I generally don't agree with Will because of my disdain for any type of fitness blogger. But, I sort of agree.
That being said, I think running needs to be looked at as a sport specific type of thing. So, if I were to tell you that figure skating is THE most beneficial activity ever, but you had zero interest in it, what good would it do to advocate that you start skating twirly shit?
You can't have an honest conversation about running without talking definitions. What do you call a jog? What about an interval, or repeat? How about a tempo or threshold run? What I'd consider a jog, that is easy pace running in which you can have a conversation, is terrible when you consider the time vs benefit. For those runs to be beneficial, they need to be long, much longer than most people would want to. For a fit person, they are very easy to recover from. Hence, its a way to accumulate a lot of miles, a yard stick by which a lot of runners measure themselves.
If you're a person trying to loose weight, its a terribly inefficient way of doing it. If your diet isn't dialed in, you definitely can't outjog junk calories. You also run into the problem of taking someone who is fat AF and completely sedentary and telling them to jog for whatever amount of time. They can't do it or if they can, its too hard to be sustainable. Weight training is much more incrementally loadable.
The problem with intervals or repeats is that most people don't do them hard enough to be beneficial. An interval is slower with a relatively short jog recovery, a repeat is faster generally with a walk recovery of sufficient duration to enable the next repeat to be preformed at the target pace.
I strongly caution about walking , just because I've observed way too many horrible incline treadmill walkers. The ones where they hold onto the machine and lean back to they're perpendicular the treadmill's belt, and thereby no longer walking at an incline. Pure hot trash. A close tie to the stair machine people who are all melted over and leaning onto the machine. If you can't walk those stairs with your arms at your side, go do something else.
Bottom line, if running doesn't appeal to you, don't do it. There's other stuff you may enjoy. If you like running, don't let people talk you out of your chosen activity. They're likely not runners anyway.
Of all the running plans I have come across, Run Less Run Faster is my favorite. The workouts are hard, but there's much less of them. There's less junk miles.
The Army seems to be moving in the direction of RLRF as well. The exercises to improve the 2-mile run for time are intervals, hill repeats and what could be considered a temp run; that is running at a pace you could maintain for an hour during a race; comfortably hard running. That particular pace has a lower physical benefit that the other two in my experience, but has a mental toughness aspect to it. No running on consecutive days either. The recovery time in the Army's new doctrine and RLRF was one of my biggest likes, being 41 years old now.
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Originally Posted by WillBrink
But it seems like this has not been widely understood among all distance runners, especially LD ones.
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