The phrase ‘grease the groove’ was coined – as far as I know – by Pavel Tsatsouline. The concept is pretty simple…if you do something often enough, you get better (and stronger) at it. Sounds pretty obvious right?

The unique point of interest to the ‘grease the groove’ approach however, is that you do many sets of low repetition exercises – at irregular intervals. It helps with examples:

I might decide that every time I go to the bathroom, I must do 5 bodyweight squats on exiting. So, if I go in and out of the bathroom 5 times during the day, I end up doing 25 squats (over the course of the day).

I may hang a door-frame chin-up bar aover my office door and do 3 chin-ups every time I pass through the doorway. Say I enter/leave my office 15 times during the day, I end up completing 45 chin-ups – try doing that in one go!

The cool thing is that this approach has been shown to increase strength and endurance: I may only ever do 3 chin-ups at a time, but you still increase your capacity for chin-ups.

How does this apply to running?

You can directly apply it by choosing exercises that work leg/core/postural muscles - squats and lunges (and variations of these) are some of my favourites – or you can just put it down to cross-training and body strengthening and go with push-ups, chin-ups etc (still good exercises for runners IMO).

The grease the groove approach takes very little extra time - you’re walking through the door, going to the bathroom, putting on your shoes, getting a coffee (etc.) anyway, why not tie an exercise to these actions and get some ‘free’ strength training?

See you out there – Juddy