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Egon

Egon

Egon

Soldato
Joined
9 Jan 2003
Posts
6,801
Location
Darlington
Short story of progress so far.

Decided to try and lose weight a few weeks ago, probably about 4 weeks. I've cut out the junk food and the drink, other than that the only change to diet has been to reduce the portions. I'm 32, 5ft 11, my starting weight was 90kg, I'm now down to 86.5. My initial aim was to get down to 85kg for the summer, I go on holiday in 1 week.... cutting it fine!

I've also taken up running. To begin with I struggled to do 2.5km, but I started with short distances and I aim to build them gradually. Last night I managed 7k, it was a struggle by the end, but damn was I pleased with myself :)

So a couple of things with my training. I've kind of developed my own running. I alternate between one distance run, like yesterday's 7k, which will increase over time (I also had a target her to get up to 10k). While I also do some track runs, where I do some HIIT running.

The HIIT stuff I've just started, the last run was something like this:

*Light jog to warm up then stretches.
*Jog bend
*Run the straight hard (no sprinting)
*Jog bend
*Run the straight hard (no sprinting)

Rinse and repeat. Length is shorter, I did 10 laps last time, with an extra fro warming up and warming down. Again I aim to increase this gradually.

How does this sound? Can I improve it? If so where?

Also, on the final 1k of my run yesterday, my legs were really tired, Ididn't feel too out of breath but my legs, particularly my lower quads near the knee were sore (not the knee itself). Any reasons?

P.S. Sorry for the long first post!! If you read it all, thanks for reading. :)
P.P.S Turned out to be a not so short a story. :p
 
Took your advice and while doing the HIIT tonight I sprinted the straights.... man it was brutal! Was slowly jogging the bends at first, but by the end I was walking them.

Felt good at the end though :p
 
^ that is kind of an important point if you haven't done much running.

Sprinting puts a huge load on your hamstrings, so in general it's a good idea to work the sprinting duration up slowly. Everyone *should* be fine, especially with a decent warm up. Don't jump straight into using spikes though.
 
I found it especially bad doing some one off interval training - did 10 x 200m sprints (with rest inbetween). The next day hurt, but after doing some squats & deadlifts it REALLY hurt :D
 
icecold said:
Sprinting puts a huge load on your hamstrings, so in general it's a good idea to work the sprinting duration up slowly. Everyone *should* be fine, especially with a decent warm up. Don't jump straight into using spikes though.
Click to expand...

What exactly do you mean by sprinting? Surely the whole point of sprinting is that you can only do it for short durations anyway
 
Sprinting is at least 85%, but basically balls to the wall effort.

So yes, you can only do it for short durations, but I'm saying you should stay sub-maximal while your body gets used to it.


explicit4u,

HIIT is fine on off days from the gym, you are working separate systems.
 
Really don't see the issue if you've warmed up. What you are describing are actually strides which are a common part of a warm up
 
HIIT is brutal. I started doing it once a week and after only two weeks my mins/mile over my 4 mile runs dropped from 8:30 to 7:30 and then to 7:15. I'm sure part of gain is that I've only recently started running regularly again but the HIIT must be doing some good.
 
You keep missing the point (and changing your position - first you recommended a beginner with 4 weeks of light training do sprints, then it was cut the duration then it was reduce the intensity which kind of makes it no longer a sprint...). If you don't regularly sprint then you are actually going to struggle to sprint much anyway. You commonly see with beginners that their performance on intervals starts trailing off pretty quickly. Plenty of beginners schedules include some amount of intervals. And you can't say for definite that you WILL pull something at best you can say someone MAY pull something.
 
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:/

It's fairly obvious that my point was to be careful.

If you recommend to beginners that they do a lot of max-v sprinting then I wish them good luck! The edge of the intensity envelope is where injuries happen, especially in untrained individuals
 
You're missing the point (yet again). I have said repeatedly that a beginner is not going to be able to sustain lots of high intensity sprints. So telling them not to do lots is a moot point. And clearly your first post didn't say anything about being careful... Anyway point made even though its ignored, so I'm bowing out.
 
I usually do 7k runs but I've never really thought about giving sprinting a try.

What sort of benefits do you see from it? And what sort of distances is it best to sprint? 100m with a 50m jog after each sprint?

I imagine lots of stretching too.
 
The distances can vary, depends on what you are training for. If you are training for a marathon for example then you are more likely to do something like 400m or 800m intervals either with a job recovery or some sort of timed rest. Warming up is pretty essential and throwing in a few sets of strides into the warm up is a good idea. The benefits is that it will help you run your normal 7k run faster. Some people don't like the structured nature of doing interval sessions. If that's you then look at doing a fartlek session. Basically on a fartlek session you vary your speed during a normal run. ie you run some of it faster than other bits. Normally you would try a range of different speeds & durations throughout a fartlek session not just flat out/recovery.
 
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