08/08/2020
W***y Fitness Tips
Why running slow can eventually help you run faster
When you’re running slowly, and your injury risk is lower, you can run more often, more kms and build up slowly. But running slowly also allows your body to improve the energy system most essential to running: your aerobic energy system
Your body relies on a few different energy systems to get you up and moving. For any sustained movement, it uses your aerobic energy system, meaning it creates energy with oxygen. Oxygen helps the muscles convert fat, protein and glycogen (the form of glucose stored in your liver and muscles, which your body generates from the carbohydrates you eat) into energy. If you want to be able to finish a marathon, for example, or even a 5K or a run around the block, this is the energy system you want to develop, And to develop it, you should run at a pace where your muscles can get plenty of oxygen.
You don’t need HIIT ( High Intensity Interval Training) to get fit. Try this instead.
When you’re sprinting, or running so fast that you’ve reached your aerobic threshold, or, based on your level of conditioning, when your body runs out of oxygen, it switches over to another energy system — your anaerobic energy system. Without enough oxygen, your muscles convert glycogen into energy less efficiently, and you fatigue more quickly, which eventually forces you to slow down or stop. So if all your runs are too fast, you’re not developing the power system that you need for 97 percent of a race. “Your maximum aerobic benefit is going to be running slowly.”
Of course, “ ‘slow’ is highly individualized and varies a lot between people. That means you need to calculate how slowly you need to run to maximize your aerobic capacity, or, in other words, to maximize the amount of oxygen your body can use before it switches to anaerobic energy. this updated method for estimating your maximum heart rate (forget the old 220-minus-your-age equation). Multiply your age by .7 and subtract this number from 208, which would then be your estimated heart rate maximum, or the number of beats per minute that your heart is likely to be able to beat at its fastest.
From there, you can look at your heart rate during exercise. For a slow run, most recreational runners will want to stay within about 60 to 70 percent of their maximum heart rate, For a typical 60-year , whose maximum heart rate is 166, a slow run means keeping my heart rate between 97 and 116.
A less-scientific approach would be to use the “talk test,” “It’s like the tale of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’ If you can’t have a conversation with your running buddy then you’re running too fast. If you can talk easily but are barely sweating, then you’re probably too slow. If you can talk fairly easily as you are running but have to pause occasionally in the conversation to catch your breath, that’s going to be fairly spot on.
