Running Performance is Built from the Ground Up with Strength Training

Strength training for runners is about far more than just building muscle—it’s the key to unlocking more efficient, powerful, and resilient strides. In this article, we’re getting extra nerdy in the best way, weaving together physics, biomechanics, and training principles to help you understand how your body interacts with the ground. You’ll learn how energy transfer, ground reaction forces, stiffness, coordination, and tendon health all work together to turn impact into your greatest advantage—not something to fear. So put on your nerd glasses and get ready to explore how smart strength training can transform the way you run from the ground up.

Groundwork Strength Training for Runners: The Key to Running Performance

Running performance is built from the ground up. Literally and figuratively.

Figuratively, running performance is built over time through small, consistent increases in volume that allow your system to adapt. You stress the body just enough, then let it rest, so that adaptations can take place. Then you do it again—slightly more. That’s progressive overload. It’s the slow-but-steady pathway to sustainable progress. Think of it like compounding interest: It might feel slow at first, but it leads to exponential results down the line. I explored this idea recently in the context of base building.

Literally, your relationship with the ground is what moves you forward. Ground reaction forces propel you, and how well your body can accept, store, and reuse these forces can make or break your running efficiency. That’s where physics meets physiology.

Energy Transfer and Running Efficiency

To understand the literal ground-up nature of running, we need to talk about energy. Let’s start with a little refresher from middle/high school science:

The First Law of Thermodynamics (also called the law of conservation of energy) states that energy cannot be created or destroyed—only transformed from one form to another.

In running, this transformation happens in two primary ways:

1. Chemical energy to kinetic energy: The food you eat gets converted to ATP, which your muscles use to create movement. 
2. Potential energy to kinetic energy: As you move through your stride, gravitational potential energy gets stored in your muscles and tendons and is then released as kinetic energy to propel you forward.
   
   

1. Chemical Energy to Kinetic Energy

This is your metabolism at work. Your body turns calories (especially carbohydrates) into ATP, which your muscles use to generate movement. You can improve the efficiency of this process by:

• Having a solid fueling strategy
• Running at a variety of paces that support the development of your metabolic efficiency. 
  
  

2. Potential Energy to Kinetic Energy

This is where biomechanics come in. When you run, your body stores gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy in your connective tissues—muscles, tendons, ligaments. Think of these tissues like springs and slingshots. As you land and load during mid-stance, you store energy. As you push off, you release it.

How efficiently you do this depends on:

• Strength
• Coordination
• Stiffness (“good” stiffness like this is really just a function of strength and coordination)

Ground reaction forces—those forces you feel when your foot hits the ground—are not just something to deal with (and fear). They’re something you can use. And you can train your body to use them well.

Ground Reaction Forces: Using Gravity to Your Advantage

Let’s nerd out a little further.

Imagine a pendulum: At the top of its swing, it holds the most potential energy. As it falls, that potential energy becomes kinetic energy. At the bottom, it's moving the fastest, with the most kinetic energy. Then it swings back up, slowing down, trading kinetic energy back for potential energy.

This same energy exchange happens in your running stride with one added partner - the ground!

At the top of your swing phase, you have the most gravitational potential energy. As you fall to the ground, you speed up in the vertical direction—that’s kinetic energy building. But when your foot hits the ground, that vertical motion is stopped. The energy has to go somewhere. It gets absorbed by your body and the ground. Here’s where Newton’s Third Law comes into play: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The better your body is at storing that energy in your tendons and connective tissue like springs and slingshots, the better you can handle those forces AND more you can use them for propulsion forward.

Think about running on sand vs the solid ground. When you land on sand, those forces dissipate through all the tiny grains moving. The energy gets lost, you can’t use it to propel forward. That’s why running on sand feels so hard.

But on firm ground, you can use those forces—if your body is prepared to make it happen.

