John's 10:1 Training Concept

The ten to one concept is a fairly simple concept. You run for ten minutes and walk for one. It can help in a many ways:

• helps beginners or heavy runners to increase their endurance to 5K, 10K, or even the marathon in as soon as 6 months.
• help runners of all ages to improve times because legs are strong at the end.
• reduces the chance of injury and overtraining to almost nothing.
• bestow the endurance for runners of all abilities to go beyond "the wall"

By alternating walking and running from the start, there's virtually no limit to the distance you can cover. The Running Room clinics have graduated 100's of people in their 40's and 50's with no exercise background who have used the walk-run method to complete a marathon.

Using this method will extend the capacity of the running muscles at the end of the run because you're shifting the workload between the walking and the running muscles. It will also allow those with some types of previous injuries to knees, etc., to train for marathons without further injury.

Walk breaks force you to slow down early in the run so that you don't start too fast. This reduction of the intensity of muscle use from the beginning conserves your energy , fluids and muscle capacity. On each walk break, the running muscles make internal adaptations, which give you the option to finish under control, increase the pace or go even further.