Article written by Performance Physique founder Arj Thiruchelvam.
In today’s running culture there is a clear, extreme divide emerging.
On one side, there’s the “just get something in” camp where it doesn’t matter what you do – running for 5 or 10 minutes, staying too safe – and then not understanding why you don’t progress.
On the other hand there’s the “go all in, every single time, until you have nothing left” camp. This involves training like everything depends on it; every day is a stress test. This athlete pushes constantly and that leads to burnout and injury. With the rise of the hybrid fitness era, I am seeing this on a grand scale.
In terms of scientifically improving, both methods are wrong and, ironically, both are being commended repeatedly within their own circles.
I’m not saying for someone new to exercise, on a new health mission or trying to change their life that managing just 10 minutes of exercise isn’t helpful – it’s a great place to start. However, if you want to see progress and improvement you have to take your body out of this comfort zone, every now and again.
If you want to get faster and fitter, the answer doesn’t lie at either extreme. It’s not about always being kind to yourself and it’s not always about going for a personal best, trying to create pain and putting yourself through the ringer!
Be smarter about your training by understanding how hard to push, and when. You may not need the level of detail of an elite athlete, but you should be using scientifically grounded methods to determine your training and training load. Real progress requires objective tools like heart rate zones, rates of perceived exertion, reps in reserve and maybe even VO2Max data and load management.
As the Head Coach of Performance Physique, my vision statement has always been that everyone deserves the right to achieve their potential using the same methods used by elite athletes.
There’s a time and a place for being kind to yourself but this article is about giving you some guidance on how to apply a “win now” mindset to your running journey, based on real sports science. I want everyone – from the newcomer who’s trying to sift through conflicting social media advice, the club runner chasing a new personal best, to the sub-elite balancing training with work – to learn how to train with purpose and progress to their goal.
Why “just move” and “max every day” both miss the mark
| Just Move Pros · Very accessible to health and fitness · Provides great stress relief · Effective for habit formation · Low barrier to exercise | Just Move Cons · Performance plateaus · Aerobic capacity development slows · Doesn’t develop full energy systems · Doesn’t challenge or stress the body after beginning · Doesn’t develop resilience · Teaches a negative cycle mentality |
| Max Every Day Pro · Will stress the full energy system · Will develop mindset to a point · Stimulus for adaptation when fresh | Max Every Day Cons · Very high injury risk · Cumulative fatigue leading to burnout · Performance plateaus · Diminish mental resilience that had been developed · Potential health risks |
How to get it ‘just right’
As a runner, you’re looking for the Goldilocks moment to emerge: finding the sweet spot of stress versus easy or recovery work. Balancing both strength and aerobic development creates a full, all-round better runner. This structure not only balances your weekly training load between easy runs, but also those quality sessions which stimulate the development of speed and fitness. This system should also flow through several phases, leading to moderate peaks that stimulate steady performance improvements and climax at your major challenge or event, such as a half-marathon.
Finding that Goldilocks zone requires you to implement:
· Objective Metrics to guide your training and your mindset
· Sports Psychology for when to push, and when to take it easy
This is a process of discipline and transparency to avoid taking the easy route.
Objective metrics to influence your sessions
When you’re looking to develop into a smarter runner, you have to be able to monitor some level of data to identify just how hard you’re working. This gives you evidence of what you are achieving in training and how to guide your sessions.
I always preach that any single piece of data can be misleading and therefore we should triangulate our data to get a more accurate picture: heart rate, pace, RPE etc. Your maximum heart rate isn’t necessarily 220 minus your age, or any of those generic formulas – they are there to provide you with a guide. I’ve actually developed a heart rate calculator that merges all of these and allows you to select your training population, to provide a slightly more specific idea of your training zones.
You can perform tests to identify your maximum heart rate and then use this to identify the most suitable specific training zone. It’s really important that when you perform a max heart rate test you know you’re in good cardiac health and this often requires a sign off from your GP or MD. Some validated tests include the 20m Shuttle Run Test (bleep test) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s repeated interval test.
How hard should my training be?
You should build your training from the 5 training zones, which are like a spectrum as they don’t start and stop with hard boundaries.
Most people should spend the majority of their week (circa 80%) focussing on Zones 1 & 2. This approach increases capacity and recovery for the hard work performed in Zones 4 & 5 for the remaining 20% of the week. For more advanced runners, that 80% might occasionally shrink to 60%, but that’s in focussed weeks during their training programme.
