Everything You Need to Know About Strides

Audio Transcript

Coach Sinead: Hi everyone. I am back with you again today to answer your training and racing questions, and help you to run smarter and faster.

Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you’re having a great day so far, and that you’ll enjoy this podcast.

Today’s question is from Tom and he asks, “What are strides and what are their purpose?”

This is a fantastic question Tom, and one that we do get pretty often at Runners Connect.

First off, to answer your first question, strides are essentially 20-35 second surges at your mile race pace. That’s about roughly 85-95% effort.

And typically, you want to do about four to six of these either after an easy recovery run, or before a big workout or race.

Strides are also often used as a part of the warmup process to help get the blood flowing to your legs and your heart rate elevated.

It helps you get your body prepared for the fast paces in a workout or a race, and also makes it so that when you jump into a workout, it’s not a complete shock to your system.

You’ll have already done a few light surges or strides at a pretty fast pace to begin with.

I will explain how you want to do strides a little bit. Like I said, often you want to do your strides after your easy run.

You don’t want to do these during your run; you always want to wait until after your recovery run.

And typically, with these, you want to find a nice flat surface to do them on, and as you get into the stride, you kind of want to ease into it during the first five seconds.

You don’t want to explode out of the gate, because that can put you at risk for injury.

After the first five seconds, you should have reached full speed, and by full speed, I don’t mean you’re running your flat-out sprint again. You are running somewhere between 85-95% effort here.

You want to focus on staying relaxed and letting your body do the work. Keep a relaxed pace, make sure your arms aren’t flailing, and work on landing on your mid foot closer to your toes.

This is really where strides are a great time to work on improving your form, because they are just these quick little surges but you do want to make sure that you are being conscious of your form, and just keeping good, efficient form in these.

After the 20-35 second stride, you want to take a full recovery between the strides and this should be about two minutes.

Make sure you just take as much recovery as you need to catch your breath and feel fully relaxed before the next stride.

The purpose of strides is not to get in a hard workout or to have you breathing hard. It’s more designed to work on your speed and mechanics.

Starting your next stride winded or before you’re fully recovered, is actually detrimental to the training adaptations you’re trying to get in these strides.

That brings me to your second question, Tom, and that is, what is the purpose of strides?

Like I said earlier, one of the reasons we do strides is to get the blood flowing to your legs and your heart rate elevated before a workout or a race.

But when you do them regularly after your recovery runs, you do get a lot of long term benefits.

One of these benefits is that strides help you work on your mechanics, and it’s a nice way to do that.

It’s kind of a sneaky way to do it in strides, because it’s just such a short increment of time and so you’re able to focus on keeping efficient form.

Whereas if you try to do so in a regular recovery run, you would most likely end up reverting to your usual form within a few minutes time.

This is a good way to just kind of sneak in some work on improving your mechanics, and it’s a really easy way to focus on form when you’re only running for 20-30 seconds and, you’re not overly tired.

Not only does it help you create mental cues to stay on your toes and feel relaxed, but it also makes the process more natural for the body during the race.

It’s good practice to improve your bio mechanics and simulate the form you want to sustain during your race, especially at the later stages of the race when, let’s face it, our form usually breaks down.

If you are able to good form at the end of your runs, when you’ve already run a few miles in your recovery run, it’s going to help kind of simulate a little bit of that fatigue and help your body adapt to keeping good form in those later stages of a race.

Another benefit I’ll talk about is speed. As distance runners, we tend to spend most of our time running at slower speeds to build our aerobic systems and work on our threshold.

Obviously, this is very important to most of us who are training for the longer distances like the half marathon and the marathon, but we do need to make sure we’re touching on a little bit of speed here and there as well.

Again, this is where strides come in. Strides offer you a great way to inject some speed work into your training plan without having to sacrifice a whole day of training.

It’s kind of a sneaky way to implement a little bit of speed work into your training without really taxing you.

As I said earlier, doing some strides a couple times a week after your recovery runs, will really help you to increase your speed and your turnover.

And you only have to do about four to six strides a day after your recovery runs to achieve this.

Another thing strides are great for, is serving as a precursor to faster more rigorous training.

I kind of touched on this earlier, and this is why we do like to have runners do some strides before a workout or a race.

It’s because it helps to get blood flowing to your muscles and elevate your heart rate.

In so doing, strides act as a gentle introduction for the body, and help you get used to the feeling of running faster before you’re thrown into the deep end, into your workout or your race.

One last reason we runners need to do strides, is because they can serve as a great way to stretch out the legs after a recovery session.

Often, especially when you’re doing marathon training, the legs can get a little bit stale when you do a lot of mileage and tempo runs.

And so, strides not only help to break up the monotony of marathon training, but they also help to break up some of that lactic acid that has settled in your legs from all those miles you’ve done, and help put a little bit of a pop in your legs, make your legs feel a little bit fresher before your next workout or race.

Tom, that was a fantastic question. Thank you so much for sending it. I enjoyed answering it today.

If you have a question you would like one of our expert coaches to answer in an upcoming episode, you can submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

We would love the opportunity to help you train smarter and faster so we hope to hear from you.

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Thanks so much again for joining me and I hope you have a fantastic run today.