Getting you running quick means getting you strong in all the right muscle groups.  For those that have missed it, I have already detailed why lifting weights will not make you slow and the importance of strengthening the hamstrings as knee flexors, the hamstrings as hip extensors and the quadriceps.  Now it is time to talk about some of the other muscle groups that will really get you rocketing along; whether you are running a marathon or 100m sprint.  The muscles we will cover here are what I call the lower extremity accessory group.  They are the triceps surae, tibialis anterior and flexor hallucis longus.     Read This Article

This January I traveled down to Sydney to take the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) Levels 1 & 2.  To be honest, it was quite overdue as I had been looking at the material for over two years but never had a chance to get taught it correctly.  In essence, the Functional Movement Screen is a series of seven movement patterns that require some form of balance, stability or mobility.  It is massively popular in the United States at the moment (most NFL teams use the FMS in their training programs) and it is a great method of getting a good idea of where you are at in terms of your injury risk; whether you are an athlete or not.    Read This Article

To make sure you are up to speed (no pun intended), make sure you have had a look at Part 1 & Part 2 of The Most Important Muscles To Strengthen For Running and also read this article here.  Now the quadriceps group (as the latin translation suggests) is made up of four muscle heads: vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, vastus intermedius and rectus femoris.  These muscles primarily extend the knee while the rectus femoris also flexes the hip, which makes it a doubly important muscle for running (as we will see in the next part of this series).    Read This Article

So everyone understands that getting stronger by lifting weights will actually make you a faster runner and will not get big and bulky, please read this blog post here and this article here.  Also let's quickly revise the dynamics of running.  There are basically three parts to running: the stance phase (which is the amount of time you spend on the ground every time your foot touches the ground), the stride length and the stride rate (or frequency).  To run faster, you have to either a) decrease the stance phase, b) increase the stride length or c) increase the stride frequency.  As I have mentioned here, this applies to every distance from a 100m sprint to a ultramarathon.  The second group of muscles we are going to talk about in regards to their importance to running and why they need to be as strong as possible are the hamstrings and in this case when they extend the hip.  Read This Article