David Rudisha: Strength Training
We spent May 2017 training with St Patrick’s athletics group in Iten, Kenya – David Rudisha’s training group. We learnt the ins and outs of their unique training program that has produced many sub 1:45 800m runner.
One of the most surprising things we learnt in our month in Iten, was that David Rudisha and his training group don’t do much weight training at all.
As described in the individual typical training day articles, the group do plenty of core work and plyometrics (including squat jumps and hamstring exercises) but there is next to no lifting of weights.
In the base period, from time to time they will do some basic lifting of objects outside the gym (tyres, simple dumbbells etc). They will occasionally do push ups/chin ups during winter time, but not regularly. But from April onwards, there’s none of this.
They do run over continuous hills every single day and this is what they consider their strength work to be.
They classify their strength training as their hill work – rather than in the gym lifting weights.. And every single day is running on hills, whether it be a tempo/high run, fartlek, endurance run. The one day they won’t run many hills, is the day of a track workout, but a surprising amount of hill running is still incorporated into the warm up/cool down on track workout days.
