Workouts — a strength-building workout for recovery days

Coach Joe English

I’m picking back up on our weekly workout series, which has been on hiatus since the end of the fall marathon season. Every week, I write about a workout that might be useful to you in your training. Today’s topic: a good strength-building workout that you can do on a recovery day when you might be feeling fatigued or just need a break from your mileage. This workout will give you a lot of bang for your buck on a day when you don’t feel mentally ready to hit it too hard.

Workout: Strength-building Drills

Workout Summary: It happens to runners. They do a hard workout and then the next day they feel totally flat, fatigued and not ready to go again. So what do they do? They hit the road for a few easy miles. The impact of these miles? Not much really. Those short mileage, slow jog days, don’t add much to your fitness. In fact, if you’re too baked to run, then those easy miles are probably just dealing your recovery. But if the fatigue is mostly mental and you are up for a workout, one suggestion would be a running drill workout that you’ll do at your local track or football field. Running drills, also called plyometrics, isolate individual aspects of your running stride to build muscular strength in specific areas. These are the equivalent of doing sit-ups or push-ups for your running muscles.

Today’s workout starts with an easy warm-up jog and then goes into a series of drills that are all kept to short distances. Why are the distances short? So that you can concentrate on your form over these short distances and keep from getting sloppy. You will want to do these drills on a soft surface, such as grass, rather than on the road.

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