Training to improve your speed.

Many people don’t fully grasp what speed training truly entails.

No, it’s not running 100% over 200m, 5 times. Go and try this and let me know how it works out. I sometimes read the dumbest things by some pretty intelligent people online. Recommending someone go to their local track and “just run flat out for 100m” It’s a sure way to get injured. If you truly want to understand speed training go and train with your local sprinters at a track for a month.

Speed work for endurance athletes is running faster than your race pace for a set time or distance with short rests and multiple reps. As for a sprinter, to run faster than race pace is theoretically not possible, so we call speed work, efforts that are close to or beyond 95% of max speed. Let’s say you are a 100m sprinter, a speed session might look like this. Run 3 x 3 x 60m at 95% with 4-6mins rest between each effort and 8 mins between each set. If you have ever done any “true” speed work, you will know how taxing this can be on your body and central nervous system. As a sprinter, you need to have at least 72 hours between these sessions.

So telling an untrained athlete to go out and run 100% flat out is not only bad advice they will likely hobble away on one leg injured.

Speed sessions are fun but challenging, warm up properly, and ideally don’t do them when fatigued.

Tweet of the week.