Progressing Your Running: Key Training Strategies for Success
If you are new to running, returning to running or looking to progress the level of intention and performance with your running, developing the knowledge base of what matters is key.
For a lot of runners, running 2-3 days per week, often with walk breaks - structured or not - is plenty. This is how 99% of us start. From how to improve your 5km time, to the best way to train for a half marathon or even how to progress from 5k to marathon running, to transitioning from road running to trail running, you will have more success when following an intentional running training plan.
For many runners in this bracket, though, runs still feel hard. You can feel stuck, seem to get niggles popping up constantly, struggle for motivation and spend more time debating running than actually doing it. This runner also likely has no clue what they need to do to reach these new goals! How do I know this?
Firstly, this was me when I started running as an adult with no prior experience. Secondly, I have coached a lot of runners who fit this category. I hear a similar version of the same story and, as a coach and someone who loves running, this is hard to listen to. The exciting thing is we know what to do with it.
Running with purpose
Like anything in life, being intentional is the way to progress. Remember the adage that practice makes perfect. Well, purposeful practice is what matters. Taking a little time to think about what you want to achieve, what you need to do, and how you will do it will maximise the time and energy you have as a runner and help achieve the new PB, longer distance, and other big scary running goal you might have.
3 key aspects of training will take you from a beginner to a more advanced, confident, resilient, consistent, and faster runner:
Prescription
Frequency
Intensity
Running Prescription
Running prescription means how you are prescribing your runs. Namely, by distance or time, and by pace, heart rate, power, or perceived exertion (feel).
Running by Time vs Distance
Amazing, this is a divisive topic. Especially for those time-poor runners out there like parents, there are real benefits of running by time. There are two reasons why running by time is efficient for busy, time-constrained runners:
Balancing running with a busy schedule is tough. Our entire day needs to be beautifully scheduled to the minute to fit everything in. Prescribing runs by time allows for the run to be slotted in more efficiently and with less stress about how long this distance might take. We all vary in how we feel day-to-day with work, home, financial and life stress. Knowing how long we need to be out for helps fit running in with our lives.
Our body knows stress, not distance, and quantifies this in time and energy expenditure. This matters because of two reasons:
If I have given you 5km Easy and you are limited on time, you'll try to run faster to fit in. Therefore, what should have been an easy, even restorative run, has become a high-stress activity in the week and can quite quickly throw you out of whack and into a fatigue well.
If you are feeling tired, sore, distracted etc, then 60 minutes is always 60 minutes but 10km might go from taking you 60 minutes to taking 70 minutes. Again, this is a big additional stress for your week and, although one run like this shouldn't make a big impact, repeated runs like this will.
Running by Pace, Heart Rate, Power, or Feel?
This is perhaps an even more contentious prescription aspect where you'll find coaches varying greatly. With my athletes, and what I advise other coaches to do who ask, is to predominantly use perceived effort whilst being open and flexible to using pace and heart rate when applicable.
Those occasions?
For pace, it's when dialling into road and track races or when I am applying a constraint to someone, e.g. “Run slower than x:xx pace because you're running too fast for this run”. For heart rate, I use this as a constraint and also as a guide when an athlete has completed heart rate zone testing and they use a heart rate strap. My preference is the Coros HRM for this, in case you are interested.
Why not power?
In running, especially when you have hills involved, power is a very unreliable metric and I have yet to see enough data that would suggest power meters are worth it.
Why effort, then?
Much like distance over time, effort is the most subjective rating and allows for daily variance in how we feel and the environmental conditions. Becoming confident with running is largely about understanding our bodies and being able to make the correct, informed choices.
Here is a message I recently sent to a run and strength athlete explaining why we predominantly use effort:
“For the most part, aside from just before flat races, I don't put any focus on paces as they don't work in most cases - often leading to people overreaching, higher injury risk, and having poor understanding of their efforts.
One of the main things with running is to learn to feel efforts so you can adjust for what your whole-self context is that day. If you're tired and stressed then the pace needs to be slower than if you've had a great sleep and feel strong. It also makes no allowance for weather conditions and surface conditions, if you have fuelled well the day before etc.
As an online coach, I need to guide you in developing the ability to self-regulate based on all the above. I often just use terms like moderate or hard, and sometimes reinforce with a time guide so you can ask yourself, especially during the first rep, of a workout, does it feel like a pace I can hold for "x" time?”
Running Frequency: How Often Should You Run?
One of the key foundations of training theory that I apply to coaching is frequency, especially for beginners. When using this term, it simply means the number of times a week you run. However, this does not initially mean increasing your running volume. As an example, let's say Joe comes to me for coaching having used a running app. His running history consists of:
Running on and off for 2 years
Runs 3 days per week
Runs a total of 2.5 hours per week, consisting of:
Tuesday - 40 minutes (workout)
Saturday - 40 minutes
Sunday - 70 minutes
Struggles with consistency, fatigue, and lack of improvement
The first step would be to increase this to 4 runs per week for 3 to 4 weeks without increasing his volume and by removing the intensity from Tuesday whilst he adapts to the load of running 4 days.
That means his week might now look like
Tuesday - 30 minutes
Thursday - 30 minutes
Saturday - 20 minutes
Sunday - 70 minutes
The same volume is now distributed across the week. By doing this we have created a routine that is better for performance, reduces injury risk, and will reduce the amount of accumulative fatigue meaning we have ticked all the boxes for why Joe came to me! This is what increasing frequency can look like.
