Enlightened Individual

For beginners-

This is a schedule I have been using for 5 weeks now. I will claim it works well as my 9 year old brother is capable of jogging about 4k without breaks, and my 12 years old brother is capable of jogging 8k without breaks.

As you can see shortly, we modified some of the original schedule to start interval exercises and hill running a bit earlier, the reason is we were capable of jogging our route within 3 weeks for me and the oldest brother, and 4 weeks for the youngest, you might need only 2 weeks, or as much as 5 weeks. It’s no  answer to how long time we need to be able running, therefore we need to modify the schedule as we progress, but we make sure we don’t make to big steps at once.

It might also be a problem for some that they don’t know how long distance they are running, if that is the case: start jogging/walking for about an hour, and when you are able to jogging without breaks you start running for 35-45 minutes.

If you look at the schedule there are parentheses with an x inside, these x is the location where you are running, we are running on the roads, inside woods and mountains, and they get to refresh themselves with water after running, either in lakes or rivers. I think it makes it a bit more fun for my brothers with variation of location, and looking at the schedule of all the places they have been running.

As for the red you find in the example, he didn’t really get a red day first week, but I put it as example to illustrate the color codes.

5k-beginners-xls

5k-beginners-ods

-Kentaki-

Before we present the exercise schedule we should discuss a bit on the methods we will be using.

The first weeks will be running / slow jogging. This is rather simple, you try jogging for 5-10 minutes, and if you get exhausted or the taste of blood in your mouth get to strong you simply start walking for a while. When you have regained some strength you try jogging for another 5-10 minutes. For each day you try jog a bit more, and walk a bit less. But please; enjoy it; don’t be too hard with yourself. I don’t expect anyone being able to jog for 30-40 minutes before you have walked/jogged for 5 weeks. I think the largest mistake people makes is to exercise to hard and creating a dislike for exercising. It’s much better to enjoy the process of achieving better endurance, than suffer and hate the days of exercising. Exercising is for one thing, to create a happy body and feeling happy during the days. For those who have some additional money; you could get a good heart monitor and make sure you run with something as 130-140 in heart rate. This will control you not to run to fast or to slow. You could be walking till you have reduced the heart rate to be about 90-100, or feeling able to jog a bit more. If you are really interested in running you could invest in a polar heart monitor. I think the newest models also include a GPS plotting where you are running to Google Earth; it will also give altitude, speed you are running, how long distance you have been running and your heart beat. It might be motivating to see how much faster you run and how much calmer your heart rate get as your endurance and speed improve.

Relaxed jogging; this is the next step, you should by now be capable of running 5-6 km, or 30-40 minutes without needing a break, but still try not to push yourself to hard. You are exercising endurance, and shouldn’t use more energy than you have. I will also advice you to run a bit faster the last couple of hundred meters of your laps, and maybe some of the hills.

Interval; this one is rather simple; you start by 5-10 minutes relaxed jogging to warm up. After that you run with everything you have for 20-25 seconds, and a rest with slow jogging/walking for 45-50 seconds to calm down, one good to go we run for 20-25 seconds again

Fartslek; its closely related to interval, except we often don’t run fast for a certain time and running for a certain time, instead we mix relaxed jogging, walking and fast running as we wish too. An example could be 5 minutes relaxed jogging to warm up, 3 minutes jogging a bit faster, 1 minute a bit faster, a bit slower for 3 minutes and relaxed jogging for another 5 minutes. The time limits are of course just as examples; you could have as a goal to run full speed up every hill, and relax when running down, and bit faster when flat.

Hill running; this one will exercise speed, but you will also exercise stomach and back muscles as you will be running everything you can up a hill, and walk down again, run up etc.  (Please note; you should have warm muscles before starting to run uphill for full speed. You warm up your body by 5-10 minutes relaxed jogging)

-Kentaki-

As I mentioned in my previous article; I originally designed a 5 k training schedule for myself; but due to my brothers desire to run with me it was made modifications for all of us to run together.

To my surprise it worked better than I had hoped. Originally I planned three exercises each week. But somehow they get restless during Saturdays and want an additional run for that day. My original plan only had three days with exercises, but somehow these three days have become four days each week.

I also learned I was capable of running 5k without needing to walk within three weeks, however, I have maintained the original plan of having five weeks to achieve this. There might be people needing more than three weeks, and there might be people needing less than three weeks to be able to run 5k without resting.

Now; do you really believe running 5k is impossible for you? I have already proven that it is possible to start using this exercise schedule for 9 yrs old, 12 yrs old, and person (28) who hasn’t exercised for a year. So I would say most people should be able to do this exercise schedule. However; if there are health issues you should discuss the schedule with your doctor.  This is due to interval and hill running which might be hard for the health. If that’s the case I am sure the doctor still will allow you to jog slowly jog or walk 5k each day.

Anyway; in the first article I wrote that I colored the schedule as we were running. The days we are running we mark as green, as completed the exercise. If someone doesn’t exercise we punish them by marking it red. And days without exercising will be marked yellow. It’s fairly easy to color them, and somehow it gives some additional motivation, as no one really wants to see the red color. We are kind of creating shame for ourselves if we don’t complete the exercises. There is one more rule, if you got a day red, you could exercise the next day, color it green, and change yesterdays red to be blank and yellow. However; you can only change the colors during the present week, you can’t change from red to green next week, or use green colored from previous week.

Anyway; I found coloring the exercise schedule to be efficient to motivate my 9 yr old brother, but I also motivate him of how fun it will be running intervals in full speed and running hills in full speed. Somehow these exercises are more appealing for him than just walking/running.

And for the sake of argument, my 9 yrs old brother has swimming exercises Wednesdays while we also have jogging/running exercises. Those days I color green and mark with swimming training. This schedule isn’t meant to replace social training as football, basket swimming etc, but as additional training to improve speed and endurance (and later strength; you will need good arm, back and stomach muscles to run well)

-Kentaki-