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Lead Stories: Sunday, September 7, 2008

Heart Rate Training

Posted January 21st, 2007 at 2:00 PM by Emily Hoskins

Section: Running & Training, Training Tips, Health & Fitness, Exercise

Monitoring your heart rate during exercise is an excellent way to improve performance, avoid overtraining, and track your progress. Heart rate training is popular because it is easy to monitor and for most athletes if offers a practical way to measure exercise intensity. Heart rate training relies on the fact that as your exercise intensity increases so does your body’s demand for oxygen.

It is important to monitor your exercise intensity because (1) there are different physiological adaptations associated with training that depends on the intensity being implicated, and (2) you can manipulate your entire training program to reach your own personal goals based upon your specific sport or event.
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Expand your comfort zones; improve “running strength”

Posted December 22nd, 2006 at 6:15 AM by Jim Fortner

Section: Running & Training, Training Tips

Jim Fortner is a weekly, guest contributor to TFS. Also check out his own personal running and advice site: “Jim2’s Running Page”.

Running strength isn’t quite as definitive as VO2Max or lactate threshold. It’s a bit ambiguous. However, as I view it, it has two components: physiological and psychological.

The physiological component is related to running economy, but it is also different. I think of both running strength and running economy as sub-elements of a broader subject that I call running efficiency.

Running economy is a measure of how efficiently you use oxygen while running at a specific pace. Improving running economy means that you can physiologically sustain a faster pace at a given percentage of VO2max, or a given pace at a lower percentage of VO2max, for a longer distance.
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Ultimate speed workout for marathon training

Posted November 14th, 2006 at 7:00 AM by Jim Fortner

Section: Running & Training, Training Tips

Jim Fortner is a weekly, guest contributor to TFS. Make sure to also check out his own personal running and advice site: “Jim2’s Running Page”.

I think the consensus of most experienced marathoners is that a balanced training program that includes a mix of lactate threshold (LT), hill training, VO2max, anaerobic, and marathon pace (MP) sessions is the best way to improve and optimize marathon performance.

Most also agree that the emphasis in such a program should be on LT and hill work, although a growing number also advocate extensive MP training. Except for novice programs, most “cookbook” marathon training programs include all of the above in one form or another and to one extent or another. In fact, most training programs for distances shorter than the marathon also include the same “speedwork” ingredients, except for MP runs, but the mix of them changes for the shorter distances.

However, I believe there is a specific “speed workout” that is superior to all of the above. It provides more training benefit, with little or no additional risk of injury, than the “standard” speed workouts. Run correctly, it is a “balanced” workout within itself that includes all of the speedwork elements, except for MP running. And it is much more fun than any of the other speed training workouts.

So, what is this “ultimate” speed workout? It’s 10k racing. Not 5k racing. Not half marathon racing. But, specifically, 10k racing. Read the rest of this entry »

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