Hannah’s Top Tips on Improving Your Running!27 Mar

Allowing yourself only to leave the house for one form of exercise, or to grab any essential food can be tricky – especially when we are so used to spending time with friends and family, as well as weekly exercise!

Hannah, a Leisure Attendant from Northgate Arena, has some fantastic tips to help you improve on your running and get the most out of your exercise. Hannah studied Sports Science at university and has completed several marathons; her top tips are based around what she finds works for her best!

Please make sure that you are staying home and safe, only leave the house if you have to and make sure to social distance.

Warm-Up

Starting with your exercise, make sure that you’re warming up! This will help prevent any likelihood of injury; it will also help loosen up your body. To warm-up, anything can work that increases your heart rate; try jogging on the spot, high knees and more.

Once you’ve got your heart racing, work on stretching your body. Dynamic stretches help stretch your body while you’re moving; this could be moving lunges, side lunges or anything that can stretch and move your body.

Beginners

Finding a way to start your running journey can be the first hurdle to get over; starting slowly by breaking up your running and walking can help you take it easy as well as training your body to get used to the exercise. Start by alternating the walking and running in intervals, as you feel yourself getting better at this; you can start to increase this and work on building your stamina of running up.

The Coach to 5K App is a great way to monitor your running and your progress, by doing this, you can see how well you are progressing, and when you need to start increasing your intervals! The app can also help you plan the route that you want to use; why not plan the route and walk this before building the running into it? Familiarise yourself with the route and how long it’s going to take; this could also help you choose when in the day to complete the challenge!

FIT Principle

Frequency – How often you go for a run. At the moment, focus on going out once a day like the government is saying; build up the number of times you go out during the week though. Starting with one day a week can help you focus on how to improve your fitness, build this up slowly to help you increase your fitness gradually too!

Intensity – How hard you’re training. Whether you’re walking or running, you can change the intensity of it! If you’re starting by walking, maybe increase the pace of your steps to a brisk walk throughout the route; if you’re running, you could always start with a light job and increase this for a couple of seconds before returning to a light jog.

Time/Type – The time is pretty simple, knowing how long you are training for. Make sure that you aren’t burning yourself out, and that you are keeping an eye on how long you are out for. With the type of training, you can change this to find out what works best for you! Anything from interval training, changing between walking and running, hill training, running up a hill, or speed training, changing between how fast you’re going.

Share your photos!

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and share your photos in the comments of our recent posts or tag us! We want to see how you’re doing, and it would be a great way to share and motivate each other from afar!

Hannah also recommends setting a goal! Whether this is a marathon or just to increase fitness; maybe create a Facebook page for your friends to see how you are progressing and how they can help encourage you to keep it up.

If you want some extra help with a running plan, Hannah has created plans for herself and friends to help them reach their goals. Just email Hannah: hannah.fozzard@brioleisure.org for any help!

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