Don’t worry, I know this sounds confusing, but all will become clear.
As discussed in previous posts, I embraced the run slower to run faster principle and committed to it. It all made sense; slow down, reduce the chance of injury, establish long term consistency, reap the gains!
Except for a while all that was happening was that I was getting slower, and slower.
It turns out that there are two types of muscle, at least for the purposes of this discussion anyway. There are slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscles. Guess what? Yup, you got it, slow running only activates the slow-twitch muscle and to really see things improve it’s necessary to train both types of muscle.
Fortunately this is pretty easy to do and best of all – it’s fun!
All you have to do is incorporate some short bursts of intense activity 2 or 3 times a week. That’s it.
Neither group of muscles act in complete isolation, so the trick is to get a good balance. The bulk of training should be spent on the endurance slow-twitch fibres to build up strength and stamina, but there should be a sprinkling of fast-twitch fibre training to keep those short-burst explosive muscle fibres in good shape too.
There are lots of ways to achieve this outcome, my favourite:
On short run days, twice a week, end the run on the flattest, safest, piece of ground possible and just sprint, give it everything for a couple of hundred yards.
Of course, before I knew this I was neglecting my fast-twitch muscles, and I believe that’s why I was getting slower over time. I just needed a little bit of power in my runs! Once I started adding in a couple of short sprint sections in every week, the ever decreasing run times ended. I believe those fast-twitch muscles started working together with my slow-twitch muscles during my slow runs to help me pick up the pace a little.
Those of you who know more about this than I do may say this is an oversimplification, I am sure it is, but this is just my understanding and experience of how it seemed to play out at the time. I hope it is helpful for some people.
Here’s a screenshot from around the time I brought all this together and really started to see great results, as you can see, even though I was working pretty hard going up and down this fell, my heart rate remained below threshold.
Here are the Statistics from the same run, the Activity time includes 5 minutes at either end, just walking to warm up and cool down.
After the months of frustrating runs, I can tell you this felt amazing. When I started these runs, this particular route felt like hell, but this day, it was like nothing, just a short pleasant, easy run up and down a small fell.
Please feel free to ask me anything about this.
How about you? Have you experienced gradual slow down when trying to run slower? How did you pick up the speed again? Do you have a favourite technique for incorporating fast-twitch muscle training into your workouts? Do you disagree and have a better theory of how this all works?
Until next time, keep running – with occasional explosive bursts of power a couple of times a week 😉