Treadmill running is a great way to work on your cardiovascular fitness in a controlled environment. Running on the treadmill works your legs as well as your heart and lungs. As you get fitter, adding speed workouts to your routine can help your body adjust to running at faster and faster speeds. Speed workouts are also a great way to break up the monotony of running on a treadmill. Speed workouts should not be done more than twice a week and should always be followed by a day of easy running or cross training to help prevent over-stressing your muscles, bones and joints. Warm up with five to ten minutes of easy running before doing any speed work and then cool down afterwards with five to ten minutes of easy running or walking.
Intervals
Interval training is the most common type of speed work. In interval training, you would run a set distance harder than your normal training pace and then recover by resting or easy walking and then repeat the same distance again. On the treadmill, you can either set the interval as a distance you want to cover or a time that you would like to be running hard for. To begin, a good speed workout would be 400 meter repeats or two to three minutes of running hard. This is not all-out effort, if this is your first time doing speed work; you would want to complete the intervals just a little faster than your normal running pace. After the hard interval on the treadmill, recover by either stopping for the same amount of time you ran for, or walk slowly on the treadmill. for that same time. Repeat four times.
Ladder Workout
There are many variations of ladder workouts, but the basic premise is that you either climb up the ladder, by running gradually longer intervals, or you climb down the ladder by running decreasingly shorter intervals. You can also do a longer workout by increasing the intervals and then decreasing the intervals. A simple ladder workout for beginners would be to climb down the ladder by starting with a long interval of 800 meters. After each interval either rest or walk slowly and then start the next interval. Climbing down the ladder from the 800 would be a 600 meter interval, a 400 meter interval and a 100 meter interval. Or complete the workouts with minutes run instead, starting with 6 minutes hard, then 4 minutes, then 2 minutes, then one minute.
Fartlek
Fartlek is a Swedish work that means "speed play." In a fartlek workout you are running continuously, but varying the speed. A beginning fartlek workout would consist of 30 minutes total running time. The first ten minutes are a warm up of easy jogging. During the second ten minutes, vary your speed based on time. Run one minute hard and then two minutes easy and continue until you complete this ten minute period. The final ten minutes is a cool down of easy running. The Runners Resource website states that you can even do fartleks without any particular structure, and adjusting the speed as you feel it is appropriate. A fartlek workout is very easy to adjust by changing the minutes run hard and easy to fit your personal needs and fitness level. The key to an effective workout is to keep running during the entire workout.
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