Running AND Lifting: The Training Combination That Outperforms Doing Either Alone
Researchers split 30 recreational male runners (ages 30–40) into three 12-week programs: strength-only, endurance-only, or a concurrent blend of both.
The strength group gained jump power and squat strength. The endurance group improved VO2max (maximum oxygen uptake capacity) and anaerobic threshold (the intensity at which lactic acid accumulates and your pace becomes unsustainable).
The concurrent group improved everything, without any single gain being reduced compared to the single-mode groups.
Body fat percentage, lean mass, running economy at race-pace speeds, power, and both aerobic markers all improved.
The key detail: sessions were scheduled on non-consecutive days, which appears to prevent strength and endurance adaptations from canceling each other out.
My Thoughts
I’ve been waiting for research clean enough to share this confidently. Most interference-effect studies used elite athletes or same-day double sessions, nothing like how recreational runners actually train.
The concurrent group here trained on separate days and captured every single adaptation measured.
For a runner juggling work and family, two lifting sessions on non-run days is completely doable.
Start this week: pick two non-run days and add 40 minutes of squats, lunges, and single-leg deadlifts.
Women Gain Muscle at the Same Rate as Men (The Numbers Are Almost Identical)
A Bayesian meta-analysis (a statistical method that pools evidence across studies and quantifies uncertainty) analyzed data from 29 resistance training studies to compare muscle growth between males and females.
Males showed slightly larger absolute gains, but the effect size was just 0.19 (a small difference by statistical convention). Relative percentage gains were virtually identical, with less than a 1% difference between sexes.
One notable nuance: sex differences were larger in upper-body muscle groups than lower-body. For leg training specifically, males and females gained muscle at nearly identical rates.
My Thoughts
The upper-body versus lower-body split genuinely surprised me.
I assumed gains would be broadly similar across the body, but the data suggests female runners may actually benefit most from prioritizing upper-body strength, where the gap is wider and the relative opportunity is greatest.
For legs, the prescription is the same regardless of sex. Female runners who skip the weight room are not avoiding something optional. They are leaving the same gains on the table that any male runner would leave behind.
Treat strength training as a universal prescription, not a gendered one.
Yoga Cuts Cortisol Better Than HIIT, and HIIT May Actually Make Stress Worse
A network meta-analysis (a technique that ranks multiple interventions at once, even those not directly compared in a single trial) reviewed 44 studies on how different exercise types affect cortisol (the body’s primary stress hormone).
Yoga ranked as the top cortisol-reducer.
Qigong and multicomponent training (programs blending aerobic, strength, and flexibility work) also performed well. High-intensity interval training tended to increase cortisol rather than reduce it.
Researchers identified an optimal weekly dose of roughly 530 MET-minutes (equivalent to about 60 to 90 minutes of moderate running per week) beyond which stress-reduction benefits plateaued or reversed. Longer intervention durations showed progressively greater improvements.
My Thoughts
The HIIT finding stopped me cold.
Many runners use intense training as their primary stress outlet, and mentally, it works. But the data draws a critical distinction.
HIIT relieves perceived stress while simultaneously spiking cortisol, the hormone that determines what stress actually does to your body.
Chronically elevated cortisol impairs sleep, slows muscle repair, and suppresses immune function.
So, while you may be relieving your mental stress with hard workouts or HIIT type training, you’re adding stress to your body that you may not realize.
It’s one of the main reasons we formulated MAS Sleep to be a recovery tool. Its primary mechanism is cortisol reduction, which directly addresses the physiological cost of your hard training days.
The optimal weekly dose of stress relieving exercise from this study is roughly three easy 20-to-30-minute runs.
If you are already training above that threshold, more intensity is not adding stress relief. It is adding cortisol.
Use MAS Sleep on your hard training days, and consider swapping one HIIT session for yoga.
