Introduction
Here is a quick and easy bodyweight leg routine for runners who aren’t doing other leg strengthening work.
It should only take about 5 minutes and should be done 2-3 times per week.
As running is a single-leg activity, these are single-leg exercises, which force you to balance on one leg and use hip and torso muscles to maintain stability.
1. Rear Lunges
These work the glutes and quads. In the quads, there is a lot of eccentric work, similar to downhill running.
2. Single-Leg Step Ups
In this exercise, the quads are mainly used in concentric motion, similar to running up a steep hill. You can do them on a bench like this or up two steps - just don’t step up so high that your knee makes an angle less than 90 degrees.
By doing all of these exercises without holding on to anything, you also work on balance and the small muscles required for stability.
3. Lateral Lunges
Running and all the other exercises here are mostly in the sagittal plane. But it’s good to be strong and stable in other planes as well, e.g. you don’t want to hurt yourself if you step off a curb with some sideways motion (which I myself have done in the past).
This exercise is working in the frontal plane (aka coronal plane).
4. Calf Raises
These strengthen the calves and achilles tendons.
In the video, my heel is dropping 1 1/2 to 2 inches - be careful not to overstretch your achilles by dropping too far.
Start with double-leg raises. You can progress to single-leg raises once you can do 30 or so double-leg raises, but lower the number of reps accordingly.
Final Thoughts
As with everything in running and strength training, ease into it - do very few reps to start, then assess soreness over the next couple days. For example, you could start with 5 reps of each, and if you are sore the next day, wait another day or two and repeat them with 5 reps. Stay with the same number of reps until it becomes easy and doesn’t result in soreness, then slowly ramp up over weeks and months. Getting up to 20-30 reps is a good goal, but remember that we are doing these just to support our running, not as ends in themselves.
Finally, you can also do this routine as a warmup, just do very few reps of each.
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