Understanding the "recovery" part of intervals
PC_67
Posts: 196
in General Chat
I did a reasonably good interval session on the track this morning, doing 6 x 800m, each at 3:05, give or take a second or two.
There's a fence 100m from my start / finish point and at the end of each set I walk to the fence, sometimes stretch, and walk back. This takes about 90 seconds and my HR drops quite a bit before I start off again. Regardless of whether I do work efforts of 800m or 1600m I always do the recovery the same way.
The book & programmes I've read usually prescribe a 400m jog in between work efforts. Am I not getting the full benefit by doing the recovery intervals my own way, or does it really make a difference? I personally think it's probably a bit easier than a 400m jog but I guess a jog could be at any pace really.
There's a fence 100m from my start / finish point and at the end of each set I walk to the fence, sometimes stretch, and walk back. This takes about 90 seconds and my HR drops quite a bit before I start off again. Regardless of whether I do work efforts of 800m or 1600m I always do the recovery the same way.
The book & programmes I've read usually prescribe a 400m jog in between work efforts. Am I not getting the full benefit by doing the recovery intervals my own way, or does it really make a difference? I personally think it's probably a bit easier than a 400m jog but I guess a jog could be at any pace really.
0
Comments
What I don't really understand is how settled my HR should be before I resume. My instinct is that what I'm doing is probably right, but I'm fearful that maybe I'm making it a little easy for myself and hence not getting the benefit. That said, I find the session hard, but not impiossibly hard. I reckon I have a little left to give and, if I really pushed I could squeeze in one or two more repeats - but I'd prefer not to!
Split the distance you are running into three to four periods (so if you are trying to improve your 10k time, you could do 4x2.5k):
Run the first 2.5k as hard as possible (obviously as a TT so not too hard to start and no fading at the end)
Rest for at least 50% of the time it took you to run the 2.5k (should be almost full recovery).
Repeat for three more sets (so you've covered the 10k in total).
Try doing twice a week (but depends on what other training you are doing - if its for a 10k road race then this should be ok, if for a olympic tri then may be too much); reduce the rest interval by 30 seconds each week (or 2 weeks if only doing one session/week) so by week four two minutes have been cut from the rest time.
This should work - but its hard work!