Hey athletes,

As I’m sure all of you have found out by now in your athletic journeys, running seven days a week usually can be a recipe for disaster.

And it’s probably not even the most effective recipe from a training perspective.

Your body needs rest away from running. You need time to recover and adapt, in order to actually reap the rewards from training.

And one of the best ways to do this while still being able to attain much of what you love about running, is to take advantage of cross-training days.

Every single athlete I work with incorporates cross-training into their schedule.

Most run five days a week with two optional cross-training days, and a much smaller number run six days a week with an optional uphill treadmill double, and one designated pure rest day.

The vast majority of professional athletes in our sport incorporate a high volume of training outside of their scheduled run time.

They bike, swim, ski, and more recently, hop on an arc-trainer.

These are all great options for building volume at a low impact to your body, while being able to grow your aerobic engine.

When you cross-train, much of the work can be done in Zone 1, with some nice extra moments in Zone 2.

When you run, you tend to only scrape the surface of your Zone 1, with most of the work in Zone 2.

Building that Z1 engine is incredibly important. In fact it’s the zone that I’d say all runners should be tapping into more.

Not only is it less stress on your body (less muscle breakdown), it’s also where you can develop the highest degree of efficiency transporting oxygen. That means the more work you do in this zone, the more efficient you become across all zones.

When you’re efficient at this sport, you can then go further and longer (important for trail and ultra runners), at less of a cost to your body to then recover, adapt and do it again.

Pretty cool eh?

So if cross-training is such a useful tool for tapping into those lower zones, why don’t we do even more of it?

Partially because there is still some muscle breakdown.

But also, as I used to say to my students in a kinesiology course, you don’t get significantly better at riding horses by riding zebras.

Even if you do 50% of your volume in a week via cross-training, you’re still doing a ton of running.

Because running more = running better. Up to a certain extent, until you get injured.

And to avoid injury, we cross-train instead.

Now with that out of the way, cross-training is nothing, really, if you’re not approaching it with intentionality.

When I worked in the soccer world, I would sit on a bike for hours upon hours watching matches, with my heart-rate at 60-80bpm.

While there is some room for this kind of Zone 0 work like yoga, pilates, walking, foam rolling, etc. to exist and be beneficial, I wouldn’t necessarily call it “training”.

So with your cross-training days, you want to get your heart-rate up to a similar level to what your “easy” run pace would normally be. For me, that’s between 125bpm-145bpm.

If I exist in that range on the arc-trainer, I’m moving. I’m pushing. I’m putting out a tom of power. It actually feels difficult. More moderate, and not easy.

And that’s one of the magical parts of cross-training, you can actually be a bit intense with it, and have little muscle breakdown. You can have little tiredness the rest of the day and the day after. Because it was low cost and low impact.

Especially when your cross-training option gets you off your feet. I like uphill treadmill for doubles, but I like it less for rest days. Rest days should be about getting off your feet with your exercise, away from the similar movements you do when running.

So if you have a favourite cross-training option, invest time into getting good at it, and develop routines around it. Then make it intentional as a regular part of your training, understanding what you want out of the training for the day!

You will see the benefits shine through, both in how your fitness develops, and in how you feel when you go out for your runs.

If you have any questions around cross-training always feel free to ask!

Thanks for reading and see you soon!