Exciting times! Congratulations, you’ve got it in your head that you want to do the whole running thing, but are pretty unsure how to start running. We are here to help – on this page you’ll find a list of essential skills and knowledge that all runners need to start safely and become great runners. Without these, you’ll wonder why it all seems so hard. With them, you might even enjoy running right from the start.
Full disclosure: this site’s reason-for-being is to provide online running education / coaching. One of the courses is “Running For Beginners”, so the aim of this page is to give you enough information to decide if either you want to start running on your own or if you’d like to check out a more structured approach with our help.
WHY
The first thing you need to work out in your running journey is WHY you want to start running. This is different for everyone, but the way to achieve this is to keep asking why, until you get to the real reason. So you might start with “I want to be fitter”, but why? “Oh, I want to be able to keep up with my kids / friends / family”, but why? “Oh, because we’ll all be happier if we can do things together instead of my being left out”.
As you can tell, that last reason is a much stronger, more emotive reason than just wanting to be fitter. It will driver you to keep going and become a consistent runner. However, some people find digging into this really tough, so if all you can think of is “It just seems like a good idea”, then that’s cool too, because you’d be right! It’s a great idea.
Goals
The next thing you need are GOALS. There’s a whole section on goals in our course, as well as a way of noting them down and changing them over time. Goals are great to keep you focused – many people try free ways to start running where they are told what to do each day, with no clear goal apart from to eventually run non-stop for a set amount of time. They give up half way through, or reach the end and then never progress any further. Nail your goals, nail your running.
Accountability Partner
Then you’ll need to work out who your accountability partner will be. We believe this is a key part of how to start running. This is normally a friend who understands how important it is to you that you learn how to start running and can kick you up the bum if you are slacking or pat you on the back if you are being awesome and sticking to the plan.
Now that you’ve covered the mental side of learning to run, let’s move on to the physical aspects of getting it right. We believe in learning great habits from day one so that you don’t have to suddenly change the way you run as you get better. If you run like a Pro from the start, you will progress more safely, with muscles adapted to efficient running form. Imagine if you wanted to start playing tennis. You could just play as best you could for six months and then decide to get tuition, but any bad habits you’ve developed over that time will be hard for the tennis coach to break. If you’d got the tuition from the start, everything would have been much easier. Running is a skill too – get it right from the beginning.
The two most important areas to learn immediately when you start running are how to breathe and something called cadence. Let’s look at them in a little more depth.
Breathing While Running
To make running easy, you’ll need to use mostly belly breathing, drawing in and expelling air efficiently with the diaphragm, instead of just using the chest. You’ll also need to match your breathing in time with your steps, using either two steps breathing in, two steps breathing out, or three in, three out. Which one you use on any run depends on whether you are trying to trying to get the most efficient air flow or just keep yourself running super slow/easy.
Running Form
A lot of people focus too much on cadence when they start out running, but just having a high cadence doesn’t give you good running form. In fact if you have poor form and try to increase your cadence, many people end up just shuffling really fast, instead of looking like good runners. Take a look here for how to use your muscles properly to have a nice running form, which will naturally end up with a higher cadence.
And remember what I said about getting good habits from the start? As you get fitter over time, you’ll want to get faster and the only ways to get faster are by having longer strides (from being more powerful and fitter) and taking more steps per minute. You can consciously take more steps per minute, but you can’t just decide to take longer strides – you’ll hurt yourself. So when learning how to start running, let’s get into the habit of the good form straight away so that you are all set to progress later on.
There are other aspects of running form that we go into more detail on in our course.
Run / Walk Schedule
You’ll need a schedule for your training sessions that gets you into running gently. It should split up the running with walks and lots of walks at first. Over the weeks, the amount of walking will decrease and the amount of running will increase until you are eventually running non-stop. Some schedules are eight weeks long, but this is quite a fast ramp up. Whilst some people will find it easy enough, many people struggle with such a short schedule. It’s better to take a little longer and have time for an easy week in the middle. Our course is 11 weeks and is thus more inclusive. It ramps up gently and then includes a week where it’s a little easier, to give the body time to recover, before ramping up again for the remainder.
Run Slowly
The next piece of essential knowledge is knowing how fast or slow to run as a beginner. Running too fast is the biggest mistake most rookie runners make, especially if they have done other sports before like cycling. Just because the lungs and heart have experience does not mean the legs are ready to get battered by running fast. The muscles need time to adapt and to adapt they need to recover quickly. It’s easiest to recover quickly if the muscles weren’t stressed much to start with. So run slowly as a beginner. Patience is key.
Theory Of Training
Then once you’ve learned how to start running and have successfully run non-stop for 30 minutes, what next? Most runners have no clue what to do next because they have been spoon-fed what to do each day, so either stop running or just end up running 30 minutes, three times a week. Our course goes into theory of training, different session types and why they are used. It educates you so you can figure out how to progress. It provides general rules so you can figure out if you need a rest day or if you can do a little extra distance the follow week or if it’s time to add a fast, hard running session.
Next Steps
So that gives you a little insight into our approach for how to start running. There’s a whole lot extra to learn on our Running For Beginners course that we can’t cover in a short blog post. We’ve no idea if it’s the right thing for you, so check out the course content page for more details and decide for yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us for more info.
