How to Improve Your Running: Three Levers With Evidence

Running performance rests on three measurable things: how much oxygen you can use, how fast you can go before lactate accumulates, and how much energy each stride costs. The third one, running economy, is the one most recreational runners never train, and it responds to work done outside of running.

Does lifting weights make you a faster runner?

It improves running economy, which is not quite the same claim. A 2024 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine covering three groups of middle- and long-distance runners, roughly 195 moderately trained, 272 well-trained and 185 highly trained, across studies of 6 to 24 weeks, found high-load strength training produced a small improvement in running economy (effect size 0.266) and combined methods a moderate one (0.426). Plyometric training improved economy at speeds at or below 12.0 km/h. Submaximal-load and isometric training showed no improvement over controls.

The honest caveat: economy is a laboratory measure of oxygen cost at a given speed. Whether that converts into faster race times is less well established than the economy finding itself, and reviewers have pointed this out.

Does the 80/20 rule hold up?

Partly. A 2024 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine compared polarized training intensity distribution against other models across 11 studies and 284 athletes. Polarized training was superior for improving VO2peak (SMD 0.24), with high certainty of evidence, but the advantage appeared only in interventions under 12 weeks and in highly trained athletes. For time trial performance, time to exhaustion and threshold speed, polarized and non-polarized distributions performed the same across 221 athletes.

So the interesting finding is not that polarized wins. It is that the distribution matters less than most training content implies, and that the majority of easy running most models share is doing the work. What tends to get less attention than either lever is how those hard sessions are recovered from, which the evidence ranks differently than most runners assume.

The bottom line

• High-load strength training improved running economy with a small effect (0.266) and combined methods a moderate one (0.426), across studies of 6 to 24 weeks
• Polarized training was superior for VO2peak (SMD 0.24) but showed no advantage for time trial performance, time to exhaustion or threshold speed
• Submaximal-load and isometric strength work showed no running economy benefit over controls, so the type of strength training matters