Last month’s blog shared six ways to progress your workout in the gym. But what if cardio is your game? It’s simple: basically, you can adopt a pretty similar approach. Typically, if running is your main form of exercise then simply increasing the distance covered will ensure progress. But there are some other ways of developing your workout. Taking running as an example, these are a few things that you can do:
1- Increase distance
This explains itself: simply, you add a little bit of distance, or go out running for longer.
2- Increase speed of a circuit
After increasing the distance for a couple of sessions, you can revert to running your original route while trying to increase the speed at which you cover the distance.
3- Increase course difficulty
Adding a run with a similar distance that includes a few hills or a light incline, for example, will naturally increase the difficulty of the run. You can then adopt the protocols 1 and 2 with this new inclined course.
4- Add interval training
This is where you set a course, or find a field or track, where you do an interval of a certain amount of time at speed, before slowing the pace, and then repeating that process a few times. For example, run for 20 seconds as fast as possible and follow this with a steady jog for 60 seconds to recover. Repeat this three to ten times. Don’t forget to warm up and cool down with a steady jog of around three to five minute—you don’t want to cause yourself an injury!
5- Increase frequency
This is the number of times you go for a run in a week and I would only make this progression after working through the other four steps above.
Remember, there is no rush to progress your workouts in or out of the gym. Don’t think that you have to make changes each and every week. I would target progress over a month before making another change, especially when increasing the frequency of your runs. So often injuries occur when someone goes from doing little or no exercise to doing a lot of the same type of exercise all at one time. You need to build up the layers of fitness before your body can tolerate multiple sessions in a week, particularly for something like running, which can place a lot of stress on your joints.
See you all next month.