6 Tips to Improve Your Running

1. Run longer
2. Run slower
3. Run shorter
4. Run faster
5. Run more
6. Run efficiently

I know none of these make much sense by themselves, but I’ll explain.

Run longer

This tip is pretty self explanatory, if you want to improve your running, you have to do longer runs, you can’t expect to improve if you just run the same 5km track every weekend. Run longer doesn’t mean to go run a marathon everyday, all it means is that you have to push yourself a little further out of your comfort zone. Once a week, go for a “long run”, now, all this means is that you should just try to run a little bit further than you usually do, and you can build on this slowly, week by week, until you start to develop some capacity for those longer runs.

Run slower

“Ok, now you’re talking crazy, how does running slower make me a better runner?” The majority of people, especially people just getting into running, tend to run too fast all the time, intensity is too high, which is unsustainable in the long term. It sounds slightly counter intuitive, but you should actually slow down, probably slower than you think you should, this is the pace you should do the majority of your running at, and this is the pace you should definitely be doing your long runs at. This lets you reduce your heart rate as you run, and will make it easier to cover longer distances. This is the recipe to building a big aerobic base, which is the key to becoming a good runner.

Run shorter

“Well this doesn’t make any sense, you just told me to run longer, why should I run shorter?” You can’t run longer all the time, you need to let your body get comfortable with the increased distances, so to balance out your longer run once a week, you should go for a shorter, recovery run once a week also, this allows you to keep up the running volume without too much strain on the body.

Run faster

Confusing I know, but now that you’ve got your long slow run and your recovery run down, you can start introducing more advanced running sessions. Tempo runs, interval work, fartlek etc. these are typically much faster than your average running pace, and the aim here is to improve your strength and speed in regards to running, and over time, will help increase your pace at longer distances as well.

Run more

This tip is also pretty self explanatory, if you want to improve your running you have to run more often, this should be a gradual build up, the last thing you want to do is jump straight into running five times a week and injure yourself. My recommendation for running frequency, if you really want to improve, is three times per week. One long run, one tempo/interval/fartlek run, and one recovery run.

Run efficiently

This step here is a simple step that doesn’t actually involve you getting any fitter. It’s called running economy. Put simply, running economy is your efficiency, or how much energy you expend to run at a given pace, the higher your running economy the better. To improve your running economy, you need to expend less energy while running at a given pace (easier said than done I know), the way we achieve this is by improving your running technique, there are many aspects to this and it's a bit too complicated to get into in this blog post, but improving your technique will allow you to run more efficiently, expending less energy to run at a given pace, or expending the same amount of energy, but running faster.