 If I had only three runs per week, if I could only run three times per week, what would I do on those three days? How would I distribute them across the week? What would I do in each run and why? So here goes. I am sitting here under my little palm tree trying to create a little bit of a non-winter vibe. I've had enough of winter to be honest. Anyway, if you're a runner, if you call yourself a runner and if you have goals in terms of running, I suggest, you know, this is somewhat arbitrary, but I suggest that you run at least three times a week. Usually more is gonna be better. More training will yield better results. A good starting point is three times a week, even if that just means you go for like one mile or one kilometer three times a week. That's probably better than going for three miles only once a week. Okay, so I suggest having somewhat of a regular schedule to it and heading out at least three times a week. Those three times a week, how would you distribute them? Well, first of all, I would say if you're gonna run three times a week, right, you don't want to do that three days in a row. That doesn't make sense. I mean, that's common sense. But I feel like I need to say that nevertheless. Ideally, if you're only running three times a week, you don't really ever have to run two days in a row. It's better to spread it out a little bit. So maybe you go Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Monday, Thursday, Saturday, or, you know, you can find your own schedule, but spread it out a little bit. Make sure you have at least one day in between each run. You know, if you look at elite athletes, they will do most of their training as in like 80 to 90% of their volume will happen at a low intensity. We're talking like zone one, like really easy. But of course, they still have regular high intensity sessions. It's just that their overall volume is so big that they can still do huge workouts with a lot of volume without that taking too big of a chunk of the total because they're training so many hours. If you're a beginner or if you're just training three times a week, you have a lot more time in between sessions to recover, right? Like an elite athlete will actually train twice a day usually. So if you train only every other day, you have 48 hours to recover between the sessions. So theoretically, you could get away with a little bit more intensity in your training because you have more time to recover. But you've got to consider as well that yes, you have more time to recover, but perhaps you have a job, perhaps you have a family, kids, there are obligations that also take energy, right? Whereas an elite athlete is just basically chilling between sessions. So that's something to consider. I would do one long run at an easy intensity. That's the longest run of the week. You know, I would usually say that a long run should cover about a third of the weekly volume, but that would mean that every run would actually be the same distance if you're just running three times. So for someone who's just running three times, I'll probably say that that long run could probably be around 40% of their weekly mileage, maybe even 50%, but no more than that. It depends on the total volume, of course, but we're talking at fairly low volumes now for beginners, for intermediate perhaps even, but three times a week, one long run. The other two, I would do one of them as an easy run, but shorter than the long run, but I would throw in some speed elements into that easy run. So maybe it could be some strides, or you could even do it as a structured workout where most of the run is just your warm-up and perhaps your cooldown, but in the middle there, you're throwing in some 100 meter repetitions, say four or five or six, depends on your volume again, how many you would do, but say you throw in a little bit of speed there. When I say speed, I'm not talking about just intense running. I'm talking about something that's not a full sprint, but certainly not something you could sustain for more than perhaps three to four minutes. So for an elite, that would be like 1500 meter pace, right? So it's where we are going pretty fast and we're activating those fast-switch fibers and getting our mechanics worked on a little bit and working on that running economy. It's almost like a type of strength training for runners, very specific. So speed training could be as simple as strides though. You know, you could just go for an easy run and throw in five times 10 seconds of increasing pace and then that's it. Just staying in control and having good mechanics, high turnover, all that good stuff. So one easy run with some strides just to touch on that speed and get some volume in terms of the easy miles, and then one long run which is just at an easy intensity. You're just going for time. The longer time, the better because the aerobic system is actually stimulated quite well just by time, spending time at an easier aerobic effort. That's two. The last run for the week should be an interval session. It's something where or it doesn't have to be intervals per se, but it's something that it's fairly intense. We're talking threshold type intensity. Perhaps we'll go sometimes a little easier than threshold and we'll hit something like marathon pace. Other times we might go a little harder than threshold and hit VO2 max. Somewhere in there is probably good. So it could be as simple as going to a track and doing three or four or five times 400, 800 meters depending on your speed, depending on your total volume. The exact session will differ, but we're talking about running at high intensity for a little while, a few minutes, and then taking a little bit of a recovery, perhaps equal or a little less than what we just did and then doing it again. That's interval training. It could also be as simple as a tempo run. Just heading out there. Let's say you're going for a half hour run. You could just spend the first 10 minutes easy. Then in the middle, you do 10 minutes just at threshold, comfortably hard, harder than easy, but not so hard that you can't keep it up for quite a while. Let's say if I told you to do that intensity for like 45 minutes, you'll be like, I think I can do that. It's going to be hard, but I can do it. That's sort of intense. That's like threshold intensity. 10 minutes of that and then 10 minutes cool down. If you run for an hour, you could double all of it. You could just do 20 minutes warm up, 20 minutes tempo run, 20 minutes cool down. So essentially what we're dealing with on this run is just adding in some volume at a fairly intense effort. So we've got an easy day with some speed, but the speed shouldn't be too hard because it's so quick and so short, the intervals. An interval day or a tempo run day where we're just hitting on some fairly hard running and it's a pretty hard day. And then we have an easy long run, which will also be a hard day actually, because it's going for a long time. Those three runs would probably be a good starting point as a basic running program. Of course, you don't want to jump right into that. You want to start out by probably just running every three days a week, but just making it an easy kilometer or an easy mile. Or sometimes even just head out for a walk and throw in a little bit of running in there. You know, I've talked about beginning schedules for runners in the past, but generally you want to ease into it. And something like what I just described is probably something that you want to spend a good, well it depends on your starting point, but you might actually spend several weeks, if not months, building up to something like that. But once you get there, that's a pretty good all-around program, I think. Of course, from there you could build the volume of each session. You could build the amount of time you spend at a certain intensity. You could add in another day, so increase the frequency and run four days a week. You could, so you could work with intensity, you could work with total volume, you could work with frequency. So over time you're going to look at actually increasing that if you want to actually improve. Because it's sort of plateaus after six to eight weeks at a certain training load, you will plateau and you will not get better. You can keep doing the same thing for years, you'll stay the same more or less. And then if you want to go up to next level, you've got to bump it up somehow. So if you want assistance, as I said, with bumping it up and figuring out how to proceed, you could always contact me. I offer coaching, we can make a custom training program for you. It could be for just one month, could be for three months, maybe leading up to race or just getting you started. Or it could be a subscription-based program where you just pay month by month and we keep evolving your program as you evolve. So check that out, link in the description, as I said. Post a comment if you have any questions. Let me know what you think about the schedule like this. I think it's a pretty good all-around program. And check out some of the other videos on similar topics. I'll put some of them around here and of course subscribe if you haven't done so already. Thanks for watching and have an awesome day.