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I've been coaching runners from beginner to pro for the last 20 years, and I've come up with a list of the 10 hardest-hitting things I've had to learn the hard way so that you don't have to. And I'm going to share them with you right here, right now, for free. And honestly, if you can't watch this video right through to the end and take all this on board, I've got news for you: you're probably not going to stick it as a runner.
Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about specifically is, I guess, fairly trendy as a topic for runners here on YouTube. It's something that I've covered in the past, and I know a lot of other creators have, but I feel like a big part of the point has been missed. We're talking about low heart rate training: running slow to run faster. This is something that people get really, really overwhelmed with, really frustrated with, and to be honest, kind of sick of hearing about. It's all valid, and it's all true that when it comes to building a solid base of aerobic endurance, slowing down, focusing on your heart rate, really spending a lot of time in zone 2 in particular, is where we do the work to build those building blocks.
Now, it's important to understand how low heart rate training works, of course, and I've got videos on the channel about that. But there is a big, big missing piece of the puzzle that people don't really talk about. They talk about the way in which our bodies adapt physiologically, so talking about things like cell mitochondria, the little organs within the cells that that really power our aerobic exercise. They talk about increased capillary beds, all those sorts of things. You know, they're real kind of nuance of the physiology, but they don't talk about why slowing down actually benefits us as runners.
Okay, now it's not about all these changes that improve from an aerobic training point of view. Largely, those will happen anyway just through consistent running. You can optimize for them by getting your pacing absolutely right, but for most runners, the vast majority of us, just getting out on a regular basis will take you from a place where your your aerobic conditioning is really poor, through to a place where it is superior to the vast population. Now, what gets us there is not being injured. And it's this whole slowing down, taking it easier on your body, and that's the key: taking it easier on your body through slowing down, that really gets us to the point where we can run without injury. And it's running without injury that allows us that consistency where we start to compound the benefits of running week after week, month after month, year after year, with minimal downtime. That is is really the key benefit to low heart rate training. Where everyone's talking about the difference between your plus or minus a few beats of heart rate on your watch, it's important to be in the right ballpark, but more importantly is how after a long, slow, easy run at a nice low, relaxed effort level, so low heart rate, more like easy conversational pace, you can wake up the next morning and feel good to go again. Your knees aren't hurting, your shins aren't hurting, your lower back isn't hurting. You haven't smashed your body stride after stride because you've been trying to do a long run at too fast of a pace. Instead, you've been running at an aerobic appropriate, relaxed pace, which means wake up, good to go again. You can continue training, you can get perhaps another session in the week. The consistency starts to compound. That's the real benefit.
And of course, all part and parcel of that, when we're talking about aerobic training, is the energy systems that we're training. Yes, of course, working on those low heart rate, slow, easy pace runs, they are going to help you to metabolize fat better, burn fat for fuel. That's a whole different conversation. It's another video where we talk specifically about running nutrition. But what I want to get across is there's a big, big difference, and no, not enough people say this, there's a big difference between burning fat for fuel and losing body fat. They're not not the same thing. So if you're getting into running, or you're into running because you're wanting to lose a bit of extra timber, this is not necessarily the the way in which that's going to happen.
Okay, in fact, through my experience and the experience of the vast number of runners that I've trained who are running for these purposes, it's got nothing to do with the mileage you're doing, nothing to do the amount of time spent aerobic training. It is all about what happens in the kitchen, the food you eat. And that just sounds so cliché, but it's so, so true. Okay, I've run blocks where I'm doing 60-mile weeks and I'm being good with my training, uh, sorry, good with my eating, and the weight just melts off me to the point that family members have asked if something's wrong. I've also done 60-mile blocks, you know, blocks of 60 miles per week training where I've eaten kind of badly, and my relationship with food isn't great anyway, and if I'm not eating well, that that mileage won't move the needle in terms of the scale.
Okay, so the difference is what you're putting in your body. The cliché whole thing of "you can't outrun a bad diet" is just so, so true.
Okay, the next thing I want to talk about, just quickly, as you're starting to see improvements in your training and you're starting to want to just tweak your program bit by bit, just to keep those improvements coming, especially if you've just signed up for, let's say, a half marathon or a marathon, and you've got a training plan for this event, is don't make wholesale changes all at once. Please, please, please, just change one thing at a time.
