Short bursts of faster running – interval training – can bring rapid improvements, and boost your confidence

WORDS: LAURA FOUNTAIN

If you want to get faster, you need to run faster. It’s a simple, if slightly disappointing, equation. But interval training, periods of fast running interspersed with jog or walk recoveries, is the part of the training plan that a lot of runners avoid and many don’t fully understand.

If you can motivate yourself to get your heart rate up a bit higher and your legs moving a bit faster, adding speed sessions to your training can make a big difference to your pace. And it doesn’t take long for improvements to show.

“If you are coming from doing nothing like this to following a two-week high intensity interval training (HIIT) programme, improvements can be quite rapid”, says Dr Hannah Moir, Senior Lecturer in Health and Exercise Prescription at Kingston University.

The term ‘HIIT’ has been getting a lot of attention recently. The number of classes and studios offering HIIT workouts has increased in the past few years, some including exercise circuits alongside sprinting, rowing or cycling. This form of training has rapidly gained popularity as people start to see fast improvements in their fitness. For runners though, high intensity intervals are nothing new.

Runners have been doing interval training on the track and on the hills, gaining the same improvements in their fitness, for decades. “There is nothing new about speed training, HIIT, interval or fartlek training. This has formed part of athletes’ training programmes for many years. However, recently there has been great interest in HIIT, which consists of brief, intermittent bursts of vigorous activity”, says Moir.