How To Run Strides

Strides are one of the best ways to improve your running. They are so simple and we think everyone can benefit from running strides each week. Here we’ve got everything you need to know about how, why and when to run strides.

What are strides?

Strides are short bursts of fast running which build from a jog up to around 90% of your all-out speed, before decelerating down to a jog, and from start to finish. A stride should take around 20-30 seconds, and you should add 3-8 of them to a couple of your runs each week. 

Once you start doing strides, you’ll soon see some brilliant benefits to your running.

Why should you run strides?

Strides really help your running economy and form. By running fast (even for just a few seconds), you’ll naturally stand up taller, move your arms and legs in a more efficient way, get up on your toes, and increase your cadence. 

Some other benefits of running of strides include:

• Improving strength and power in your legs, challenging all the major running muscles, which helps make us more resilient to injuries
• Strides help your running efficiency, which helps you to run better at all paces. That’s right: running fast make you better at running slow
• As we get tired in longer runs our form is one of the first things which suffers. By practising strides we can maintain good form for longer, which is especially helpful when we’re chasing new goals 
• Most running is aerobic, but strides use your anaerobic energy system (meaning without the use of oxygen, which is why we’re quickly out of breath doing it), and this generally improves our strength and fitness 
• By quickly increasing our heart rate during the stride and then walking or jogging, we’re improving our body’s capacity to help you recover after a hard effort
• And best of all, they only take a few minutes each week!

When and how do you run strides?

Strides are not like running a 100m race! To run strides, find a straight, flat stretch of ground. Start from a jog and gradually get faster over 5-10 seconds until you’re running at almost full speed, and hold that speed for another 10 seconds (count to 20 or 30 steps in your head) before gradually slowing down to a jog or walk.

Try to stay relaxed and controlled throughout, make sure you’re running tall (imagine there’s a string coming out the top of your head, pulling you upright!), and don’t try to exert yourself too much or run too fast. Jog or walk for 30-60 seconds, and then repeat that up to 3-8 times. Try to add strides to one or two runs each week.

It’s most common to run strides at the end of an easy run, which is a great way to activate different muscles and push yourself when you’re not tired. Or you can run them as part of your warm-up before a workout, interval session or race.

Will I look silly running strides?

No way! You’ll look amazing because you’ll be running faster than ever before and with the best running form, plus you’ll know that you’re getting stronger and improving as a runner because you’re doing them. Sure, it might take a few times for these to feel comfortable, especially if you aren’t used to running fast, but keep running them and soon you’ll realise just how good they can be for you.

Want to get more from your stride?

Then find a hill! Doing strides on a gentle incline is an even better way to work on your running form (it’s hard to run fast uphill with bad form) and it’ll build even more strength. And you can always look for steeper hills to keep on challenging yourself (if you happen to have a hilly race coming up then you could also do these on a slight decline). Walk between strides to help your recovery.

If you’re looking for other ways to help improve your running form then Andy takes Sarah through some strides and drills in the video above. They talk about the running stride in general (which is your cadence and stride length together), which is slightly different to the faster stride exercises we talk about above.

If you’ve added fast strides into your runs then have you seen a benefit from them?