ZONE 1 : 50-60% MHR | Very light – great for recovery
ZONE 2 : 60-70% MHR | Light – endurance & capillarisation
ZONE 3 : 70-80% MHR | Moderate – onset of lactate
ZONE 4 : 80-90% MHR | Hard – lactate threshold / speed endurance
ZONE 5 : 90-100% MHR | Maximal – speed, towards anaerobic
Not every session feels great, in fact a third should feel pretty horrible. If you aren’t already, you can use Nike’s Run Club App, Strava, Garmin or Coros to measure your pace at the corresponding zones.
Utilise ‘Rate of Perceived Exertion’ to support your decision making when you need to ease off or up the training intensity. It’s particularly useful when stress, heat etc causes your heart rate data to be skewed. The idea is that you have a scale of 1-10: up to 3 is light, to 5 is moderate effort and then it’s hard to maximum effort. You can then lay this RPE scale over the top of your heart rate and make adjustments based on your session that day.
To support these two main pieces of data you can utilise power metres like Stryd to identify effort consistency and reps in reserve when performing sprints or hill sprints. Finally, look at cadence and stride length to monitor your form as you fatigue, and then apply it to future runs. Do you notice that perhaps your cadence was lower, stride length longer and thus you began overly heel planting, elevating your chance of injury, for example?
The vital importance of Sports Psychology
You get to a training session after work and feel the need to rest because your body feels tired. This is fine if it’s true and it might even be necessary if your long-term training has been demanding. Are you truly struggling and a rest would be valuable, or are you stealing success from yourself by finding an excuse that fits? Ask yourself the tough questions and try to establish what’s real. Some of the best training sessions I’ve ever had or coached have been in these pivotal moments.
One useful technique is to train for 10 minutes and see how you feel. In my experience, once you get started you’re good to keep going! Many warm-ups are 10 minutes long and leave you not only physically but mentally ready to start your session.
Occasionally some people follow the maximal daily training approach as a sort of punishment, pushing that intensity so they feel worthy and deserve a treat. This isn’t a healthy behaviour because you are not defined by your training session and this should not dictate what you can or can’t eat. Look out for those behaviours and look to make a change, usually with the support of an expert.
The final card you can play when having these psychological battles is skipping a workout once every 10 days or so, taking it a little easier or mixing up your training to give you that break without stopping completely. Just be strict with yourself and remember that accountability often comes from a coach, or at least a training partner.
When to back off: RHR & HRV in training
Now let’s consider using data to identify your long-term readiness to exercise. Objectively, I’d focus on waking, resting heart rate and then Heart Rate Variability (this is still an emerging area of data and actually requires more information than most smart devices can provide). If 1 or 2 days after a tough training session your resting heart rate hasn’t returned to your average, this would indicate that your body is still recovering and you should employ more recovery focussed training. With a resting heart rate elevated over 3bpm for 3 consecutive days, this signals a greater need for rest or possible early onset of an infection, like a cold. Combine this with subjective data like mood and muscular soreness and you might identify it’s time for a de-load week.
Heart rate variability (HRV) is a long-term measure which requires 24 hour monitoring over a 7 day average to identify training stress. It measures the time difference between each successive heartbeat. Studies suggest that when HRV decreases it generally occurs during heavy training blocks, whilst rises indicate a runner is ready to train and perhaps push on harder. A study by Nuuttila et al., (2024) looked at a very small sample, and their findings showed a 0.7% drop occurred after 3 heavy weeks of training. What this means is short bouts of heavy training aren’t necessarily bad, but actually demonstrate when you’re working hard to improve. You should have a planned period of lighter training to capitalise on these adaptations, which is ideal for tapering!
The overriding theme that all scientists and practitioners agree on is not to rely on one piece of data. Combine the information with your honest feelings and ensure that you spend your training time mostly in your comfort zone, as well as implementing a few very challenging moments during the week to make progress.
Share this article with a fellow runner and, if you’re interested in that heart rate calculator, reach out to me @performance_physique. Let’s not waste time, let’s #WinNow
Works Cited
Li, K. N. & Tan, Z., 2024. Application strategies of resting heart rate for monitoring training load intensity in football players. International Medical Science Research Journal, 4(5), pp. 579-584.
Nuuttila, O. et al., 2024. Monitoring fatigue state with heart rate‐based and subjectivemethodsduringintensifiedtraininginrecreational runners. European Journal of Sport Science, Volume 24, pp. 857-869.