Runner's World The 4-Week Treadmill Workout Plan to Conquer Your Next (Fastest!) 5K

From: Runner's World - Sunday Jan 09, 2022 05:01 pm

The 4-Week Treadmill Workout Plan to Conquer Your Next (Fastest!) 5K

Winter generally isn’t considered racing season—not that you can’t find great races to beat the winter blues! But this off-season is still the ideal time to a) build your aerobic base and b) work on your speed. Nope, you don’t need a track (or even to venture outside) to train to run faster. The treadmill can be a runner’s best friend when it comes to tapping into your pace potential—especially for a 5K.

The beauty of the tread? It’s a controlled environment. “Training for 5Ks generally includes speed and tempo runs, and the treadmill allows you to precisely set the paces, inclines, and interval lengths you want to run at,” says Lindsey Clayton, a certified run coach, cofounder of the Brave Body Project, and founding digital instructor at Barrys in New York City. That way, you’re not wasting mental energy constantly looking at your running watch.

And before you knock the “dreadmill,” know that science supports running indoors (sometimes, at least). Your biomechanical patterns don’t change when you run on a treadmill versus outside, according to older research published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, and your VO2 max stays the same in both scenarios, another study in the same journal found. (To better simulate outdoor running, you can set the treadmill to a 1 percent grade, older research from the Journal of Sports Sciences suggests.)

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