How much time to dedicate to intensity work

How much time to dedicate to intensity work

We all hear that intensity and speed work will help you run faster, but who does it really benefit? How much of your time should you be spending doing intensity work? Comrades Marathon Coach, Lindsey Parry is here to give you the low down on who should be doing what amount of intensity work, on this episode of the Ask Coach Parry Podcast.

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Welcome back to this edition of Ask Coach Parry, I’m Brad Brown, it’s good to have you with us. Lindsey, an interesting question today from Mthembeni Ndlela. Mthembeni wanted to know, as far as intensity workouts go, if you had to break your weeks training up into percentages, what percentage of your weeks training should be at high intensity?

Your running ability will dictate your intensity work

Lindsey Parry: So that depends a lot on the ability of the runner. But for an elite athlete, it will be somewhere in the range of 15-20% of their week will be done at intensity similar to or higher than race pace. The further towards the back of the pack you go, the smaller that percentage should become. The bronze guys should be looking at roughly 10% as a maximum. Then your finishers should be doing very little of their training at high intensities. Their main focus should just really be on running and getting a good consistent platform going.

BB: Awesome stuff, thank you very much Lindsey for that, we’re back again in just a couple of days time with another edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast. Don’t forget, if you haven’t left us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or whatever platform you listen to this podcast through, we’d really appreciate it.

It helps us get in front of more people and get more people listening to the podcast, which helps us grow and spread the message. If you do get some value out of this, we’d really appreciate it if you took just two minutes and left us an honest review and rating, it really does help us a lot. Until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.

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