There are a lot of complicated training plans out there full of hyper precise workouts and regimented intervals, but at the end of the day, running doesn’t have to be complex. If you run more miles, you’ll get fitter and faster. Simple. There just aren’t many secrets to this sport, especially at the passionate-but-not-professional level almost all of us run at. But, what can be tricky is running more more without getting hurt. Training load “errors” (running too much, fast, etc.) are the number one reason runners get injured (study).
Today we’ll share some evidence based guidelines for increasing your weekly mileage safely. Instead of going to staple advice like the “the 10% rule,” we’re going to focus on general strategies that have been shown to help any runner on any training plan. These concepts apply to any race or distance goal. We want you to walk away with something you can try or an idea for how to tweak your training program to reduce your injury risk while getting better over the long haul.
#1: Slightly decrease your usual training intensity
Have you ever heard of the 80-20 principle? The idea is that 80% of your mileage should be done at a comparatively “easy” effort. Dr. Stephen Seiler analyzed endurance athletes from a variety of sports, sometimes over entire careers worth of training, and concluded that most casual endurance athletes are doing more like 50% of their work at a “moderate” intensity rather than the 80% easy that creates so many world champions (study). His research suggests that slowing down a bulk of your running will allow you to do more volume and get fitter overall. It’s a classic, slow down to speed up scenario, and it works.
#2: Incorporate “recovery” or “down weeks”
Our body gets better at running through the process of progressive overload. That just means, “we go a little more than we’re used to and our body adapts.” The trouble with this is that we can’t simply keep building every week over and over. As Dr. Cheri Blauwet, Paralympic champion and sports medicine physician puts it, “we can sustain a tremendous amount of load, but if we don’t couple that with periods of recovery, we get ourselves into trouble.” We need some regular and intentional period of lower strain. Another example of slowing down to speed up.
The common way runners do this is through “down weeks.” A down week is a scheduled reduction in training volume that a runner does to prevent any training related problems from showing up.
Dr. Seiler’s research suggests that there isn’t one best way to do this, but a scheduled week of reduced mileage every 3 or 4 weeks is a common strategy that seems to work well encouraging healthy training.
#3: Expand your training capacity through strength training.
Strength training has been shown to reduce rates of overuse injury by nearly 50% across many different sports . Strength training prevents injury for a fairly simple reason. Injuries occur when training load goes beyond training capacity. Getting stronger increases our muscles’ capacity and therefore allows us to tolerate more load. Think you don’t need to be strong to run healthily? Check out this math:
Let’s say Jimmy Jetlegs (a hypothetical athlete) runs 30 miles per week at an average pace of 8 minutes per mile. 30 miles at 8 minutes per mile is 240 minutes of total running time per week. If he averages about 180 steps per minute, that’s 43200 steps per week. The muscles of the legs experience approximately 3 times one’s bodyweight with each step. If Joe weighs about 160 pounds, that means he’s managing 480 pounds of load per step. 480 pounds of load per step for 43,200 steps per week is just over 20.7 MILLION pounds of total load per week.
That’s bananas. We need to be strong to tolerate this massive quantity of load. Here are a few of our favorite strength training moves for runners.
Weighted Calf Raise
Lunges with Weight
Single Leg Romanian Deadlift
If you’d like a custom strength training program that matches your training goals and injury history, try the recover athletics app for free!
To be totally honest with you, we want to start a revolution. A revolution against the old attitude that “injuries are a part of the sport.” Millions of runners have to miss training days due to injury ever year. It simply doesn’t have to be that way, and we’re going to change it. Get to know our team here.