work your aerobic engine by increasing the recruitment of capillaries to the muscles and improving your ability to utilise oxygen more efficiently. You should increase the time of your long run by no more than 10 per cent each week to avoid overtraining
flaring, back off. "The single most common cause of re-injury is doing too much too soon," Pruitt says. Your body may also be vulnerable to over-training when you're coming back from injury, so respect rest and easy days.
salvaged what could have been a disastrous day. In such a situation, elite runners see no need to push so hard to hit the prescribed times that they overtrain.2. Reduce repeatsA second option is to adjust the number of repeats. So instead of doing five
. These injuries usually come after a burst of speed, and with a popping sound or sensation. Overtraining, forceful stretching, excessive speedwork or speedwork without a proper warm-up can strain a muscle. Strength imbalances also pose a threat. If the fronts
they are working well, they allow us to love every step, so it’s a priority for all runners to keep them healthy. Feet and ankles are built tough, capable of sustaining two or three times our bodyweight. But when they are abused (overworked, overtrained
should be done as genuine recovery runs, but I see so many club runners doing them as steady runs – it puts you on a fast track to fatigue and over-training." Slow it down – use a heart-rate monitor, train with a plodder or take in some chilled, view
, injury, overtraining or fatigue hit. Youll find that as well as your recovery time increasing, your speed for a given heart rate will drop but your HRM should help to stop you running too fast during recovery.
(unsuccessfully) to maintain your pace, but despite the fact that you're still working hard, your heart rate drops throughout the race. This pattern is not uncommon and can also be seen in overtrained athletes, who can find it hard to maintain their normal high
found a way to be both decadent and fit. I was going to be the one who could overeat and overtrain. For most of a year, I managed to be both what I had been and what I was trying to become.Eventually though, I began to realise that my priorities were
sleep – an extra 30-45 minutes a night. Having difficulty nodding off – and then struggling to get up the next morning – could mean that you are over-training. As you’ll see in our schedules, you will benefit from having an occasional easy week – usually
