RTTC #230 What Makes You Faster Quicker Running or Strength?

In this episode of Running to the Castle, Dr. Ali tackles one of the most common questions she hears from slow and back-of-the-pack runners: what actually makes you faster: running more, strength training, or speed work? 

She breaks down the "gray zone," the frustrating middle ground where runners feel exhausted all the time but never seem to improve, and explains why the right answer depends entirely on where you are in your running journey. 

Dr. Ali also shares a simple standing test to figure out whether your legs need more strength work or more speed practice, and why pain is never a reliable measure of whether a workout is working. 

By the end, you'll understand why sequencing strength and speed correctly, instead of trying to do everything at once, is the real key to getting faster.

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  Hi, I'm Dr. Ali
  I've been running for 15+ years and been in the rehab space since 2012 when I earned my Doctor of Physical Therapy Degree. I get injury prone runDisney runners across the finish line without feeling broken.

Transcript

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Hey, how's it going? Today I'm talking about what makes you faster, quicker, running or strength. This is Running to the Castle, a podcast for slow, back-of-the-pack Run Disney runners on a journey to running magical miles. Join me, Dr. Ali, as I share the secrets I've gathered as a runner, doctor of physical therapy, and coach. You'll learn the exact ways I get my clients to the castle strong, have a bigger buffer ahead of the balloon ladies, and have time to stop for character photos. Keep listening if your goal is to PR in fun, cross the finish line without feeling broken, and have energy to enjoy the Disney parks. As you know, I get so many questions asking about how to get faster. And many, there are many different things that runners will tell me that they have tried to do. One of them is they run more. One is they add strength training. One is they just try and go faster all of the time. I'd say those are the top three. I'm sure there are more that runners have tried. And now, of course, there are probably way more for like the elite runners, the super duper fast runners, but us here in the slow category, slower category, 13 plus minute per mile paces. That's who I'm talking to. So that's what I'm talking about. I honestly, you know, I made an episode a couple episodes ago talking about running doesn't have to be your whole life. Running is not my whole life. I do not pay attention for the most part, the running world. Like, I kind of watch the Olympics. I don't watch the Boston Marathon. I don't watch Chicago. I don't watch London. I don't watch New York City. Like, I don't watch these marathons on TV when it's happening. Most of the time, I don't even know when they are happening. Like I know when the Boston Marathon happens because I'm originally from Massachusetts. And it's the third Monday in April. It also is Patriots Day in Massachusetts. There's no work on that day. So I it is just ingrained in me of when that is, but don't ask me when the London Marathon is. Don't ask me when Berlin is. Don't ask me when New York City is. Don't ask me when Sydney is. Like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't pay attention to it. That is, it's, it doesn't have it's doesn't have to be your whole world. It is not my whole world. I don't really follow elite runners on social media. I like running as a hobby because it helps clear my mind. It helps keep me active. I like the way I feel when I'm active, I don't feel as sluggish and everything like that. So, anyway, the the whole point of me saying that is I the information I'm going to give in this episode is based on my personal experience and my professional experience working with at this point hundreds of slow runners. And it if you are faster than this category of people, if you have ever been professional, elite, thank you so much for listening. I'm not sure why you're listening, but thank you. Um, this message is not for you. So when we're talking about getting faster, there are a couple aspects that go into it. And we do need muscle strength. We do need, for lack of a better term, like a rebound, a bouncy aspect to our body's ability to move. And I'll explain a little bit about that in a second. And of course, we need to be running. So one thing that I notice runners that happens to runners is in the beginning, they start noticing getting fast really quickly. And they start noticing they're getting fast just by running. So there is a phenomenon, that's not the right word, but that's the only word I can think of right now, where the less in shape you are, the quicker you see, you start seeing results. Same thing with weight loss. Like you can lose a lot of weight really fast. And then it plateaus and tapers off. I'm not talking about that. It's just a comparison from what happens when you first get active. So when you first start running, you notice, let's say your first time out, your first mile is 20 minutes per mile. The next day you go out, you may be 19 minutes per mile faster. And then a couple of days later, 18 minutes per mile faster. These are not exact numbers. I'm giving an example, but you start noticing how quickly you're getting faster. And a minute per mile is a big deal. Getting that much faster is a big deal. That is a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. And new runners