With Coach Kelvin, offering Online Running Coaching for We Run and the We Run Virtual Running Club, and 1:1 Running Coach for Leeds and surrounding areas.
A Simple Way to Add Speed to Your Training
In this little video, I’m gonna talk about a cool little way to add speed into your training.
Why Top-End Speed Matters
Many of you will know, those who have watched my videos, that I sort of think that many runners lack top-end speed. Even those training for longer distance events are always running at a percentage of their top-end speed. So periodically, depending on when it fits within your training and race schedule, adding some speed into your training is a good call.
What Is Threshold Training?
A lot of runners add a threshold into their training, which is an intensity that we could hold for somewhere between 40 minutes and 60 minutes in an all-out effort. That sort of is – it’s kind of like hard enough to be fast, and slow enough where it’s kind of got an endurance component. For most people, it’s a 10K race pace or slower.
How to Modify Threshold Workouts to Include Speed
A really good way of adding a bit more speed into that is to adapt the threshold workout.
So let’s say we’re gonna do some classic threshold – that might be the equivalent of four times one mile. Instead of just kind of doing a warm-up and then doing your four times one mile and then a cool down, we’d do a warm-up, and then we might add sort of four to six strides before we do the main set.
The strides are sort of 15 to 20 seconds of quite fast running. So we get a little bit of extra sort of power production, a little bit of added neurological component before the one mile reps.
Then what we might do is add something like four to six times 200 metres after the four times one mile at threshold. And we might do these at a 5K pace.
So again, four to six times 200 metres with full recovery – maybe 200 metre jog recovery or even walk recovery. It isn’t stressful in terms of adding too much stress to the threshold workout, but it is spending a little bit more time at those faster paces and teaching the body to work at higher velocities.
Final Thoughts
I hope that makes some sort of sense, and if you’ve got any questions, please pop them in the comments below.
And for now, happy running.
