Efficient Exercising - 5k

There are many things that could be said about exercising, but most of us exercise because we enjoy a sport. Some of course seems to enjoy social exercising at gyms; however, I feel it’s often a waste of time being at the gym. Firstly; most exercising at gyms are social exercising, meaning, we spend most of the time talking instead of exercising, secondly I don’t find much joy in exercising muscles by lifting weights. I would rather do more natural exercising as running, swimming, pushups, sit ups etc.

I also enjoy more training for something specific; as you might have guessed from the headline, I will be talking about the 5k. The 5k has many benefits as exercising for something specific; you will continuously be improving your muscles and health by improving both speed work and endurance. A benefit of this is of course you use the entire exercise session by doing something, you are not wasting your time talking, looking others or other things you might do at a gym.

It’s often discussed of which way is best to start the exercising; whether to start with short intervals in full speed, and lots of walking, or intervals where you slowly run for 5-10 minutes, with increasing length of the intervals. Some firmly believe in old school of working with endurance before starting speed work, other believe it’s best to start with speed work and keep improving the endurance. I personally find it best to start working with endurance, however; you might try the other way and find it more successful.

I have read some ideas on running from Enlightened Individual/ Health Development, and it seems work find by exercising 3-4 times each week. It starts simple by building up endurance for 5 weeks, and focusing speed work and endurance for the last 5 weeks.

Endurance I am sure most know how to build up, but you should also include speed work as interval, fartslek and hill running. To have variations on will also make the exercising much more fun.

Interval is simply to run a distance or a period of time with higher intensity, and having a break to regain strength for another period of high intensity. I would recommend running for shorter distance as 20 seconds or 100 meters and a break for a minute to regain strength. You could also make a longer interval of 800 meters or 2 minutes, but should then rest for 4-5 minutes to regain strength. Make sure you don’t start with too many intervals when starting.

Fartslek is a Swedish words for speed game, the idea is that you make variations in speed by running some parts fast, some slower, some fast again, and maybe some walking. It’s much the same as interval, except; it has no rules. You are only having fun with variations.

The last form of interval is hill running, it’s simple; you run full speed up a hill, and walk down again to repeat running up.

As a last advice: make sure you don’t make to hard exercises in the beginning as you should enjoy it. Also slowly increase and include variations in your schedule to have fun while exercising.