How to Avoid Overtraining For Runners

<b>How to avoid overtraining for runners.</b>

The hard/easy rule of training will take you a long way towards avoiding overtraining. It involves taking a rest or easy day after every hard workout in order to allow you body to regenerate. The easy day following your hard day of training is absolutely essential for the regeneration of your body: your muscles, bones and blood cells and connective tissue immediately begin to heal themselves following your hard run. Some people may even need two easy days between hard workouts in order to complete this process of regeneration.

<b>What is hard and what is easy?</b>

Your hard and easy days are relative to your level of fitness. As a beginner, run only every other day taking a complete rest day in between. As you improve you’ve reached the intermediate and advanced levels, you may be running every days. On your hard day you might add some extra time to your base run or maybe incorporate some interval training (running at 80% of you maximum heart rate for no more than 3 minutes follows by a recovery jog). For your easy day you might a familiar loop at a conventional pace. As you get fitter you hard days should become harder and your easy days become easier.

<b>The friction coefficient and recovery.</b>

Some runners are lighter on their feet than others which is due to their varying friction coefficients. Knowing yours won’t help you recover more quickly than before, it simply explains why you need more easy days than your running partner. Simply put, this is energy used to propel the body forwards, relative to what is lost and pushed downwards into the ground. It’s not just down to body weight either. Even light weight runners can have a heavy foot strike. ‘Landing hard’ produces more micro tears in your leg muscle fibres than being light footed, and therefore the body requires extra time to recover and regenerate.