In order to improve as a runner avoid injury and just keep from getting bored you’ll need a balanced training program. Unfortunately, we cannot just offer you a ready to go training program because training programs are very personal things. But what we can do is explain how you can develop a training program that will work for your unique situation. To do this we are going to look at the basic principles of training and then we will take a look at different types of training sessions, and how they work to get you closer to your end goal.

Even armed with all this information will still might want to get outside expert help with setting up a training program. Talking with a personal trainer or joining a training group maybe your next step. Before getting into specific of how to set up a training program there are four basic principles of training that you need to understand:

1. Know that your body adapts quite well if slowly to physical stress. Over time your hearts and lungs become more efficient. And your muscle and bone density will growths that you can handle more punishment. But if you increase the level of stress too fast your body will break down before it has a chance to adapt.
2. It is important to know that your body does not actually improve when you train, but when you rest. Serve you train your body too hard and do not rest you are not going to improve.
3. Third basic principle of training acknowledges that there are three key factors in any training program: duration, intensity and frequency. No matter what level you start at none of these factors should be increased by more than ten percent per week.
4. Last basic principle of training, simply states that you get your best results if you keep your easy days easy and your hard day’s hard. A good gauge for easy run is that you should be able to comfortably carry on a conversation. Hard days will be more taxing on your body it happen a lot less frequently. Your hard days can either involve a long distance, a low-intensity or short distance with a higher intensity. In either case, if you cannot maintain the intensity of your run then you have gone too hard.

Keeping these four basic training principles in the back of our mind now let’s take a general look it was a training program looks like. The first part any training program focuses on high-frequency with low duration and low-intensity. This phase in a training program is often called based training. Depending on what fitness level you are at when you begin, it may be appropriate to start with walking five days a week. Your then slowly start to incorporate easy running into your program. Once you are comfortably and steadily running around five days a week. You can then begin to increase the duration of your runs but keep the intensity low.

Now, let’s say your goal to run a 10k race, a good role the following if the keep the intensity allow while increasing the duration of the distance that you got a ride into you can comfortably run 10k. It is important to note that your base training will continue to provide the foundation of your training program. Let’s now take a closer look at the base training part of your training program.