This week our technical focus is on hip stability – keeping the hips high and level to promote running economy and minimise injury.
The fitness focus is on building top end speed with some anaerobic efforts in the Tuesday session and plenty of strides on the Sunday.
Suggested Drills for the week
Lunge Progression – remember to keep your leading knee behind your leading toes and your trailing knee should not quite touch the ground.
A-March to Skip Progression – ensuring chin, toes and knees are ‘up’.
Strides with a ‘balloon’.
Tuesday Session
10 minute warm-up
40 minutes of:
During the warm-up give everyone in the group a number from 1 to 3, ensuring that there are roughly equal numbers of ‘1’s, ‘2’s and ‘3’s.
Start out at a steady (long-run, i.e. arerobic) pace then pick a landmark (lampost, postbox, bush, cone, anything!) that you are about to run past, the whole group should continue running at a steady pace after passing it, continue for 30 seconds, then all of the ‘1’s should run fast (3-5km pace or faster) back to the selected landmark, turn around at the landmark and continue, fast, back to the group. When the ‘1’s return to the group, pick a new landmark and then the ‘2’s run fast back to it after the whole group has gone 30 seconds past the landmark, repeat this for the ‘3’s and then continue this pattern until it is time to cool down.
For a detail explanation with diagrams see here.
10 minute cool-down
Thursday Session
NO SESSION – Sale Sizzler
Sunday Session
Long* Run – surges every 1km; accelerate to 90% of max pace, hold that pace for 10 long breaths (about 20-30 seconds), focus on imagining your head and torso being lifted by a balloon.
*Long is relative to what you have been doing recently; no more than 20% longer than any run you’ve done in the past 4 weeks.
Manchester Harriers and Athletics Club 