The Best Running Plan For Beginners
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In this post you’ll learn what’s the best running plan to follow so you don’t get knee pain.
This video is all about the whole program and how to make sure the training you’re following won’t cause knee pain.
To do this you’ll need to know a few things
How far can you run without knee pain now? This is your starting point
What is your pace? If you’re just getting started you may not know this yet, that’s OK
What’s your goal distance? This is usually the distance of a race you signed up for.
Ok while you’re getting all that info together let’s look at an example so we can put this all together.
My client Allison was getting back into running after having 3 kids and gaining some baby weight.
She was an athlete in high school and recreationally in college but she’d never really run besides for practices, mainly punishment days.
So since she was starting out she decided on running a mile a few days a week to play it safe.
That went great for the first 2 weeks so she decided to sign up for a 5k which was just a month away.
She figured since she wants to do good in the 5k she’ll run that distance for the next month.
Practice makes perfect and practice like you play right?
She ran 3.1 miles 4 days a week and in the first week her knees were aching so bad that she couldn’t do anymore.
Her doctor said running’s bad for her knees and she needs to rest for 2 weeks.
So Allison rested for 2 weeks which really helped her knee pain.
That brought her to the week leading up to the race.
She ran 5k 2 days that week and then missed a run and kept her other rest days.
Race day came.
She lined up and right out the gate she was feeling great.
Just past 2 miles it hit her, she had started out too fast, her legs were cramping and oh no her knees were stabbing her.
She had to walk.
She wasn’t able to run the whole thing like she’d hoped.
Should she have been able to do it?
See it’s not that running too fast on race day is what hurt her knees, it's that not following the correct plan from the beginning of her training is the problem.
See if you want to train for a race the program you use should follow the 10% rule.
This rule is you should run no more than 10% more each week.
So let’s look at Allison’s example.
She started out running 1 mile 4 days a week for a total of 4 miles that week.
So following the 10% rule means that the 2nd week mileage should be no more than 10% more than 4 miles, so 4.4 miles max.
So when Allison felt so good and decided to run 3.1 miles 4 days a week that was 12.4 miles total. That is waaay more than 10%.
So there you have it, the best plan to follow to run without knee pain is one that has a total mileage each week of no more than 10% from the week before.
Of course there are other features of training programs but that info is for another post.
If you’re interested in that information tell me in the comments and if enough people want it I’ll make a post about it.
Watch the video below
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