Most endurance athletes already know they should be doing strength training. The issue is not awareness. It is that resistance training is still seen as optional, risky, or something that takes time and energy away from real training. Just as often, athletes avoid it for a simpler reason. They do not know how to do it.
Public health and fitness guidelines reinforce this gap. Aerobic exercise is prioritized, with recommendations of roughly 150 minutes per week, while resistance training is reduced to a brief add-on. Twice a week. Minimal emphasis. Very little guidance on what that actually looks like in practice.
A recent paper published in Exercise and Sport Movement, The Health Benefits of Resistance Exercise: Beyond Hypertrophy and Big Weights (Abou Sawan et al., 2022), challenges this framing. The authors argue that resistance training plays a far more important role in long-term health and physical resilience than it is typically given credit for.
Research shows that resistance training can deliver many of the same health benefits as aerobic training. When the two are combined, outcomes are consistently better than performing either alone. Not as a replacement for endurance work, but as a foundation that supports it.
Despite this, participation remains low. Dr. Stuart Phillips, professor of kinesiology at McMaster University, states that only about five percent of Canadians engage in consistent resistance training. Among endurance athletes, the gap is driven not only by time and recovery concerns, but by uncertainty. Many simply lack clear, practical direction on how to begin and how to integrate strength work without compromising their endurance training.
Research Highlight
Resistance training is associated with reductions in all-cause mortality comparable to aerobic training, despite receiving far less emphasis in public guidelines.
Why Endurance Athletes Often Avoid Resistance Training
Endurance athletes rarely avoid resistance training because they believe it has no value. More often, it is avoided because its role is misunderstood, its application feels unclear, and it is difficult to justify within an already full training schedule.
Misunderstanding Its Role and Purpose
Resistance training is often viewed as something separate from endurance performance, or as a tool reserved for aesthetics or general fitness. Its role in long-term performance, healthy aging, and durability across years of training is frequently overlooked. When strength work is framed as optional rather than foundational, it becomes easy to dismiss.
Lack of Knowledge or Confidence
Even athletes who believe strength training is important often do not know how to apply it effectively. Questions around exercise selection, type of strength, progression, and how strength training changes across phases of the season create uncertainty. Without a clear framework, many athletes either avoid it altogether or perform sessions that feel disconnected from their endurance goals.
Fear of Interfering With Endurance Training
Endurance athletes are less concerned about lifting weights and more concerned about how strength work affects their key sessions. Poor scheduling, excessive soreness, or poorly timed lifts can compromise run or ride quality. Without guidance on when and how to integrate strength training, this fear reinforces avoidance.
Perceived Time Constraints
With limited training time and recovery capacity, resistance training is often the first thing removed. The assumption is that it requires long sessions or frequent workouts to be effective. When strength work is not clearly prioritized or efficiently designed, it struggles to compete with mileage and intensity work.
Why Resistance Training Becomes More Important With Age for Endurance Athletes
Endurance training creates powerful adaptations, but those adaptations are highly specific. Over time, relying on aerobic training alone leaves important gaps that become more relevant with age. Resistance training addresses what endurance sports do not.
Bone Density
Bone adapts to where and how force is applied. Running loads the femur and tibia. Cycling provides minimal impact loading. Upper body, spine, and non–sport-specific regions receive very little stimulus, even in highly trained athletes. Resistance training applies load across a wider range of skeletal sites, helping preserve bone density in areas endurance training does not meaningfully stress.
Muscle Mass and Strength
Endurance training strengthens the muscles repeatedly used within a specific movement pattern. Running and cycling load the lower body in very specific ways, while many other muscle groups receive minimal stimulus. Over time, this contributes to uneven strength development and age-related muscle loss in areas that matter for posture, stability, and force transfer. Resistance training preserves muscle and strength where sport-specific training does not.
Metabolic Health
Muscle tissue plays a central role in glucose regulation. Resistance training improves insulin sensitivity by increasing and maintaining functional muscle mass. For endurance athletes, this supports energy availability during long training days and improves recovery between sessions. As athletes age, this becomes increasingly important for sustaining training quality and consistency.
Research Highlight
Combining aerobic and resistance training produces superior health outcomes compared to performing either modality in isolation.
Fundamental Movement Patterns Matter
One of the reasons resistance training feels overwhelming for many endurance athletes is that it is often presented as a long list of exercises. In reality, effective strength training is organized around a small number of fundamental movement patterns that reflect how the human body produces and controls force.
These patterns include squatting, hinging, lunging, pushing, pulling, carrying, and resisting or producing rotation. Together, they represent the primary ways the body moves and stabilizes under load.
