Yes — and trail runners need it more urgently than road runners do. On North Shore trails, descending loads your quads with braking forces well beyond anything flat running produces, and rooty, rocky footing asks your ankles and hips for hundreds of small corrections every kilometre. Mileage builds the fitness to run the trail; strength is what lets you come down it intact.
The good news is that the dose is small: two short sessions a week, biased toward single-leg work and scheduled so they never sabotage a key run.
Descending is a strength event
Every downhill stride is a landing your muscles must absorb while lengthening — eccentric contraction, the kind that shreds unprepared quads. It's why a big descent day leaves people sorer than a flat run twice as long, and why the final kilometres down can feel like your legs belong to someone else. The North Shore's classic routes concentrate their descending late, when form is already fraying — precisely when untrained quads give out.
Eccentric-focused training — slow five-second lowers on squats and step-downs, controlled downhill strides — builds specific tolerance to that load. Stated qualitatively, the protective effect of prior eccentric exposure is one of the most repeatable findings in muscle physiology: legs that have practised braking recover dramatically better.
Ankles and hips that catch you
Technical trail punishes wobble. Calf work through both a straight and a bent knee, single-leg balance holds, lateral lunges and dedicated hip strengthening build joints that self-correct when a root moves your foot somewhere you didn't plan. Ten focused minutes tacked onto each session covers it.
None of this makes you unrollable — but stronger, better-conditioned ankles and hips tolerate the missteps that would end a season for untrained ones. The payoff arrives fast, too: most runners notice steadier footing within a few weeks of starting.
If it's not single-leg, question it
Running never happens on two feet at once, so your lifting shouldn't either — at least not exclusively. Rear-foot-elevated split squats, single-leg deadlifts, weighted step-ups and step-downs cover most of what a trail runner needs, loaded heavier and moved slower than runners usually expect. Research consistently points to heavier strength work improving running economy — you get faster partly by lifting, not only by running more.
Fitting lifts around real running
Keep hard things together: lift on the same day as a quality run (after it), keep the day before your long run light, and trim lifting volume in race weeks rather than dropping it entirely. Coached options like our strength classes or one-on-one strength coaching take the programming question off your plate.
Balance the terrain diet too: hammering trails every run leaves no room for the legs to absorb any of it. Flat easy miles — the kind covered in our Spirit Trail running guide — are the other half of a durable week.
Common questions
Won't lifting add weight I have to haul uphill?
Meaningful muscle gain while running serious mileage is slow and hard-won; the strength improvements runners see in their first months are mostly neural — better recruitment, not bigger legs. The trade runs heavily in your favour.
Can hill repeats replace gym work?
They overlap with climbing strength but leave the two biggest gaps open: eccentric descent tolerance and lateral ankle-and-hip control. Hill repeats are a running workout — they complement lifting rather than replacing it.
How heavy is heavy enough?
Heavy enough that the last couple of reps in a set of five to eight demand real attention, with technique intact throughout. Runners tend to err light and stall their progress; a coach's eye solves the calibration quickly.
Should I stop lifting during race season?
Reduce, don't stop. One maintenance session a week holds the qualities you built, while dropping to zero lets descent tolerance decay just when races demand the most of it.
