The Running Red Pill: Why You Should Stop Running and Start Lifting!
We’ve been told our entire lives that running leads to increased fitness and can be a catalyst for weight loss but what if I told you using running to increase your fitness and lose weight is an exercise in futility? Let’s take a look at how detrimental running can be to your overall health. We’re going to start off where it all began, in Ancient Greece.
Niki!
You ever wonder where the word marathon comes from? Why we call a 26.2 mile run a marathon? What started this whole fad? Well in order to answer this question we’re going to have to take it all the way back to Ancient Greece, the town of Marathon specifically. The first ever marathon was completed by Pheidippides in 490 BC. The Athenians were attempting to hold their ground against the advancing Persians at a battle in Marathon and were ultimately successful. They needed to get the news to anxious Athenians who were awaiting news about the battle, needing to know if the Persians were able to break through and whether or not they needed to prepare for battle in an attempt to hold the city.
Pheidippides was tasked with getting the news to the Athenians and began his trek to Athens, Greece. The distance between Marathon and Athens was roughly 26 miles and this news needed to get there fast so he decided to run the entire distance. At the time this was more than likely the furthest a human being had ever run, there just wasn’t really any reason to run that far in the ancient world so it’s fair to conclude that he was pretty unprepared for this. Pheidippides started his run and made it all the way to Athens, and when he got there shouted “Niki!” which is the Greek word for “Victory!” Shortly after announcing the victory over the Persians, Pheidippides fell over and died.
The first ever person to run a marathon DIED, on the spot, after running the roughly 26 miles between Marathon and Athens. His body just couldn’t handle the stress that was placed on it by running that far. He was a warrior, someone who fought in battle regularly and tested the very limits of human physiology on an almost daily basis. Running this distance literally killed him. Crazy right? For me this seems like a reason to stay away from extreme distance running, but Pierre de Coubertin saw it as a challenge.
The Modern Olympics Impact on the Marathon
Coubertin is the father of the modern Olympics and the founder of the International Olympic Committee. He decided to include the marathon in the first ever modern Olympics back in Athens, Greece in 1896 as a tribute to Pheidippides’ run. This race was approximately 40,000 meters, or 24.85 miles long for those of us who use Freedom Units (because ‘Merica!). This race was to begin at the Marathon Bridge and would end at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, Greece and there were officially 25 entries. The first ever marathon of modern times was won by a man named Spiridon Louis, who was a mere postal worker and of the 25 entries, only 9 finished the race. The winning time? 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds.
The very next year the Boston Marathon was born and a whole new sport was created. Over the years humans have trained for and completed countless marathons. The world record is currently 2 hours, 1 minute and 39 seconds and it’s held by a man named Eliud Kipchoge of Ethiopia. If you do the math, you’ll see that this time would make his average mile around 4 and a half minutes. Eliud can run 26 consecutive miles at a pace of about 4 and a half minutes. That’s INSANITY!
Why Running?
Now that we’ve got the history out of the way let’s take a look at running in and of itself. Why do we as humans feel that running is good for our overall health? There’s a few reasons and I’ll list them here:
We’ve been told it is
It makes us tired, so it’s gotta be good right?
You burn more calories in the moment running than you do weight training (more about this later)
It’s good for our heart health
It can actually be incredibly healthy from a mental/emotional health perspective
It can be good for bone health, helping increase bone density
It’s good for our immune system
From the instant gratification that running provides us to an increase in our overall health running sounds like it would be an absolute win right? Not so fast! While running can be a good thing in small doses, like everything else it only works as part of your overall training plan. We’re going to talk about the pitfalls associated with distance running now.
EPOC
There’s a term used in physiology called EPOC. This means Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption and it’s the scientific term for what is often referred to as the “afterburn” of exercise. Another name for this phenomenon is oxygen debt. Following exercise the body enters into this oxygen debt and needs to return to homeostasis so we can be normal, functioning human beings again. During this time the body has to:
Increase ATP production in an effort to replace what was lost during exercise.
Resynthesize glycogen that was utilized during exercise.
Restore oxygen levels in the blood, skeletal muscle and myoglobin.
