RTTC #220 Should Slow Runners Wear a Weighted Vest?

In this episode of Running to the Castle, Dr. Ali answers a Stronger.Faster.Finisher. listener question… should slow runners wear a weighted vest? 

She explains why weighted vests might make sense for firefighters, military personnel, police officers, paramedics, or anyone who needs to train with heavy tactical gear, but why they usually are not the best choice for slow, back-of-the-pack, or injury-prone runDisney runners. 

Instead of making every workout harder, Dr. Ali encourages runners to ask what the purpose of the workout is: endurance, speed, cross-training, or strength? And keep that purpose clear. 

She also explains how adding weight can make you fatigue faster, cause your form to break down sooner, and potentially increase stress on your knees, ankles, hips, and back… especially if you already believe weight or impact is contributing to your pain.

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  Hi, I'm Dr. Ali
  I've been running for 15+ years and been in the rehab space since 2012 when I earned my Doctor of Physical Therapy Degree. I get injury prone runDisney runners across the finish line without feeling broken.

Transcript

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Hey, how's it going? Today I'm talking about should slow runners wear a weighted vest? This is Running to the Castle, a podcast for injury-prone Run Disney runners on a journey to running magical miles. Join me, Dr. Allie, as I share the secrets I've gathered as a runner, doctor of physical therapy, and coach. You'll learn the exact ways I get my clients to the castle strong without feeling broken or held together with KT tape as they cross the finish line. I got this question in my Stronger Faster Finisher call this week, and it was such a good question. I just had to share the answer with everybody else. And before I do that, I actually want to let you know, because I feel like I don't say this enough. And maybe I do. Maybe you're gonna say, Allie, like we know, we know, just you say it all the time. Stronger Faster Finisher opens twice a year. This next round opens mid-June in time for wine and dine half marathon or two course challenge training and marathon, dopey, and goofy training specifically. You don't have to be running those races to join, but I time when I open my program to line up with different Run Disney race dates. So you don't have to specifically be training for those races to join this round. I believe almost anybody could join any round at any time and it would be beneficial. And I want to let you know that the wait list for it closes May 25th. Okay, the wait list will close May 25th. And anybody on the wait list does get priority pricing and first dibs, because I'm a one-woman show. I can only handle so many clients in the group the way it's structured right now. So if enough runners come in through the wait list or enough runners carry over from this round, I won't, I'll close the doors and that will be it for the round. So first dibs to waitlisters and anybody on the wait list who has questions about the program before they even join. I am going to host a QA. Oh, I am going to host a QA online. It's going to be a like a Google meet, a virtual, like a Zoom where you come on, you ask your questions, give scenarios, wondering if this is going to work or be right for you. Runners on the wait list will have access to that. I'm not opening it up to everybody. I'm not opening it up to my whole email list. I'm not opening it up to my Instagram followers, just the runners on the wait list for stronger, faster finisher. Details for that QA are going to go out in the wait list emails specifically. So you have to be on the wait list emails to get that. There is no obligation to join the program once you're on the wait list. Absolutely no obligation. It does give you the first dibs and it does give you the lowest pricing. So right now, the pricing is going to be if I open it up to the public, it's going to be$175 a month. It's a seven-month program or just over$1,000 pay in full. If you join from the wait list, it's going to be$149 a month and it's going to be$849 pay in full. So$149 a month for seven months,$849 pay in full. However you pay, you still get the program for seven months. It's just, do you want it divided out into monthly payments, or do you want to pay all up front? You do get a little bit of a discount when you pay up front and go from there. So that is the pricing as of right now, May 2026. It's actually May 6th, the day I am recording this episode. So go get on the wait list. The link is in the show notes. If you're at all interested in joining Stronger Faster Finisher, and I would love to have you in there. It is the full training program to get you across the finish line ahead of the balloon ladies faster times so that you have more of a chance to get more character stops and enjoy every magical mile. You get it all the speed work, the long runs, the stretching, the recovery recommendations, the fueling advice, the shoe advice, the equipment advice. And that's where today's podcast episode goes. Equipment advice. The question was: should we be wearing weighted vests? And there is, there's a lot of question about weighted vests because on one hand, you hear, well, adding the extra weight makes my muscles work harder. So I'm going to burn more calories in a workout. I'm going to work my muscles harder in a workout. This sounds like it is a great thing to do, right? It's it sounds almost too perfect. Coming from a physical therapy background, my first instinct is what is the purpose? Why are you looking to use that weighted vest? So are you a member of one of the following categories? Paramedic, firefighter, police officer, military personnel, or other people who need to wear tactical gear or heavy gear. Are you one of those people? Yes or no. In general, if you are one of those people, I can see the benefit in wearing a weighted vest because that means that during your workout, you may be mimicking to some