The Slender Running People

Unfortunately, a lot of runners don’t believe a word of this advice. They like to point out that if a strong upper body were necessary to run well, then certainly you’d develop one through running. They also like to scare people away from trying to get stronger by warning that lifting weights will make you “muscle-bound” and add tons of unwanted bulk. After all, they’ll ask, wasn’t losing weight one of the main reasons you started running?

Sounds kind of like the reasoning that the anti-stretchers tried to use in the previous chapter. Obviously, you can run without ever even so much as looking at a weight or contemplating a sit-up, but that doesn’t mean that you’re going to run as well as you can, or that it will feel as good. Running can do some contradictory things to your body; for example, it can tighten the very muscles that are most needed for running. That’s why you need to stretch. In the same way, running doesn’t affect many of the muscles that, when stronger, will help make running easier. That’s why you need to strengthen.

As for worrying about piling on pounds of unwanted bulk, don’t. Just as most people who run are never going to have to worry about being as thin as I am because of not being genetically predisposed that way, most people are never going to look like a bodybuilder. The top bodybuilders are as suited to their chosen sport as I am to mine; most people can’t look that way, no matter how much they lift.

More important, the strengthening program I’m going to outline here would make most of them laugh. That’s fine. They work to build maximum bulk. What should concern you is doing a minimum to make your running better. What’s necessary for that isn’t much and certainly doesn’t involve any of the kinds of mega weights that bodybuilders throw around.
If you’re still opposed to the idea of strengthening exercises because you’re running to lose weight, consider the results of a study that was conducted in the Netherlands a few years ago. In the study, people were divided into a solid group and a slender group. Both groups then lifted twice a week for 12 weeks. As expected, the members of the solid group (the football players of the world) had stacked on significant amounts of fat-free mass during the study. That is, they gained weight in the form of muscle. The slender group, however, was as wiry as ever after the 12 weeks, with no real increase in fat-free mass. The researchers concluded that those with slender body types, which includes most runners, lack the genetic predisposition to bulk up.
If that’s the case, then why bother with weights? Because the slender group’s failure to gain fat-free mass doesn’t mean that they didn’t benefit from their lifting program. At the end of the 12 weeks, they had increased their strength by 13 percent, and they had 10 percent less body fat than at the beginning of the study. They were stronger and leaner, yet not bulkier, after just 12 weeks of lifting. Next excuse?