BLOG: Fitness coach Jamie Kennedy on how to boost your Pennine 10k time

Others will be wanting to just feel more comfortable doing the run.

Either way, we have a few more weeks left to help increase our fitness levels and a great way to do this is through interval training.

Interval training is, at the moment, one of the biggest methods of fitness training and has been around for years and is widely recognised as one of the best ways to improve cardiovascular fitness.

There have been plenty of variations over the years – all with benefits to endurance athletes.

The variations include “time intervals” and “distance intervals”.

There are also slightly different methods that have a similar effect on the body but are mainly for higher trained individuals these include the latest method “high intensity interval training” (HIIT) and “Farklet training”.

For the run I would suggest using time or distance intervals as these can generally be sustained for a long period or short period of time and don’t have to be only for advanced runners.

A timed interval could be as simple as a 30 second walk followed by 30 seconds jogging then repeated over several minutes and is easily progressed by increasing time ie. 20 second walk followed by 40 seconds running.

You can also keep with that same time interval but increase the intensity of you your work out buy running faster.

Distance intervals are one of my preferred techniques and are easy to use you use distance as a marker for example 1km steady followed by 100m fast or something a simple as using land marks for example five lamp posts steady and fast for two lamp posts.

A typical hour-long session using interval training would look like this.

Ten minutes steady state jogging as a warm up followed by 15 minutes increasing your speed to a comfortable pace.

Then five intervals of 20 seconds work 40 seconds rest.

This is followed by five intervals of 30 seconds work 30 seconds rest.

Finally complete five intervals of 40 seconds work 30 seconds rest. Don’t forget to do 10 minutes steady state running at the end followed by a 10 minute cool down and stretches.

The next blog we will be looking at diet and training the week before a run.

There is still time to sign up to run the Jane Tomlinson Pennine Lancashire 10k which takes place in Burnley on Sunday, June 2nd, by visiting www.forallevents.co.uk.