If, like me, you’ve over-indulged at Christmas, you may be thinking about going out running to work some of the Christmas cake / turkey / chocolate-covered marzipan off. You may, like me previously, have not done serious running before and thought, “How hard can it be?”. After a run with my wife on New Year’s Day several years ago, as we were recovering from our frozen alveoli, I said (between pain-wracked sobs) “There must be an easier way to do this” – and there was.
First, get over the idea of actual, proper running – all I do is a jog, about 5 – 5.5mph, that’s what I call running. I’ll sometimes throw in sprints, but we’ll get to that later, this is all about starting running.
Next, get yourself some decent running shoes and a place to start running – a local park is good, I would recommend running on grass to start with, or a treadmill in the gym if you’re a member. You will also need a stopwatch, or at least a digital watch, but if you’re on a treadmill, you’ll have a timer regardless.
Now, the system. What we are going to do is do some cardiovascular exercise for twenty minutes in total (to start with). We’ll start by splitting the twenty minutes into two ten minute sections. After a gentle stretch, you start off by walking for nine minutes, and the jogging for one. Jog at a pace you feel comfortable with, do not try and run, just jog. Repeat that for the other ten minutes, and you’re done – have another stretch to cool down.
Repeat this routine again in the same week, and if you have the time, once more – I feel that 2 – 3 times is optimum. Concentrate, because here comes the magic science part: next time you go out, walk for eight minutes and jog for two, and repeat that twice. Same twenty minutes of exercise, but you’ve jogged a little while longer. Repeat that a couple more times, then go out for a seven minute walk, three minute jog twice, etc. Stick to the twenty minute sessions for now.
You are basically doing a form of progressive resistance training, a phrase coined by the inventors of the Nautilus fitness machines back in the 70s. As your body gets used to the jogging, it can do more of it, and the minute (in time) increases are not too much of a shock, e.g. not going out and running straight away.
Of course, this is not set in stone. You may feel like you can jog for three minutes after a seven minute walk and skip the eight minute walk and the two minute jog. That’s fine, but make sure you are able to do both ten minute sections of the same division – if you can’t, you may have moved on a bit too early. That said, you may quickly adapt to the program and find you can skip up quite quickly – especially of you’re out two to three times a week. If you’re not, don’t worry, it’ll just take a little while longer.
The goal of the first part of the program is to stretch, walk for a minute, and then run for nine minutes and repeat that twice. In other words, two minutes walking and eighteen minutes jogging in total. When youre happy with that, try cutting out your middle minute of walking, e.g. walk five minutes and then jog fifteen minutes non-stop. This should not be too hard, as by the end of the first stage of the program you’ll have already been jogging for eighteen minutes, just not non-stop. The ultimate goal of the first part of the program is walk one minute, jog nineteen.
You will also want to record your progress, not least so that you can see improvement, but so you don’t forget what you did last time (I frequently had that problem). I’d suggest recording the date and a notation similar to “w4 j6 x 2″, which would mean “walked four minutes, jogged six, twice”. Hey, there’s probably an app for that on the iPhone, but this program won’t cost you anything 
Once you’ve done the walk one, jog nineteen a few times, try to increase your time to thirty minutes in total. For this, I’d suggest going to a five minute walk, five minute jog section for three repetitions, e.g. thirty minutes in total. And as before, as you get used to it, the amount of time spent walkng will decrease per section and the amount of time spent jogging will increase. For this second stage, again you’d be looking at doing one minute walk, nine minute jog for three repetitions. And then forty minutes, etc.
Note: The body can take a while to start burning fat under cardiovascular exercise, usually about twenty minutes. This is why it’s advisable to do at least 30 minutes of exercise, even if it’s just walking and jogging
But if you’re time-constrained, you can keep at twenty minutes and work on your speed. As an old friend (a thoroughly decent chap called Richard Brentnall) once told me, “First you work on your distance, and then work on your speed”. Once you’re up to the one minute walk, nine minute jog x 2, slowly increase the speed that you jog at. You may do this for only part of the nine minute section, or all of it, or only once and that’s fine: listen to your body. By this stage in the program, your body will have already told you a lot, and you should know when you can increase your speed. For extra fun (?) you can even through in a fast sprint (or run) for the last 30 seconds or minute.
That’s about it, but I may edit this in a bit. This approach has worked for me, I hope it will work for you – have a Happy and Healthy New Year!
