Strength training for runners after 40: the exercises that actually matter

You have read that runners should strength train. You may even have started. The problem is that the list you found was the same list everyone gets: squat, deadlift, lunge, plank. A generic gym routine with a photo of a runner attached.

That list is not wrong. It is just unsorted, and sorting is the whole point when you have under an hour a week for anything other than running. So this guide is not an argument that strength training is good for runners. It assumes you already know that. It is about which exercises pay back most inside an actual running stride, in what order, and why the priorities look different at 45 than at 25.

A running stride does not load the body evenly

A stride looks like whole-body work. Mechanically it is not. The force is distributed very unevenly, and it piles up at the bottom.

A 2021 study in Scientific Reports measured Achilles tendon loading during treadmill walking and running. During running, tendon force sat between 2.3 and 2.6 kilonewtons at 2.5 and 3.5 metres per second respectively (roughly 10:45 and 7:40 per mile). Strain ran from 4.5 to 4.9 per cent in running, against 4.0 per cent in walking.

Translated into something usable: the authors themselves put that at roughly 3.2 to 3.5 times body weight in running, against 2.7 times in walking. An hour of running contains on the order of 9,000 to 10,000 steps, meaning around 4,500 to 5,000 landings per leg. No other tendon in the leg gets that treatment.

One detail worth knowing, because the figure is almost always quoted higher than this: older estimates built on computer models of the musculoskeletal system landed at five to seven times body weight. Those numbers still circulate in running writing. The study above measured lower values and argues explicitly that the models overestimate the load. So the measured figures are the ones used here. The conclusion is unaffected: a little over three times body weight through a single tendon, roughly five thousand times an hour, is still the hardest treatment any tendon in the leg receives.

The Achilles is shared by two muscles with different jobs. Soleus sits deep, crosses only the ankle, and is the bigger force producer at push-off. Gastrocnemius, the visible calf muscle, crosses both the ankle and the knee. Being biarticular has a practical consequence that almost never gets spelled out: when the knee bends, gastrocnemius goes slack and soleus takes over. So a straight-leg heel raise and a bent-knee heel raise are not the same exercise. They load different muscles. Do only one of them and you are training half your Achilles.

What changes with age is measured at the ankle

Here is the reason this article does not look like a standard runner's strength list.

When researchers compare how middle-aged and young runners divide work between joints, the same pattern keeps appearing. A 2024 study in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports compared middle-aged runners (mean age around 57) with young runners (around 28 to 30). The young runners ran with more positive work and higher peak power at the ankle; the middle-aged runners with more at the hip. The phenomenon is called a distal-to-proximal shift: work migrates up the leg with age. The same pattern has been described in walking for longer.

What matters practically is the direction. The contribution that drops most is the ankle's. The hip's contribution is intact or larger. A programme that puts its emphasis on hips and thighs is putting it where the problem is not.

Three honest caveats

This kind of finding is easy to oversell, so here is what the evidence does not say.

• The shift is not purely ageing. When weekly running volume is matched between groups, ankle kinetics come out broadly similar (Paquette and DeVita 2018), and higher running volume goes with less of a shift. Part of what looks like ageing is training volume. Be honest about the limit, though: the 2021 follow-up still found a residual age effect on positive ankle work even with volume in the model. Volume explains some of it, not all. It is still good news, because volume is a variable you can move.
• The shift does not automatically wreck your running economy. A 2016 study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise compared runners over 65 with young runners. The older group had clear biomechanical differences, including leg stiffness 10 to 20 per cent lower, yet used 2 to 9 per cent less metabolic energy than the young runners across the range of speeds. The idea that everything simply degrades does not hold.
• Nobody has shown that strength training reverses the shift. That the ankle is the joint losing most is well described. That a heel raise restores the distribution is a reasonable inference, not a measured effect. What has been measured is that strength training improves running economy, which is the outcome you actually notice.

The conclusion still holds: the ankle is where a runner over 40 has the most to lose, it is under-prioritised in almost every generic programme, and it is cheap to train. That is enough reason to put it first.

The exercises, in priority order

This is the whole list. It is deliberately short. If you only have ten minutes, do the top two rows and skip the rest without guilt.

Priority 1: the calf, at two knee angles

Stand on one leg, either on the floor or with the ball of your foot on a step. Fingertips against a wall for balance, not to take your weight. Rise as high as you can go, hold for a second at the top, lower slowly. What decides whether this works is the height: a heel raise that stops halfway is not training what you think it is.

