The aerobic base is built at low speeds. By building your endurance & aerobic capacity through easy running, you are becoming a more efficient, stronger, fitter, and YES- faster, runner! Easy runs give your body a huge range of benefits and leave you ready to push hard on your speed work days. I get so many questions on how to build your endurance and how to improve your heart rate— this is it 🚨 watch above 👆🏽 read more below 👇🏽 A common ‘trap’ endurance or new runners make is spending too much time in the moderate / grey zone, which doesn’t build aerobic capacity as effectively as low intensity effort, and isn’t hard enough to get the adaptations from higher intensity, and also requires more recovery time... which results in plateau, burnout or injury 🤧 A guideline I use with myself & my athletes is 80% easy + 20% moderate or hard effort— that being said, there may be phases of training where distribution includes more easy, more hard, or more moderate effort runs depending on your experience & goals of your current training phase 🏃🏽‍♀️ ALSO— your body doesn’t know “pace”, it only knows effort. That’s why we use things like heart and rate of perceived exertion to help us find our easy effort zone! If you are out of breathe or your heart rate is sky high on an “easy run” then you NEED to slow it down or embrace the run walk method as your running fitness improves 🫀 I hope this was helpful. What do you want next?? Your race your pace 🤙🏽 #commitwithmelissa