Balance Strength and Endurance

By Kieran Richardson

If you scroll through social media or your Strava feed, you’ll notice most people are training for a 5K, a 10K, a half marathon, an Ironman.

Endurance is the goal. The strength work is meant to support it.

Which is exactly why so many athletes get the strength training completely wrong.

Not because they’re not trying. But because the fitness industry has handed them a set of ideas about “strength training for runners” that range from pointless to actively counterproductive.

Let’s fix that.

Why You Should Be Lifting in the First Place

Before we get into the how, let’s talk about why –  and I’ll start with the reasons that don’t get enough airtime.

Your bones need stress

If your training is primarily swimming, cycling, or anything low-impact, you’re doing great things for your heart, your lungs, and your muscles. But bones need stress to stay strong, and low-impact work doesn’t provide it. Strength training does. As you age, this stops being a minor consideration and becomes a serious one. Conditions like osteoporosis don’t announce themselves until something breaks.

You need to be strong in positions your sport ignores

Endurance sports are, by definition, repetitive. Cycling takes you through a narrow range of hip and knee motion over and over again. Running has its own repetitive pattern. Neither exposes you to the full range of positions your body might encounter in the real world — or mid-race when something goes wrong.

The research on “strength training prevents overuse injuries” is actually weaker than most people think. But the research on strength training reducing injury risk from slips, falls, and missteps? That’s much more solid. If you’re trail running and your foot goes sideways on mud, being strong through your adductors means you’re less likely to be forced into a range of motion you can’t control.

Your performance will actually improve

Here’s the one that endurance athletes often struggle to believe: strength training makes you faster, and not through the mechanism most people expect.

When researchers compare groups who add strength training against those who don’t, the strength training group improves — but their aerobic fitness and lactate threshold are essentially unchanged. The benefit comes from movement economy. When your maximum force output increases, race pace becomes a lower percentage of your ceiling. Every stride, every pedal stroke is less relative effort.

Jonas Abrahamson is the clearest example of this at the elite level. A few years ago he was struggling — skinny at around 60kg, plateauing, not winning races. His team deliberately had him gain 20kg through a serious strength training block. He added over 600 watts to his peak power output and became one of the most dominant riders in the peloton. He’s a professional cyclist. He doesn’t care about his squat numbers. He cares entirely about what happens on the bike — and strength training transformed that.

What Most Endurance Athletes Actually Do (And Why It Doesn’t Work)

Picture a “strength workout for runners” from a running magazine or Instagram. Some planks. Bird dogs. Bodyweight squats. Maybe some banded glute work.

This is almost completely worthless if you’re already running.

Here’s why: endurance sport is high-repetition, submaximal, cyclical work. Running at 180 steps per minute for multiple hours means you’re accumulating an enormous number of reps — all sub-maximal, all in the same pattern. If we’re trying to plug the gaps that your sport leaves, we want the opposite. We want high force, low repetition, full range of motion.

Let’s do the maths on hill sprints as a “strength session.” 10 sets of 30-second sprints at 180 contacts per minute — that’s roughly 900 reps. If a coach prescribed 10 sets of 90 reps in the gym, you’d question their sanity. It would require an empty bar, and it would provide zero strength stimulus. The same logic applies to low-cadence cycling intervals, high-rep gym circuits, and every bodyweight “strength” routine marketed at endurance athletes.

Strength training should plug the gaps left by your sport. Not replicate it.

What Good Strength Training for Endurance Athletes Actually Looks Like

The principles are simple, even if they’re counterintuitive.

Heavy compound lifts. Squats, deadlifts, pressing, pulling. The exact variation matters less than you think — what matters is that it loads the pattern heavily, agrees with your body, and you can execute it well. There are no mandatory movements here. If back squats beat up your lower back, front squat. If conventional deadlifts don’t work for you, trap bar. Find what loads the pattern and doesn’t cause problems.