Repair muscle tissue damaged through exercise
Restore body temperature levels to normal (exercise increases core temp)
All these functions cost energy (calories) in the body which is why this is typically referred to as the afterburn following any kind of exercise, because you’re continuing to burn calories after secession of exercise. In running this typically lasts less than 60 minutes and you can actually kind of feel this in real time as it usually takes a little bit of time to feel “normal” again following a distance run. But after 60 minutes or less, this process stops as we reach homeostasis and the total caloric expenditure of running is over.
Weight training is another story. The afterburn of weight lifting can last as long as 48 hours! In the moment weight training costs less total energy but when the EPOC of lifting is taken into account the overall caloric expenditure is pretty comparable to running, and you can actually make the argument that it’s even greater when compared to running. We’ll talk about that next!
Oxygen Debt and What it Means to Caloric Expenditure
If you’re into your fitness at all chances are you’ve owned some kind of wearable technology. From WHOOP Bands, to Apple Watches and FitBits there’s a plethora of options to choose from. Have you ever noticed that when you enter exercise as “weightlifting” that the total caloric expenditure is substantially less than when you enter it as some kind of cardio? It can actually be pretty infuriating to look down at the summary and see that you only burned 180 calories over an hour of kicking your ass in the gym when going for a walk can yield higher caloric totals. There’s a reason for this and it has to do with your heart rate.
Your wearable technology assumes a lot of things but the biggest thing that it assumes is that if your heart rate is elevated, you’re doing some form of exercise and thus burning more calories. The higher the heart rate, the more calories burned. The algorithms in this technology are actually designed to function that way. You may even find your Apple Watch or WHOOP Band will ask you if you’ve exercised after consuming too much caffeine. Hell when I was going through alcohol withdrawals my Apple Watch thought that I was running a marathon at times because it told me that my caloric expenditure was around 5,000-6,000 calories a day, while I was laying down in bed. It did this because my resting heart rate was extremely elevated while my body was trying to get through the withdrawals. The reason it assumes this is 1) most people aren’t going through withdrawals or having panic attacks all day long and 2) when your heart rate is elevated you’re consuming more oxygen and more than likely exercising.
For every liter of oxygen you exchange in your lungs, it costs your body roughly 5 calories. Thus the higher your heart rate is, the more oxygen you’re consuming/exchanging and your wearable technology knows this by design. This wearable tech will continue to assume you’re burning more calories when your training session is over while your heart rate is slowly coming back to normal, but it doesn’t account for the EPOC recovery process that can last for up to 48 hours and it may leave you thinking that you’ve only burned 200 calories from this weight training session. Don’t let this fool you though! The recovery process COSTS energy, so you’re going to continue to burn calories while this recovery process happens. When compared to the total caloric burn of exercise and recovery, weight lifting is absolutely comparable to running.
There have been countless studies done on EPOC and its relation to caloric expenditure and they’ve concluded that heavy resistance training actually yields the largest EPOC, leading to a greater caloric burn over the course of recovery. A study done by Bersheim and Bahr found just that when they concluded in a 2003 study that “studies in which similar estimated energy cost or similar exercising VO2 have been used to equate continuous aerobic exercise and intermittent resistance exercise, have indicated that resistance exercise produces a greater EPOC response.” All things being equal, you’ll burn more calories over time with weight training. It’s a fact.
Muscle Mass Costs Energy Just to Maintain
One of the many benefits of weight training is an increase in muscle mass. Weight training causes a break down of protein structures in our muscles, and our body will “build back better” in an effort to be better prepared the next time you face this stimulus. It’s actually pretty amazing when you dive down into it, but I won’t bore you with the intricacies of it all just understand that weight training will inevitably lead to an increase in muscle mass.
What does this mean for your overall body composition? Besides looking like a bad ass with more muscle you’ll actually burn much more fat just to keep this muscle. Muscle is what we call metabolically active tissue, it costs energy just to have and maintain it. If you were able to add 10lbs of lean mass to your body, you’d burn an extra 3500 calories per week at rest. That’s roughly a pound of fat worth of extra calories every single week! That’s the equivalent of running 60 marathons over the course of a year, or 182,000 extra calories. Think of all the pizza and sushi you can eat with that! You going to run more than a marathon every week? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say no. Imagine what that could do for your overall health and body composition or even the leeway it allows you on the weekends and vacation to eat off your plan.
