Running Explained

Are you doing strides yet? No? Well this is your sign.

They are the easiest thing you can add to your running today with the one of the biggest impacts on your fitness for not a lot of time spent.

Strides are short (15-20s) bursts of fast but relaxed running and they will help you sharpen your turnover, recruit fast twitch fibers and teach your legs what fast actually feels like. Without the fatigue cost from a real speed sessions.

It’s simple 4-8 of them, 1-2x a week after an easy run. That’s the whole hack.

Save this and start actually doing them!

Sometimes the solution is the one right in front of you, you just need to shake things up!

Today we are talking about the one thing to take your running to the next level and it’s progressive overload and how you can apply it in your training.

The key here to notice throughout this post is it’s about gradual progress. It takes time but if you continue to build that fitness gain and don’t push too hard too soon it’s going to take you to places you’ve never been before fitness wise.

In here are just some ways you can look at a workout and how you can manipulate it to give yourself different types of stimulus to continue to drive your adaptions.

If you ever need help that’s why I’m here. A running Coach of 8+ years coaching athletes from the Olympic Trials to chasing PR’s and so much more. You can schedule a discovery call or book a coaching consult with me! And if you just want to go at it on your own with science based training plans check out The Run Club App. You get access to all our training plans, a ton of resources and strength training! Check it out.

So much goes into your running performance it can be easy to just blame your fitness or say you weren’t tough enough but the reality is any of these things can make a good running performance go bad.

We’ve talked about all of these here on this page. You can read about the impact negatively or positively sleep can have on your running.

Every week and on the blog we dive into how your mindset can cause you to spiral full of doubt or can be one of your greatest assets. We even have a Race Week Mindset checklist available for you for this very reason.

Life stress, heck stress in general we can’t run away from. It’ll make everything feel harder on those bad days and on those good days things will feel like a breeze.

As we enter summer the heat and humidity will cause you to have to slow down to run your best. One of our most recent blogs is all about tips to help you in summer running and let’s not forget the terrain an uphill race will cause things to feel harder while downhill, if run smartly, can be an advantage.

And let’s not forget about fueling and hydrating. Both of these factors at their worst will cause significant slowdowns but when done correctly can be a huge advantage on your performance.

At the end of the day, so much goes into your running performance and all we can do is prepare ourselves the best we can and show up! But doing a little prep work to be prepared can go a long way!

Just a friendly check in on you and all your running related things!

We have all done some of these things before so it’s pretty normal running stuff. I’m still waiting for those race photos to get better!

It’s Sleep! We teamed up with our friends over at to bring you some education and fun regarding how sleep can be one of the best performance enhancers for you!

In addition to this post head over to our blog where we deep dive into sleep, how it can impact performance, and some tips. We also talk about how depending what season of life you are in, it’s not just as easy to say “I’ll just add 2 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night” because I think it’s important to always acknowledge seasons of life.

I thought this was such an important topic I wanted to make sure you got all the information for it and had some fun with memes too.

I hope you enjoy this new format as we try and add a little fun to our educational content.

At the end of the day start with sleep when you are looking to improve your performance before you go out and try the latest product. Once you nail the basics then you can add in other things!

You may have heard the phrase Poor Man’s Altitude or Summer Miles Bring Fall PR’s.

Well in this post and subsequent blog post you can check out on our blog. You will learn what it all means.

You can learn some tips on how to deal with the summer heat. How you can adapt and adjust.

Tricks to help you look at the dog days of summer and instead of seeing something holding you back, see an opportunity for growth for your fitness.

It’ll be hot, and sweaty and humid. Your paces will absolutely be slower and the air will feel thick at times. But with the right adjustments to your training, some little things you can do inside to help adapt and maybe some Aqua jogging from yesterday’s post. You can make this summer work for you. Because when done right summer absolutely leads to massive Fall Gains and PR’s!

As always if you are looking for help with your running you can always schedule a Coaching Consult call with me and pick my brain on running. Purchase a training plan to support your goals or book a discovery call. So many ways to work with me or the running explained team to help you!

Want to add some additional cross training while your kids are at the pool this summer? Do some aqua jogging!

Everyone will be talking about that person running in the deep end and ask you what you are doing! Even the life guard will be concerned!

In all seriousness when it’s hot out and you want to do some cross training how about hopping in the pool and doing the best representation of running as your cross training. It’ll add cardio, keeps the pounding off your joints and keep you cool!

That being said when I am working really hard on one of these aqua jogging workouts it can feel like I am attempting to drown myself but I stay close to the wall or have a belt to keep me going.

Plus the fun of grabbing some friends, going to a pool and doing some cardio together can keep group chat going. Or bring an audio book and enjoy!

Either way Aqua jogging can be a fun way to cross train and add some extra fitness in your training block if you have the time and want to add something more fun then sweating to death in the gym on a bike.

Have you tried aqua jogging? Do you enjoy it? Something you are interested in adding this summer to your training block?

We’ve got a new product for you and your running: Introducing Running Explained Strength Training Plans

Comment Strength to get all the details on the plans.

We’ve created these plans to take out all the barriers to starting strength training. We explain it all in your plan, help you plan out your year with running and lifting, all the benefits, how to progress your strength training and videos for every exercise. No excuse not to add in strength training today and it pairs perfectly with our running explained running plans.

This plan is built to help you add strength training to your running today and start building up your power to become a more complete runner and human being.

Hope you love these plans, we put alot of work into making them the best possible for you!