What you need to know about fitting strength into your training week
- Emma O'Toole
- 13 hours ago
- 5 min read
Many runners and cyclists struggle to know when to schedule strength training within their weekly plan. Poor timing can lead to unnecessary fatigue, disrupted recovery, and reduced quality in key endurance sessions. However, when strength training is placed correctly, it enhances performance without compromising running or cycling. This article explains how to structure strength sessions within your week, how to combine them with endurance training, when to prioritise each session, and how to avoid common mistakes that turn your training into a constant “middle effort” zone.
Strength training for runners and cyclists over 30 is a game-changer for performance, resilience, and long-term health.
If you want the full breakdown, check out my Strength Training Over 30 Guides:
TRAINING BREAKDOWN
"Get it right and strength fits around your running and cycling without compromising either. Get it wrong and it muddies your whole training week."
By Emma O'Toole
Hi there!
This question came into my inbox earlier this week and I wanted to answer it properly because I get a version of it almost every week.
"When in my training week should I do my strength sessions? And does it matter whether I do my endurance session before or after, or will it negatively affect my running and cycling either way?"
It is a great question and the honest answer is that most runners and cyclists are not asking the wrong thing, they just have nobody giving them a real answer built around their actual training week; so today that is what I want to do.
The fear behind this question is usually the same: strength training will turn a recovery day into a medium day. Instead of genuinely recovering, you end up adding stress to a body that needs a lighter day to adapt, and the result is a training week where nothing is hard enough to drive adaptation and nothing is easy enough to allow recovery.
That is a legitimate concern and it is exactly why the timing of your strength sessions matters. Get it right and strength fits around your running and cycling without compromising either. Get it wrong and it muddies your whole training week.
So here are the guidelines I use with the athletes I coach and that underpin the educational material I wrote for my NSCA approved endurance strength training course, which carries Continuing Education Units for coaches.
There are two things I come back to every time a runner or cyclist asks me this question. Two golden rules that everything else is built around.
Golden rule 1: allow 4 to 6 hours between sessions done on the same day.
If you are combining strength and endurance training on the same day, which is often the most practical and inevitable solution for busy runners and cyclists, aim for a minimum of 4 to 6 hours between the two sessions with a focus on your nutrition between sessions. This gives your body enough time to begin recovering from the first before the demands of the second begin and can look like a morning run/ride and a lunchtime or evening strength session.
If that 4-6 hour window is not possible and you have to do back to back sessions, keep the endurance session short and at a low intensity, think a 4 out of 10 RPE. This is not the day to do a quality interval session or long ride directly followed by strength training. Save that for when your body is fresher.
Golden rule two: allow 48 to 72 hours between your two strength sessions.
Your strength sessions need recovery time between them for the adaptations to take place. When sessions are too close together, you accumulate fatigue faster than your body can absorb it, and the quality of both sessions suffers as a result.
The 48 to 72 hour window is based on the time your muscles, connective tissue, and nervous system need to recover and remodel following a strength session, and that recovery process is where the adaptation actually happens. Spacing sessions 48 to 72 hours apart gives you enough stimulus to drive progress and enough recovery time to absorb it.
Once you have those two rules in place, the next question is which days in your week work best, and this is where it gets individual.
So, which day in the week works best for strength?
This is where it gets individual and I want to give you two different pictures because different endurance athletes respond differently.
Some runners and cyclists do their best work when strength is paired with a quality endurance session on the same day. A threshold interval ride in the morning and a strength session in the evening, for example. The logic here is that it concentrates the hard work into fewer days, which protects the rest of the week for genuine recovery and easier training.
For runners and cyclists who are very busy and need to protect certain days completely, this approach can work really well.
Other runners and cyclists find it works better to pair strength with an easier endurance day. An easy run followed by a strength session later in the afternoon, for example. The logic here is that the body is under less total stress on an easier day, the bucket is not as full, and the strength session can be done with better quality and less accumulated fatigue.
For runners and cyclists who carry a lot of life stress alongside their training, demanding jobs, family commitments, disrupted sleep, this approach tends to work better because the total load on those combined days stays manageable..
Neither approach is universally right. What matters is that you find the combination that allows you to do the strength work with enough quality to make it worth doing, without compromising the sessions that matter most in your endurance training.
And what about session order when you are doing both on the same day?
Do the priority session first.
If you have a key interval run or a quality ride that day, do that first when you are freshest and your nervous system is most ready to produce the effort the session demands. Strength comes later when the endurance work is done.
If strengthening your body is the priority, as it often is in the off season or early base phase when you are building your strength foundations, do the strength session first. You will get more out of it when you are fresh, and the endurance session that follows can be at an easier effort anyway.
The mistake most athletes make is defaulting to endurance first every single time regardless of what the priority actually is. If strength is important enough to be in your week, it is important enough to occasionally be done when you are fresh enough to do it properly!
There is no perfect training week that works for everyone, but the principles we’ve covered in today’s newsletter make the timing of your strength work much less of a guessing game.
Apply those principles and your strength training will support your running and cycling rather than compete with it… and that is exactly what it should be doing as strength training is your endurance enabler!
If you want to talk through how this fits into your specific training week, come and join BUILT TO ENDURE®’s free coaching group. There are over 800 runners and cyclists over 30 in there and this is exactly the kind of practical question that comes up on a regular basis.
Happy running and riding!
Emma x
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