Week 6
Remember to warm up before running.
| series 1 | series 2 | series 3 | series 4 | |||||
| running | marching | running | marching | running | marching | running | marching | |
| day 1 | 7 | 2 | 7 | 2 | 7 | 2 | 7 | 2 |
| 1-day break | ||||||||
| day 2 | 7,5 | 1,5 | 7,5 | 1,5 | 7,5 | 1,5 | 7,5 | 1,5 |
| 1-day break | ||||||||
| day 3 | 8 | 1,5 | 8 | 1,5 | 8 | 1,5 | 8 | 1,5 |
| 2-day break | ||||||||
If you manage to complete the entire day, you can safely proceed to the next one. If you are having a bad day and cannot run the entire training, it will be better for you to repeat the training after a day’s break. There is no need to hurry – regularity is more important than results.
How often should you actually run?
It is one of the first questions every new runner asks, and the frustrating truth is that the right answer depends entirely on who is asking. There is no universal number of runs per week. What works is a frequency you can sustain without breaking down, and that shifts with your experience, your goals, and how the rest of your life is arranged.
Where to start
If you are new to running, less is genuinely more at the beginning. Two or three sessions a week, with rest days in between, gives your legs, tendons, and joints time to adapt to a new kind of load. This is the stage where enthusiasm gets people into trouble: it is tempting to run every day because you feel good, but the soreness and the overuse niggles tend to show up a week or two later. Building slowly is not a sign of weakness; it is what lets you still be running in three months.
Once you have a base and running no longer leaves you wrecked the next day, three to five times a week is a comfortable range for most people. At this point it helps to vary what those runs are, mixing easy days with the occasional harder effort, and leaving room for other things like strength work or simply a walk. Runners training for a specific event may push toward near-daily running, but even then the key is variety of intensity. Running hard every single day is the fast road to an overuse injury.
Let your body set the pace
Whatever the number, the most reliable guide is the one attached to your own legs. Persistent soreness, a run that feels heavier than it should, sleep that is off, a mood that has soured on the whole thing: these are signals to add a rest day, not to grind through. Rest is not time off from training, it is the part of training where the adaptations actually happen.
If you are genuinely unsure how to structure things, a coach or experienced runner can help you sketch a plan that fits your starting point. But the underlying principle is simple. A few quality runs you look forward to will always beat a punishing schedule you dread and eventually abandon.