It's all too easy for runners like you and me to neglect one of the key
principles of running a faster mile, marathon, or anything in between.
While running slowly to run fast
is a powerful way to develop your aerobic engine.
You also need to train a little smarter and make time for faster
paced work to teach your legs exactly how to run quickly.
While it's true that mile
after mile of easy effort, aerobic paced, running will definitely build
you a solid base of running endurance (and it's your aerobic system
that gives you the energy to sustainably run faster for longer),
that stamina counts very little if your muscles, tendons,
and most importantly, nervous system isn't accustomed to running fast.
Speed is a skill.
There's a certain degree of coordination,
technique and conditioning that goes into running fast.
And of course, all these things can be taught.
Even if you already have perfect technique,
your body still needs to practice running fast on a regular basis.
If all
you have to do is run slowly without any regular exposure to faster
pace, running your muscles and tendons won't have the chance to adapt
to the high loads stresses and strains of running quickly.
Not only that, but the more often you reinforce the neuromuscular link
between your brain and your muscles, that your body uses to run fast,
the more coordinated and efficient your technique will become.
Worst case scenario; if you suddenly throw yourself into lots of hard speed work
without doing any regular fast paced running, you might well get injured.
But more positively, I'm going to show you some powerful ways
you can introduce some speed training into your weekly training schedule,
without the need for you to make any time for additional runs in the week.
Get this right and you'll be able to run faster for longer
without getting so tired.
I'm a firm believer that all runners, apart from advanced and elite athletes,
only need to run at most one speed workout per week.
That said, there are still plenty of opportunities
in a normal training week to get your body used to running fast,
running fast on a little on often basis will get your body ready for hard speed.
Sessions and races without you having to deal with the fatigue
that comes with more than one speed workouts in a week.
My favorite way to do this is to add a few sets of strides to the end of a warmup
before a run or at the end of your run before you cool down.
If you haven't done strides before, the concept is super simple.
Think of them as short technique focused acceleration runs
start from an easy jogging pace and accelerate to what would roughly be
the pace you'd run for me to represent
Do that over 40 to 60 meters.
And once you've reached that pace, maintain the pace for a few seconds
before gently slowing down to a walk while you're accelerating and running fast.
Focus on the aspects of technique like holding your hips high, maintaining
a high cadence, pumping your arms and holding a a running posture.
Take lots of walking recovery between sets of strides.
The goal of these isn't to make you tired.
More to reinforce good running form.
In fact, less is more with these.
If you want to take them onto another level,
try doing your strides up a gentle hill again.
This isn't a hill running workouts.
Far from it.
But the extra challenge that comes with running
uphill will really force you to use your glutes and hamstrings more.
So if strides are a great way to reinforce proper running technique,
how about increasing leg speed?
To run faster
if you feel like a lack of leg speed is holding you back from running faster?
One technique you might want to try is gentle downhill running.
I'm not saying that you need to start sprinting down big hills uncontrollably
fast.
Instead, find a short running route with a barely noticeable decline,
just so much downhill that you can feel it helping build momentum
whilst you stay well and truly in control and run 40 to 60 minutes a reps
downhill focused on turning your legs over as quickly as you can.
As your pace increases, focus on gently increasing your running cadence.
As your pace gets faster and as you speed up, the tendency will be
few to lengthen your stride
and perhaps even start over striding, but focus on maintaining good form
and feeling your leg speed increase a little faster than it normally would.
Again, less is more with these downhill reps and four to six
sets of 40 to 60 meters will help you to fire up your neuromuscular system
and get you ready to turn your legs over quicker in preparation
for running faster on flat surfaces and even uphill.
The third way of putting a little more
speed into your legs is to work on improving your ankle stiffness
as counterintuitive as it might sound, given
that most of us runners are being told that we need to actually stretch more
the muscles and tendons
which cross your ankle, such as your calf muscles and Achilles complex,
need to produce a certain amount of stiffness at the ankle
to provide a degree of spring in your stride.
Runners like you are looking for smarter ways
to run faster can easily train this type of ankle stiffness
with basic plyometric drills like simply jumping rope.
Five rounds of 20 seconds with a skipping rope three times per week
is enough to help put some serious spring in your ankles over the next few weeks.
Click the video on screen right now to find out
where runners really do go wrong with running slow to run faster.
And I'll see you in the next video.