degree how much weight you have to carry during your work day, right? If you are not in that category, I recommend avoiding weighted vests. So here's a couple of reasons. The first and foremost reason is every workout has a purpose, right? Like recently I've been talking about run with purpose. And that's the run that you're doing has a purpose. If it's a long run, it's to go the distance. It's to be on your feet for the amount of time that you need to be on your feet. If it's a speed workout, it's go hard and fast for a short amount of time to work my body to be able to get faster, right? Cross-training is to build cardiovascular endurance, stamina, strength, your heart and your lung strength to mimic what you would be doing during a run without running. So it's another way to get your breathing heavy, get your heart rate up without actually running. And then that translates to when you go for that speed workout, when you go for that long run. You're not huffing and puffing as bad, right? And you don't have to do it running. Okay. So that's what cross-training is for. Strength exercises are to build power and strength. Lift heavy things to see your muscles grow. That can translate in your normal daily function with improvement. Like I'm going through a new strength program myself right now, literally, so that I can lift my dog and put a suitcase in the overhead bin when I'm traveling. I'm going to be going to four Disney races next year. I need to be able to put my carry-on above the seats. I need to put it in that overhead bin. Levi, he is 45 pounds. He is 12 years old. He's not getting lighter. He is getting older. And we already are noticing that I have to carry him around for odds and ends. The main one being the bath that he hates so much. If I don't carry him, it is a wild goose chase around my house to try and wrangle him and get him in the bathtub. Now, in the bathroom that I bathe him in, it's a Jack and Jill bath. So I have to go in and I have to shut all of the doors around it to corral him and keep him in there because he will escape and he will go and hide. Now, he hides in the same places every time. So I know where to find him, but he does go and hide. And he is just not having it. The bath is like you would think I was murdering him. It is miserable for all of us involved. And so I have, I have to be able to carry him. And then even most recently, he hurt his leg or he hurt his back. We actually don't even know what hurts him, but something hurts him right now. And so we didn't want him jumping up and down from the couch, up and down from the bed. I was carrying him across the house because we mostly have wood floors. We have a couple of just rugs and we have two rooms with carpets, but we his feet just in general, as he's getting to be an old man, are slipping a little bit more on the wood. And so I had to carry him. And so I'm like carrying this 45 sack of potatoes across my house. And I we are very fortunate. We do not have a small house. So it is a long walk. These arms, this core, these legs right now can't hang for very long. So here we are. Strength training is to build muscle and build strength. Okay. So when we think about what is the purpose of this workout, what then is also the purpose of wearing the weighted vest? Because if you're wearing the weighted vest to make your muscles work harder and get a cardiovascular activity done, like you want to breathe heavier, breathe harder. Well, now you have two competing priorities, right? You are trying to do a cardio event, a cardio activity, and you are trying to strength train all in the same go. I don't recommend it because when we have two priorities, we have zero priorities. There always has to be a top priority, or it's just a list. We need to think of the priority and the purpose. So that's the main thing. The second thing is some of the listeners here may have started running to be on a weight loss journey and came across Disney because Disney is so fun. And why not get a pretty shiny metal? I do run Disney because I like the shiny metal. I like Disney and exercise gives you endorphins, endorphins make you happy, and happy people don't kill their husbands, right? Like, that's a legally blonde quote for anybody who didn't know. But I jokingly, right? Like it helps my mental health, even if not in the moment. I was actually thinking about this today. Even if it doesn't help my mental health in the moment, I know that the cumulative effect of just working out regularly, I am just a happier, more calm, less stressed person. And so if let's say you are somebody who's on a weight loss journey and maybe you also have knee pain, because those are common, right? As a physical therapist, that is one of the most common things that I would see in the clinic. It also didn't help, you know, for who I saw that it was meniscus problems, arthritis problems, so on and so forth. And so that's mainly knees, right? But so many times my patients would come in to see me. And even now I get DMs, I get emails when I'm corresponding with runners and they say, you know, my knee hurts and my doctor says it's because I'm overweight. If you think whether it's actually true or not, that's a whole other conversation. But if you think that your doctor's right in this case, that your knees hurt because you're overweight, why are you adding a weighted vest to your body? Why are you adding more weight to exercise when weight is the reason you have pain? Now, I'm not saying weight is the reason you have pain, but if that's what you believe, why would you add a weighted vest? That's more weight. It does the math ain't mathing. And finally, when you add a weighted vest, you are going to make yourself more tired and sooner. Your body now has to overcome this extra weight. I don't even know how much weighted vests weigh. I've literally never looked it up because I don't care because I will never recommend it to somebody and I will never wear it myself. But when you get tired, your form suffers. You, I mean, we see it just in sitting. Sitting is a great