When resistance training is organized around these patterns rather than isolated muscles or advanced lifts, it becomes easier to understand and more relevant to sport. For example, the hip hinge and squat patterns support lower-body force production and load transfer, which carry over to climbing, accelerating, and sustained power output. Pulling and carrying patterns support posture and upper-body stability, influencing breathing mechanics and fatigue management during long efforts.
Within this framework, targeted work for weak or underdeveloped areas still has a place. Addressing imbalances, such as insufficient lateral hip strength, supports the larger movement patterns rather than replacing them. The foundation remains whole-body movement. Targeted exercises simply help reinforce it where needed.
For endurance athletes, this approach provides structure and clarity without unnecessary complexity. Strength training becomes a way to support sport-specific demands while addressing gaps endurance training alone does not cover.
Consistency Over Complexity
Once resistance training is understood and appropriately scaled, the determining factor is no longer how advanced the program is, but whether it is performed consistently.
Strength adaptations that support endurance performance depend on regular exposure over time. Sporadic or short-lived efforts, even if well designed, fail to produce meaningful or lasting benefit. Consistency allows strength, tissue tolerance, and fatigue resistance to accumulate without disrupting aerobic training.
For endurance athletes, this matters more than occasional “perfect” sessions. Modest, repeatable strength work integrated week after week supports durability and performance far more effectively than complex approaches that are difficult to sustain. Consistency is what allows resistance training to fit alongside endurance training, rather than compete with it.
Research Highlight
Low volumes of resistance training are sufficient. Measurable benefits have been observed with as little as one to two sessions per week.
Health Benefits Beyond Muscle Size
Resistance training is still widely associated with muscle size and aesthetics. While maintaining muscle mass is important, especially for endurance athletes exposed to years of high training load, it represents only a small part of what resistance training actually provides.
Strength training influences how the body moves, recovers, and adapts under repeated stress. It supports joint control, tissue resilience, metabolic health, immune function, and overall physical robustness. These adaptations directly affect an athlete’s ability to train consistently, recover effectively, and tolerate the cumulative demands of endurance sport.
As athletes age, these benefits become increasingly relevant. Resistance training is not just about building muscle. It is about maintaining the systems that allow endurance athletes to keep training, season after season, year after year.
A Simple, Sustainable Starting Framework
For endurance athletes who already train consistently but have deprioritized resistance training, getting started does not require an advanced plan. What matters is choosing a simple structure that supports durability and performance without overwhelming recovery.
A sustainable approach typically includes two brief sessions per week, spaced to allow adequate recovery alongside endurance training. Sessions focus on fundamental movement patterns, controlled effort, and maintaining good movement quality rather than chasing fatigue.
A basic example might include one lower-body hinge pattern, a squat or lunge variation, an upper-body push and pull, and a loaded carry. Together, these movements cover the primary demands that endurance training alone does not fully address.
The goal of this kind of framework is not exhaustion or maximal strength development. It is to introduce consistent, repeatable strength work that supports long-term training, reduces breakdown, and fits realistically into an endurance-focused schedule.
This example is meant to show how uncomplicated resistance training can be when it is properly framed and appropriately dosed.
Final Takeaway
For endurance athletes, resistance training is not an add-on or a phase-specific tool. It is a foundational component that supports how the body tolerates training, adapts to load, and continues to perform over time.
When strength work is understood, appropriately scaled, and integrated consistently, it stops feeling disruptive or optional. It becomes part of a sustainable training approach that supports both performance and longevity.
That shift in perspective is what allows resistance training to fit naturally alongside endurance training, rather than competing with it.
If you’ve read this far, you’re likely already reconsidering where resistance training fits in your endurance training. Not as something extra or disruptive, but as something that supports how long and how well your body can keep doing the work you ask of it.
In the end, the real question is not whether resistance training belongs in endurance sport, but how long you want your body to keep up with your ambitions.
An Optional Next Step
If you want a simple, structured way to apply these ideas, you can explore my free Muscle Up Program for Endurance Athletes. It’s designed to help runners, cyclists, and multi-sport athletes integrate resistance training without compromising their endurance training.
https://gofitlife.ca/muscle-up-challenge/
Resource:
Abou Sawan, S., Nunes, E. A., Lim, C., McKendry, J., & Phillips, S. M. (2022). The health benefits of resistance exercise: Beyond hypertrophy and big weights. Exercise, Sport and Movement, 1(1), e00001. https://doi.org/10.1249/esm.0000000000000001