notice that speed improvement very quickly. And part of that is just for the fact that you are new to this. You have a lot of room to grow. And you grow and you grow fast. And one thing that runners in this time frame notice is, oh, I'm just running more. That's why I'm getting faster. And that is not the case. Running more does not equal faster. I have talked about the gray zone. Now, this this is more the gray zone is more for uh people who have been running for at least two, one to two years. Like these aren't super, super new, still new to the space comparatively to other people, but they've been doing it for at least a year, probably closer to at least two years or more. And the gray zone is that middle zone where you're not quite going slow and you're not quite going fast. You probably do feel exhausted doing it all of the time. You feel like you're putting in your full, absolute effort all of the time, but you end up not getting faster. And it's because you're in the gray zone. So if you're new to this, I do have other episodes talking about the gray zone, but very quickly, I talk about speed as in like fast and slow, easy, hard. Easy and slow, I think of as pink. Fast and hard, I think of as green. Okay. Pink, slow down. Green, go fast, go hard. When the colors pink and green come together, they make the color gray. So at the far end of the spectrum where you are super duper slow going your easy peasy lemon squeezy pace, that is bright pink. Okay. Bright pink. As you start getting a little bit faster, a little bit faster, that color pink starts fading and it starts blending into gray. And then it gets darker and darker gray until it hits the midpoint, part way through. Then it starts getting lighter and lighter gray and it turns green and green and green. So the far, far end of the spectrum where it's fast and hard, you are super bright green. So super bright pink on the slow end, super bright green on the fast end. In the middle, it's gray. So if you are just beginning, you are going to get, you're going to bounce from one end of the spectrum to the other very quickly. And then it's going to start meshing into gray. And when you are in the gray zone, you're not going slow enough to recover and you're not going fast enough to hit your ceiling to actually get faster. Because if you, if you what's the phrase where it has to challenge you to change you, right? It has to challenge you to change you. And that can be in either direction. It has to challenge your speed on the green end, on the fast end to break past that upper limit, that upper ceiling to get faster. It also has to challenge you to slow the heck down to get yourself to go slow enough to actually recover. So it has to challenge you in both ways. If you're not telling me that easy pace challenged me, and it's honestly probably mentally challenging, right? Like I have to overcome this fear of running slow because many runners will have a fear like, oh, if I run too many miles slow, I'm never gonna get fast. But you have to run slow in order to get fast because you have to not exhaust yourself. When you're in the gray zone, you're going too fast to ever recover, but you're going too slow to ever hit your upper limit and surpass it. You're in the gray zone all of the time. And so, in the very beginning, we don't necessarily talk about gray zone. It does at that point, it doesn't matter. Movement is the best thing you can do to get better because of this phenomenon where you just naturally get faster as you're doing more and more, as you're practicing more, right? And so what happens is in the beginning, you start getting faster, and all you're doing is running more. And so you start equating, oh, more running equals faster. And that is only the case in the very, very beginning. Once you start hitting a plateau, this is the time where we're thinking about the gray zone. So then runners will say, Well, I just need to run more, and they just start adding more and more miles, and it's not working, and they cap out of how many they can do. And then they start noticing, while they are adding more miles, they're actually getting slower. And then it becomes frustrating. So then you add strength work because you've read online somewhere, somebody said, adding strength exercises changed everything for me, and now I'm so much faster. Great. I love that for them. I love that for them. And then other people will say, Well, you need to run faster. You need to just when you run, try and push your limits and go faster. So who is right? What will make you faster? And it all has to do with what you, where you are currently at in your fitness level, what you currently are doing. Like, are you historically a strength person and you've added running into the mix? Maybe. Or have you never done strength training and now you're adding, you did added running into the mix and now you're adding strength training into the mix. Well, remember when we talked about runners who just start running from the very beginning, they notice a lot of improvement in the beginning very quickly. Somebody who adds strength workouts to their program at the right amount, the right level, the right dosage frequency duration is going to notice a lot of improvement very quickly in their speed. But maybe somebody else who adds strength training doesn't notice improvement, but they add speed workouts and they notice improvement. So they tell you, well, I added speed workouts, very designated speed workouts, or I added strides at the end of my long