05 · Exercise selection
The Big Four: What Strength Training Exercises for Runners Actually Look Like
Four barbell lifts, not fourteen resistance-band exercises. What the Kench Method actually prescribes, and why compound lifts beat isolation work for a runner's strength base.
Ask a runner what strength training looks like and the answer is usually resistance bands, single-leg balance drills, and a handful of bodyweight exercises borrowed from a physio's clipboard. The strength training exercises for runners inside the Kench Method look nothing like that. It is four barbell lifts, run twice a week, borrowed almost entirely from a powerlifting textbook.
An earlier post on this site described the system as four exercises without naming them correctly. This is the correction. The four lifts are the barbell back squat, the deadlift, the overhead press, and the bench press. Nothing rehabilitative about any of them.
The four strength training exercises for runners, named properly
The Big Four run across two sessions a week, Workout A and Workout B, spaced roughly three days apart. Workout A is squat, overhead press, deadlift. Workout B is squat, bench press, deadlift. Three sets of five reps on the squat and press work, one set of five on the deadlift. Forty-five minutes, twice a week.
This isn't an original invention. The book credits it, in the preface, as a runner's adaptation of Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength novice linear progression, the programme used to bring absolute beginners from an empty barbell to a meaningful working weight over their first months of training. The adaptation is the sessions per week and the exercise order, fitted around a running schedule. The lifts themselves are untouched.
Why compound barbell lifts, not isolation work
There's a reason the list is four barbell lifts and not fourteen resistance-band exercises. Each of the four is a compound movement: it moves more than one joint and recruits a large amount of muscle mass in a single repetition. A back squat asks the hips, knees, and ankles to extend together under load. A deadlift asks the same of the hips and spine. An overhead press and a bench press do the equivalent for the shoulders, elbows, and trunk.
Isolation exercises, the single-leg step-downs and calf raises that show up in a lot of runner-specific programmes, train one joint and one muscle group at a time. They tend to have a real place in rehab, where the goal is often to load a specific weak or injured structure on its own. That is a different problem to the one this programme is solving. The goal here is a general increase in the amount of force the whole system, hips, legs, spine, and shoulders together, can produce and tolerate. Four compound lifts appear to do more of that per minute of training than a longer list of isolated ones, largely because the load is heavier and the movement pattern more closely resembles how the body actually produces force outside the gym. The four-lift list only looks minimal. In terms of total load moved and muscle mass recruited per session, it sits closer to a maximal-strength programme than a corrective one.
A training age of zero, whatever your running history
None of this depends on how experienced the runner is on the road. A runner with fifteen years and ten marathons behind them can still have a training age of zero at the barbell, and the body tends to respond to squatting and deadlifting the way any true beginner's body does: fast, close-to-linear improvement for the first several months, provided the technique is sound and the load increases in small steps.
That's the situational novice idea in short, and it's worth its own post elsewhere on this site. What matters here is what it implies about exercise selection. A genuine beginner, whatever their age or background in another sport, tends to do well on a small number of compound lifts practiced often, rather than a larger number of exercises practiced occasionally. Working through that adjustment, from band work and balance drills to an actual loaded barbell, is most of what the coaching side of Barbell Empowered spends the first few weeks on.
A masters runner starting the programme a few months ago put it plainly after his first squat session. He'd expected something closer to the exercises his physio had given him after a calf strain two years earlier, not a loaded bar across his back, and the bar work felt disproportionate to a running goal at first. Eight weeks in, once the bar had gone up most sessions, the goal stopped feeling disproportionate. What changed wasn't his running. It was how much force his hips and legs could produce, which is what the four lifts were there to change in the first place.
Four exercises sounds too simple to work, and that reaction is common enough to address directly. The list is short because the lifts are heavy and few movements are compound enough to earn a permanent place on it. Everything else, the mobility work, the accessory exercises, the physio-style corrective drills, still has its place. It sits around the Big Four. It doesn't replace them.
Frequently asked questions
What are the four main strength exercises for runners in the Kench Method?
The four are the barbell back squat, the deadlift, the overhead press, and the bench press. They run across two sessions a week, Workout A (squat, press, deadlift) and Workout B (squat, bench, deadlift), and the programme is adapted from Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength novice progression.
Why do runners need barbell lifts instead of resistance bands or bodyweight exercises?
Barbell lifts are compound movements that load several joints and a large amount of muscle mass at once, which tends to produce a bigger increase in total force production per minute of training than a longer list of isolated band or bodyweight exercises. Isolation work still has a place, mostly in rehab, but it is solving a different problem.
Is a powerlifting programme like Starting Strength really appropriate for runners?
The lifts themselves are unchanged from Rippetoe's programme. What is adapted for running is the frequency and scheduling, run twice rather than three times a week and timed around a training calendar. A runner is typically a genuine beginner at the barbell regardless of running background, so a beginner-appropriate strength programme tends to fit better than a runner-specific rehab circuit.
Do experienced runners still start with the same four lifts?
Yes. Training age at the barbell is separate from training age on the road. A runner with years of racing behind them usually still starts as a true novice under a bar, and tends to respond to the same small, frequent load increases a first-time lifter would.