Then repeat the whole thing seated, or standing with the knee bent to roughly thirty degrees. That is the version that hits soleus, and it is the one usually missing entirely from a runner's programme. If body weight is too light, wear a rucksack full of books or hold a dumbbell.

This is also the exercise that pays back most if you have had Achilles trouble before, which is one of the most common injuries for runners in midlife.

Priority 2: lateral hip work

Running is single-leg work. Every time a foot lands, the pelvis has to be held steady by the muscles on the outside of the hip, and that is the direction in which the knee drifts inward when control runs out.

The evidence here deserves an honest description, because it is routinely overstated. The popular version is that weak glutes cause runner's knee. A 2017 systematic review in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport screened 1,841 articles and found eleven meeting its criteria. For iliotibial band syndrome, the pain on the outside of the knee, three of five studies found weakness in the affected runners. So the picture is mixed, and much of the material is cross-sectional, which cannot separate cause from consequence: a painful knee makes you weaker, not only the other way round.

There is prospective evidence, though. A one-year observational study published in 2015 in the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy followed novice runners training on their own. Those with higher-than-normal eccentric hip abduction strength developed patellofemoral pain at a lower rate over the first 50 km. That association came from the unadjusted model, meaning without controlling for other factors.

Reasonable conclusion: hip work earns its place, but it is not the magic key to knee pain it is usually sold as. If your knee already hurts, do not start here. Start with the guide on runner's knee, which sorts out which of the two common knee problems you actually have.

Priority 3: thighs and glutes

The single-leg Romanian deadlift is the closest any classic gym movement gets to a running stride: one foot on the ground, the hip as a hinge, the hamstrings braking. Hold a weight in the opposite hand, push the hip back with the knee almost straight, feel the stretch behind the thigh, come back up. The balance demand is part of the exercise.

Bulgarian split squats or plain lunges cover the front of the thigh in the single-leg position running actually uses. This is where the generic list's squat ends up: further down than most programmes put it. It is not excluded. It is simply not first.

Priority 4: a small dose of jumping

Elastic recoil in tendons and muscles is a real part of running economy, and jumping trains it. But the priority should match the evidence, and there jumping is the addition rather than the base. Thirty to sixty seconds of light bouncing on the balls of your feet at the end of the session is enough. If you have a history of Achilles problems, put it last of everything and build slowly.

Heavy and slow beats light and high-rep

The next question is how to lift. Here there is an actual head-to-head comparison to lean on.

A systematic review with meta-analysis pitted heavy resistance training against plyometric training for running economy and time-trial performance. The pooled effect on running economy was g = −0.32 for heavy resistance, a small effect, against g = −0.13 for plyometrics, which counts as trivial.

A 2024 systematic review with meta-analysis in Sports Medicine went further and split the effect by running speed. High-load methods produced small improvements in running economy (ES = −0.266) across a wide speed range from 8.6 to 17.9 km/h. Combined methods, meaning heavy lifting plus jumping, produced moderate improvements (ES = −0.426). Plyometrics on its own improved economy only at speeds up to 12 km/h. The programmes behind these numbers ran six to twenty-four weeks with one to four sessions per week.

The effect sizes are negative because using less oxygen at a given pace is better. The figures come from different reviews with partly different source studies, so read them as a direction rather than as exact head-to-head values.

In practice, heavy means a load you can manage roughly six to ten times, with a final repetition that is genuinely hard. It does not have to look impressive: a rucksack full of books works fine at the start. The condition that decides whether home training produces anything at all is covered in the guide on strength training at home.

Tendons give you a second reason to go slow. A randomised trial published in 2015 in The American Journal of Sports Medicine compared heavy slow resistance training against classic eccentric training in 58 patients with midportion Achilles tendinopathy whose symptoms had lasted more than three months. Both approaches produced clear and lasting improvement over twelve weeks, holding at one-year follow-up. The heavy slow group tended toward higher satisfaction at twelve weeks (100 versus 80 per cent), but the difference was not statistically significant (P = .052) and had gone by the final follow-up. So the conclusion is not that one method wins. It is that slow, heavy loading is tolerated well by tendon tissue, even tissue that is already irritated.

The session: 25 minutes, twice a week

Two sessions a week is what recurs in the evidence and what actually survives contact with a week that already contains running. Here is what it looks like.