Let’s break this down even further. What if you only put on one pound of muscle (because in all honesty 10lbs is a pretty big ask)? You wouldn’t even notice it from looking at yourself in the mirror but it would still increase your overall caloric needs pretty drastically. That would help you to burn an extra 350 calories per week which would be roughly 18,000 extra calories per year. That’s an extra 5lbs of fat worth of calories over the course of a year. And that’s if you laid in bed all day! Imagine the impact it has when you include exercise and functioning all day as a human being.
Weight training increases muscle mass, and muscle mass costs energy just to have. Weight training beats running once again.
Adaptation is the Enemy of Weight Loss
One of the coolest things our bodies are capable of is adaptation. When we place ourselves under physical stressors, our body will adapt so the next time we do that kind of physical labor it’ll be easier. This is a great thing as it’s how we make physiological changes in our bodies, and how we get better for sport and increase our overall health. This in my opinion is one of the greatest downfalls of running for health/body composition though: your body is going to adapt to the stressors you place it under and become more efficient over time. What happens when we become more efficient from a physiological perspective? It costs less energy to accomplish the same task. Remember P90X? They created an entire training regimen off of not adapting to training, and it helped a TON of people gain control over their health again. The constant changes to the kind of work meant your body never adapted, which meant we didn’t need more and more volume over time to keep losing weight. For the general population, this is the ideal way to train for body composition. We just can’t accomplish that with running.
When you took up running you probably wanted to quit pretty much right away. That first mile you completed probably took you 12-15 minutes and left you feeling like your heart was going to explode. Or maybe you didn’t even finish that mile because you couldn’t breathe so you walked most of it. If you stayed with it, over time that mile got easier and easier and you probably even managed to drop an ok amount of weight over the first month or so. Over this time period your body started to adapt to that stressor, and it became more efficient over time. On the surface this is a good thing! Your body is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. BUT the efficiency of the human body is actually working against your body composition goals.
Remember how hard that first mile was? Your body spent a TON of energy trying to accomplish that task because you were so ill prepared to do it. But over time it became easier and easier and believe it or not you burned fewer and fewer calories because you adapted to the work. On top of that, if you managed to drop any weight during that time period it literally took less effort for you to run that mile without carrying around all those extra pounds. Between becoming more efficient and carrying around less weight, you burned fewer calories every time you went for that run. This adaptation to the physical stressors of running is actually working against you.
If you’re like most people what you more than likely did was add volume to your runs. Meaning you decided to run more and more in an effort to lose that weight. That’s the thing about running: while you can change the intensity of your run you’re going to top out eventually and you’ll HAVE to add more and more volume just to maintain the same caloric burn that running originally provided you with. This increased volume can lead to some unwanted outcomes and we’re going to talk about that in the next section.
Overuse Injuries - But But But, Weight Training is “Dangerous”
The running world is FULL of overuse injuries. Shin splints, plantar fasciitis, back pain, there’s even something called runners knee. It happens so often that it has a name associated with the “sport” itself. By the way, running isn’t a sport so don’t ever fool yourself into thinking it is. That aside, there’s a lot of reasons for this but it’s mostly because our bodies aren’t built for distance running and in order to continue seeing the “benefits” of running, we have to do more and more of it. Remember Pheidippides’ first run? It literally killed him. Chasing volume in any fitness endeavor is always a recipe for overuse injury (or in his case, death), and running is no different.
When you run a mile, on average you take about 1500 steps give or take. That’s about 750 reps on each leg. Ground reaction forces of running are right around 2-3 times your body weight so with every step you’re overcoming upwards of three times your body weight. Let’s say you weight 200lbs and decide to take up running in an effort to lose some weight. Every step your take, you’re overcoming upwards of 600lbs! That’s a lot on your joints and even the soft tissue (muscle/fascia) associated with movement. To complete a mile you’re going to have to overcome up to 900,000 pounds of force over the course of the whole mile. You see where I’m going with this?
