Do you have too let legs recover?

I see too run a 10K I should be running a lot more miles through the week, but do you have to wait until, the pain goes from your legs?

 

i don't mean pain as in injury pain, I mean like the soreness from a workout? 

Comments

  • booktrunkbooktrunk ✭✭✭

    IMHO no, but maybe don't run to hard when you have aches in your legs. As you might be slightly more prone to injury so just be careful 

  • Id say no. I'm sure we can all remember the first session we did where our legs ached for nearly a week after. If you kept taking weeks off when you're legs ache you'd never get anywhere.



    Obviously if you are in severe discomfort then rest would be the only real cure... Just take your time, stretch before and after and eventually the aches will start to become minimal and you'll get a feel for your own body.
  • Are you blasting every session?

    If so you need some easier and/or shorter runs. Once you've got into the routine of running, your legs shouldn't feel sore after every run you do.

  • RicFRicF ✭✭✭

    You have to wait until the pain goes.

    There's plenty who argue otherwise. They get nowhere. slowly.

    🙂

  • CC82CC82 ✭✭✭

    I'm kind of making this up - "thinking out loud" if you will.

    I'm also guessing as to how much you are running based on the sort of thing I used to do.

    I used to go out and never run anything less than 3-4 miles, despite having not run for months sometimes.  I.e. "right, must go for a run and get back into it".  Off I would go, remembering that when I was running regularly, I would cover 4 miles in 28 minutes.  That was always the benchmark for me.  If it was over 30 minutes, I was disappointed in myself.

    My legs would always ache afterwards, and I would have to wait at least a couple of days before I could run again.

    I'm now a regular runner (instead of a footballer who occasionally runs) and run 5-6 times a week and my legs are fine after pretty much any session / race that I do these days, but I still run most of my miles "easy" and that's a good bit slower than the runs I was blasting back in the good old days when I didn't have a clue what I was doing!

    What I'm getting at is, I would have been better to firstly SLOW DOWN and run anything slower.  But, rather than going out and running 4 or 5 (or sometimes more) miles in one go and then having a forced few days of resting to get my legs back to normal, it may have been more beneficial to spread that distance over the course of the week.  So, running something like 1.5-2 miles at a time at an easy pace and doing that 4 or 5 times a week to begin with, rather than just thinking that to make a run worthwhile it had to be 4 miles or whatever.

    That's a bit of a ramble but if you look at the likes of the couch to 5k programmes etc. they go farther than that and have you running no more than 1 minute intervals to begin with.

    It's all about building up gradually.  If your legs are aching for days, then you're probably doing too much, or going too fast or both.  I certainly used to do both.  All the time!

     

  • CC82CC82 ✭✭✭

    I also meant to say that "recovery" runs the day after a workout are really there to prevent injury.  I.e. running a recovery run on sore legs isn't really what is meant.  Your legs may be tired (or they may not even feel that tired) but the main purpose is to get the blood flowing to the muscles to repair and rebuild the muscles quicker than if you were just resting.  It's important to keep the recovery pace very slow so that you're not putting added strain on already strained muscles.

    If your legs are "sore" then the chances are that they are already under too much strain and rest would be better than a recovery run.

    Again - that's just my view though, based on my own experience and what I've read/heard etc.

  • RicFRicF ✭✭✭

    Its results that count.

    I'll argue the toss for a while, but soon enough I'll take a step back and just get on with my own thing.

    Then we'll see who's right or not.

    In my experience, when leg muscles are damaged enough to hurt. Don't run. It only makes them worse. Wait until the pain subsides, note how long that took, then double it.

    Now you can run again.

    On half measures.

    Don't over do it.

    🙂

  • CC82CC82 ✭✭✭

    I think we agree RicF. image

  • RicFRicF ✭✭✭

    To add some weight to my view of this, I once ran a 16 mile point to point XC race. My quads were somewhat tested by this but no matter, I kept training.

    I never recovered for the entire summer and ended up fully injured at the end of it.

     

    🙂

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