Rest one to two minutes between sets. The session should take twenty-five minutes, not fifty. If it runs longer, you have added exercises that are not in the table.

The calf and hip rows sit above the six to ten repetitions recommended earlier. The reason is load: with body weight alone you will not reach near-failure in ten repetitions on those movements. Once you have added weight to the rucksack, those rows belong at six to ten like the rest. Soleus is also largely made up of fatigue-resistant fibres, which is well established, but the step from fibre type to a specific rep range is disputed. Treat the higher numbers as a practical choice, not a physiological law.

Where the sessions should sit relative to your running is a separate question, and it is answered elsewhere. The short version is that the order inside a combined session matters, and that the gap between a hard run and a strength session matters more. The full puzzle is in the guide on strength training and running.

The test that shows where you stand

Before deciding how much calf work you need, you can measure. The test is simple and needs a book, a pair of shoes and a wall.

Stand on one leg with the ball of your foot on something angled at about ten degrees, such as a wedge or a book under the forefoot. Keep your shoes on and the knee straight. Fingertips against a wall for balance. Rise as high as you can at a rate of one repetition per second. Count until you can no longer reach full height. That is your result. Change anything in that setup, such as going slower or standing on flat ground, and the number stops being comparable with the table below.

A 2017 normative study in the journal Physiotherapy tested 600 healthy adults aged 20 to 81, with the normative values drawn from 566 of them. Modelled values at each age:

An older clinical rule of thumb, from a 1995 study of 203 healthy adults, sets 25 repetitions as the threshold for normal function regardless of sex. For someone in midlife the two benchmarks point the same way.

Five mistakes that cost the most

• You only do straight-leg heel raises. That trains gastrocnemius and loads soleus, the stronger force producer at push-off, less than you could have. The bent-knee version is not variety for its own sake.
• You train too light because heavy does not feel runner-ish. Twenty-five easy repetitions feel virtuous but sit below the load that produces the effect. The evidence showing improved running economy is built on heavy training.
• You put the squat first. It is not wrong, it is wrongly prioritised. When time runs out, the bottom rows should disappear, not the top ones.
• You do everything on two legs. Running never happens on two legs. The single-leg versions cost no extra time and cover both the strength and the lateral control that two-legged exercises skip.
• You start with six exercises and quit after three weeks. Two exercises that get done beat six that do not. Start with the two heel raises. Add more once those are automatic.

And a reminder that runs through this whole guide: a missed session is data, not a failure. A programme that collapses in week three was too big. You were not.

When to seek medical advice

Strength training that leaves a muscle mildly sore the next day is normal. What follows is not.

• Pain in a tendon or joint that increases during the session, or is still there the next day.
• An Achilles that is sore and stiff for the first steps in the morning for more than a few weeks.
• Sudden pain with a snap or a pop in the calf or Achilles, or an inability to push up onto your toes.
• Swelling, redness or heat in a joint, particularly alongside a fever.
• Numbness, pins and needles or weakness radiating into the leg or foot.
• Chest pain, unusual breathlessness or dizziness during exertion.

See a doctor or physiotherapist if a problem is not resolving. Sudden severe calf pain with an inability to push up onto your toes should be assessed the same day, because a ruptured Achilles tendon needs to be looked at quickly.

Operatör 45 provides general health information. We do not diagnose and we do not give personal medical advice. If you have a known condition, an ongoing injury or training advice from your own doctor or physiotherapist, that takes precedence over everything written here.

Where to start tomorrow

Do the test tonight. It takes two minutes and gives you a number that says more about your running year than most of the values on your watch.

Then add two heel-raise variations while the coffee brews, three sets of each. That is the entire starter pack. Exercises three through six can wait three weeks without anything being lost, and they get easier to add once the first two have become a habit. If you are new to running as well, the foundations are in the guide on starting to run after 40.

Frequently asked questions

Which strength exercises matter most for a runner over 40?

Start at the calf. Straight-leg heel raises and bent-knee heel raises together cover the two muscles that share the Achilles tendon, and that tendon is the most heavily loaded tendon in the leg when you run. Add lateral hip work next (single-leg hip thrusts or side-lying abduction), then the hamstrings and glutes (single-leg Romanian deadlift) and the knee work (Bulgarian split squat or lunge). A small dose of jumping comes last of all. The order is not arbitrary: what measurably changes in an older running stride sits at the ankle, while hip work is unchanged or greater.

