At the beginning, the major obstacles to becoming a runner are:

  1. Habit Formation.
  2. Risk of Injury.

Addressing the above two points should be the main goal of someone getting into running.

Ideally, to see good progress in your running, you will want to schedule:

  • 3 weekly runs
  • 2 short cross-training sessions to improve your strength, mobility, and stability: targeted at reducing the risk of injury, while running.

The 3+2 training program was popularised in the book: “Run Less, Run Faster”. Each of the 3 runs has a specific purpose. The following table gives a brief overview of these 3+2 sessions, along with an example scheduling.

Day Type Goal Time
Sunday Long Run Improve Aerobic Base Up to 3 hours
Tuesday Tempo Run Improve Lactate Threshold Less than 1 hour
Wednesday Cross-Training Improve Strength, Mobility, and Stability Less than 1 hour
Thursday Interval Run Improve VO2Max Less than 1 hour
Friday Cross-Training Improve Strength, Mobility, and Stability Less than 1 hour

I will describe the above types of run in a second blog post. Although, for a complete beginner, I would instead recommend a simplification that should help both in habit formation, and injury prevention.

The biggest risk when you begin to run more frequently is to start ramping-up distance and speed too quickly, before your body is actually ready to absorb this stress, inevitably leading to injury.

Moreover, the formula for progressively increasing distance and speed is not trivial: it is not necessarily linear.

MAF Method

Beyond your overall fitness, there are many other factors that might affect the training load that your body is ready to absorb. Ideally, when you begin run training, you would like to dynamically adapt the load of your run, depending on your current fitness.

Luckily there is a body signal that is very much linked to the current exercise load: your Heart Rate.

Phil Maffetone, an applied kinesiologist, has proposed a training method, the MAF Method, where you adjust your running pace to always keep your running pace in the aerobic range (the range where your body is most efficient at burning fat for energy, and your body is able to clear the lactate generated by the muscles). In this training method, you monitor a single variable: your Heart Rate, making sure to never go beyond (180 - Age) beats per minute. For example, if you are 40 years old, you should keep your heart rate below 140 bpm.

Habit Formation

In the beginning, you can start forming the habit of running three days a week, two shorter runs during the week, and a longer run during the week-end, following the MAF method.

Forget about distance and pace, and only focus on increasing the amount of time you spend running, aiming at progressively reaching 1 hour for the shorter weekly runs, and possibly up to 3 hours for the long run in the week-end.

A possible starting point could be 30 minutes for the weekly runs, and 45 minutes for the long-run in the week-end, increasing by 5 to 10 minutes week after week, always keeping your HR below the (180 - Age) threshold.

This approach will provide you a solid base for the next phase of your training:

  1. It will build-up your aerobic base, increase the density of mitochondria in your muscles, and improve your capability of using fat for producing energy.
  2. It will reduce the risk of injury and over-training.
  3. It will start forming your running habit, creating the 3 weekly-runs pattern that you will use in the future for other different types of runs, to further improve your training.

Injury Prevention

The other major area of focus for a beginner is Injury Prevention.

The MAF method presented above is a good approach to mitigate the risk of injury, but to grow further as a runner, you will need to put in place two other foundations:

  1. Running Form
  2. Strength, Mobility, and Stability

Running Form

There is one major mistake in the running-form that can lead to injury: over-striding, landing heel-first. If you land heel-first straight in front of you, the arc of the foot, the tendons, and the leg muscles do not have a chance of absorbing the impact, and the shock travels directly to your knee.

In the ideal running form, you should land on midfoot, with a slightly bent knee, landing slightly in front of the centre of mass. You should stand tall, with a neutral spine position, and a minor lean forward.

Depending on the pace, and your peculiar bio-mechanics, the running cadence (number of steps per minute) should be between 172 and 212 steps per minute. If you have a lower running cadence, your running form will likely improve taking shorter strides, at a higher frequency.

To further reduce the effort to move your leg forward, you want to “shorten the lever”, bending more your knee, raising more the heel in your back.

The above is much better explained with a video: Principles of Natural Running with Dr. Mark Cucuzzella

Strength, Mobility, and Stability

Running puts a huge strain on your body, the force sustained by one leg receiving the impact on the ground and recoiling it back can be about x2.5 your body weight.

After years of sedentary life, spending a large part of the day seated, you can have the certainty that your body is not strong enough to properly handle the stress of running for an extended period of time. Ignoring this fact inevitably leads to injury.

Lack of mobility on the other hand will prevent you from being able to have a good running form, and this will lead you to compensate using other sub-optimal, less sustainable, movements.

To incorporate this type of training in my routine, my personal choice for the past 4 years has been attending the Cambridge Bootcamps. A bootcamp session incorporates a variety of movements mimicking everyday activities, like lifting, pushing, pulling, and squatting, often done in a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) format, designed to build overall strength, stability, and fitness through exercises that directly translate to real-life movements.

The following is an example good cross-training session for runners: Strength and Mobility Training for Runners