If you’re a newer runner, you’ve likely been bombarded with training plans discussing time on your feet and working on building up endurance and mileage. Maybe you’ve even heard about the benefits of strength training as you begin stacking kilometres. But what about stepping on the gas a.k.a. speed workouts?

Faster pace work is the unsung hero of any well-rounded training plan. With it, a good runner can become a great one!

“Speed work is a crucial component of training to help establish confidence, develop mental tenacity, and allow the body to learn and implement faster goal paces for race day,” says Jess Movold, certified run and strength coach.

But it’s not just about stepping on the gas occasionally. You need a plan! You also need to regularly integrate speed workouts into your overall running plan — without overdoing it.

For Movold that means using the 80/20 rule: “80 percent of the weekly miles should be easy and comfortable with no pace goals or numbers to focus on,” she says. “Twenty percent of them should be quality sessions with goal paces and goal targets.”

New to speed workouts? Consider this your get-started guide. We’ll unpack the benefits, discuss the injury risks, and offer tips on how to make it a seamless part of your overall training regimen, including the best workouts to start with and how to progress them.

What are the benefits of speed workouts?
The surface-level benefit of speed workouts may be a faster pace, which is great, but there are plenty of other things going on behind the scenes, too. “Speed work enhances your overall muscle strength, power, running economy, and efficiency,” explains Marcel Dinkins, Peloton Tread instructor.

“Speed work is also good for your heart, helping to improve your cardiovascular capabilities by increasing your VO2 max,” says Movold. The higher your VO2 max, the more effective your heart is at supplying blood and oxygen to your muscles, which enables you to work harder and longer during your runs.

Your bones also get a boost with intervals. According to research published in Sechenov Medical Journal in 2023, sprint training not only positively affects the density and structure of your bones, but for older and middle-aged runners, specifically, it may also potentially prevent age-related bone loss.

Are there risks to doing speed workouts?
The simple answer is yes. Here’s why: Speed workouts involve more dynamic and explosive movements. You are moving your muscles at a much more rapid pace, particularly your hamstrings and calves, which play a pivotal role when accelerating and decelerating during sprinting, and thus are exposed to high levels of force and strain. (The glutes also power your higher paces, but they’re less prone to injury, says Alex Rothstein,  coordinator and instructor for the exercise science program at New York Institute of Technology.)

This, according to Dinkins, not only increases your chance of injury but the potential severity of the injury as well. That’s why “it’s crucial to build up the strength of your muscles beforehand so that you are strong enough to endure speed work when it is introduced,” she says.

How do you avoid injuries when adding in speed workouts?
To help build your body’s resiliency, work exercises like glute bridges, lunges, deadlifts, clamshells, calf raises, planks, step ups on a medium to high step box, and squats into your strength sessions. And for those exercises, focus on the eccentric phase of the movement, which is when the muscle lengthens under load (think the downward portion of a squat), says Rothstein.

“When you get hurt sprinting, it’s usually when the muscles eccentrically contract,” he says. A review of studies in the journal BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders backs this up, saying hamstring injuries that occur during sprinting often happen during the eccentric action, which occurs during the late swing phase of the gait cycle.

Proper sprinting mechanics can help keep you from being sidelined as well. To maintain correct form, Rothstein says you want to avoid overstriding and try to keep the legs and arm swing relatively forward and backward without much side-to-side movement. Another important cue: “Focus on actively decelerating at the end and not just relaxing the body into decelerating,” advises Rothstein.

Mobility and flexibility are also key to amping up your speed while keeping injuries at bay. This is not as simple as doing static stretching before a speed workout, which Rothstein says is a big no-no (do it after your workout!), but rather making it a priority to include this type of training in your overall program.

One researched-backed way to improve your flexibility is foam rolling. Research in a study published in International Journal of Research in Exercise Physiology in 2019 reveals that performing just six weeks of this self-myofascial release technique (like foam rolling) on the lower back, butt, quads, hamstrings, calves, and IT band helped improve lower-back and hamstring flexibility, as well as overall range of motion.

