What are endurance workouts, you ask? You've probably experienced one before. They're the workouts that leave you exhausted, covered in sweat, and cursing your workout buddy for making you do it. Here's the thing about these kinds of workouts — though they might be disagreeable at first, they're crucial if you want to improve your running performance. Whether you consider yourself a novice or a more advanced athlete, weeding out bad habits and developing new ones is an essential component of endurance training that can help provide benefits in the future.
Here are three game-changing tips that will allow you to crush all your endurance workouts.
Tip #1: Preserve Your Posture
Posture is super important when doing long endurance workouts. When you preserve your posture in your movements you have a much better capacity to take in more oxygen. For long workouts, oxygen is your friend. When you position your body to breathe, you can continue to move fast but also recover at the same time.
With better posture, you utilize the muscles around your body more evenly. When posture or form starts to break down we tend to overuse certain muscle groups. As soon as a muscle hits failure it takes a very long time to recover. So better posture means a better allocation of energy throughout the workout.
Tip #2: Cultivating Peace in Your Mind
One of the most common mistakes I see most athletes do in training is that athletes go out of the way too fast at a chaotic pace. What ends up happening mid-way through is the athletes fall apart and find themselves at the end of the pack later in the workout.
A great way to prevent this is to make the first few minutes as peaceful as possible meaning taking a pace that almost feels like a warm-up. Endurance is all about sustainability and finding a pace that you can maintain all the way through.
Tip #3: Practice Patience
There are moments in the workouts where you can move a little faster, do a little bit more reps, or hold on for much longer. I advise keeping these moments in the last 25 % of the workout. Be patient when to turn it on. It's going to serve you in the long run.
You will have moments when you tell yourself I can go faster and that narrative normally starts the very first half of the workout. But if you can remain patient in pushing it until the last half, you will absolutely crush longer workouts.
Now what?
If you are hating longer workouts, perhaps we might be missing one of these three critical principles for long workouts. Try these tips and see if you feel different after these long workouts.
Leave us a comment if it helps or if long workouts are still a trap.
PS: Are you struggling in interval workouts as well? Check out our other post on 3 Tips to Improve Interval Training.