So if you've been doing reasonable mileage for you, and all of a sudden you want to add a bit of speed work, don't bump up your weekly mileage at the same time. Keep your mileage where it is, just add in a speed session, so you're tweaking the intensity. All the time, I see people who they want to throw in an extra speed session in the week or start doing a bit of speed work, and they do it on top of what they're already doing. So their mileage increases at the same time as the intensity in the week increases. Training load just goes through the roof, and all of a sudden they've found that they've tipped over this threshold where their body is no longer able to tolerate the training load, able to tolerate the the stress, the strain, the impact cumulatively week after week after week with this new level of stress, and something breaks down. Again, where it is is largely dependent dependent on where their weak link lies. But please avoid that at all costs. Think about, right, how's my training looking at the moment? What can I add in? What do I need to dial back on to to kind of balance that out?
And on that note as well, when it comes to speed training, it's really, really important to appreciate that not all speed workouts are created equal. There is a big, big difference between different types of speed session. Now, if you're new to doing speed work, or if you're doing speed work again, factoring it in after an injury, you have to respect this continuum. It starts out with long hill reps. The intensity isn't particularly high because you're working uphill for those longer reps. You're not smashing it like you're doing short hill sprints. And the fact that you're running uphill actually takes a little bit of the impact off your knees and, to be honest, also your low back. But from there, that's when we can start factoring in, as the next more stressful form of speed training, factoring in our tempo runs. Okay, so we're not doing hard speed intervals yet. Those tempo, tempo runs are just a bit more sustained. They're still at a bit more of a a conservative effort. So we're talking more like kind of 10k race pace for a lot of people. And that is our next step. Beyond that, we're looking at things like unders and overs. So again, it's a sustained, uh, sustained run, a sustained effort, but you're just working above and below a set pace. So let's say you're doing two minutes at ever so slightly above 10k race pace, two minutes ever so slightly below 10k race pace, and you're just bouncing between the two for, let's say, half an hour. From there, that's where we've got our Kenyon Hills. So we're starting to factor hill back in. So we're working uphill, flat, and downhill. Let's say a good example of that is you've got a hilly one-mile loop, and you're just working round that loop, uphill sections, flat sections, downhill sections. You're focusing on effort, so keeping the effort high. So again, let's say 10k race effort, but you're allowing the hills, the inclines, the flats, the declines to actually dictate the pace that that equates to. From there, that's where we've got our hill sprints as our next level of intensity. And then beyond that kind of higher level of intensity, that's where we've got our track intervals. So we've got our K reps, our 800s, our 400s, our 200s, those sorts of interval sessions, which are much higher intensity, much harder on the body. So speed work is not just speed work. Think of that as you start out of this end and you can progress through all sorts of different types of sessions, respecting all those different types of, uh, tons of speed training through to a point where you're able to do some real high-intensity stuff.
And then, of course, the question is, how much speed work should you be doing in a given training week? And honestly, for most runners, it's absolutely adequate to be doing one speed session per week. Most of us don't need any more than that. A lot of new runners, if you're just getting into running, you're just beginning to add some structure into your training, you're perhaps just starting to train for your first 10k, half marathon, maybe even stepping up to a marathon. If you've been running running for a little while, you don't you don't need to be doing a lot of speed work. All these distances, your performance, it's largely based on your aerobic capacity, okay, your aerobic fitness. Speed work is very much cherry-on-top type stuff. Once you've built a solid aerobic base, that's when adding in that extra speed work session each week can really start to take things on to the next level. If you're still working on that first level, then don't feel like you need to suddenly do this because this is what everyone's talking about. Okay, so speed work once per week, absolutely adequate.
So let's move on and talk about strength work or injury prevention exercises. There are so many different types that you could be doing, whether we're talking about the exercises that your physio once gave you, and we'll talk about that in a second, or you're looking at doing some more heavy gym work, looking at big compound movements like squats, deadlifts, etc. You're doing, you know, lifting heavy weights on a bar, five sets of five, that sort of thing. Either way, it has its place. But I, for one, would rather reserve this type of work, the heavy gym work, for periods where you're not being super focused with your running training. It's certainly not for when you're in the middle of, let's say, a half marathon training plan or a marathon training plan. It's want to preserve the, uh, energy in your legs, really focus on the recovery between runs, and not allow a big, heavy lower body gym session to start affecting that.
However, what we can be doing are more bodyweight-focused exercises. So if that is out and out strength, then perhaps where we use the term strength, this kind of thing isn't necessarily appropriate. We're talking more neuromuscular control, mobility, coordination, all those sorts of things. But they are the factors that a lot of the time lead us down as runners and end up with us getting injured. Okay, there are two ways in which we can we can not get injured as runners. We can either manage our training load better, and let's face it, we could all do with managing our training load a little bit better. Or, and/or, we can increase our body's tolerance to that training load. Okay, so if we keep our training load in check, and we start with these exercises to improve our body's capacity for work, our tolerance to that training load, then we're less likely to get injured. And that's really what these exercises are all about.