Whatever you do, don’t forget to warm-up either. “Warming up might be the most overlooked component of a workout but it is consistently talked about as one of the most important,” says Rothstein, who notes that benefits to warming up include an increase in tissue temperature that improves its function and ability to tolerate stress. “A dynamic warm-up uses low intensity, repetitive, non-fatiguing movements that gradually increase in intensity in order to prepare the body for the stress of the future physical activity.”

Before doing speed work, Rothstein advises individuals perform light jogging followed by various types of hops, skips, jumps, and leg swings. This helps “move the body through large ranges of motion and warm up the soft tissue and joints so that their body feels ready for higher intensity movements,” he says.

Next, move on to lower intensity running, working up to a full sprint. For example, he says, a 10- to 20-yard fast jog followed by a short walk then another 10- to 20-yard run at a faster speed. “Continue this pattern or something similar until you work your way to 100 percent and you are ready to go.”

How do you know if you’re ready to add speed workouts to your schedule?
We know it can be tempting to go all out on day one, but beginners should complete a few weeks of running sans speed work first to build a foundational base of easy, conversational mileage. “Doing 800 kilometres of easy kilometres is a safe bank to build upon,” says Movold. “But if you haven’t been running long enough to accumulate 800 kilometres, make sure you have been running consistently for about three months before you begin stacking intensity with speed work.”

When you do get started with speed workouts, true beginners can probably expect to see improvements in speed after about four to six weeks of regular speed work, Dinkins says.

For our non-newbies or those who have done speed workouts before, but it’s been a while, you can’t just count on your muscle memory to kick in either. Yes, “the nervous system or the skill exists but the actual tissues might not be as supple or as strong or as well conditioned,” says Rothstein. In other words, you too need to build back up to a place where your body is ready to handle this stress.

A silver lining: If you ramp up the right way — safely and gradually with no injury — Rothstein says you’ll get your speed back faster than somebody starting for their first time. However, the length of time will vary for everyone depending on your original fitness and the time you spent sedentary.

“Some may take months to work back to being able to safely do a full speed workout and others may take just two to four weeks,” Rothstein says. “If you are unsure about whether you are ready to incorporate speed work, I recommend adding just a few sets of speed work to your runs and building up slowly to get to a full speed workout.”

For Movold, data is king when it comes to knowing whether you are ready to get speedy. “It’s very important and helpful to use a training journal to keep notes about your runs so you can look back over the weeks of training to see how you’re progressing,” she says as opposed to just going by whether your easy runs feel, well, easier. “In order to incorporate speed work, you should be consistently running at least three times per week for about eight to 12 weeks.” This helps you establish a base of fitness first.

Running a new race distance can also be a smart option. “Once you have established an understanding for what that race distance feels like, you can then determine a smart goal for yourself and work toward improving your performance, especially when it comes to bigger distances like the half and full marathon. “Experience the distance first, then set time goals to improve,” Movold says. “Most importantly, make sure you’re having fun.”

How should you start incorporating speed workouts into your schedule?
Now that you have a nice base to work with, your next step is to ease into small doses of speed work, with things like fartlek runs — continuous running where periods of faster running are mixed with periods of easy- or moderate-paced running or progression runs, where you begin at a relatively easy pace and steadily get faster throughout the run, says Dinkins, as they help ease you into the process by pushing your pace slightly.

With fartleks, Dinkins says you want to be careful not to run so fast during the pushes that you can’t return to an easy pace afterward. Her suggestion: Run your faster segments, which should feel challenging but sustainable, around 80 percent of your max effort. “You can vary these pushes between 15 to 20 seconds or even 40 to 90 seconds faster than your easy pace,” she says.

For progression runs, though, Dinkins says the goal is “a smooth, steady increase in intensity without specific speed targets, allowing your body to adapt gradually to the increased demands.”