Should runners lift heavy or do high repetitions?

Heavy and slow, with few repetitions, has stronger support than light and fast when the goal is running economy. In a systematic review with meta-analysis comparing heavy resistance training against plyometric training, the pooled effect on running economy was g = −0.32 for heavy resistance versus g = −0.13 for plyometrics, a small effect against a trivial one. That does not make jumping worthless. It makes it the addition rather than the foundation. In practice: a load you can manage roughly six to ten times, moved under control.

How many strength sessions a week does a runner need?

Two a week is what recurs in the running economy literature, where programmes typically ran six to twenty-four weeks with one to four sessions per week. Two is enough to get the effect and light enough to survive a week that already contains running. One session a week beats none. That three is rarely worth the recovery cost for someone who also runs is our experience of building schedules rather than a study finding: the reviews above included programmes with up to four sessions a week without reporting any downside.

How do I know whether my calves are strong enough?

Test with single-leg standing heel raises, but use the study protocol, or the number will not be comparable: ball of the foot on about a ten-degree incline, shoes on, knee straight, fingertips against a wall for balance, one rise per second. Count until you can no longer reach full height. In a normative study of 600 healthy adults aged 20 to 81, the modelled value at age 40 was around 28 repetitions for men and 25 for women, and around 24 and 22 respectively at age 50. Performance falls by about five repetitions per decade for men and two to three for women, so a 49-year-old should measure against the age-50 value rather than the age-40 one. An older clinical rule of thumb sets 25 repetitions as the threshold for normal function. If you land clearly below the value for your age, you have found your first exercise.

Will strength training make me heavier and slower as a runner?

It is the most common objection and the evidence does not support it. Systematic reviews in middle- and long-distance runners show improved running economy with no negative effect on maximal oxygen uptake. Two short sessions a week at six to ten repetitions also rarely produce meaningful weight gain, because that volume sits far below what noticeable muscle growth requires. For how the sessions should sit in the week without eating into your running, see the guide on strength training and running.

Can I strength train if something already hurts?

Often yes, but at that point it is rehabilitation rather than general training, and it should be matched to what you actually have. For long-standing Achilles problems the support for heavy slow resistance training is good: in a randomised trial of 58 patients with midportion Achilles tendinopathy whose symptoms had lasted more than three months, both classic eccentric training and heavy slow resistance produced clear and lasting improvement over twelve weeks, sustained at one-year follow-up. That said, do not self-diagnose from an article. See a doctor or physiotherapist if the problem is not resolving.

Sources

Kharazi et al., Quantifying mechanical loading and elastic strain energy of the human Achilles tendon during walking and running, Scientific Reports 2021. Kearns, DeVita & Paquette, Gender differences on the age-related distal-to-proximal shift in joint kinetics during running, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports 2024. Beck et al., Older Runners Retain Youthful Running Economy despite Biomechanical Differences, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 2016. Llanos-Lagos et al., Effect of Strength Training Programs in Middle- and Long-Distance Runners' Economy at Different Running Speeds, Sports Medicine 2024. Eihara et al., Heavy Resistance Training Versus Plyometric Training for Improving Running Economy and Running Time Trial Performance, Sports Medicine - Open 2022 (PMID 36370207). Blagrove, Howatson & Hayes, Effects of Strength Training on the Physiological Determinants of Middle- and Long-Distance Running Performance, Sports Medicine 2018. Beyer et al., Heavy Slow Resistance Versus Eccentric Training as Treatment for Achilles Tendinopathy, The American Journal of Sports Medicine 2015. Mucha et al., Hip abductor strength and lower extremity running related injury in distance runners, Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport 2017. Ramskov et al., High Eccentric Hip Abduction Strength Reduces the Risk of Developing Patellofemoral Pain Among Novice Runners, Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy 2015. Hébert-Losier et al., Updated reliability and normative values for the standing heel-rise test in healthy adults, Physiotherapy 2017 (PMID 28886865). Lunsford & Perry, The standing heel-rise test for ankle plantar flexion, Physical Therapy 1995 (PMID 7644573). Paquette and DeVita, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 2018 (PMID 29016393). Paquette, Powell and DeVita, Age and training volume influence joint kinetics during running, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports 2021 (PMID 33080072).