A few months ago we in this blog some tips to start running, and later others to keep running. But there is an issue worth addressing in more detail, and I found that deserved its own article: it’s improved performance. Here are some tips.

Start gradually

A common mistake for beginners is to want immediate results. Like when you want to lose weight takes time and effort, when you want to get in shape and improve your performance, you have to go through a curve progression. Tampering is not only counterproductive but discourages you and exposes you to different medical risks (damage, heart problems, among other things).

So when you start running, you have to take it calmly, look out realistic goals, and be consistent. You can get to run a short distance for a week, then increase the following week, and so on. Then you can try to run a little faster, but always climbing the rungs of tranquility and difficulty with time.

Measure progress

It seems obvious, but many people who want to improve their performance do not measure their progress. Today you have many monitoring tools, from the Smartphone to the stopwatch lifetime, through the smart bracelets that measure you pulse, time and distance. If you take the trouble to measure your results, the better you see your progress and you will notice if you are failing in your perseverance. Because often, people start looking forward, but eventually sports sessions are spaced out, which of course influences on performance.

Do a stress test

When you have more experience and have already reached a good level of fitness, to go a step further you may need to perform a stress test. It is a medical test that often subjects the elite athletes, as well as certain patients with heart disease.

What does it consist of? Usually, it comes to perform the incremental exercise, usually on a treadmill or a stationary bike, while the behavior of the organism by an electrocardiogram and gas analysis (your breath) is measured.

The main interest of a stress test is ruled out that any medical problems that prevent us from playing sports at high intensity but also to gain insight into our performance, to adapt the training accordingly. Data are obtained as maximum heart rate, the VO2 max (the maximum consumption of oxygen the body can assume), and other data such as aerobic and anaerobic thresholds. With this information, we will know how hard we have to run to improve our strength, what we can run full speed without accumulating too much fatigue, etc.