You have a training for a half marathon and don't have a training plan, great.
Because in this video, we're going to give you the two most
important workouts you need to do each week to get ready for that race.
But don't go anywhere.
If you are training for a half marathon and you do already have a training plan,
the two workouts we're going to give you today will probably be tweaks on workouts
that you already have in your training plan.
And those tweaks will make those workouts so much more effective.
What's up, motivators?
My name is Taran Woolley.
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something extraordinary in endurance sports.
They choose our totally free Motiv Training plans.
You're ready to take on that next big challenge?
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Studies have shown that when it comes to preparing for endurance events like
running races, triathlons, duathlons, or cycling events, for example.
Just doing the training isn't what will make us successful.
Just doing a lot of training won't even make us successful.
The most important thing that determines
how successful we are in the event is what we do in the training.
Put another way, you can take two twins with the exact same physiology and do
the exact same mileage and number of hours of preparation for their races.
And the one who's training use the most
time efficient training methods that we'll explain here will do far better because
they're getting more out of the time that they're putting in.
The two most important workouts for a half
marathon are the long run and the interval run.
So let's dive into how to supercharge
those two key workouts so that they are as effective as possible.
There are a lot of ways to make the long run more effective.
First, the long run should be a long, easy run.
It should be done in your zone 2 heart rate.
This zone is all about building endurance.
You train your body to burn fat really
well, giving yourself more energy every single minute that you're exercising,
and you'll be building up a lot of mitochondria.
Mitochondria are the energy producers of our body, so more energy from fat
and more mitochondria to use that energy, and we will have much more run endurance.
Related to all this is the second tip.
You want to keep your blood glucose low
during long runs so that your body can learn to burn fat better.
So keep your pre and during long run
nutrition to fats, proteins, vegetables, and low blood glucose carbs.
The thing about making the long run easy
is that running at a low heart rate isn't that much fun.
It barely even feels like a workout.
So to make this run much more effective, much more fun, and easier for us to do,
we get all of our athletes to do these long runs on trails and hills.
Running on trails while still in zone two will give the same training stress
and endurance building effect as running in zone two on the roads.
But with the added improvement of much more leg strength, the side to side,
up and down nature of trail running will naturally keep your heart rate lower
because you get built in walk breaks, so it's much more fun.
And all of that additional range of motion going up and down all around the hills
and trails will build more leg strength than you will on flat ground.
One study comparing road runners to trail
runners showed that despite elite trail runners training 45 % less
than elite road runners, their legs were much stronger.
In addition to more leg strength, running more on trails will mean that you
have less chance of injuries, so you can continue to execute consistent
training without having to adjust your runs.
And the final tip for long runs is that I
am a big believer that half marathoners should build the long run up
to significantly more than they typically do.
I think the longest long run when training
for a half marathon should be roughly 15 miles or 25 kilometers.
Running longer than the distance of your
chosen race will make the distance you need to run on race day much easier.
Then it just becomes about how fast you can go.
And if you're doing these over distance runs on hills and trails,
you're going to have to change this to time instead of distance.
It should be somewhere around two hours and 15 minutes.
What you do is work out how long it would
take you to run 15 miles on the road in your zone 2 heart rate,
then just run that duration on the trails in your zone 2 heart rate.
Now, let's get into the interval run
and how we make that much more effective because there is a lot we can do
to improve upon how most people do their weekly interval run.
First, and this is most important,
the interval run needs to be done with structured progress week by week.
If one week you're doing two-minute intervals and the next week you're doing
15 minute intervals, and the week after that you're doing 30
second intervals, or maybe even in the same workout,
you're doing 2 minute, 10 minute, 4 minute intervals.
This is so erratic,
it's bouncing around all over the place and it doesn't know what to adapt to.
So our plans clearly build from 30 second intervals in the off season
and base-building season to establish absolute top end speed.
Then it goes into two to four minute
intervals in the early race season to build endurance with that top end speed.
Then we progress into four to eight minute intervals in the core of the training plan
to build up vo2 max and the ability to stay at a high heart rate easily.
Then finally, close to the race, we do 10 to 30 minute long tempo speed
intervals to get you adapted to a fast race pace.
That progress ensures that every single week your body is adapting and improving.
It recognizes that you did something
similar the previous week that it adapted to then.
Then you give it a little bit more
challenging version of that same workout week by week by week.
So it adapts over and over and over, making you faster and faster and faster.
There are a few more ways to make this interval workout more effective.
The first is the opposite of what you think.
Instead of finishing every interval
workout totally spent, stop doing intervals one short of what you can do.
When you feel like the next interval will be the last one that you can do at your
target pace, you stop before doing that final interval.
You see, going to the absolute well every workout is like trying to get a fire
roaring by dumping 20 logs on it at one time.
Your body won't adapt very well to workouts when you do this because it'll
be too focused on recovering from the extreme stress of the workout.
The next tweak we make in our training
plans is a secret sauce workout that I'll share with you here.
Every six weeks or so,
we get our athletes to do a hill sprint workout where they do a series of really
forceful 30 second uphill sprints up a steep, steep hill.
This will force you to recruit a bunch more muscle fibers than running on flat
ground, so you'll have access to more muscles when you're running.
And the final tweak is we talked about
keeping blood glucose low for the long run.
Well, the interval run is the exact opposite.
Load up on those carbs before, during, and after the run.
Having a really high blood glucose level will give you easy access to fast burning
energy, so you'll be able to nail those interval runs to the best of your ability.
Now, I recognize that these tweaks might
seem too basic to be immensely effective, and that's the reason that most people
don't do them and coaches don't really talk about them a lot.
But what we see when athletes start using our Motive method is that the time they
train goes down a little, the easy workouts become easier so
that the hard workouts can be harder, and their times vastly improve because
they're getting so much more out of every single workout that they do.
You don't have to take my word for it, though.
You can check out the 4.7 out of 5 star
average review we have on our app store and read what our users write.
Better yet, the app is totally free so you can go see for yourself the athlete you
can be with just a few months of really well designed training.
Finally, I mentioned low heart rate, zone two running in this video.
It is the key to running success, but it's really hard for most runners to do.
So we created this seven minute video that gives you our system for how to make
low heart rate running as easy on yourself as possible.
Click the video on the screen to check it out now.
Later, motivators.