Now, I mentioned earlier, physio exercises. One of the best ways to get started. If you, if you've ever seen a physio for an injury, chances are, especially if it's a running injury, chances are that injury exposed a weak link anyway. And the physio, if they were worth their salt, they gave you some exercises to be getting on with. The problem is that us runners, a lot of the time, we do our exercises, we get bored of our exercises, it kind of stops hurting, we get back to running, the exercises just get forgotten about. Find that piece of paper with the stick men drawn on them, because those exercises are the exercises that your body needs to go from being rehab exercises to them being your maintenance exercises, your prevention exercises. Find time to factor them in. And the beauty is, they don't need to take 90 minutes, two, three times per week, like a big gym session might. You can work 15, 20 minutes, again, two, three times per week, and just work on these key exercises that your body needs on a little and often basis. And it's that little and often basis, just getting it in the program, making it as important as those midweek runs, that will allow you to start building up that resilience and that tolerance to the training load.
Now, if you don't know what you need to be working on, check out the Bulletproof Runners program, which works on this little and often principle again, 15, 20 minutes, couple of times a week. The link is down in the description. It's put together for runners just like you and me. We're busy, but it covers all your bases.
Next up, I want to talk about the 10% rule. Lots of us will be familiar with the 10% rule: not increasing your running by more than 10% week on week, because once you step over that 10% line, all of a sudden you're opening yourself up to injury. Or the other way around of looking at it is, you can increase by up to 10% and you'll be let you'll be unlikely to hurt yourself. I have an issue with that. Okay, I have an issue with kind of both of those ways around of looking at looking at it, because really, what most people equate that to is thinking about either mileage or time spent running per week. And that's a problem, because if we think about weekly mileage and we start out doing 15 miles per week, let's say, and we add 10%, and we add 10%, and we add 10%, and we add 10%, where does that go? Where does where does that end? You've got all of a sudden, um, a bit of a bit of a problem, because it's not a measure that you can just consistently use.
What I would much rather have you focus on instead of mileage is training load. And I've actually put a video together about training load, which I'll link to down in the description. But training load will be a far better metric, because it combines your time spent running and the intensity of those runs. And the combination, which brings up that training load figure, is a figure that you can look at on a week-by-week basis, not stepping up by more than 10% again. That will do a far better job of not gring you. Again, if you want to know more about training load, check out the link down in the description.
Okay, this one is something that I could genuinely talk all day about. I won't. I'll keep it brief, to the point. But running form. Running form is something that again, people online love to talk about and give random bits of advice about. And people, a lot of the time, want to change because we're looking for that kind of marginal gain, that that percentage gain through just making this small tweak or that small tweak to how we run. Problem is, we've got to appreciate that how we run is kind of dictated by the way in which our bodies are put together. Areas of strength, areas of weakness, tightness, flexibility, um, even skeletally, you know, some people are different to others in terms of how your hips are or how your lower legs are, you know, some people's feet turn out, etc. How you run is largely individual to you.
Now, we can certainly tweak that and just start to, based on an individual one-by-one basis, figure out what might be slightly better than what your body naturally does. And a lot of the time, that is based on injury history. So if I've got someone who's got a history of runner's knee, patellar femoral pain, then I know there are things you can do to start to actually offload that patellar joint, that kneecap. You can start to work on all the things we usually talk about, reducing an overstride, working on increasing your cadence, those sorts of things. If you've got someone who's got a history of Achilles tendon problems, Achilles tendinopathy, and again, we don't want to see that they've got this really long contact time, lots of time under tension for the Achilles, which would usually come with a big, heavy heel strike and slow cadence. We also don't want to see them right up on their toes where they're not allowing the heel to come down and touch the ground, because again, that's going to equate to putting lots of strain through the Achilles.
