 All right, so I just got back from an easy run and you know sometimes it's quite difficult actually to run easy on your easy days. It's very typical to sort of just like I did today, I just felt good, everything was perfect, my fitness was good, my body felt good, and I was just finding myself running a little bit too hard on my easy run. I'm just stretching a little bit now, just got back from the run, and ideally we want to avoid that sort of thing. I of course recognize this during my run and I could fix it and slow down, but the question is, are you man enough to run easy, to run slow? Are you woman enough? Are you tough enough? Are you serious enough about your training to actually slow down and run easy when you're supposed to run easy? Let's talk about what easy means and why it's so important to stay easy on your easy days, let's get into it. So I'm just stretching my hip flexor here, I'm pretty tight in the hip flexor area, so I need to do this stretch a lot to open up a little bit. Easy runs, they form the foundation, the basis of any endurance runners program. Endurance running really meaning anything above like 1500 meter really, and so if you're training for distances like that and up, the majority of your running is going to be easy, intensity, and that doesn't mean that it doesn't make you fitter, in fact it makes you a lot fitter, that's the bulk of your fitness is actually coming from those easier runs. Just accumulating time at an easy intensity, it builds mitochondria, it helps you build more capillaries to deliver blood, oxygen, nutrients to your muscle cells, it's good for your heart, etc, etc, etc, it's good training. Of course we need hard runs as well, threshold sessions, VO2 max sessions, speed sessions, we need to practice our race pace, etc, and that's certainly important, but if you're going to execute those hard workouts at the right intensity, you have to take it easy on your easy days. Why? Well because if it's Tuesday and I had a hard workout on Monday and I have another hard workout on Thursday for example, Tuesday and Wednesday I'm just looking to recover from my Monday workout and not overdo it before my Thursday workout, because I want to arrive on Thursday feeling fresh, feeling good, and ready to really execute a high quality session. So during those easy runs, take it easy, all right? It's difficult because you get eager, especially if you feel good, and a lot of people also feel like it's boring maybe to run slow, and I get that, sometimes it is, but maybe you should put on a podcast, you know? Maybe you should think about something, just and explore, if you're in a city, go exploring some new routes or wherever you are, explore some new routes, go into the forest, do some trail running, take it easy, just be with yourself, just relax, be with yourself, and easy should feel comfortable, right? You shouldn't be straining at all, your breathing shouldn't be really all that much, you should almost not hear your breath, you should be able to have a conversation if you're running together with someone, etc, etc. I've made other videos in the past talking about what easy pace feels like, heart rate wise, you're definitely below 80% of your max heart rate, probably more like around 70, 70 maybe up to 75% of your max heart rate, that's easy, and so if you're serious about your training, if you actually want to go somewhere with your training and reach your goals, you have to focus on taking it easy on your Easter days, not just to be able to hit it hard on the hard days, but to be able to accumulate enough volume, because if you're always running, a lot of people, they always run in that middle, you know, in the gray area, kinda hard, kinda easy, like in the middle between easy and hard, they're not getting the full benefits of a truly hard session, they're not accumulating enough time because they're running too hard to do that, so instead, slow down, take it easy, focus on building your volume, run more, more kilometers, more miles, more hours in the week, and in order to do that, you have to do it at an easy intensity, so if you're serious about your training, you should be serious about intensity control as well, and so using a heart rate monitor is good, but you can also go by feel, if it's an easy day, take it easy, simple as that, otherwise you're actually sabotaging your own training, it feels sometimes counterintuitive, like why can't I just go faster, that must be better, I must be getting fitter if I feel like it's harder, and I'm coming home from my run like drenched in sweat, I'm just like, oh my god, that was intense, well sure, that's a good quality session, could be, but then what do you do the next day, and the day after, that's when you have to get in those easy runs, and if you're going for a really long time, like on a long run, it doesn't necessarily make sense to add in intensity as well, sometimes you will, of course, do a hard long run, but most of the time you're just going for time, and that's going to be tough enough to just go running for two hours, for example, so in that situation, easy intensity is what it's all about, so that's all really, next time you're out for a run, ask yourself, am I serious about my training, am I serious about reaching my goals, well then I have to be serious about polarizing my training as well, making sure the hard days stay hard, and the easy days stay easy, that's the champion mindset right there, the champions are good at running easy when they need to, and hard when it counts, all right, so that's it, if you want assistance of course with your training, I do offer training plans, online coaching, all that good stuff, check out my website at MGJ coaching, there's a link in the description, and check out some of my other videos as well on similar topics, make sure you subscribe too, thanks for watching, leave a comment, click the like button, click the little bell button next to the subscribe button even if you want notifications when I upload a video, all right, I think I'm pretty much done stretching, thanks for watching, bye