How to Run Faster With Fartlek, Tempo & Hill Running

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Samuel Harvell and I'm a personal fitness trainer and running coach. Today I want to talk with you about how to improve your speed for Fartlek training, tempo running and also hill running. Fartlek is a Swedish word that means speed play. So Fartlek essentially means running from one landmark to the other, increasing your speed, slowing down your speed to the next landmark and then increasing your speed again to the next landmark until you do as many as you feel necessary during your run. So another form of running is called tempo running. A tempo run is where after you've done your warm-up job, so your warm-up job would be fifteen to twenty minutes of easy jogging to get the body warmed up for the actual workout or the tempo workout. So you may set a specific time that you're going to run and sustain the same running pace for that entire time. We don't want to start out at a pace that's at maximum speed in terms of going full speed for the entire twenty minutes. You want to find a balance of maintaining a sustained pace that you feel comfortable with for the entire twenty minutes. There are many ways that you can improve your speed. One of those ways is through hill training whereby for example, we may find a hill that is say 300 meters up and I may have them do say 4 by 40 seconds. So 4 by 40 seconds means that they're going to run up the hill at a certain goal pace for 40 seconds. At the end of the 40 second mark, they turn around and they jog back down as part of their recovery and then start the next run uphill for 40 seconds. So they would do those repeats 4 times and then they would do a second set of repeats going from 40 seconds to 50 seconds, same process, run up the hill for 50 seconds at a sustained, controlled pace, jog back down the hill for recovery and then up again and then do another set of say 4 by 60 seconds running uphill at a controlled pace for an entire minute, jogging back down for recovery and then starting over again. Increasing the time each time and also maintaining a controlled pace per interval, per set that you are doing."