if they even have one, but the coaches bring out 3 standard bench press/squat bars to the track each day and the girls do squats and snatches and other exercises right there on the side of the track.  The moral of the story is that you can do it if you really want to.

So finally you can add lunges, squats, pushups, dips, calf raises and other body weight exercises if you don't feel like being over zealous and bringing weight training equipment to your practice.  The key is get a baseline strength training program started for your team which will pay dividends sooner rather than later.