How Much Should I Reduce My Mileage During Down Weeks

Audio Transcript

Aaron: Hello! I have a question about down weeks.

A lot of race training plans, and a lot of generic base training advice that I’ve found, recommends that every fourth week or so, you should have a rest week or a lower intensity week.

I’m wondering if there’s sort of rule of thumb for how much less that should be, than your previous three weeks of training.

If you’re building up for a race or just in general, and your long run is at 15 miles, should you be cutting back to 80% of that – 12 miles for instance?

Should all of your runs be cut back by 80%? Your tempo runs? Your slow runs? What would you recommend for calculating those rest weeks?

Thanks for the help and I love the podcast.

Jeff: That’s a good question, and I’m going to break it down into two sections.

First, I’m going to talk about what down weeks are, because some of the listeners may not know what those are and why they are important. Then I’m going to go on and answer your question specifically.

Down weeks are periods in your training that you plan to back off the intensity and/or the volume of your running, in order to make sure that you’re properly recovered.

Recovery is paramount to making sure that you are able to make progress in your workouts.

Here’s the analogy that I like to use. Imagine your body is like a sponge and the training that you do is like a faucet. You can put your sponge or put yourself under the faucet and then you can change the amount of water that you’re pouring into the sponge.

If you’re training hard, that would be like putting the faucet all the way up. If you’re training really easy, that would be like pulling the faucet all of the way down.

If you’ve envisioned that sponge, it’s going to be slowly filling with water. At some point, it’s going to become saturated.

It’s obviously going to come quicker if your spouts are on high all the time, and it’s going to come slower if your spouts are low all the time.

Regardless, the sponge is going to become saturated. When a sponge becomes saturated, it’s no longer able to absorb any more water.

Now, if you imagine that your body is like a sponge, and the training that you’re pouring into it is the water, at some point your body needs to wring that sponge out.

It needs to let go of all that accumulated fatigue.

That’s what a down week does. It’s squeezing that water, out of the sponge into a bucket. Then that bucket becomes the training that you’re able to use on race day.

That’s how I like to envision down weeks. It’s a really great way to help you visualize how that process works.

Most people recommend taking a down week every three to five weeks in your training cycle, and there’s obviously some leeway there because more experienced runners can get away with more. If you’re not doing high intensity, high volume compared to what you normally do, you may be able to get away with five or six weeks without getting any down week.

If you’re training intensely, you may want to do a down week, every three to four weeks.

When we talk about down weeks, we’re not necessarily doing them in this specific training cycle, so that’s a little bit of a complicated topic to get off on in this podcast.

Basically, I consider the time between 10 to 12 weeks before your race, as your race specific training period. That’s where your workouts and everything are going to get very race specific.

If you want to know more about that, I recommend checking out runnersconnect.net and seeing when we’re running our next webinar because we talk a lot about that in our webinars.

If you don’t see a webinar time, shoot me an email at jeff@runnersconnect.net and I’ll send you a link to the webinar page, which will give you the rundown of the next times that we’re going.

In any case, any time that you’re not in that 10 to 12 week race specific period, you want to have those down weeks, to make sure that you’re properly recovering.

To get back to Keith’s question, how should you adjust your training? What percentage should you reduce your mileage by? Should it be all of your runs, workouts, long runs et cetera?

There is no exact answer here, as it depends on what your volume is, your intensity and your experience level.

For very experienced runners, I usually recommend reducing mileage by 10% to 30%, depending on how much you need it.

That’s where a little bit of the coaching/art of training comes in. If you’re not feeling that tired, or if you’re experienced, you can probably get away with 10-20%.

If you’re doing a hard training cycle or you’re kind of upping your mileage and doing a little bit more than you ever have before, you should probably go with 10-30%.

If you are a less experienced runner, and you’re running 20 to 30, 40 miles a week, those numbers are going to be roughly anywhere from 30% to 50%.

The reason that the numbers are higher is because you’re running less mileage and you need to have a greater percentage in order to make a significant drop in your training mileage.

For example, if somebody is running 70, 80 miles a week, a 50% drop is going to be 35 to 40 miles. Whereas, if you’re running 30 miles a week, a 50% drop is only 15 miles. In order to elicit that response, we need to drop the percentage a little bit more.

That’s what I recommend. Anywhere from 30% to 50%, if you’re under 40 miles a week for a less experienced runner, and anywhere from 10% to 30% if you’re a more experienced runner or running higher mileage.

There’s no real scientific evidence or research studies that show if there’s an optimal percentage or an optimal range. Again, that’s kind of where the art comes into play with your training. You need to know yourself; know your body and be able to adapt, and know the training level that you’re under.

In terms of dropping everything, I like to drop everything; easy runs, long run and workouts because, when I look at a down week, I want to make sure that everything that I’m doing has a specific purpose.

If my purpose for that training week is to optimally recover, and to make sure that I get rid of that backlog or fatigue, then I want to make sure that I’m not doing anything during the week that’s going to add to that fatigue, or make it so that I’m not able to get rid of it.

For the long run, I usually reduce that by 40%, 50% and that’s pretty much no matter what your experience level is.

If you’re doing 16 to 17 mile runs, reduce it by 50%. If you’re doing six to eight mile runs, reduce it by 50%. That’s where I go in terms of long run introduction.

When it comes to workouts, what I actually do is, I like to do one workout during the week and I usually make it like a Fartlek workout.

Anywhere from three to eight times three minutes and I’ll go between 5 k and 10k pace. It’s not anything difficult, and I usually have equal rests. If I did three minutes hard running, I do three minutes easy.

The goal isn’t to have a hard workout. The goal is to just turn over the legs a little bit because during the down week, you can get a little stale.

You’ve gone from training very hard to not training hard at all that week and sometimes the body can get a little out of funk.

Then the first workout back after the down week can feel a little bit like you’re trying to get your wheels going again.

What I like to do just have an easy workout mid-week, anywhere from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You can do a Fartlek six times three minutes, six times two minutes with two minutes rest, between 5k and 10k pace.

Nothing too hard. You don’t have to go too fast. The goal isn’t to show off and run really fast. The goal is to turn the legs over, get a little bit of a harder effort than just easy, and then next week, when you get back into your real training block, your legs won’t be feeling stale.

I hope that answers your question. I really like down weeks and I hope that you’re able to incooperate them into your training.

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Thank you guys so much for listening today’s podcast. I hope you’ve learned a lot about down weeks and enjoyed my analogy.