Now, those things can be guided, like I said, by injury history. But if you're just changing or trying to change your running form through a desire to run faster and improve performance, a lot of the time you're going to be working against that path of least resistance. So it's really, really, really important to just take a second and think, is this, is this a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"? Is changing your running form actually the thing that's going to take you where you want to get to? If we're talking about getting away from pain and history of injury and a recurring pattern of injury, great. Lots we can do there. If you're looking to just shave a few seconds or minutes or whatever off a personal best, chances are you'll be better served either, and I'm sorry to say it, either to figure out do you need to lose 10 pounds, or to say, well, and to say, what can I do? Can I do an extra certain amount in terms of training volume per week to bump up my aerobic fitness to actually then see the benefits there, rather than just trying to find these kind of hacks that that kind of don't exist. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Okay, here's one that comes up all the time. I've felt it, you've felt it. It's that first mile. The first mile of a session, which a lot of the time can feel you're really, really uncomfortable. It almost feels like your body's kind of, your heart's racing, your lungs, you can't really get a proper breath. It's almost like just taking your body by surprise. And to be honest, that's exactly what's happened. The reason why, for a lot of us when we go out for a run, let's say we're time-poor, we've just thrown our shoes on and gone, the reason why it's uncomfortable is because we haven't done a warm-up. And I'm not talking about doing a full-on track session type warm-up before you're about to go and do four miles after work on Tuesday. I'm talking about just easing into your run. The warm-up can be a few gentle mobility exercises, perhaps a couple of activation exercises like some bridges or something like that, whatever, you know, your body needs. I, for one, always like to warm my calves up, some ankle pumps, because I know that's an area I get tight if I don't. But from there, just know that not heading straight out of target pace, but instead building in through that first mile, can make all the difference to how miserable it would otherwise feel.
Okay, here's an observation. Over years of working with all sorts of different types of runners, trail runners, yes, they trip over tree roots and rocks and all those sorts of things, they twist their ankles, very specific trail runner type stuff. But when we're looking at running injuries which are overuse in nature, so let's say we're talking about things like ITB syndrome, I see far, far less of it in trail runners. And I think there's no coincidence there. For me, the nature of running on trails, the way in which compared to running just on the concrete or asphalt, which is so uniform and flat, well, the trails just give that much more variety. And it's that variety in how our feet land and load, and therefore that translates up the system in terms of how our ankles work, how our lower legs, knees, hips, blah, blah, blah, they get a real variety in terms of the workout as you go stride by stride, mile by mile, run by run. Instead of us road runners, same, same, same, same, same. It's a really, um, repetitive, un, whatever the word is, unchanging pattern. Um, that if you've got a certain imbalance or a certain weak link, you're going to be picking on the same muscle, the same area, the same tissue over and over again with those very, very similar steps. Trails, because it is so different, because it is so varied, you're getting that varied workout and you're not going to be pinpointing that specific tissue that's just going to get beat with every single, uh, step that you would do if you didn't have that variation.
So all that to say, it will be well worth, and this pretty much goes for all of us, well worth thinking, how can I get off-road at least once per week, maybe twice per week, and just start to add a bit of variety into the workout? Okay, not so much that all of a sudden you're feeling like this is really, really hard work. I went and did a number of years ago, I went and did a half marathon that was, um, it was advertised as being a road half marathon with a little bit, a little bit of trail. To be honest, we were running through plowed fields. It was just brutal. And my hips, muscular, like muscular pain, thighs, the days, the days after, it was brutal. So it does demand different aspects or different things of your body. So don't throw yourself in headlong, but just factor it in and see how your body responds. I think you'll find it'll be positive.
And of course, if you do find that there's an ache, a pain, beginning of an injury starting to raise its head, please, please, please don't make the mistake that so many runners make, which is trying to run through it. Running through pain is stupid. Okay, there's there's no point. And us runners are really headstrong at times. We are very, very driven, and it's what it's what powers us forwards. It's it's a it's a double-edged sword, because that thing that powers us forward is also often the thing that causes us to go that little step too far, just to run through, through perhaps more than we should do. All of a sudden, we've got a little case of shin splints that turns into a full-on stress fracture, as an example. That's a fairly extreme example, but you know what I mean. We've got a little bit of a, a little bit of soreness which turns into a full-on muscle strain. These are the sorts of things that are entirely preventable if you would just listen to your body.
Okay, so don't run through pain, because I'd much rather you take a couple of days off, perhaps even a week off, just to give yourself a little bit more recovery. You can still swim, you can still cycle, give yourself a little bit of recovery. Do that proactively so that you don't have to take a month off, six weeks off, two months off further down the line when you realize that, okay, this is a real thing, this is a proper injury, and it sucks. So there's that.
And similar conversation, of course, when you have taken that time off, perhaps you've taken two, three days off because you've really felt the effect of a hard session more than you expected, don't feel you have to play catch-up. Okay, just allow yourself to say, right, those sessions, they've gone. Perhaps you could, like I said, do some stuff on the bike, but those run sessions are gone. I'm just going to pick up, start next week, and off we go. If you start trying to play catch-up and cram sessions in together, it's it's just again, a recipe for disaster. So don't run through pain, don't play catch-up.