Run Longer without Knee Pain
In this post you’ll learn how to run longer without causing knee pain.
In another post I talked about running faster, you can go to that one here.
Today it’s not about going faster, it’s all about running more, longer amount of time without causing knee pain.
For this you’ll need to know a few things.
How long you currently, comfortably run
What your comfortable pace is
What your goal length of running time is
How many days a week you want to run
Stay with me because I’m sharing how to run longer without knee pain.
Let’s look at an example to do this so it all makes sense.
My client Tina started running and when she started she went out for however long she had that day.
Sometimes it was 20 minutes, maybe 45 minutes, and on a rare occasion 1 hour.
She’d do this a few days a week and it would go fine for a few weeks.
Then she’d hit a wall and her knees would pinch, ache and overall scream at her.
She couldn't figure it out. The pain came out of nowhere.
See what she didn’t know was that the pain didn’t come out of nowhere.
It’s that her knees were stressed too much over time without proper progression…
Meaning she went out too long too soon. She overtrained.
When you overtrain, your muscles and joints can only handle it for so long, eventually they scream at you.
So instead of winging it for her program, her knees would be much happier if Tina ran gradually more by 10% each week.
By following the 10% rule you won’t overdo it so it shouldn’t cause pain.
The 10% rule means you can increase no more than 10% each week.
Let’s look at Tina’s example.
She wanted to run 45 minutes as her goal.
She said 60 minutes would be nice but consistently she knew she’d have about an hour to workout… so the 45 minute run left her time to stretch.
Ok so 45 minute goal.
What was her pace?
Tina tracked on her Apple watch and it was 12 or so minutes.
How many days a week did she run?
She ran 3 days a week
And finally what could she comfortably do when we started planning her program?
She could run 20 minutes without knee pain.
So the 10% rule means she will increase by no more than 10% each week.
You can do this by adding 10% of run time to each run so everything is equal or add 10% of total weekly run time to 1 run to make 1 long run a week.
I talk about 1 long run a week in another video and I shared the link to that one in the description so watch that video after this.
Today I’m talking about making all runs equal, that’s what Tina did.
Tina added 10% of run time to each run.
So the 10% rule means she’s going to add 10% of running time to each run.
For her, 10% of 20 minutes is 20 times 0.1, so that’s 2 minutes.
So her new running time is 22 minutes.
So each run she did in the 2nd week was 22 minutes, 3 days a week.
And that my friends is the 10% rule.
Add 10% of your running time to each run each week.
Remember, the key to running longer without knee pain is the 10% rule, so you gradually increase how long you’re running over time.
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