Introduction

You make a decision to improve your running and pay for a program, or for coaching, but how do you know it's working?  How do you know it was worth the investment in time, effort and money?

Most people will follow a plan and then check at the end if it's made a difference by completing a race, for example, and seeing if they did it faster than before (or if it's their first at that distance, whether they are happy with the result).  But that leaves everything until the end, the last minute...  What if there was a lack of progress through the training that you missed but could have used to tweak things?

And what are your goals anyway?  Are you really clear on what you want the plan to achieve for you?

In this video (link down below), I look at the ways we monitor progress for our clients so that you can hopefully gain greater clarity on how you can measure your own improvements (before you waste too much time and money).

Let me know in the comments down below what experience you have had (good or bad) with following a running program.  Did you see the improvements you expected?  Did you know along the way whether you were heading in the right direction with the training?

While you're here, we have a FREE guide for you to download that will help eliminate a lot of the stress involved in buying your next running shoes.  Head over to our website to download your FREE copy now: https://www.be-fit-coach.co.uk/7-steps-to-buying-your-next-running-shoe-opt-in

Happy running 🏃🏼

Summary

• How do you monitor your progress when you're following a running plan?
• Most people typically leave it until the end of the program to see if they can hit their goals
• We take a different approach!  We monitor our runner's progress on a regular basis to ensure that they are always working at the correct level so that they always get the best chance of progressing
• Watch this week's video to see what you could be doing differently and let us know if you'd like to hear more about our coaching programs

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Full Transcript

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of the BE Fit Coach "Let's Talk Running" show.  Please note that this episode, like all LTR episodes, is often unscripted and unedited and features Barrie talking about a subject that we believe runners will find useful and interesting.]

So you’ve decided to improve your running. You’ve downloaded a plan off the internet, or you’ve signed up to a coaching program, or you’ve signed up to work one-to-one with a running coach.

How do you know that your running is improving? How do you know that you’re getting the results that you’re paying for?

At the end of the day, if you’re putting in the time, effort and money, you want to know that you’re actually getting something in return for that. So how do you know that?

Well, what I’ve found most people will do is that they’ll go down that approach and they’ll get a plan or a program and they’ll tailor it to “okay, I want to run a half marathon” or “I want to be able to improve my half marathon PB time”, or 5k, or whatever it is. And they’ll follow the plan, try and do their best to follow along with whatever it says, and then wait until the race day to find out “did it work and did I get the improvements I was looking for?”. You might get some idea along the way but it’s basically down to that final race and “did I make it or not, did it work?”.

The problem with this is that there are so many factors come into play. Obviously, you’ve got the effect of the race day itself. The weather might be an impact. If it’s too hot, it’s going to slow you down. If it’s too cold, if it’s raining heavily, or if it’s windy? What if the course is hillier than the one you’ve run previously? All of these different factors. What if you’re slightly under the weather on the day? All these various factors that come into play in terms of the actual performance.

So you don’t necessarily know whether that’s the conditions or is that the actual training plan, is that the work you did? It’s really difficult to tell with those sorts of situations.

Also, the plan itself in terms of how do you monitor the progress through the plan. If you’re following along with the sessions you’ve been asked to do, how do you know that you’re working at the right level and getting the results that will influence changes in your running performance along the way?

So what I typically do with my clients is, I work with setting a performance level. So when I start working with them initially I’ll gauge their performance and that might be based off a 5K time or a 10K time, a race time; or it can sometimes just be going out and running with them just to get a few ideas of where they’re at in terms of their natural pace and what they can do if they push themselves.

I’ll use that to create a performance measure that I’ll base their training plans off. Then, what that means is, whether you’re doing an anaerobic session or a VO2Max aerobic power session, or whether you’re doing threshold training for your lactate threshold, or your easy runs. Whatever it is, you’ll be very clear on what pace you should be achieving for each of those. So if you’re running a 400m fast anaerobic threshold pace run, you’ll know exactly how long it should take you to complete that repetition. You’re rest intervals, etc are then based around that.

What you’ll find is that over time you’ll repeat some of these sessions and you’ll start to hit those numbers a little bit easier than before. So that way what you’re doing is checking in on that performance improvement almost on a session-by-session basis because you know what your targets are and you can measure the way that you feel and the performance that you achieved when you run those sessions.

Also, you’ve got other factors that you can look at to get a bit more detail around your performance. So, say you’ve run 8 lots of 400m at a certain pace with rest periods in between, and then a few weeks later you come back and you repeat that session, we can look at how did you do on each of the intervals. Was there a variation across, and how did that compare to the previous time? Also, what was your heart rate like this time? Was your heart rate maintained at a lower level? Was it at a higher level? What factors come into play? And we can use those then to adjust your performance.

