New Year New NURVV Training Guide: Week 4

Week 4: Improving running fitness and reducing injury risk

One of the hardest things about running is striking the right balance in training.

To improve your running fitness, you need to challenge your body by increasing the volume or intensity of your training – or both. But dial it up too much, and you risk falling into the overtraining zone.

Overtraining can lead to mental and physical burnout, disrupt your sleep, make training feel much tougher, and put you at risk of overuse injuries.

This week, you’ll discover how to use NURVV Run to train in your optimal zone, boosting your fitness and improving your running, while reducing the likelihood of developing a running-related injury.

Week 4 training

This week you’re going to complete two runs. We’ll be analysing your Running Health Score after the runs. You must have covered a minimum of four runs or 10km in total in the past 4 weeks to unlock the NURVV Run Running Health feature.

Run 1 and 2:

Run each run at a steady pace either indoor or outdoor. The distance is up to you.

What to look out for:

After you’ve completed each run, click on the Health tab in the NURVV Run app and check the following:

• What is your average Running Health Score? Is your 28-day trend increasing?
• Which metric/metrics score well in your Running Health radar plot?
• Which metric/metrics score low in your Running Health radar plot?
  

Click through to the specific detail on each Running Health aspect (listed in Breakdown) for recommendations on how you can improve.

The Running Health feature lets you know how healthy and sustainable your training is. By looking at four key aspects of your running – Training Load, Cadence, Pronation and Balance – it highlights any aspects of running form you may need to work on to reduce your injury risk.

You can take a deep dive into each of the metrics by hitting Breakdown to see trends in your training load, cadence, pronation and balance over the past 28 days.

To improve your running fitness, pay particular attention to your Training Load – the balance between your recent training and your typical training – to ensure you’re progressing safely and gradually. Try to stay within the optimal zone most of the time and avoid moving into over training too often as it will increase your injury risk.

To keep you on the right track, NURVV Run gives you a Daily and Weekly distance recommendation based on your training load. Your Daily Run Allowance is the recommended daily mileage needed to progress while avoiding unnecessary spikes in your training volume. It will also let you know when you need a rest day.

Targeted exercise plans to build strength and improve your running form

Once you’ve analysed your Running Health graph, you’ll know which aspects of your running you need to work on. The following exercise plans will help you build strength and work on any weaknesses or imbalances.

Exercise plans to improve your balance

Single leg exercises

Exercise plans to improve your pronation

Improving over pronation

Improving under pronation

Exercise plans to improve your cadence (these exercise plans differ from those in week 1)

Beginner

Advanced

Next week: we’ll be looking at upping the intensity. Look out for week 5 in your inbox soon.