To do this well, your system needs:

• Strength to handle the forces
• Coordination to time the loading and release effectively
• Stiffness - a combination of strength and coordination - in the right tissues so that your connective tissue can act as springs and slingshots.

These can all be trained. But first, you have to believe that you are not fragile. Your body is adaptable.

Train For the Impact—Don’t Avoid It

Many runners avoid impact because they fear injury. But the less we train for impact, the more likely we are to respond poorly to it.

While yes, there are times that we may need to focus on minimizing ground reactive forces in running - when coming back from an injury, running during pregnancy, or returning to running postpartum…I believe the ultimate goal of athletic training for running is to train your body to accept, store, and use the ground reaction forces, and this is where strength training for runners is vital.

Ground reaction forces and gravity are not the enemy with running. We can actually use them to our advantage!

It’s all about training and adaptation - building tolerance over time (from the ground up, literally and figuratively). That’s where strength training, including plyometrics, with intentional progressive overload comes in.

What Strength Training Should Actually Do for Runners

A good strength training program isn’t just about getting stronger. It’s about building:

• Coordination
• Stiffness where you need it
• Energy transfer efficiency through your kinetic chain
  

In my coaching, I always come back to the Five Skills for an Efficient Stride. Here’s how they show up in strength work:

1. The Stack

Stacking your ribs over your pelvis is fundamental. It helps you use your core efficiently, transfer energy through your trunk, and unlock movement through your hips. Without this, efficient rotation and propulsion are limited.

2. Standing on One Leg

This isn’t just balance—it’s about force production. Mid-stance is when your body is putting the most force into the ground. You’re lengthening through the back of the pelvic floor and the glutes. The foot pronates. The hip internally rotates. All of this lengthening loads the system like a spring.

3. Rotation and Counter-Rotation

After mid-stance, you move toward toe-off, transitioning from internal rotation to external rotation. Efficient rotation throughout the body—from shoulders to hips to feet. Training this involves:

• Rotation through the ribcage
• Rotation at the hips
• Reciprocal foot motion (pronation to supination)
  

You can develop this through unilateral lower body strength work, alternating upper body work, and precise cueing.

4. Hip Extension Before Knee Extension

This is the sequence that allows runners to use the powerful glutes to their fullest. When the hip extends first, the glutes can generate more force, allowing that stored potential energy to be released efficiently.

This is also a perfect example of how stiffness, coordination, and co-contraction around a joint—specifically the knee—play a major role. When the surrounding musculature works together to stabilize the joint, energy isn’t lost in unwanted motion. Instead, it’s directed into that propulsion. This is what it means to use your body's natural slingshots and springs.

5. Training Tendon Health for Energy Storage

Finally, skill five is often overlooked: training the tendons themselves.

Tendons—your body’s connective tissue—are critical players in energy storage and release. Unlike muscles, tendons don't require much metabolic energy to do their job. They simply deform and then return to their original shape, like rubber bands and springs. But to do this well and consistently, they must be healthy and resilient.

Tendon health is trained through a balance of:

• Plyometrics, which build the stiffness required for energy return
• Isometrics, which support suppleness, durability, and long-term tendon integrity
  

Together, these strategies condition tendons to absorb, store, and release energy efficiently across thousands of strides.

Ground Up: The Takeaway

So what’s the big picture?

Running performance is built from the ground up, in every sense.

• Figuratively, it’s about training with consistency, progressing gradually, and applying stress in doses the body can adapt to. That’s how you get stronger, week by week, month by month, year by year.
  
  
• Literally, your performance is built through your relationship with the ground. The forces you put into it—and how your body coordinates the forces it receives in return—are fundamental to how efficiently you run.
  
  

Energy can’t be created or destroyed. But through coordination, strength, and stiffness, your body can transform the forces of gravity and ground contact into the kinetic energy that powers you forward.

This is the case for strength training for runners. Done well, it’s your ticket to managing impact and improving performance.

You have to trust your relationship with the ground before you can learn to fly.

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