Low to moderate reps. Sets of 3-6 for your main lifts. Some work in the 8-10 range for accessories, particularly upper body, isn’t the end of the world. But the idea that 15+ reps equals “endurance training in the gym” needs to die. You have a sport for that.

Violent intent. This is probably the single most common correction I make with endurance athletes — there’s no pop to the lifting. You don’t need to go heavier. You need to move the weight faster. Intending to move a submaximal load explosively has significant carryover to endurance performance, particularly at race-deciding moments. Control the lowering, but drive the lift with real intent.

Rest properly. True heavy sets require 2-4 minutes rest minimum. For your main barbell work, closer to 3-6 minutes. Endurance athletes hate this because they’re conditioned to be in the pain cave. But cutting rest short means your next set is compromised, and you’re no longer getting the stimulus you came for. Do not fill rest periods with burpees, jumping jacks, or anything else. If you want to superset, pair it with something that doesn’t compete — a gentle stretch, a mobility drill, an upper body movement while your legs recover.

Progressive overload. This one sounds obvious but it gets ignored. The “just do 40kg squats, that’s enough for runners” advice floating around is baffling. You adapt quickly. The program should be getting you stronger over time — full stop.

The Biggest Programming Mistake: Adding Without Subtracting

Most people who’ve tried to add strength to their endurance training have simply stacked it on top of everything else they were already doing.

That doesn’t work.

A running app is designed to use close to 100% of your recovery capacity. A standard strength program is designed to use close to 100% of your recovery capacity. Combining them without adjustment doesn’t create a 200% athlete — it creates an overtrained one.

When you add strength, something has to come out. Usually that means reducing the volume of easy endurance work. This is why the 80/20 rule (80% easy, 20% hard) doesn’t map cleanly onto how we programme at OMNIA. We don’t fill every available slot with zone 2 miles. We make room for the strength work to be done properly.

How OMNIA Structures It

Two principles underpin the way our programmes handle the interaction between strength and endurance:

Consolidate your hard work. Rather than spreading hard sessions evenly through the week, batch them together — either on the same day or back-to-back days. Your interval session and your lower body strength session side by side, followed by an easier day. This protects quality in both sessions and gives you genuine recovery windows rather than perpetual medium fatigue.

Use pre-fatigue strategically. Placing high-volume strength before your long endurance session means you start that session slightly depleted. You reach the same level of fatigue with less total volume. If you’re an ultra runner doing a three-hour long run, going in slightly fatigued from the previous day’s strength work might mean two and a half hours achieves the same training stimulus — with less impact on the body overall.

A Note on In-Season Training

If you race week to week — crit cycling, for example — strength training during the season looks different. Volume drops significantly. Intensity stays. Instead of three sets of eight, think five sets of three. Less total fatigue, heavier loads, maintained neural stimulus. A few sets of heavy cleans, heavy squats, a couple of accessories. Bare bones, but effective.

The good news: strength is one of the most resilient physical qualities there is. It takes very little to maintain what you’ve built. If you’ve put in a serious strength block over winter, you won’t lose it if you trim back during race season. Maintain it with minimal volume and trust the work you’ve already done.

The Summary

If you take nothing else from this:

  • Strength training for endurance athletes should be heavy, low-rep, and full range
  • It should plug the gaps your sport leaves, not replicate the sport itself
  • High-rep circuits and bodyweight “runner workouts” are almost entirely pointless
  • You cannot just add strength on top of your existing training — something has to give
  • The biggest benefits come from movement economy and force production, not from “muscular endurance” work
  • Rest properly. It’s not wasted time. It’s where the adaptation happens.

Done right, strength training doesn’t compete with your endurance performance. It supports it. It makes you more resilient, more powerful, and (when it counts) faster.

That’s the OMNIA approach. No fluff, no filler – just the work that actually moves the needle.

If you want help structuring your training – how to build a hybrid training week, how to periodise strength and endurance together, how to avoid the interference effect and balance your nutrition — you can apply to work with us here.

Or, if you’d like an introduction to hybrid training – you can download our free hybrid training guide here.