Speed in the running does not come naturally in everyone. It is a slow process that improves week by week. You cannot run at high speed from day one. Running is one of the best workouts to improve your body fitness; it also helps in increasing the body stamina and metabolism activity of your body. Speed is the most critical factor in running, especially when you are participating in any competition or marathon. It is the physical activity that separates you from the competition.
Either you are a beginner or an experienced runner, you want to improve your running endurance and speed. With patience and hard work, you can increase your speed in the running. Below are some critical running tips to improve your speed training. There are three basic types of running that helps you to stay fit and healthy:
Jogging
This is the most common type of running. People who do not enjoy running or who are not able to run or not going to compete any race can do the jogging one or two times a week and get the health the benefits. For the people who have minimal running, the experience can start with jogging. The pace for jogging slower than 6mph.
Distance Running
When you increase your pace above six mph, then you can do distance running. In this running, you begin to lose fast-twitch muscle fibers.
Sprinting
It is a form of high-intensity interval training (HIIT). This running should only be performed when you have already built a muscular fitness through jogging and running.
Speed also matters a lot in the running. Do not expect to increase your running speed in a single day it takes time. So now let’s focus on the tips to improve the speed training in running:-
1. Keep your knees high
To enhance the speed, your knees should lift high as your hips. This will helps you to stretch farther, and it shortens the lever through the height of knees. Starts by doing some high-knees running at the spot. Includes the following exercises:
- Walking high-knees
- High-knee toe up
- Full effort high-knees
- High-knees skipping match
2. Strengthen your ankles
According to some professional runners, ankles can develop more speed. With the reduced ankle mobility and strength, the structure of joints do not allow to move back, and front and calf muscles become tight and required more flexibility.
Includes following ankle drills in your workout can help you to increase mobility and strength.
- Ankle Circles
- Straight-leg calf stretch
- Bent-knee calf stretch
- Standing Calf Raises
- Standing squat jumps
- Ankle Bounces
3. Run Tall
Slouched posture is typical in runners due to sitting over a computer all day, which is a wrong posture for running. If you are passionate about running, then try to keep an upright position with back straight and head up so that your chin should be parallel to the ground.
Focus on the below exercises for running tall and light:
- Straight-leg run
- running on your toes
- Try to run on toes into strides
4. Mix up your pace
Running flat during every workout will not work much to improve your running speed. Do the interval running at different pace will help you out in increasing the speed.
Includes the following factors:
- An easy endurance run
- A tempo run
- Speed works such as intervals
5. Get your glutes firing
Glutes are basically hips or buttocks muscle. Glutes are a group of muscles which consists of three muscles, gluteus maximus, gluteus minimus, and gluteus medius. Glutes are a very important part of the kinetic chain of muscles. Most of the runners have ‘’sleepy glutes’’ syndrome where glutes are not firing much and this happens due to our modern lifestyle where we spend most time of our day sitting which makes our glutes inactive. Strong glutes can help runners to involve more muscle in run thus resulting in better speed.
There are several exercises which can help runners to strengthen glutes, like donkey kicks where one have to get on knees and hands then keep back straight, squeeze glute muscles and start raising one leg. One can do3-5 sets of 15-20 reps depending on one’s strength. In this exercise, you have to make sure that thrust is coming from glutes and not lower back as this is where many people go wrong.
