 So running frequency. How many times per week should you run? What are the benefits of running more often? What are the benefits of running less often? Should you run every day? Should you have a rest day? Obligatory rest day? What about taking a day off when you feel like it? And also what about running twice a day? Let's get into it. So if you're anything like me, you want to run as much as possible because you love it. That's what I do anyway. I love running and I would just love it if I could just run all the time, almost. However, I don't. I do have rest days and I think they are important but it depends on your fitness level. It depends on where you're at, right? So let's take it from the beginning and go up to the elite. We'll start at the beginning. If you are a beginner runner, running every day is a bad idea, okay? You certainly don't want to do that. And without getting into the details of how much you should run and how far you should run and if you should do some walking in between and all that stuff, I've sort of covered that in another video. You can check it out here. We'll just say it like this. As a beginner, you probably want to run more than once a week. That's a good idea. Once a week is just, that's too little. Rather than trying to do 10 kilometers in one run, much better to do five kilometers in two runs. And honestly, if you're a beginner, spreading that out for like three runs of like 3K or 4K is probably even better yet as a beginner. You want to spread it out. It's almost like you want to look at it as you're walking across thin ice. What do you do in order to not go through? You spread your weight out. Well, you got to look at it in the same way. How many times you run per week? It has to do with load management. You need to manage your training load. And of course, that includes things like intensity, how hard you run on each run, how long you run on each run. Those are huge factors that we'll cover in other videos. But the frequency is also a factor. So as I said, you want to spread it out somewhat evenly, but not completely evenly. That's the thing with periodization. You don't want to run the same distance every time you run. Ideally, you probably want to have a longer run every week, and maybe a shorter run that's slightly harder effort. And then the rest of the week, maybe just easy running, right? Or really depends on the phase you're in in your overall training plan. But generally speaking, how many times should you run a beginner twice a week, three times a week? I think that's a good place to start. Two to three times a week. Now, as we move up in mileage, we need to add in days. But you got to remember, if you're adding in a day, and that means all your runs stay really, really short, that might be good as long as you're trying to adapt to the new mileage. Because again, you're spreading that weight out, so to speak, that load. But once you're used to that training load, ideally, as I said, want to have that slightly longer run, and another run maybe slightly shorter, you want to sort of, you don't want to spread it completely evenly. And in that case, rather than adding in another day per week of running, you might want to consider, instead, increasing the length of your long run, or increasing the length of all of the runs in your week. So that's something you have to balance. And there's a certain frequency of running per week that's appropriate for every mileage, right? So if you are running 30k per week, and you're running three times per week, you could do 10, 10, 10, or you could do 15, 10, 5, right? That would probably be an even better way to do it. Now, I'm currently running about 50 miles per week, 80k. I should have just reached 90k last week, so I'm really happy about that. And I run eight times per week. But I only run six days a week, though. I have an obligatory rest day. And some people say, you shouldn't have an obligatory rest day, you should just listen to your body and take your rest day when needed. And I think that's probably a great way to do it if you're able to listen to your body, and if you're flexible enough with your schedule. Personally, though, I like that sort of obligatory rest day every Monday. It allows me a little bit of a reset. And I think up to a certain point in terms of mileage, it's still fine to do that six day period. What you always have to consider when you're determining how many days a week to run is that at a certain point, the load on each individual day you're running gets so big that you might be better off adding in another day of running, right? At a certain point, you have to run so far every day and get up to like 100 miles and further. You have to run so much every day that it's better to add in another day of running. If you're just running five days a week and you're trying to do 100 miles, you'll be much better off adding in a six day of running as well. And that's why actually I'm running eight times a week, even though I'm just running six days a week. And that's because I'm actually running twice a day on two of those days. So doing twice a day is something that you'll do as you get up to a little bit of a higher mileage, but it also depends on your logistics. For me, it's kind of like on my recovery days, Wednesdays and Saturdays, I want to do about 10 kilometers each day. And rather than doing one 10 kilometer run, for me it's fun and it's also practical to get in a little bit of a run in the morning, maybe before my guitar students on Saturdays, but I don't have time for a full 10k run. So I'll just do a 5k run. Fine. And then in the afternoon I go to the gym and I do some mobility work and I just run 5k on the treadmill as a workout. There we go. Twice a day, 5k each time, I do 10k for the day. You know, that's a good way of doing it. So you might want to consider splitting up your runs into two runs for practical reasons or as you get up to higher mileage, it might be necessary because if you need to run 30k or 40k each day to reach like 100 miles or more, you're probably better off doing 10k in the morning and 20k in the afternoon or vice versa, rather than doing a huge big run. Although some people are successful with that. People like Jim Walensley, you know, super successful ultra runner, he tends to sometimes do that, it seems anyway, when I look at his driver, that rather than splitting it up into twice a day, he will do actually one, just one big run day after day after day, just doing lots of long runs basically and seems to work pretty well for him. Going back down to mere mortals, you know, from the elite, going back towards the beginners again, maybe the intermediate gang, like myself maybe. I would say that generally speaking, two to three times a week is a great beginner point. You can do that, that's good. If you just want to stay healthy, that's a good place to be. But if you're a little bit more serious about running and you have a little bit more goals, etc., you're probably going to get up to like four days a week, right? Pretty much every other day. Those days in between are important. That's when you rest, that's when you recover from your last run and get ready for another one. Of course, as you get fitter, your ability to recover gets better, you recover faster. That's why for me running every day, except for Mondays, works because I recover from my run on Wednesday, by Thursday I'm recovered, I'm ready for a new run. That's something that comes with training. As you get even more serious, moving up to five or six days a week, like where I am now, that's where you get great benefits. If you're really serious about training, you probably want to work up to five or six days a week. Seven days a week, though? Probably not. I'm not a big fan of that idea every day. I like that obligatory rest day, as I said. But of course, if you're Elliot Kupchoga and you're running 220Ks per week and you're at a super high level, you pretty much just have to run seven days a week in order to make it work. Although I have heard that even Elliot Kupchoga takes a day off once every three or four weeks. Maybe that's what he needs. I need one day a week. He needs one day a month. Makes sense. He's a lot more fitter than I am. Again, it has to do with your fitness level and it is individual to a certain degree. You have to consider your own fitness and your own goals. Generally, run as much as you can, as much as you want without getting injured, pay attention to your health, include those rest days. As you increase in mileage, you'll naturally increase in running frequency as well. At a certain point, you'll add in those doubles. You'll start running twice a day, et cetera. Of course, you should always have at least one, probably two long runs, depending on your goals, per week, which is a big single run. You would never do, I don't think anyway, you should ever do seven days a week doubles every day. It's better to then do at least one of those days one big long run because there are benefits that happen in long runs that will not happen in shorter runs. You don't want to spread it out as much as possible. You don't want to run one kilometer five times a day. That's not the same as running five kilometers once a day. Keep that in mind as well. Let me know what you think about this topic. Leave a comment. 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