run. So what which is it? What do we need to do? And the honest answer is you do need to do it all. You need to do it all, but you can't do it all at once. You can't there, it's physically impossible, temporally impossible. Is that the word I'm looking for? Like time-based impossible. It you you there aren't enough hours in the day, there aren't enough days in the week, there aren't enough days in the year, weeks in the year to be able to do it all at once. And when you change too many variables at once, if something goes haywire, when something goes haywire, because something will go haywire, you don't know which it is, and then you have to stop everything and start from the ground up. It is much, much, much, much easier to slowly add something in than to do it all. A for consistency-wise, it's really hard to stay consistent when you're trying 75 new things. It's much easier if you make one simple change, aim to do that for two weeks, three weeks, and then you add in another simple change. Like recently, I started working with a client and her schedule is really jam-packed right now. And she wants to do speed workouts and she wants to do cross-training and she wants to do strength workouts, she wants to do the long runs. And so we had a frank discussion of well, what is your priority right now? What is your priority with your fitness? What is your priority with these races? And priority with the races is to not feel like they're gonna collapse at the end of the race and make this a lifelong thing, that they don't go back and forth between doing it all and doing none, because that's historically what has happened. So I said, okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna do three workout days, excuse me, three running days, no cross-training, two strength days. Because for this particular runner, they wanted to get a little bit faster. Priority was finish the race and not feel like they were gonna collapse at the end. And they also want, like they don't worry about their breathing. Like they, their, their lung capacity, their heart rate, their breathing rate does not limit them. They aren't catching their breath before their legs give out. So they that means to me, cross-training is not a priority right now. That's a nice to have, not a need to have right now. So to make it work with her schedule to still have two rest days, let's just do three running days. Two of them are speed work, one is a long run, and two strength days. Let's just do that because that's what's doable. If it's going to be a fight, then she's gonna end up doing none of it historically. Now, I've I've just met this person, but when I look at this pattern in runners that I work with, that's more often than not what happens. Now, of course, could this person be completely atypical and that's not the case? Sure, yes. But I have to think of the more likely scenario and we ease into it. But so we start looking at, okay, well, what have you tried before? What is your fitness level? What's your activity level? What is your goal with this? So, you know, I started talking um a couple episodes ago of kind of what I just dove into of is it breathing rate that hits you first, or is it, you know, your legs give out first to determine like cross-training, strength training, speed work? Well, in this case, when we're determining what you should do to get faster, if if your legs cannot turn over fast enough, meaning they literally just like can't lift up and put down. They can't, they just can't move fast enough. Then we start looking at, okay, well, why can't they move fast enough? Is it because of how heavy your legs are? You know, if you're overweight and they're heavy, if they just are weak and you can't, you don't have the power to lift, or if you've just flat out never tried it, never tried to move your legs at a fast pace, at a fast speed. And then we start diving into it. So if the legs are weak, where you just can't, like even just standing still, like not running, I mean. So you won't be still because I'm gonna tell you do a movement. If you're standing and it is physically demanding for you to lift your knee towards your chest with the leg muscles, not using your arms, and you're doing just like a march in place. If it's physically demanding where you're like, oh man, this is really hard, if that's the case, strength workouts would actually be better for you in this case right now. Because speed work, if it's physically demanding for you to just lift your leg, it's going to be very hard for you to lift your leg over and over and over and over again in the form of speed workouts. So it may be prudent to work on strength of lifting the leg up first. Or the better option is actually not relying on the lift up of the leg, but the push off from the ground, right? It's still the same motion, but instead of relying on using your hip flexors to lift your leg in front, you rely on your calf muscles and your glutes to push you off the ground. And I have mentioned this before. I haven't gone into great detail before, but your hip flexor muscle is a the tendon itself is about the width of your index finger. Okay, so imagine just like a long line of your index finger right across your hip. And then the muscle spreads out and the muscle belly is bigger. It's the it's the quad muscle, as an example, is four muscles that take up the whole front of your thigh. So it's however big your thigh is, whether you are overweight, skinny, or whatever, it's it covers that bone. Okay. Your glute muscles, they