August 14, 2026
When you first start trying to combine lifting + running, it can feel like fitting a round peg in a square hole.
Without a structured plan, great results can be hard to come by. Your legs may end up feeling sorer and more tired than they need to be.
So, this week, we're going over a 4-step sequence of events you can follow to make better progress and feel better along the way.
The exact form this takes would look slightly different for everyone.
I'll try to make this as actionable as possible, but there's a lot of specifics I'll have to leave out to make this generally applicable.
Examples include pace, intensity, volume, etc. etc.
If you'd like personalized help, consider inquiring about 1:1 coaching.
It's worth setting up your resistance training split such that it makes sense to blend with endurance.
My recommendation would be to use either a full body split or upper body / lower body split.
I explain why here.
Running requires to distinct kinds of adaptation:
Aerobic (your body's ability to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the working muscle during exercise)
Structural (your body's ability to sustain the high volume of impact)
When you introduce running to your program, your introducing both stimuli at the same time.
If you introduce just one at a time, your cardiovascular fitness can begin making some serious progress without you feeling run-down all the time (pun intended).
The way you do this is by starting with something other than running.
Cycling, rucking, incline walking, rowing, AirDyne, etc. would all work.
Because these don't have any impact, they're much easier to recover from. Thus, your lifting will be unaffected and your aerobic system will begin to develop.
Start with something manageable:
~30-60 minutes across the whole week
e.g. 3 20-minute sessions
Easy to moderate intensity
Maintain an effort level of ~4-6/10
I don't give heart rate recommendations because appropriate heart rate prescription is different for each mode of exercise
Build the volume you do (in terms of time) up slowly for about a month or so.
For context, minimum physical activity guidelines call for 150 minutes per week of this sort of exercise. So, that's not a bad end goal before moving on.
Once you've spent ~4 weeks on the previous step, remove some amount of it (e.g. 40 minutes) and re-allocate that time to running.
The goal is to identify a dose of running that gives you some exposure to it so your body can learn to recover from that + lifting.
Ideally, it should be a small dose (~1-2 miles) done 2x/week.
The key is to identify a dose that gives your body exposure but is easy to recovery from.
Keep the dose of running the same, and do not increase how much you do, for ~2-4 weeks or so.
This helps more than people realize. Your ability to recover from running as you progress it will be much easier once your body has had some practice doing so.
At this point, your aerobic conditioning is mostly non-impact with some running.
Each week, for ~2-4 weeks, replace the non-impact aerobic conditioning with running.
Do this until running is the only cardio that you are doing.
At this point, the next logical thing to do is progress how much running you are doing.
The generic rule of thumb is the 10% rule.
That is, increase the total amount of miles you run each week by 10% compared to the previous week.
Don't even worry about increasing pace. Keep this all easy and just focus on the distance.
There's plenty of fancier progression models and session structures you could utilize after this point.
However, what's most appropriate will depend on what you want to get out of running.
Do you want to improve your 5k time, or run a marathon?
Maybe you want to be in better shape for a hike you have coming up.
There's no wrong answer, and you may end up doing it all at some point in time.
In any case, following these 4 steps should get you to this point safe and sound.
Hope that helps.
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