There are a multitude of reasons for this:
1. Reducing injury risk
By distributing your running load across more days in the week the mechanical loading and cumulative fatigue are more evenly spread with smaller, more regular stimuli. Whilst still getting the signalling response needed for development, the body recovers and adapts more readily which is essential for long-term progression and consistency in training.
2. Improve performance
A more frequent running stimulus helps in building endurance, improving running economy, and enhancing muscle adaptation more effectively than fewer, longer sessions. The steady training stimulus not only increases the likelihood of consistency via injury protection, but it also supports continual physiological adaptations without the excessive strain that less frequent longer runs impose.
3. Increased efficiency
For us distance runners, becoming more efficient at using multiple fuel sources - glycogen, fats, lactate - is the name of the game. With more frequent energetic stimuli, our metabolic rate will increase and our body becomes more efficient at transforming these sources into energy.
Not only does this help us become more efficient at using fat for energy thus delaying the transition to more glycogen-derived energy (increasing our aerobic threshold), but the substrate (sources) utilisation takes less oxygen to do so.
Concurrently, our body will improve the storage and utilisation of glycogen meaning performance will be enhanced via more rapid glycogen access when needed and better durability (fatigue resistance).
4. More frequent growth stimulus
One of the awesome physiological reactions to exercise is the release of Human Growth Hormone (HGH). You'll likely have heard of this as a form of performance enhancement (doping) in sports, so natural production is a good thing! HGH release is shown to occur around the 20 to 30 minute mark depending on intensity, peaking around the 45 to 60 minute mark, and providing diminishing returns past 60 minutes. Read more here. The benefits of increased HGH are:
Improved muscle repair and growth
Improved fat metabolism
Increase bone density
Strengthened immune system
Promotes deep sleep
Not only that but after only two to three minutes of exercise, key molecules are activated due to protein signalling. We won’t go deep on this today but this signalling enhances fat oxidation efficiency, and energy efficiency, and improves our adaptation to training.
(For those that want to get more into the science, those molecules include: AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR), and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator-1 alpha (PGC-1α).)
Considerations for Frequency
When considering how many times per week you run, there are a few important considerations:
Don't increase by more than a day per 6 weeks (assuming volume is constant). This is a precaution to see how your body responds as physiological adaptations take roughly 6 weeks.
Unless you are a very well-trained athlete, leave one day as a full rest day. For example, I run 10-12 hours per week and have Monday completely off.
Don't overcommit and run yourself into a hole. Most people I coach are parents and/or have high-stress jobs, busy social lives, and don't have much spare time. Because of that, running 5 days per week is typically optimal, with an optional 20-minute run and/or cross-training day. Remember, there are two strength sessions and potentially a quick pilates session we'd like to try and fit in there, too.
Intensity
Time for the fun one, and probably the most misunderstood and overhyped aspect of training - this can also be the part that causes the most anxiety. If this is you please know you are not alone.
Any plan that helps you get better is awesome. That said, time after time I see runners on cookie-cutter plans or ill-fitting AI-generated training that has hard interval sessions every week, possibly with a long tempo on another day, and then a long run. The runner is busting their bottoms to complete the training and yet they don't understand why they're getting injured, burned out, or simply not improving. You’ll often see this approach at Park Run, too
To be blunt, you’re wasting your time.
The main thing with running is to become as efficient (how well you run - your form) and economical (how much energy you use to run - the engine) as possible. To start with, you simply need to practice the skill of running more frequently and, ultimately, just more. Increasing the number of days you run and then volume will specifically make you more aerobically efficient and begin to find the form that works for you. The why is outlined above - HGH release, protein signalling, aerobic enzymatic activity etc.
Start with Strides
Once you are running comfortably 3 days per week or easy volume, I suggest adding in strides.
Strides are progressive near maximal accelerations on flat or hills for 10 to 30 seconds with plenty of rest, from static to a slow jog.
Start with 4 x 20 seconds on a slight hill ~4-8% gradient and walk down (~80 seconds)
As you increase the frequency of runs, increase the frequency of strides. It's more than okay to be doing five runs per week with three to four days of strides. I would max out at 8 reps per run and predominantly focus on hill strides. The reason for this is they are lower impact and when done on lesser grades, help reinforce the biomechanics of running making you more efficient and more powerful. Steeper hill strides make you stronger but move you further away from a flat running gait.
Progress to Moderate Efforts
As you increase your frequency, start to run one of the runs more moderately after an initial 15-minute warmup. This moderate run can be a progressive pickup in pace for the last 10 minutes of your run, something that is comfortably hard but not strenuous. It can also be a Fartlek (speed play) where you run, for example, hard to the next lamppost then easy for 2 lampposts. Essentially adding a fun, less structured option.
Within this context, running over hills can also create a moderate run stimulus. Hills are hard!
Do this plan over 6 months and from the 5km to the trails you will see improvements. Once you have built frequency and started introducing semi-structured and intentional intensity, you can look at more structured workouts once per week - whilst maintaining strides 2 times per week. This workout will depend on your goals but focusing on the 10km distance will develop you the most as a runner, or the 30 to 45 minute race effort range.
Closing Out
Running to time, and effort, increasing frequency, and focusing on easy and moderate running with strides will level you up as a runner beyond anything you feel you are capable of right now, but perhaps what you think you could be..
What are your big goals?
If you’re doing this alone and feel is time to unlock your full running potential (it’s cheesy but true), start your journey with an intentional, tailored plan today and see the transformation. Get in touch today.