are flat muscles. So instead of a long, thin tendon that has to pull and contract, it's a lot of thin, uh, not thin, but flat tendons that attach at multiple spots along the bone. So there are multiple connection points as opposed to like this one connection point at the top. And so it kind of looks like a fan. If you, you know, one of those uh fans that it's like the paper fans that spread out and collapse in. If you imagine that fan being open, that's like one of your glute muscles, and you have three on each cheek. And then your calf muscle, even though the calf area is smaller, the calf tendon is actually quite more girthy than your hip flexor tendon. So these muscles do a lot more with less effort. Pushing off is easier than pulling up for your leg. So that's why you hear like, oh, strengthen your glutes, strengthen your calf muscles. And those are very good things to do, excellent things to do. And so for that particular person, strength exercises may get that person faster. And then somebody else who standing there lifting their leg in the air is not overly taxing. It's not that the leg is weak, it's that it doesn't turn over fast enough. Or they haven't even tried going faster in specific speed workouts in the past. And so for them, practicing doing the motion over and over and over again and practicing hitting those fast paces would be more beneficial to them. In a well-rounded program, you're going to have it all. That's why Stronger Faster Finisher addresses all of them. But we don't address them all at once. You can have it all, but you can't have it all at once. In the beginning, we need to figure out what is what's the least amount that we can do to help achieve the goal. So many runners, when they first come into Stronger Fast Finisher, we don't really address a ton of strength training because that doesn't align with the goals and where they're at at that moment. Now, if we have a lot of time, like as an example, if somebody is joining Stronger Faster Finisher in June and their next race is Princess Half Marathon in February slash March, we have lots of time. So we can we can change up the program and it will be different than somebody who's joining Stronger Faster Finisher in June for Wine and Dine Half Marathon or the Marathon or Dopey or something like that, because we are jumping right into training mode, right? So it does depend on where you're at and what your goals are. But doing it all at once is going to be a recipe for disaster, recipe for failure. No matter what it is that you think you need, you do need Need to make sure that you are challenging your body. And how do you know if you're challenging your body? It's not if it hurts. That's one thing that I hear often is somebody will say, Well, it doesn't hurt, so it must not be working. And that's not the case. Pain is not indicative of if something is doing its job. Pain is your body's response to something that is going wrong or it deems unsafe. Like that's why if you touch a hot stove, it hurts and you immediately pull away from it. That's why if you get cut, you immediately pull away from the knife, right? That that's what pain is telling your body. Pain in the workout aspect in fitness, pain is your body's way of telling you not this, not right now. So you're either doing the motion wrong, you stepped wrong, you did too much, you didn't warm up enough, you didn't stretch enough the other day, the lifting too much weight. There's there's a whole slew of different things. But pain is not your guide of this is working. It like it shouldn't hurt. It doesn't have to hurt to work. The way you tell if it's challenging you is for strength, you do a one rep max test or you test your strength in some capacity. I like the one rep max test because it's very finite. It's you either can lift that weight one time or you can't lift it at all, or you can lift more than that. If you can lift more than that, it's not heavy enough. If you can't lift it at all, it is too heavy. And if you can lift one rep at all, that's it. That's perfect, right? And then you take that information, one repetition, how much weight was that? And then make a light, medium, and a heavy day. Light day is 25% of that one rep max weight. So if it's 100 pounds is one rep, 25% is 25 pounds. Okay. Medium is 50%. So if we're using 100 pounds, 50 pounds would be a medium weight. And then heavy is anywhere between 75 to 90%. And I have changed my wording on this. I used to say 75 to 80%. I have now changed it from 75 to 80 to 90% because of the availability and how the increments that weights go to. Sometimes that 80% just doesn't exist. There's you can't replicate it. You don't have like one extra pound to add to it. You don't, you know, it can be challenging. So 75 to 90%. I'm changing my wording on that. You may hear me in other aspects still use 75 to 80%, because that's the ideal situation. But I am finding out that just with workout equipment, dumbbells, barbells, and and everything, like sometimes it just 80% doesn't happen. But that's so that would be 75 to 90 pounds of that 100 pounds. The heavier the weight, the fewer repetitions you can do. Typically, like five, about five repetitions. And the the last two are going to be challenging. Medium weight, you should be able to do eight to 10 repetitions. The last two should be challenging. 