900,000 pounds of force per mile. 900,000! Now let’s factor in two huge truths associated with running for the average human being:
Most of us honestly don’t know how to run, our form sucks because no one really ever taught us how to run, we were just told to do it in elementary school PE and continued to run however we did it back then
Most of us get fatigued when we run, leading to not knowing how to run AND trying to do it in a fatigued state making our form even worse
Now running is hard enough on our bodies, but doing it in a broken state makes this 900,000lbs of force even worse for us! If we pronate when we run (a lot of people are more flat footed than they think they are) it obviously affects structures in the foot and ankle. But pronating at the foot also causes us to internally rotate the hip creating a valgus stress at the knee which over time will lead us to wearing out the articular cartilage in the medial aspect of our knees. This can also lead to poor tracking of the patella leading to the dreaded “runners knee” and wearing out the articular cartilage on the back of the patella and within the femoral groove. This internal rotation of the hip also leads to more stress created in the lumbar spine, leading to back pain. And guess what? This poor movement is a cue for your EVERY DAY MOVEMENT! It’s going to exacerbate any movement dysfunction you already have leading to even further injury potential even outside of running.
With all this being said I can’t sit here and pretend that lifting weights can’t and won’t lead to overuse injury over time. It absolutely can and does, however when it comes to weight training there’s a multitude of variables that we can manipulate to mitigate overuse potential. From bar speed, to load, to volume, to rest periods, to various movements, to different load modalities; the possibilities are almost limitless. Running just doesn’t have these different variables that can be tweaked, and in order to continue to burn the same amount of calories you’re stuck increasing the volume increasing the potential for overuse injuries down the road. Lifting wins again.
Let’s Talk Hormones
So what is a hormone? You hear the word all the time and it’s often associated with testosterone and estrogen, but there are a myriad of hormones within the body. Hormones are chemical messengers created by our endocrine system that signal different processes to take place in the body. They can trigger growth, mood, hunger, immune system responses, body temperature, reproduction, metabolism and pretty much all physiological and biological functions within the body. Hormones can trigger muscles to grow, they can make you hungry, they can trigger catabolism (the opposite of growth), and they can even make you tired. Training, or lack-thereof, can create a myriad of hormonal responses both good and bad. The goal of training is actually to game the system concerning your hormones and make them work for you.
The hormones we’re most concerned with when dealing with any kind of exercise (or lack of exercise) are typically the following:
Testosterone/Androgens
Estrogen
Progesterone
Growth Hormone
Cortisol
Physiological adaptations within the body following/during exercise are typically caused by these hormones and honestly our training needs to be mapped out in an effort to create a good balance of these hormones if we want to continue to progress and get better. Here are some of the effects of distance running can on these hormones:
Testosterone/Androgens
Distance running has been shown to decrease testosterone levels in both men and women.
Estrogen
Distance running has been shown to decrease estrogen levels in women and can temporarily lead to secession of menstruation.
Progesterone/Cortisol
Distance running can lead to a decrease in progesterone and an increase in cortisol in women. This is because both share the same precursor in pregnenolone and the body will prioritize cortisol to help the body deal with the stress placed on it by distance running.
Growth Hormone
Distance running can cause a slight increase in GH, however with enough volume and consistency over time there will be a pretty good dip in GH production.
The above are all fairly undesired outcomes from a hormonal perspective. They won’t only negatively effect your body composition and training over time, but they’ll have an impact on many of your every day processes. They can interrupt sleep, screw with your fertility and even affect your mood. Training at higher intensities (weight lifting/sprinting/etc) has actually been shown to do much of the opposite! Lifting weights can have the following changes in your hormone production:
Testosterone/Androgens
Weight training at higher intensities has been shown to increase testosterone levels in both men and women.
Estrogen
Weight training has been shown to help balance estrogen levels in women.
Progesterone/Cortisol
Weight training will absolutely lead to an increase in cortisol as it helps to help remodel tissue following exercise. However this response won’t lead to decreased progesterone levels as the increase in cortisol won’t be incredibly high, unless your volume is out of control (too high).
Growth Hormone
Heavier weight lifting (particularly compound movements) has been shown to increase even resting levels of growth hormone in both women and men. This is a good thing.
Looking at the two, you’d have to conclude that weight training will have a much healthier impact on your hormone levels, and help keep you “balanced.” Weight lifting wins again.
Wrapping it All Up
Now this isn’t to say that all cardio is bad, because it unequivocally isn’t. We’re talking steady state, long slow distance training here and comparing it to weight training. Can you go run a mile a few times a week and be incredibly healthy? Absolutely! But can allowing distance running to be the center of your training lead to undesired outcomes? The answer is 100% yes.
