7 tips to improve your running speed

1. Find your race pace

To train yourself to run faster, you have to first become familiar with your different running paces. If you’re aiming to achieve a specific finishing time, you’ll need to know what speed to maintain during the race to ensure you hit this target. The easiest way to establish this is to take your current fastest time for the distance you’ll be racing and work out how long it takes you to run each kilometre. This is your current race pace, and you need to improve it if you’d like to run faster.

2. Vary your training

If you’ve been running for a while, one of the main reasons you might not be seeing an improvement in your speed is that you’ve hit a plateau.

This can be down to a number of reasons, the first being that you don’t have enough variety in your running routine. How many times do you say to yourself, ‘I’m going for a run’ and that’s it? You might have a distance or total time in mind, but that’s as complicated as it gets. However, varying your types of run and running workouts will enable you to work on speed, strength and endurance and that’s why it’s important to take the time to plan out your sessions, especially if you’re looking to get faster.

If you’re looking for speed, try and build in some interval training or Fartlek runs. These types of workouts give you an opportunity to experience faster paces and will help your overall speed improve as well. It’s a good idea to reserve time for one session a week for this training if you want to build speed.

3. Build speed

During training sessions, practise running at faster speeds for shorter distances. Begin with 100m, 200m or 400m bursts, running a little faster than your current race pace, and allow yourself a few minutes between each period of faster running to recover. Progressively work up to 400m, 800m and 1K at a faster pace. Once you’ve practised this a few times you’ll get a feel for the race pace that will suit you and that you’ll need to maintain to achieve your faster time.

At this point your focus should be on increasing the distance over which you can maintain this pace and decreasing the periods of slower recovery running. This will be most easily achieved by mixing up your training sessions to include some short, fast interval training, some longer intervals and plenty of practice at your new race pace. It’s a great idea to also include some hill training for extra leg strength and stamina.

As you train harder, remember to focus on your breathing and maintain a fluid running style at all times. It’s important to stay relaxed, whatever speed you’re aiming for. Once you’ve worked on your speed, it’s time to plan your race-day tactics.

4. Avoid overtraining

Overtraining can really get in the way of a faster running goal. We’re also more at risk of overtraining when we’re pushing ourselves . If you’re working towards a specific time goal and you want to get faster, it can be tempting to put all your effort into running or to do every run at a hard pace, but there is a limit to what you can do. Overtraining can lead to injury, as you’re not resting enough and not giving your muscles and the rest of your body enough time to recover and adapt between training sessions.

If you’ve noticed that you’ve stopped making progress, you’re feeling more fatigued and feeling that training is requiring a lot more effort than usual, you could be overtraining. If that’s the case, take a break from your running schedule. Allow yourself to recover, then build running sessions back in one at a time, until you find a sweet spot that allows you to make progress without compromising your health.

5. Run slowly

This might sound silly in an article all about increasing your speed! But it’s really important to keep slow, steady runs in your training plan. It’s very easy to add the speed work mentioned above into every session, but this can lead to overtraining. Keep some ploddy runs in your routine. Learning more about the 80-20 running method can help you to plan this out.

Image: Canva

6. Prepare your body for running faster

For a regular run, a quick 5-minute running warm-up should suffice. But if you’re looking to do interval training or hit a PB, it’s really important to put a bit more effort in to increase performance and reduce injury risk. Include some more explosive movements to prime your muscles for speed, and include some activation exercises for your lower body muscles to make sure they’re ready to support you through your run.

Don’t forget to cool down, too – walk briskly for at least five minutes when you’re finished running and try these stretches for recovery.

7. Don’t just run

Incorporating strength training into your weekly schedule can make a big difference to your running speed. Stronger muscles generate more power with each stride, helping you run faster and more efficiently. Focus on compound movements like squats, deadlifts and lunges to build strength in your legs, glutes and core, all key muscle groups for runners. Just one or two sessions a week can lead to noticeable improvements in both speed and injury resilience.

8. Revamp your running playlist

We all know that a good running playlist can make all the difference to our runs. Research has shown that music with a faster BPM can help us to run faster while we’re listening. Most music-hosting platforms offer running playlists based on a certain BPM – experiment to find a good rhythm for you and feel the difference!

Looking for workouts to help you get faster? Try these treadmill sessions.