So typically, I won’t change somebody’s performance level more than once every 3-4 weeks because your performance can vary on a session-by-session, or a week-by-week basis just because of your natural state. Some days you might be better fuelled on a run, or better hydrated. Other days you might be slightly under the weather but not realising it just yet. Or there may be something affecting your breathing, or affecting your performance in some way.

Changing it too often is not good either, so we tend to leave a good 3-4 weeks in between changes. Also, that gives you time to vary the sessions as well, and just make sure that you’re not having a one-off good day, for example.

So what we'll do is, we’ll look at the results on each session and then I’ll adjust the training level based on those results, and that will change your pace guides for each of the different session types. So you’re always working at the right level for your current performance.

That makes it a really good way for runners to check in as they are progressing through a plan, “Am I seeing progress here? Am I developing as a runner, or am I now stagnant and performing at the same level, just repeatedly doing lots of training? At the end of the day, if we’re putting lots of effort into following a training plan or a coaching program, you want to see a result for that effort, and a result for that money and time that you’re investing in there!

So having a way to monitor that is a really powerful tool. And that’s what you get with the performance measures that we use in our coaching programs. Also, it’s not just down to those numbers, a lot of the time you need to think about the subjective measures as well. So, you might do a run and think well I feel a particular way and you do the run again later on and think “you know what, I feel better that time, I feel better with that running now, I can manage that. I don’t feel maybe my breathing was quite as hard, or I’m holding my breathing rate at this particular pattern rather than dropping to a faster pattern”.

So there’s subjective measures there as well, and a lot of the time that’s difficult to measure unless you’re taking the time and effort to record the information. Which is why, when I’m running with clients, whether that face-to-face or through online programs, or even virtual programs, I’ll always suggest completing a running journal entry after each session.

What these do is give you an opportunity to think about your basic stats like your distance, your average pace, your heart rate max and average, your time, the terrain, maybe even the shoes that you’re using, the facts of the event. But actually thinking about “how did I feel on that run?”, “How did I feel going into it?” and “How did I feel at the end of it?”.

These sort of more subjective measures are a really good way of being able to look back and see “well actually the last time I ran that distance, or that actual route, I ended up feeling like this after it but this time, actually I’m not feeling quite as bad and maybe the pace was different, and it’s a really good way of just keeping on track with those measures as you go through.

The other thing that I always get my clients to think about is what are your goals for the training. Now, if we go back to what I said at the start, you might download a plan or buy a plan because you wanted to run a half marathon or improve your half marathon time, but what is the actual goal for that plan? That might be getting more specific with the measurements, “I want to knock 3 minutes off my PB time the next time I run the half marathon”, or “I want to run it without stopping”, or “I want to run and feel in control of my breathing all the way around”, or “run it non-stop”.

Whatever it is, get very specific with the goal you have so that when you come to measure the performance improvements through the training, you always know that you’re working towards this particular goal. If you don’t set a goal then we’re aimless. We’re trying to improve but we don’t know in what particular way, or what we’re heading for. It could be that actually what you need to improve on is your lactate threshold because it’s your endurance is suffering, or your top end speed so it’s more anaerobic training you need to improve on.

Getting very clear on what your goal is and what that means for you is a really powerful way of measuring that performance as you work through a coaching plan.

So, as I said, all of this is what we do as standard on the coaching programs that we run with BE Fit Coach, and if you’re interested in finding out more about any of our programs then I’ll make sure there’s a link down below somewhere. Or just head to our website at be-fit-coach.co.uk, and if you look on the top menu you’ll see the online store there. You can have a look and our coaching programs are available in there to have a look at.

While you’re there, why not sign up for our FREE download to help you choose your next running shoes? This is a really hot topic for runners in terms of “how do I know the right shoes?”. For some people that means going to a specialist shoe shop and getting their gait measured. Other people, it might just be trial and error. What I give you in that document is my version, and my guide, what I use for choosing my own shoes, or suggesting to my clients, or even when I’ve taken clients shopping to buy shoes with them. It’s the same process I use there so it’s a really useful way of making sure that you’re getting something that works well for you.

While you’re doing that, you’ll be added to my email list, so when I release new blog posts which I tend to do every week, or when I am putting an offer out for a new program or something like that, you’ll get first notification because I always send those out to my email subscribers before anyone else.

So the form should be on the website somewhere, just have a look and fill that in and get on the list to make sure you get notifications. That’s it for this week. I’m Barrie Evans of BE Fit Coach and I look forward to speaking to you soon, bye for now.

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