Why More of Indiana's Top Female Distance Runners Are Adding Strength Training Alongside Their High School Program
By Coach Justin Roeder
Let me clear something up before we go any further. Strength and mobility training through the Distance Collective complements a high school running program. Period. It does not replace it, compete with it, or ask an athlete to choose between the two. Several of the state's best female distance runners currently work with me on strength and conditioning while following their high school coach's running plan exactly as written.
I want to spend this post explaining why that combination works so well, and why I think it matters even more for female distance runners specifically.
Your high school coach owns the running. We own the strength.
Your school coach knows the team, knows the competition schedule, and is the one calling the workouts on the track or the course. That relationship doesn't change when an athlete adds strength and mobility work with me. I'm not writing a second running plan or second guessing what the school coach has built. I'm filling in the piece that almost no high school program has time to cover, which is structured, individualized strength and mobility work built specifically for a distance runner's body.
Think of it this way. The running plan builds the engine. The strength work builds the frame that has to hold up while that engine runs. Both matter. Neither replaces the other.
Want to see exactly what that looks like week to week? Check out the Strength and Mobility program here.
Why this matters even more for female distance runners
Female distance runners deal with a set of physical demands that often get glossed over in a standard team practice. Hip anatomy alone changes the mechanics of running in ways that make certain injuries, like IT band syndrome, patellofemoral pain, and stress reactions, show up more often in female athletes than male athletes running the same mileage. Add in the hormonal and nutritional factors that come with adolescence, and the margin for error gets smaller, not bigger, as training volume increases.
Strength training addresses a real piece of that risk. Building glute strength, hip stability, and single leg control directly targets the exact weaknesses behind most of the injuries I just mentioned. It's not a cure-all, and it doesn't replace good coaching, smart mileage progression, proper fueling, or medical care when something's actually wrong. But it is one of the most useful tools available, and it's one that almost no female high school runner gets access to through her school team alone.
What the athletes I work with are actually doing
Two strength sessions and two mobility sets a week, built specifically around a distance runner's needs rather than pulled from a generic gym program. Single leg squats, hip thrusts, Romanian deadlifts, Copenhagen adductor holds, and controlled plyometric work, all programmed around the athlete's current training load and race calendar so it never conflicts with what her high school coach has planned for that week. Every exercise comes with a video demonstration, so there's never any guesswork about form.
This runs alongside her high school season, not instead of it. That's the whole point.
If you're a parent wondering whether this could fit into your daughter's current season, reach out through the Strength and Mobility page and we can talk through exactly how it would work alongside her school program.
The bottom line
The best female distance runners in this state aren't choosing between their high school coach and outside strength work. They're doing both, and it's working. If your daughter is putting in the mileage but nobody's addressing the strength and mobility side of her training, that's the gap worth closing before it turns into an injury.
Take a look at the Strength and Mobility program and let's talk about adding it alongside the plan she's already following.
