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- Right, correct me if I'm wrong,
but I bet most people would love to have
a fast five K under their belts,
because when we're talking about personal best times
and all that stuff, it is, pretty much,
the first time that most people ask about.
- Yeah, no, the five K is a great distance
whatever the level you are,
from beginners right through to elite,
highly competitive athletes.
For beginners it's really good just because,
well it's quite a moderate distance
and for the top level competitive runner,
it's that high intensity and speed aspect
that draws them to it.
So, all that being said,
today we thought we'd bring you four excellent run workouts
that can help you run a faster five K.
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- Okay, the five K is a speedy distance.
It's brutal in fact, it requires a close to all out effort
for, what feels like, that little bit too long.
- Yeah, so you need to develop your top end speed
and to do that we need to have a speed session.
Ideally, you need to think about including
one of these into your schedule per week,
but be careful of that because
before we get to be able to do that,
please make sure you've got enough
base and volume behind you.
- Absolutely and I know a lot of athletes
choose to do these on an athletics track
to really hit those top end speeds,
but you can actually perform these wherever you like
or wherever is easiest for you.
Now, we have two speed sessions for you today
and the first one is
a warm up of ten to fifteen minutes easy,
finishing with a few fifty to eighty meter strides
or accelerations to open the legs up
and get them ready for the session
and then the main set is two sets
of eight by two hundred meters
with an RPE of nine to ten
or imagine around a Three K race pace,
so above that desired Five K race pace,
taking two minutes recovery between each rep,
which can be an active job recovery if you wish
and then finish that with a warm down
of ten to fifteen minutes easy.
- [Second Presenter] But we also have another one for you,
which would be a warm up
of a similar ten to fifteen minutes,
finishing with those few strides we talked about before.
For a main set, we would have four times a kilometer
at an RPE of eight to nine.
Now, this is somewhere between this three K race pace
and your desired Five K race pace.
Obviously, the increase distance will make it harder
to dip under the Five K race pace,
but give it your best shot.
You may will find that you want to start
at your Five K race pace and then work from there,
taking two to three minutes of recovery between each rep.
Similarly, finishing that with a nice, easy
ten to fifteen minutes easy warm down.
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- Now, speed sessions are all very good and well,
but occasionally it wouldn't be the worst in the world
to drop one of them and add in a hill rep session, right?
- Hill sessions are fantastic for improving lost strength,
activating muscle groups
and actually also preventing injury.
They're really good during the off season,
but as we move closer to the race season,
as we've already mentioned,
we want to start increasing our speed workouts
and that top end speed,
but the hill sessions are fantastic to, maybe,
replace the odd speed session every few weeks.
- Yeah, exactly and what's particularly good about them
is they still bring that same intensity level
to the table that you get from a speed session,
but crucially, because we're going at that slower speed,
because we're running uphill,
they're far more forgiving on our bodies
and this is excellent
if you're somebody that struggles, perhaps, with injuries
because of the load that comes from those speed sessions.
So, on that note,
a session that we got as an example would be...
So, a warm up of fifteen minutes steady
to the hill of choice,
which should be somewhere around
a five to eight percent gradient,
with a main set of six times ninety seconds
at a hard five kilometer race pace effort
or an RPE of eight,
jogging back down the hill to recover
with an extra ten seconds to reset
and compose yourself at the bottom, before going again.
Warm down can just be nice
ten to fifteen minutes easy jogging.
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- And, finally, for the threshold workout
and this is actually one of my favorites
and I attempt to try and leave this until later in the week,
so I tend to start my week with the speed workout,
somewhere around the Tuesday,
and then allow myself time to recover
and then do a threshold workout
somewhere around Friday or a Saturday.
- Yeah, now, the beauty of these sessions are,
because you're working pretty hard,
you tend to cover quite a lot of distance
or working hard for quite a long duration
and that means you can actually come away from these
feeling like you've achieved quite a lot, right?
- Absolutely, and the idea behind a threshold session
is that you're working just below your lactate threshold
and a lactate threshold being the point
at which you start to produce lactic acid
at a faster rate then you can flush it from your system
and with this, you then can work just below that ceiling,
in a threshold session
and cover more duration and distance at the intensity
and whilst bumping your threshold up.
- Yeah, now, essentially,
the more you can bump up that threshold pace,
the faster that we're going to go before producing lactate.
I don't know about you Mark,
but I think that's pretty important for a Five K, right?
- Ah, absolutely, now, intensity wise,
for a threshold session,
that should be a seven to eight out of ten on the RPE scale.
It terms of heart rate,
that's around eighty five to ninety percent
of your maximum heart rate and so, as a pace,
if we take our Five K current race pace,
you want to add thirty to forty seconds on per kilometer
and for your Ten K current race pace,
you want to add something around
fifteen to twenty on per kilometer.
- Yeah, and if you want to have a specific session for that,
then we've got one here.
With a warm up of nice and easy fifteen minutes jogging,
we can lead into a main set of eight minutes
at threshold pace, with a two minutes job recovery.
Then, there's a six minutes at your threshold pace
with two minutes recovery, four minutes at threshold pace,
with two minutes jog recovery
and then finishing off this main set
with two minutes at threshold pace
with two minutes jog recovery.
That gives us a total of twenty minutes
of threshold intensity within the workout
and finishing all that off with
ten to fifteen minutes nice, easy jogging for a warm down.
- Well, there we go, there are four Five K workouts for you
and please do let us know how you get on with them
in the comments section below
and if there are any other workout or races
that you're targeting, you'd like to know how to train for,
then please do let us know in the comments also.
- Yeah and, obviously, if you've enjoyed this video,
please hit that thumb up like button,
don't forget to click on the globe
and get all the other videos we've got on GTN
and if you want to see a video that we did
on how to run a sub twenty minute Five K,
well you can find that here.