I received a question from listener Alex from Austin, Texas recently about the best way to improve his run time. Alex shared in his email that he’ll be running his first 10K race in about 8 weeks and wanted to know if I had any suggestions that’ll help give him a performance boost.
I was pretty excited to get this question! When I was a U.S. army physical therapist and Master Fitness Trainer, I did a lot of work helping people improve their running performance. It was my favorite part of the job and a topic I enjoyed reading research about.
There’s evidence supporting resistance training, plyometric training, high-intensity interval training, altitude training, and even nutritional interventions such as caffeine intake as effective means of improving endurance performance.
But if I had to choose only one of these approaches, I would choose high-intensity interval training—known as HIIT—hands down. The concept of HIIT is simple: you alternate between exerting high-level and low-level effort.
Not only is HIIT easy to implement into any endurance training program, its effectiveness is also well supported by research. Remarkably, participants in one study more than doubled their “time until exhaustion” on an endurance test after only two weeks of HIIT.
Japanese researcher Dr. Izumi Tabata was among the first to recognize the special benefits of high-intensity training. While studying the workout routines of Olympic speed skaters in the mid-1990s, he was surprised to discover that those who performed four minutes of higher-intensity exercise produced better results than those who performed an hour of lower-intensity exercise.
Keep listening to find out why HIIT is so effective. Plus, I’ll show you how to improve your run time with a simple HIIT program that you can incorporate into your training routine.
Why HIIT is effective
As I mentioned earlier, the concept of HIIT is straightforward: you...
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