Another good place for beginners to start, adds Movold: Implement strides after an easy run one to two times a week. “This can look like four to five reps running for 15 to 20 seconds and increasing speed throughout [those 15 to 20 seconds], with a one-minute walk between reps,” she says. “After you’ve successfully introduced strides and feel confident doing them for a few weeks, you are ready for a speed session once per week.”

While you may want to lock in on a certain pace, Movold suggests “letting feel dictate your pace as opposed to the watch or the pace telling you how you’re doing.”

For strides, consider it an opportunity to progress up to top speed. “Use the full duration of the 20 seconds to accelerate up to peak speed, then pull it back down to a walk,” she says. “The more you incorporate these drills, the quicker you will be able to reach an efficient speed seamlessly to effectively benefit from the strides.”

For comparison’s sake, an advanced runner might complete strides after an easy run the day before a speed session to tune up the legs and work on mechanics, says Movold, noting that specifics would really depend on what distance the runner is training for.

As you start adding speed sessions to your schedule, Dinkins says you still need to be cognisant of your overall mileage. “It’s essential to microdose your training, gradually adding intensity,” says Dinkins who cautions not to increase your running volume by more than 10 percent each week.

So, if you have a 4 kilometre run planned, you could break it into speed training segments. For example: Warm up for a kilometre, then do 400-meter runs at 80 percent effort, followed by 400-meter walks for a full recovery. “Depending on your fitness level and experience, you might do this for two to three sets to begin with,” Dinkins says, while also being mindful to listen to your body to ensure you’re not overexerting yourself. Then, cool down with five to 10 minutes of easy jogging or walking to help your body gradually return to a resting state and prevent muscle soreness.

“As you progress, you can increase the number of 400-meter intervals gradually, but always maintain the warm-up and cooldown periods to protect against injury,” Dinkins adds.

As your body adapts, you can also increase intensity by moving from 400-meter repeats to 800-meter repeats. Start with two sets of 800 meters with 400 meters of recovery, and gradually build from there. “The key is to use your traditional runs to progressively increase difficulty, ensuring a gradual adaptation to longer intervals and higher intensities,” says Dinkins.

Eventually, you’ll add short bursts of tempo speed (a pace that’s about 25 to 30 seconds per mile slower than your 5K race pace) toward the end of a workout and incorporate hill repeats, but you want to be careful not to incorporate multiple types of speed work in a single session or be too aggressive with your approach, says Dinkins.

Try a 5-kilometre run with the first 2 kilometres at an easy pace, followed by a kilometre at a tempo pace, and finish with 2 kilometres at an easy pace. Alternatively, for a 5-kilometre run, you could run the first 3-4 kilometres at an easy pace and use the last kilometre for hill repeats.

Ultimately, your speed workout should get you to a specific goal. That means that if your goal is to get faster in the 5K, it would benefit your training to start with 400s on the track, says Movold. “Maybe the following week you would decrease the total reps but complete 600-metre efforts at the same pace as the previous week’s 400s,” she explains. “Eventually, you would progress to tempos or mile repeats to introduce your goal pace to longer efforts.”

Sample Speed Workout

🟩Fartlek Run🟩

• Add in bursts of speed as you see fit.

🟨Strides🟨

• 4-5 reps x 15- to 20-second bursts of max effort at the end of a run.

🟧Interval Repeats🟧

• Start with a 1.5 kilometre warmup, then do 3-4 reps of 400s at 80 percent effort with 90 seconds of recovery between.
• Gradually work up to 10 reps.
• Gradually increase distance to 600-, 800-, then 1600-metre repeats.

🟥Tempo Run🟥

• Start with 2-3 kilometre warm-up, run 800m at tempo (about 30 seconds per kilometre slower than your 5K race pace), cool-down with 1-2 kilometres
• Gradually increase the distance of the tempo run.
• Eventually incorporate tempo efforts into long runs.

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