 Question is from Matador 30. How would you strength train for endurance events like marathons where low body weight is key to running faster? Okay, so first off, strength benefits everybody, okay? Strength is a foundational physical pursuit. So if you're an endurance runner and we kept everything equal, your same body weight, everything's the same. The only difference is I added 50% more strength to your body, you are gonna notice a dramatic increase in your endurance. Strength contributes to endurance. So it is an important component of your training. That being said, if you wanna get really, really good at distance running, the vast majority of your time should be spent on improving your ability to run for distance. In this case, resistance training typically is, you know, once a week of traditional resistance training and maybe correctional exercise added to that, you know, like priming stuff, and that's pretty much it. I've trained quite a few marathon runners and when I would do more than one day a week of traditional resistance training, because marathon training is a lot. You're running miles and miles every single day. You're doing lots and lots of road work and if I threw two days a week of resistance training on that person, oftentimes it would be a little bit too much, so what I would do is one day a week. Well, I may even prioritize mobility over that, to be honest, just because of the sheer, like repetitive stress that you're continuously placing on your joints because inevitably you're just doing one thing that whole time for a very long period of time and to be able to then reinforce and help to, you know, build more support and stability around the joints is gonna be crucial. That obviously strength training is a component to that in terms of gaining size and more muscle. Like, I mean, a lot of that is gonna be derived from the nutrition though. It also matters if you're a marathon runner who wants to be stronger, or are you somebody who wants to be strong and then also wants to marathon run? Right, right. Are you trying to get better at marathons? Right, so it depends on how you answer that question to yourself because if you come to me and you're somebody who is a marathon runner and you just wanna build some strength because you know that you've heard us talk about the importance of strength and it does have carryover and it's gonna benefit you, then the training looks like what Sal or Justin's saying. Maybe one day a week of strength training or maybe even to Justin's point, mostly mobility because all those things are gonna help build strength while complimenting your marathon running. But if you come to me and you're like, hey, I really wanna get stronger but I also love to run marathons, like the conversation is different. I might have you strength training two to three days a week and then on your off days we're progressively increasing our runs so you can run a longer distance but my priority is building strength. So it all depends on what's more important to you. They're conflicting, although strength has its carryover, they're conflicting messages that you're kinda sending the body. I wanna be very good at long endurance which is gonna train your body to be very efficient metabolically. That's really challenging when you're also trying to send a signal I wanna build strength, build muscle which is the opposing signal. So it really, it's about what is more important to you and then you prioritize the programming around that. Now best exercises in my experience with marathon runners and of course it depends on the individual so I'm gonna give you some general answers. I love lunges for runners in general. I love lateral lunges because running is such a forward- Sagittal plane only. Yeah, it's all moving in front of you. Lateral movements, so like lateral lunges, I like lateral sled drags. I like doing with my marathon runners. And then marathon runners typically benefit tremendously from really, really good back strengthening exercises. Running can really cause, if for anybody who runs a lot, you know you get that kind of forward shoulder posture that can get exhausting, it can cause some neck strain. So I like to strengthen my marathon runners with rows, single arm dumbbell rows or cable rows just to strengthen their mid-back. And then of course core training, core training. You wanna do some strength training for the core and it's funny when I had a couple runners that I trained for the Boston Marathon and it was funny, if I trained their legs really hard, they were able to, right after the workout, go and run 15 or 10 miles and they'd notice a little bit of a decrease in performance, but for the most part they're okay. If I trained their core really hard, they couldn't run that day. That's how important your core strength is to that long distance type of repetitive running motion because it's kind of what connects the upper and lower body, so core, strengthen your core. Because when that fatigues, I mean you're just basically like running on, you're sitting on your joint. You become super inefficient with your running and you're just exerting a lot of energy trying to run long distance. I also see a lot of value in addressing ankle mobility and foot strength stuff too because what's really common that you get is issues like peronials or you get issues with shin splints. Tibialis raises, I love tibialis raises. Right, working dorsal flection. So focus on working a combat stretch. So this is very, very common that you get shin splints or have any of those issues that I was mentioning from running and that repetitive movement. So addressing good ankle mobility and foot strength is a must in programming for me, for somebody like this to help support that. Now I'll tell you what, if you're a runner, one of the best programs you can invest in that will make a tremendous impact on you is Maps Prime and Maps Prime Pro. What you would do is going through Maps Prime, for example, do the compass test, identify what your priming session would look like, and then do that before your runs. Forget the resistance training, do it before you do your runs and then watch what happens with your running performance, how much smoother you feel when you run because you primed appropriately. It'll help to establish better patterns for you getting out there in the run.