The Most Underrated Four Minutes.

If I could get every athlete I coach to do one thing they currently do not, it would not be a session. It would be six twenty second efforts at the end of an easy run, twice a week.

It takes about four minutes. It is the highest return per minute of anything I prescribe, and it is skipped more often than any other instruction I give, because it does not feel like training.

Nobody has ever come back from a run and felt proud of doing strides. They work anyway.

What a Stride Actually Is

Twenty seconds of relaxed fast running. Not a sprint. Around the pace you could hold for a mile, maybe slightly quicker, with the emphasis on being smooth rather than on the pace.

You build into it over the first three or four seconds, hold it, and let it go. Then walk or jog until you are fully recovered, which is usually a minute or so, and do it again. Four to six of them.

The critical part is the recovery. Strides are not an interval session. If you are breathing hard on the third one, you are doing something else, and that something else has a recovery cost you did not plan for.

Why They Work

Three reasons, and they compound.

The first is neuromuscular. Running slowly for hours teaches your body to run slowly. The pattern you rehearse is the pattern you own, and an athlete who only ever runs easy gradually loses access to the mechanics of running fast. Strides keep that door open. They are a reminder rather than a stimulus.

The second is elastic. Twenty seconds at speed loads the Achilles and the whole posterior chain quickly and briefly, which is exactly the stimulus tendons adapt to. You are training the spring, at a dose small enough that it does not accumulate into an injury.

The third is that they show you your form. At easy pace you can shuffle and never notice. At stride pace, a hip that drops or an arm that crosses the midline becomes obvious, to you and to anyone watching. I have diagnosed more mechanical problems from twenty seconds of strides than from any amount of easy running.

Where They Go

At the end of an easy run, when you are warm and not tired. That combination matters. Warm because cold fast running is how calves tear. Not tired because the whole point is to rehearse good mechanics, and you cannot rehearse good mechanics on legs that have nothing left.

Which means the end of an easy run, not the end of a long run and not the end of an interval session. If Sunday's long run has emptied you, do not put strides on the end of it. You will be practising the fatigued version of your gait, which is the one you are trying to fix.

Twice a week is plenty. Some weeks three. It is not a session you progress.

What to Think About

As little as possible, ideally. The instruction I give is to run tall and let the legs turn over, and then get out of the way.

If you want a cue, use an external one. Think about pushing the ground back rather than about your knee lift. External cues, focused on the effect rather than on the body part, produce better motor learning than internal ones. Telling somebody to lift their knees usually produces somebody running badly while concentrating.

Relaxed hands, relaxed jaw. Speed comes from letting go rather than from clenching. Most people run their first stride with their shoulders up around their ears.

The Objection

Athletes tell me strides feel too easy to be doing anything, and that if they only have thirty five minutes they would rather run for thirty five minutes than thirty one minutes with four minutes of standing around.

Thirty one minutes of easy running plus strides is a better session than thirty five minutes of easy running. Almost always. The four minutes you removed were the least valuable four minutes in the run, and what you added was the only part of the week that maintains your ability to move quickly.

The athletes who do them consistently for a season tend to find that their easy pace has drifted faster at the same heart rate, and they cannot point to the session that did it. It was these.

The Bottom Line

Four to six efforts of twenty seconds, relaxed and fast, full recovery between, at the end of an easy run, twice a week.

It will feel like it is not training. It is the cheapest four minutes in the sport, and you will notice it in about eight weeks, in a way you cannot attribute to anything.