example. So I used to be the physical therapist for the spine clinic at Rhode Island Hospital. I saw 48 patients a day, three days a week, all with back pain, the majority of it low back pain, and the majority of people longstanding, unrelated to significant trauma. Like there were some people that it was like a major car accident, really screwed up their back, stuff like that. But a lot of it was just like over time, this is what happened. And so many people would say, I can sit, but not more than like 20 to 30 minutes. So as I did research, literally with my patients, my own research, my own observations. If you haven't guessed, I am a big observer. I didn't, according to my mom, I didn't talk until I was three, but I knew it all. That sounds weird. I didn't know it all, but like I understood what was going on around me. And you, we have home videos of me where I am just quietly sitting in my high chair, just observing. And somebody will say something and I do the thing, or I answer them back when questioned. Like Nana would ask me a question or say something and I would respond. Or we have a video of me, it is uh Christmas. I have to be like one and a half. My birthday's in September. So Christmas, I have to be like one and however many months, or maybe two and however many months. But my sister got um one of these flowers. And in the 80s, uh, if you turned on music, the flower would dance. And so dad's on camera, because he's dad's off camera, but you hear his voice and he's saying something like, make it dance, make it dance. And so we're like, they're turning on the music, whatever. I am standing next to the flower dancing. Just there is little one or two-year-old me, just dancing away, make it dance. Okay, I'll make it dance. My point is, I observe a lot and I take note of what works and what doesn't. And so with the low back pain, with sitting for no more than 20 to 30 minutes, well, I started observing my patients. Just they would sit down, like, you know, we'd have our little assessment, we'd have a session or something like that. And then sometimes I would just be like, okay, why don't you go over there and sit with heater ice for 20 or 30 minutes? And I would watch them without telling them, but I would watch them. And about 15 to 20 minutes in, everybody's slouching. Everybody, hands down, everybody does it. I do it. And what I noticed was it's when we get fatigued. And so every 20 minutes, stand for 20 seconds, and then other researchers have done this and they actually say, look at something 20 feet away. This is more for people who are at the computer. So it's 20, 20, 20. Every 20 minutes, stand for 20 seconds, look at something 20 feet away. And that was literally just a reset because the form folded, the form got poor after they got tired. They start getting tired around 15 minutes of sitting, they're corded, and then their form starts to suffer. And then after about five to 10 minutes of that form having suffered, they have more pain because now they're putting undue stress on their hips or their spine. And so that just became routine. Every 20 minutes, stand for 20 seconds. And that's what we would do. I would do 10 to 15 minutes of sitting exercises, and then a little bit beyond to get them a little bit more time sitting, practicing their core sitting. So it would go from like 10 minutes and then it would 11 minutes all the way up to 21 minutes, 22 minutes. And now they could sit longer and longer. But in the beginning, it would be sit and do exercises, sitting for 10 minutes, stand and do exercises, standing for five minutes, because we only needed like a 20 to 30 second reset. We didn't need something significant, but we would still do like five minutes. That was mainly an insurance thing, an insurance rule. There's timing related to how long you're doing something for it to count and yada, yada, yada, and then go and do 10 more minutes of sitting exercises. And we we'd change it up. So the point of this story is form. If you're adding weight to yourself because of the weighted vest, your form may suffer. And if that's the case, it's gonna suffer first. So now you're going to be bent forward running, or you're going to be stepping shorter, like your stride is going to be shorter and you're going to come down harder on your foot because it's shorter, right? You're used to doing a longer stride. So you know your body inherently knows how much force to put in that leg, how much force you're going to come down on that foot, because by the time it actually touches the ground, the amount of force reduces and so on and so forth. So when you actually shorten that stride, unknown to you subconsciously, you're going to come down really hard because you don't know that you're shortening that stride. And now you're coming down really hard, jarring your ankle, jarring your knee, jarring your hat, uh, your hip, jarring your back, and your form has suffered. So think about all those things. Does wearing a weighted vest, do the pros of wearing a weighted vest outweigh the cons? In my mind, if you are not in one of those categories from the beginning, then no, it does not. It does not outweigh the pros do not outweigh the cons. The cons are far exceeding and it's not worth it. It's not worth it. And so you should just do your separate workouts and have the purpose of each workout be is it speed? Is it endurance? Is it cross-training? Is it strength training? Separate them. Can't have competing priorities because then it's just a list and nothing is at top. I hope this information was helpful. Remember, if you want designated guidance and support to train the full Run Disney season, that's my stronger faster finisher program. We start training in June. Wait list closes May 25th. Get on the wait list for priority pricing, first dibs. And this is the first time I'm ever doing this, but I'm doing a QA session for waitlisters only. So if you want to ask me your questions live, go back and forth with me on a Zoom, join that. The information will come out in the wait list emails soon.