Preventing sneaky stress accumulation

There is an innocent mistake I see runners making that nearly doubles how stressful their easy runs are.

It is important to avoid mistake this if you are doing any kind of structured training.

If you are doubling the stress of your easy runs, you will be stressing your body way more than necessary.

And, more stress is not a good thing if you are following a training plan.

You will be increasing risk of burnout rather than getting faster.

What is that mistake?

Sometimes, zone 1 runs feel too slow and way too easy.

Runners mistakenly believe that running must be fast and it must be hard.

So, they make a change to their plan.

Instead of running in zone 1 on an easy day, they decide to run near the top of their zone 2 instead of in zone 1.

They feel like this is an innocent tweak to their plan.

Zone 2 is still fairly easy so it is not all that much different from running in zone 1, right?

Wrong.

According to our running stress score system, you only accumulate 0.65 stress points per minute at the bottom of zone 1.

At the top of zone 2, you are accumulating nearly twice as much stress: 1.24 stress points per minute.

By choosing to run in zone 2 instead of zone 1, you are accumulating anywhere from 51% to 90% more stress per minute!

That "innocent" tweak to your plan is letting more and more stress seep into your week of training.

You may not notice the extra stress on the day of the run, but you will notice it when you complete your next hard training session.

This mistake is incredibly sneaky as well.

You will attribute the challenges of the hard training session to the intensity of that hard workout instead of the unnecessary higher intensity of the easy run from a few days ago.

So, the real reason of the problem never gets discovered and the mistake is made over and over again.

It is important to know how stressful your runs are, so you can correct these sneaky mistakes.

Our new PowerCenter helps you monitor your week-by-week training stress with the new "My Training" chart.

This chart is invaluable in letting you identify periods of higher or lower training load so you can make the correction in your pursuit of following a structured training program.

To start populating this chart, you will need to start collecting running power data with Stryd.

You can get Stryd at the link below:

https://store.stryd.com