25%, the lightweight, you could probably do that a lot. You could do 15. You could do 30 in a row. I do recommend capping it at 10 to 15 repetitions for time's sake. Is there a time and a place to do a hundred repetitions of something? Yes. That usually is not in this world, like this running world, I mean. Okay. So that's how you check to make sure you're challenging your strength. Do a one rep max test and then continue to check it that you're still progressing and still challenging yourself. You don't need to keep redoing a one rep max test. Once you've done it and you're exercising consistently, just pay attention to the last couple of repetitions. Are you doing five repetitions for heavy and the two, the last two are no longer challenging? Time to up the weight. Make it so that the last two repetitions are challenging. And if you're going from 75 pounds, it's not necessarily going to 80 pounds. It might be going to a hundred pounds. That used to be your one rep max. And now it's not. But you don't have to redo the one rep max test. You can just add more weight. And, you know, maybe it'll take a couple of times to figure out, okay, you know, this is gonna be too light. Like you might do two repetitions and be like, oh, I could definitely do more than five by the end of this. Because by two, if it's if you're only doing five by two, you're recognizing, okay, I would be hitting my midway point soon. And if you're not hitting that, well, just put those weights down, finish out the set with the next higher weight. Same thing with medium or light. You don't have to go through a one rep max test again. You can just kind of fiddle with what weights you've been doing. If you want to do a one rep max test, you can. I don't think it's necessary. I wouldn't recommend it unless you've taken a long time off from strength training. But if you're regularly strength training and increasing your weight, then you will know what weights you can and should be using. And then for speed workouts, to check to see are you hitting your upper limits? Do a speed test. Check it out. What are my upper limits? What is my hard? What is my hard pace? That's what you can do for one interval of your run walk interval. So if it's run walk intervals 30, 30, 30 seconds, 30 seconds, what's the max speed you can run for the whole 30 seconds without slowing down and needing like five to 10 minutes to recover. You should be going so fast that you're like, oh my God, I hate Allie. This sucks. When is it over? It's over in the 30 seconds for you if you're doing 30-30. And you should need five to 10 minutes to recover. You should feel like an Olympian who just sprinted for their 30-second, however many meter dash, right? Like you see how they recover after. They're like laying on the ground, stumbling all over the place because they've gone so fast. You should be doing that on your hard. That's your upper limit. And then slow it way, way down for your easy, and then find your middle ground, find your moderate in between. And this is what I do the very first week. All of my clients work with me. What are your paces? Let's figure this out. And then we divide up the paces, move the paces around to fit the different speed workouts and go from there. So, which getting back to the original question, what makes you faster, quicker? It depends on what you need. If you are very, very brand new and you haven't ever run before, well, just running more is going to get you faster. And in the very beginning, that is what I recommend. But once you hit a certain point, that's when strength and speed are going to come in. Now, which one should you do first? It all depends on your goals. I would say the majority of runners, based on their goals, the majority of runners that come work with me, we go with speed workouts first. It helps your confidence for one, because you you very quickly see that your body can do hard things and it it helps keep you going. You can see speed improvements from speed workouts in six weeks. Strength workouts are going to take longer. Strength workouts, you will see results closer to 12 weeks. So it's about double the time. Now, of course, some people are gonna go faster than that, some people are gonna go slower than that, but typically, just physiologically speaking, it takes 10 to 12 weeks for your muscle to have built up, like for the cells to replicate, for the muscle tendons to hypertrophy, that's the term to mean they've gotten bigger and to get stronger. It takes that amount of time. And so, based on how somebody or what somebody's goal is when they come to see me, the majority of the time we go for speed workouts first. Um, and a big part of that is being able to maintain confidence that you can do it. Because if you're gonna see results in six weeks versus it taking 12 weeks, if it takes 12 weeks and you wanted to see results faster, you're going to stop that sooner. And I don't want that to happen. Now, there are runners where I'm like, no, we should hold off on speed workouts for right now, or we're not gonna do them quite yet and we're gonna work on strength. But I will, but like I said, the majority of runners at the point that they come to me at, speed workout really is the best first option. And it, and it, it also improves your confidence. So we have a win-win there. But I will always lean toward the thing that I think will be best for you that aligns with your goals. And I won't just push somebody into speed workout because I'm saying speed workout first. No, it really, it really does depend on the person. And there, there are situations where strength comes first. And so it really just depends on what you need, where you're at, and what your goals are.