Published October 20, 2026, 12:01 AM
Thanks to a decade of personal experience with hybrid training, Outside Run contributor Adam Meyer knows all about the inherent challenges of combining heavy lifting with endurance running. To get the best professional advice on how to schedule resistance training around key running workouts, he interviewed Katie Cyrana Hillery, a physical therapist and RRCA-certified running coach, alongside Mike Thomson, a certified running coach and personal trainer.
Every runner has heard by now that spending more time in the weight room can lead to better running performance. It sounds counterintuitive to endurance athletes focused purely on cardiovascular output, but Meyer stands as living proof that runners of all builds can benefit from it. Standing at six-foot-five and weighing 215 pounds, Meyer has spent the last ten years lifting weights and logging running miles side by side.
His current weekly routine includes four lifting days structured on an upper and lower body split, a functional fitness session on Wednesdays, and a total of about 25 miles of running. He rounds out his schedule with weekend active recovery days, which involve hiking with his family, biking with his kids, or incorporating dedicated mobility work.
Scientific research consistently shows that strength training can improve running economy, boost overall performance, and help prevent common overuse injuries. The truly challenging part, however, is knowing how to balance the volume of each discipline so that one does not negatively impact the other. Athletes often find themselves asking difficult scheduling questions. Where does heavy leg day go when you have hard intervals scheduled on Tuesday and a long-distance run on Saturday? What happens to your squat numbers when your weekly running mileage finally peaks? Put a heavy lifting session in the wrong spot of the weekly calendar, and your next intense running workout will likely pay the price, alongside your body’s overall recovery capacity.
To sort out these scheduling dilemmas, Meyer spoke with Katie Cyrana Hillery, DPT, OCS, CSCS, clinical director at Evolve Physical Therapy and an RRCA-certified running coach, and Mike Thomson, a certified running coach and personal trainer at Life Time. Together, these experts outlined how athletes can design a weekly routine that leaves ample room for both rigorous strength training and high-mileage running.
Keep Your Hard Days Hard
For years, Meyer’s initial instinct was to spread out his intense training days evenly throughout the week. Back then, a typical Tuesday would include running intervals in the morning followed by a lower-body lifting session that afternoon. He would then avoid anything heavier than upper-body work until his long run on Saturday. It took him longer than he cares to admit to stop feeling guilty about "wasting" a scheduled rest day by not touching a heavy barbell squat. However, both expert coaches recommend the exact opposite approach, advising athletes to stack their hard days together so that their easy recovery days can actually remain easy.
As Thomson explains, the goal is to concentrate the physical stress rather than diluting it across the entire week. What he recommends is keeping the hard days genuinely hard. On speed and tempo running days, athletes should ideally complete their runs in the morning and follow up with their lifting sessions in the afternoon. If schedule constraints make that impossible, the next best option is to complete the lifting session immediately after the run concludes.
The physiological reason behind this strategy is that lifting soon after an intense running workout is far better for recovery than lifting the next day, when your legs already feel heavy and residual fatigue would compromise your running performance. Put into daily practice, if a Saturday long run is your primary weekly priority, that schedule could mean tackling speed intervals in the morning and a lower-body lifting session that same evening on Tuesday. From Thursday onward, the athlete would avoid anything heavier than upper-body maintenance work to ensure fresh legs for the weekend.
Short on Time? Train One Leg at a Time
When life happens, and work or travel knocks an athlete’s routine down to just two strength training sessions a week, every single exercise has to count. When training time is severely restricted, Hillery suggests focusing heavily on unilateral movements.
Athletes should prioritize single-leg strength, Hillery notes, because running is fundamentally and purely a single-leg sport. Exercises such as walking or reverse split squats, single-leg Romanian deadlifts, and weighted step-ups can profoundly support single-leg stability and correct muscular imbalances.
During weeks when professional or personal obligations force Meyer down to just two gym sessions, he prioritizes single-leg work over any bilateral movements. While it might feel less satisfying than loading up a heavy traditional back squat, making this adjustment has kept him out of the physical therapist’s office more reliably than any other change he has made to his regimen.
Thomson recommends starting strength sessions with the big compound movements that build foundational power, including traditional squats, lunges, deadlifts, pull-ups, and dips. Once the central nervous system has handled the heavy compound loads, athletes can fill the back end of their strength session with targeted injury-prevention movements. These accessory exercises include Poliquin step-ups, lying hamstring curls, and core stability work.
While every runner’s body, structural makeup, and specific goals are entirely unique, elite hybrid trainers utilize structured splits separating lower-body single-leg days from dedicated upper-body development to maintain balance without overtraining.
When Your Mileage Peaks, Cut Volume, Not Load
During a running base season, which is the foundational training phase primarily focused on building aerobic endurance and cardiovascular capacity, athletes should scale back their overall strength training volume without cutting their lifting load. This means performing fewer total repetitions and sets, or training less frequently each week, but without decreasing the actual amount of weight on the bar.
Whereas in the base phase of training an athlete should be actively trying to gain maximum strength, during peak running mileage and race preparation phases, the primary focus must shift to simply maintaining that hard-earned strength, according to Hillery.
For Meyer, his lifting weights do not get lighter in the five or six weeks leading up to a goal race, but he completely drops accessory exercises and reduces his gym frequency to two lifting sessions per week instead of four. Making this transition requires a difficult mental adjustment, especially for athletes who are accustomed to constantly chasing personal records in the weight room as well as on the track. However, Meyer points out that this strategic reduction is the critical difference between showing up to the starting line on race day feeling fresh versus arriving completely burnt out.
Lifting Won’t Slow You Down
Meyer used to worry about the prospect of gaining excess muscle mass or losing running economy, especially early on when he frequently read about the physiological principle of training specificity. At the time, he figured that all the hours spent standing under a heavy barbell were actively working against his running goals. A decade into his hybrid journey, however, his running times have only continued to get faster as his lifting numbers have gone up, proving the exact opposite of his early fears.
If runners are still worried that heavy strength training will make them bulky or slow down their race paces, Thomson is well-acquainted with those persistent myths. The idea that strength training will slow down an endurance runner is outdated misinformation, Thomson emphasizes. He notes that he does not know of a single Division 1 collegiate distance running program that fails to incorporate structured lifting into its athletes’ weekly routines.
Getting stronger can significantly improve running economy and neuromuscular efficiency, Hillery explains, meaning that running at the exact same pace will eventually feel much easier and require noticeably less physiological effort. Furthermore, building absolute strength allows your leg muscles to produce more force into the ground, which translates directly to better performance on steep hills, during sharp accelerations, and throughout high-intensity speedwork sessions.
After ten full years of hybrid training, Meyer no longer thinks of lifting and running as competing priorities pulling him in opposite directions. Instead, they are both simply forms of training that serve as fundamental pillars of his overall fitness. The demanding weekly routine he maintains—featuring four lifting sessions, a functional fitness workout, 25 miles of running, and weekend active recovery—only functions successfully because he stopped treating strength work as a mere add-on to his running and began treating it as an integral part of a cohesive long-term plan.
The Long Game
Experts strongly recommend stacking your hard training days together, aggressively protecting your easy recovery days, and judiciously adjusting your overall training volume before you ever reduce your weight loads when running mileage peaks. By following these foundational principles, lifting stops being an adversary that competes with your running performance and instead becomes the vital component that allows you to keep running, stay healthy, and remain injury-free for years to come.
