What do you do the day after a hard workout when you feel creaky and stiff? I’ll tell you what I used to do: run my normal route medium hard and feel worse after. Unsurprisingly, I was achy all the time and missed a ton of runs due to injury. As I learned more about physiology and performance, I discovered Recovery runs and everything changed. Intentionally planning shorter runs at easy paces – relative to your normal level of effort – has a host of benefits for every runner. Today we’ll explain how recovery runs reduce injury risk.
What is a recovery run?
There is no universally accepted definition, but we’d define a recovery run as, “a run that’s short and slow by an athlete’s individual standards for the explicit purpose of recovering – both physically and mentally – from a hard effort and reducing injury risk.”
A recovery run will look different for every athlete, but the point is to recover. So, it should be easy and shouldn’t last too long. You can think of recovery runs as a form of active recovery. We know from the research that easy aerobic exercise is the best way to reduce exercise induced muscle soreness (review) and that’s basically what a recovery run is and does.
Examples of recovery runs
Elite male Kenyan marathoners, who can sustain faster than 5:00 pace for 26.2 miles, regularly complete recovery runs at easier than 9:00 pace. Molly Seidel, friend of Recover and Olympic Medalist, can do 5:30’s or better for a marathon and often runs around 8:30 pace for recovery. 3:00 or more minutes per mile slower than race pace doesn’t stress these athletes bodies, and that’s the point! This form of active recovery helps work out aches and pains and reset their bodies for the next big effort.
How recovery runs reduce injury risk
An easy recovery run allows an athlete to gently work their aerobic system without overextending muscles, bones, and tendons. But, the most important thing about a recovery run is that it’s not a hard run. Let me explain.
You have to stress your body to get fitter, but you can’t stress it all the time. In almost everything physical, the human body performs best on a dose of 2-3 difficult activities per week with mostly easy activities on the other days. Pro runners are the perfect example. Most of them do 2 workouts and a long run every 7 days. For several deep evolutionary reasons, working hard today then going super easy tomorrow is better than doing hard work every day.
How to optimize your training with recovery runs
To be clear, there is no scientific research that has found an ideal recovery run pace, or an ideal recovery run frequency to reduce injury risk. The benefits of the super easy run are not yet fully understood by science, but their value is as old as the sport. Peter Snell, a 3 time Olympic gold medalist from New Zealand said this about his extra easy morning jogs: “I feel that [it] has the effect of easing out the aches and pains of the previous night’s training, and as such it has great value.”
So to boil it down, here’s how we recommend utilizing recovery runs in your training. After you do a hard run / workout / long run, the next day is a perfect time to do a recovery run. If you want to train like the best runners throughout history, we recommend several minutes per mile easier than your marathon race pace! Additionally, if you’re experiencing soreness of any kind, that’s a perfect time to integrate a recovery run into your week. Easy & slow miles keep injuries away, and they make you better at running too.
Proactive resistance training (we call it prehab) has been shown to increase every aspect of running performance and one study even found it reduces injury risk by over 57%. If that sounds like something you’d benefit from, we’d love it if you gave the Recover Athletics App a try. There is an unlimited free trial and a year’s subscription costs less than one trip to a PT if you get injured!
If you don’t know us, we’re so glad you stopped by our page. Recover athletics is a team of runners, doctors, physical therapists, and entrepreneurs. We’ve made it our mission to help runners around the world prevent injury. Meet our team.