If the answer is ‘No’, then this is a must-read for you.
Often times, the importance of building stronger upper body muscles is underestimated by many athletes because they believe that strong legs are all that’s needed to run fast.
Now, here’s my question to you: ‘Have you ever tried running without swinging your arms?’
If you have, you’ll know how weird, inefficient and difficult it can be without the help of your arms.
Just as we train our legs to run faster, stronger arms help to propel an athlete forward during a race.
How? When lactic acid starts attacking your lower body, your legs get tired; you’ll experience progressive difficulty in lifting your legs to maintain that run.
When this happens, you’ll end up using your arms to drive yourself forward due to the kinetic chain.
Besides this, a stronger upper body will help maintain good running form as the miles go by.
That stable, upright posture helps to increase an athlete's level of endurance by improving their lung capacity.
Improved upper-body strength also reduces oxygen requirement. This means that an athlete will be able to run faster with the same amount of energy. As a result, your running time improves as a few seconds get sliced off on your splits.
This is why weight training is crucial for runners. We’re not talking about bodybuilding or bulking up — it’s for building muscle endurance.
The goal here is to stress the muscle to its breaking point in order to tear the muscle tissue; these micro-tears will enable the muscle to get leaner and stronger once it repairs itself.
Weight training also helps stave off osteoporosis by strengthening the underlying bone.
To help you get started, I’ll be sharing some toning exercises for your upper body next week, so stay connected.
With that, love, Tana :)
