When should you do your strength sessions?
A guide to timing your strength sessions around your running and cycling, so they support your training instead of competing with it.
A version of this question regularly comes into my inbox from runners and cyclists who want to begin strength training but are unsure how to add it to their training programme:
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"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?"
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The honest answer is that most runners and cyclists are asking exactly the right thing. They just have nobody giving them a real answer built around their actual training week.
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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. It is exactly why the timing of your strength sessions matters.
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Get it right and strength fits around your running and cycling without compromising either. Get it wrong and it muddies your whole training week.
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These are the guidelines, BUILT TO ENDURE®, a UK-based specialist in strength training for runners and cyclists over 30, use with the athletes we coach and what underpins the educational material founder, Emma O'Toole, wrote for my NSCA-approved endurance strength training course, which carries Continuing Education Units for coaches.
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There are two golden rules, I come back to every time a runner or cyclist asks me this question.
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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 them.
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This gives your body enough time to begin recovering from the first session before the demands of the second begin. In practice, it can look like a morning run or ride and a lunchtime or evening strength session.
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If that 4 to 6 hour window isn't possible and you have to do back-to-back sessions, keep the endurance session short and at a low intensity, think around a 4 out of 10 effort level. 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.
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2. 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.
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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. 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.
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Which day in the week works best for strength?
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. Different endurance athletes respond differently, and I want to give you two clear pictures.
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Approach A: ​Pair strength with a quality endurance session
A threshold interval ride in the morning and a strength session in the evening, for example. This concentrates the hard work into fewer days, which protects the rest of the week for genuine recovery and easier training.
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Works well for: busy runners and cyclists who need to protect certain days completely.
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Approach B: ​Pair strength with an easier endurance day
An easy run followed by a strength session later in the afternoon, for example. The body is under less total stress on an easier day, so the strength session can be done with better quality and less accumulated fatigue.
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Works well for: athletes who carry a lot of life stress alongside training.
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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​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.
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Does session order matter?
Yes, but to help you structure this, follow this advice: "Do the priority session first" and follow the framework below.
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A simple framework for deciding what goes first:
1. If you have a key interval run or 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.
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2. 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 Runners and Cyclists Make
​Most runners and cyclists default to doing their endurance training 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 apply these principles and your strength training will support your running and cycling rather than compete with it.
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And that is exactly what it should be doing, because strength training is your endurance enabler.
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