With all rules, there are exceptions. Runners focusing on

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• Increasing your speed
• 3 Signs You’re Ready to Push Your Pace in Training
• How Much to Increase Running Speed When You’re Ready
• Undertraining: Causes and Solutions
• How to Know You’re Training at the Right Pace

Many runners want to get faster. But the biggest mistake you can make in that pursuit is constantly pushing the pace and trying to run every workout faster than the one before.

Increasing your speed takes time and strategic planning. That includes finding where you’re at now and maintaining both a pace and effort level that works for you in training, so you can work to increase those baseline metrics.

With the help of expert coaches, we help you do that by providing insight and guidance on analyzing your body’s response to your current paces. Plus, learn the signs you’re ready to go faster, and key strategies for pushing your training paces so you achieve your fastest speed come race day.

Increasing your speed

Before you work to increase your training paces, establish your baseline numbers. An easy way to obtain them is by racing. No matter if it’s a mile, 5K, 10K, or marathon, you can take your average race pace, plug it into our training pace calculator, Should You Split Up Your Long Run easy runs, Shoes & Gear, Strength Training Guide, long runs, and Yasso 800s.

Just remember, you’re not a robot, so not every sprint rep or long run will come in at exactly the pace that you are given.

“I would say probably 95 percent of the time, athletes are running [training workouts] too fast,” says New York City-based RRCA- and USATF-certified run coach Kai Ng. “You want to stick to the training paces for your current fitness level so that it is just challenging enough for your body to adapt and get stronger and faster.”

Then, before you even think about picking up your paces, it’s important to learn how to control your paces. “Looking at your watch is not controlling your pace. Working on your breathing is not controlling your pace,” says Ng. “Those are results. That’s like someone saying they control how fast their car goes by looking at the speedometer. You control your pace based on how hard you’re pushing on your gas—on your effort.”

When you’re running any of the above mentioned workouts, you want to make sure your effort lines up with your pace, so you have a mix of easy runs and hard sessions, and that you’re not consistently overdoing it in training—or not pushing it enough to see results.

3 Signs You’re Ready to Push Your Pace in Training

Your body needs time to change and adapt to training. Instead of pushing all of your training paces after you crush your one speed workout for the week, it’s important to meet each of the following progress checkpoints in a four- to eight-week training period.

1. You’re Consistently Hitting Target Paces

The first sign it’s time to push your speed is that you’re consistently hitting target paces in your workouts without your effort level or heart rate spiking. Maintaining this balance between perceived effort and measurable data brings back Ng’s car analogy, as this is where looking at your speedometer comes into play.

Adhering to your training plan’s designated paces is easier to do if you use a rate of perceived exertion (RPE) Shoes & Gear, easy pace (recovery runs/easy runs) should be about a 3 or 4 out of 10 on that scale, with 10 being all-out effort. Marathon pace should hit about a 4 to 5, half marathon pace 5 to 6, threshold pace sits around 7 or 8, mile pace is generally an 8 or 9, and an all-out sprint is a 10.

Ng notes that an important part of consistency is not only holding fast paces during tough workouts, but slowing down on easy days. That means maintaining a constant zone 2 heart rate (60 to 70 percent of your maximum) on your slower runs to dial in your recovery run effort level before thinking about pushing your paces.

Once you achieve this consistency benchmark in one workout, that’s great! But strive to have this balance between pace and effort level in every Aside from normal. For example, If you find your heart still working too hard on your easy days even though your tempo session the day before was fantastic, take another week or two in your training plan Increasing your speed.

2. You’re Recovering Well

The Benefits of Training on Fatigued Legs Runnersfix, Jon Mott says he likes to see his runners complete two or three speed sessions week after week, and recover well from them, before offering up a change in pace.

For Mott, easy runs serve as a barometer for recovery from speed sessions (which he usually prescribes once per week). “I know a lot of coaches say easy runs are just for recovery, and to a certain extent I agree,” Mott says. “But I do believe that runners gain fitness on easy runs.” For example, if one of his runners comes back the day after a speed session with a sluggish easy run—even if they completed the speed session at the correct pace—he will hold off a pace increase until those recovery days feel more comfortable.

This is a clear sign you’re adapting to running on tired legs. Mott typically makes sure this sign of recovery happens for two to three weeks before having clients push the pace.

3. You’re Not Injured or Overly Tired

Aside from normal tiredness and soreness that you feel from tough workouts, Ng and Mott stress that injury-free running is the most important box to check off before you increase your training paces. If you try and run when you’re hurt or excessively fatigued, at all of your training paces and supplementing a good sleep schedule with a balanced.

Maintaining quality running form at all of your training paces and supplementing a good sleep schedule with a balanced diet to mitigate fatigue and illness are just a few of the things you can do to support an increase in speed.

If you are injured, overly fatigued, or ill at any point in your training, take time to heal. Shifting a Sunday rest day to Wednesday because you didn’t sleep well the night before is okay. Cross-training for a week or two is an effective way to minimize heavy impact and keep up with your training effort. Training plans are meant to be fluid and flexible, and these are just two of many ways you can mitigate injury during yours.

The bottom line remains: Don’t dive headfirst into faster paces if your body isn’t physically ready to take on that challenge.

How Much to Increase Running Speed When You’re Ready

The consensus from both coaches is that you should aim for a general pace increase of five to 10 seconds per mile for tougher workouts like sprint intervals, VO2 max workouts, and even tempo runs, once you’ve proven you’re ready to run faster.

Easier efforts should stay easy (so don’t worry about pace so much!). Mott even says that within 12-week training blocks where he may increase a runner’s paces for speed workouts a few times, easy paces stay relatively the same to allow for adequate recovery.

It’s easy to get excited about pushing your paces but it’s also important to remember that you want to find the line between pushing yourself enough to see improvement, but not going too hard that you hurt your progress.

Undertraining: Causes and Solutions

Benefits of Trail Running for Road Racers workout paces Everything You Need to Know About When and How to Increase Your Training Paces.

With all rules, there are exceptions. Runners focusing on base training and longer, slower miles might be looking at more than eight weeks before pushing their pace. On the flip side, an experienced runner in the build phase of their training plan may not even need four weeks before picking up their paces because they can maintain pace and know their body’s capacity for a higher effort level.

“Every runner is different,” says Mott. “Newer runners can make so much progress and may be ready in just a couple weeks, and veterans with more experience may take longer.”

It’s this potential for variation that makes listening to your body, and matching up your workout goal, pace, and effort, so important.

How to Know You’re Training at the Right Pace

Your first workout at your new paces is extremely important now that you know how to find and control your pace. Feeling exactly the same as before? You probably didn’t increase enough. Absolutely gassed? Ng offers a solution: “If you struggle to hit the new target paces for half the workout, then something is wrong,” he says. “But if you’re like ‘okay, I can get through half the workout’ then maybe we’ll give it another week. We’ll start at that halfway mark and push it to 75 and then 100 percent.”

For example, if your speed session calls for 10 repeats of 200 meters at your new pace and you only hit that pace for four reps, you most likely increased your paces too quickly or by too much time. However, if you make it through five or six of the reps at your prescribed pace and are not too far off on the other four or five, Ng’s recommendation suggests that for your next 200-meter repeat session, try to hit that pace for seven or eight out of the 10 reps. If you can do that, try the full 10 the next time around.

The sweet spot is right in between too easy and too hard; you want to feel challenged by your workouts while not going too hard. If you’re there? Keep it up! In no time, you’ll be ready to repeat this process and continue working to lower your PR.