You know that point in a run when your legs start to feel heavier, your breathing The Best Running Music to Add to Your Playlist hey, maybe it’s time to walk? Even just for a second? That’s exhaustion creeping in—and while fatigue is an inevitable part of distance running, you do have some control over when it stops you in your tracks.
Increasing your time to exhaustion—or how long you can hold a specific pace or intensity before needing to slow down or stop—is a huge part of training. While pushing your distance gradually will certainly help stave off fatigue, there are plenty of science-backed ways to push that quitting point further down the road that have nothing to do with the physical act of running. Whether it’s using performance-boosting tools, optimizing your fueling, or training your brain, these proven strategies will help you run stronger for longer.
1. Hit the Sauna Postrun
You’re sweaty enough postworkout, what’s another half hour of schvitzing? When study participants followed their easy or long runs with 30 minutes in the sauna three times a week, they improved their time to exhaustion by 12 percent on average, research The Best Running Shoes CA Notice at Collection determined.
“The performance benefits are linked to the thermoregulatory stress of the sauna heat,” explains Micah Zuhl, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Health Sciences at Central Michigan University, who researches exertional heat stress. “That stress causes an expansion in plasma volume, so you have more blood volume to circulate to the heart and working muscles.” That means your heart doesn’t have to work as hard to deliver oxygen to your muscles, which lowers your perceived effort.
“This also allows for an improvement in managing body temperature,” Zuhl adds. “You’ll start sweating sooner, and that sweat is more diluted, so you better conserve electrolytes, which aid performance.”
Just know the key to this benefit is using the sauna regularly, research suggests.
2. Hop to It
Plyometrics, or explosive exercises like jumping and bounding, elicit a number of tissue changes in the body, especially related to tendons and neuromuscular control, explains Matt Ferlindes, D.P.T., a physical therapist who specializes in treating runners and endurance athletes at How to Mimic Elite Runners’ Mechanics in Milwaukee. “If we train this way, our body will be better adapted to absorb and release overall forces, likely leading to improved efficiency,” he adds.
In fact, new research published in Scientific Reports found practicing just five minutes of hopping each day can help improve running economy—or the amount of energy your body uses at a given pace—in amateur athletes. And with that boost in running economy, you can run faster or longer at the same energy output.
3. Practice Mindfulness
To quote the GOAT, Eliud Kipchoge, “when your mind is calm, and well concentrated, then the whole body is controlled.”
The Zen-master marathoner is on to something: Athletes who followed a five-week mindfulness training program demonstrated more resistance to fatigue than those who didn’t practice mindfulness in a study published in the journal Neural Plasticity in 2020. You know that point in a run when your legs start to feel heavier, your increased endurance published in 2020 in posture, but also an acceptance of discomfort.
“Mindfulness changes how the brain perceives discomfort, reducing the mental resistance that often triggers premature fatigue,” explains Sue Williams, a clinical hypnotherapist and certified sports mindset coach in Melbourne, Australia. “When athletes learn to quiet the constant stream of conscious thought, they create space to engage deeper mental processes that regulate how the body responds to stress and exertion. This kind of mental training can increase resilience, improve pain tolerance, and reduce the tendency to overreact to fatigue cues, ultimately extending performance capacity.”
4. Train Your Brain
Your brain may not be a muscle, but you can train it just like you would your quads or glutes—and doing so can increase your time to exhaustion, according to research published in 2023 in the CA Notice at Collection. Study participants watched four videos and followed the guided instructions for exercises designed to enhance performance twice weekly for three weeks. At the end, the participants were able to increase their time to exhaustion by 10 percent in a cycling test.
The best part: The mental-skills training the study participants underwent are super easy to replicate at home. The videos included deep, slow breathing to reduce stress and anxiety; a lesson on “controlling the controllables,” meaning focusing on things you can change; self-talk and confidence interventions to combat negative thinking and doubt; and imagery instructions Why It Takes Years to Reach Your 26.2 Potential.
5. Lift Weights
We earn a commission for products purchased through some links in this article strength-training sessions every two to four days, runners demonstrated improved running economy durability and increased high-intensity time to exhaustion at the end of a 90-minute run, a 2025 study from the American College of Sports Medicine determined. FYI: The authors noted that their findings are particularly relevant for road races between 10K and the marathon.
The benefits of strength training go deeper, though. “Biomechanically, it reduces the energy cost of running by increasing musculoskeletal stiffness, increasing muscle strength, and increasing the rate of force development,” explains Nick Occhipinti, D.C., C.S.C.S., chiropractor and assistant professor of exercise science at Centenary University in Hackettstown, New Jersey.
“Metabolically, it’s the opposite of distance running in that the way we regenerate ATP [a.k.a. adenosine triphosphate, the body’s primary energy currency] for muscle contraction is from anaerobic pathways that primarily use stored muscle glycogen for fuel,” he adds. “As a result, the body increases its storage capacity for glycogen, which means you’ll have more fuel for higher intensity running, thus increasing time to exhaustion.”
6. Take Caffeine
If you’re looking for a legal performance boost, it might already be in your kitchen. Caffeine intake showed a meaningful performance-enhancing effect in increasing the time to exhaustion in a systematic review and meta-analysis published in the journal Nutrients in 2022.
Caffeine works by blocking adenosine, a chemical in your brain that makes you feel tired, which increases with prolonged exercise, says Occhipinti. “Caffeine also increases the release of a class of hormones known as the catecholamines, or epinephrine and norepinephrine,” he adds. “These hormones are involved in our fight-or-flight mechanism and also get released with exercise.”
“The best results seem to be around 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight which for a 150-pound person would be 204 to 409 milligrams,” says Occhipinti. “For reference, there is about 100 milligrams of caffeine in a typical 8-ounce cup of coffee.”
FYI: Higher doses do not seem to have an additional performance benefit and side effects are usually seen with very high doses (up to 9 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight), he adds. Also, because caffeine content and absorption rates can vary significantly, it’s important that you really get to know how your body responds to caffeine.
7. Listen to Your Favorite Playlist
For many runners, music is an integral part of the experience. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that listening to preferred music during a running time trial led to a 10 percent increase in total distance covered in a study published in the Journal of Human Kinetics in 2022.
On the surface level, “syncing your movements to a steady beat can improve running efficiency and pacing,” explains Elisha Peterson, M.D., an anesthesiologist and pain medicine physician in Washington, D.C. “Add in the distraction effect—where music draws attention away from internal sensations of strain—and you’ve got a powerful endurance enhancer.”
But if you look a little deeper, you’ll find that “music activates two key systems in the brain that are directly relevant to endurance performance,” Peterson says. “It strengthens the descending modulatory system, which decreases pain signals from the body—like the internal signal to stop when you’re about to How to Build Fatigue Resistance—before they reach conscious awareness, and it stimulates dopamine release in brain regions tied to motivation and pleasure, like a neurochemical ‘second wind.’”
