The 5 Training Mistakes Sabotaging Your Progress

As coaches, we see athletes making mistakes consistently in training. The important thing to remember is making mistakes in training is an important part of developing as an athlete. Misjudging effort, underestimating routes and pushing too hard are part and parcel with the process of training for running. Mistakes aren’t inherently bad; they’re part of learning. But when they become habits, they stall progress. Here are the five most common training mistakes we see as coaches, and how to avoid them.

1. Training where you want to be and not where you are Unless you're aiming to qualify on time for the Olympics and World Championships, the best thing you can do for your development is to train where you currently are. A lot of us have the luxury of being able to build training on our own timeline, which means the training you plan should look like the training you can recover from and absorb. 'Repeatability' is an important training theme that works for a lot of the year, because framing training through this lens leads to consistency over the long term. What does repeatability look like? Not doing anything in training that causes you to take a long break or pause in training to recover from. Practically this might mean reducing the intensity of your workouts and running less volume while you absorb and adapt to training. 2. Going too hard, too soon in workouts This is often paired with a decoupling of perceived ability and execution, or people running above their pay grade and bombing workouts. A nice example of this is threshold workouts, which can be understandable as the term is embedded in a confusing jungle of semantics. In a series of threshold intervals with short recovery, a lot of people tend to run their first rep too fast, subsequently decreasing the quality of the remaining intervals and increasing the cost of recovery post session. Depending on interval duration and the volume of the session, we like to frame threshold workouts as an opportunity to spend some time in the 'middle' of the first and second threshold. This sets the athlete up to finish the workout with momentum and steers training towards that theme of repeatability.

3. Going too long in the weekend long run and not fuelling the demands of the activity We've all misjudged the distance of a route, taken a wrong turn here and there and ended up running much longer than intended. This only becomes problematic if you make going longer than planned or than you're ready to run a consistent theme of the weekend. Under fuelling the long run and/or going way longer than planned can very quickly turn a purposeful run into a waste of time and energy, also putting more stress on the running sessions that follow the long run. Don't let the long run impact your ability to train throughout the week.

4. Not being able to zoom out Not enjoying a run or missing the mark in a workout or a long run are all normal parts of training. These experiences don't speak to your ability and are not always an accurate representation of the progress you are making. The ability to 'zoom out' with an understanding of context is an important skill to harness. Running a bad workout that lasts for 30 minutes equates to 0.0057% of your year. Any additional time you spend dwelling on that gradually starts to increase that percentage. Zoom out, control the controllables and let everything else be.

5. Jumping on trends

Spend any amount of time on social media and you're bound to come across someone trying to sell you a product or an idea that will revolutionise your training. In the past few years we've seen a few of these come and go, some with more success than others. As a coach, I'll always prioritise long term aerobic development over short-term gains, as there are no shortcuts. This means training doesn't always look exciting or interesting on paper. The single most important thing to remember is that recreational runners can spend more time focusing on the simplicity of the 99% (consistency, meeting energy demands, sleep) than worrying about introducing the 1%. Experimentation can have a place, but if it disrupts consistency, it isn’t worth the trade-off. Master the basics, avoid the noise, and progression will follow.