"The best pace is a suicide pace, and today looks like a good day to die." -Steve Prefontaine

 I place a lot of focus talking about how to properly add lifting and resistance exercise into an endurance athletic routine, but it's high time that we look at the nature of the sport itself.

Running, Biking, Swimming, and other endurance sports take a lot of practice to perfect, and the necessity of performing these sports properly is essential, due to the lengthy repetitive nature of these sports; imbalances, miscues, and other improper form issues can become magnified over the course of the race, or circuit causing a great of problems that don't exist in other types of activities. Just performing these repetitious exercises alone if not developed properly can cause more issues than benefits. In order to truly enjoy the advantages of endurance sports, it is important to add more than long miles, finding success with endurance sports is more than 1 step.


Now let's get into the real conversation... running, endurance sports and how to train for them. In this article, we are going to focus on running, but all the principles talked about here can be applied across the board. 

Endurance sports are a different animal compared to the popular sports that we all know and love on TV. Endurance sports require a different kind of strength than what is commonly accepted as strength. In order to perform well on the running stage, it is important to incorporate a series of phases and aspects to your training so that you can enjoy a successful season. When training endurance athletes these are 5 key principles that I focus on for every workout on the road or track.

1) Dynamic Warm-up: Apart from the typical stretching and passive approach to bring the body up to a functional temperature, utilizing movements that require moderate intensity and compound movements will be more effective in priming the muscles to be ready to work. Essentially methods that require muscle contractions along a range of movement at an intensity that is slightly lower than what your race pace would feel like. Examples of this would be: Lunges, Body weight Squats, Pushups, Leg lifts, Bridges, Hip Circles, Scorpions, Lat Ham Reach, Fire Hydrants, etc.

2) Drills: Following the dynamic warm-up, we want to instill proper running technique and remember mental and physical cues to promote good running form. Drills are pretty self explanatory, and often overlooked by the casual running population, drills break down your running technique into pieces, helping you focus on the individual aspects of your run and preventing overuse injuries and other injuries caused by improper running gait. High Knees, Power Skips, Butt Kicks, Quick Legs, A-Skip, B-Skip, Straight Leg Run, Bounding, Ankling, etc.

3) Accelerations: After the drills, your muscles are ready to move and fire. This when it is most useful to push your muscles to an intensity above your race pace. In doing this we accomplish 2 things. First, we see an exaggeration of proper form, helping the body get used to the physical cues that will help ensure proper running gait. Second, we cause neurological adaptations showing the body that it is capable of speeds greater than comfortable. Here this will be a series of 25-50m Accelerations, starting easy and by the halfway mark reaching 90-95% max speed.

4) The Volume: Training throughout the season varies, but there is always a purpose to the kind of workout you or your coach are going to plan. Depending on where you are in the season depends greatly and what will be done here. (In another post I will discuss more on season long training plans)

5) Fast Finale: As a sprinter by nature, I cannot help but see the need to increase speed. Speed is an aspect to running that is extremely important. The faster you are the more success you will find, period. At the end of every workout, I want all my athletes feeling fast, and what perfect time than at the end of the workout, you can simulate that critical phase of the race, teaching to push to the end not feeling tired, but fast. at the end of every workout simply add 2-4 150m-200m strides, faster than race pace, focus on form and running all the way through the line. 

I include these five aspects into every training session and I have competed and coached with very successful programs that base their sport specific training on these principles and the results speak for themselves. Running alone is not enough, do more and achieve more!

Every Day... A Little Stronger