The cardio guide

How do you start running, and how far can you take it?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 15, 202610 sources

Start by running for a minute and walking for a minute and a half, three times a week, and build up to 30 minutes of running over 9 weeks or more. Run slowly. In 55,137 adults, runners had 30% lower risk of death than people who didn’t run, and even 5 to 10 minutes a day at under 6 mph went with that lower risk.

Most people who decide they “aren’t runners” decided it in the first five minutes. They set off at the pace they remember from school, get a stitch and a burning chest by the end of the street, and walk home sure that their body isn’t built for it. Their body was usually fine. The pace was too fast and the first run was too long. The other way new runners go wrong comes a few weeks later, when it starts to feel good and they double their distance.

How do you go from the couch to a 5K?

The best known plan is the NHS’s Couch to 5K, and it’s free. You run 3 times a week with a rest day between runs. In week 1 you run for 60 seconds and walk for 90, over and over, at a pace that suits you. Each week you run a little more, until you run 30 minutes without stopping. The NHS says to take 9 weeks or longer, whatever works for you, and the app is free on the App Store and Google Play, with a web version and a PDF too.

How does Couch to 5K work? has the plan in more detail. Any run-walk plan built the same way does the same job.

How slow is too slow?

Slower than you think is fine. In 2014, researchers followed 55,137 adults for an average of 15 years. People who ran had 30% lower risk of death from any cause and 45% lower risk of dying of heart disease than people who didn’t. The surprise was that the slow, short runners did about as well as everyone else: running 5 to 10 minutes a day at under 6 mph, slower than a 10-minute mile, went with markedly lower risk.

Even a slow jog is hard exercise by the guideline’s count. In the Compendium of Physical Activities, a jog-and-walk mix is 6 METs and a 13-minute mile is 6.5, both past the line where every minute counts as two.

A 20-minute jog three times a week is 60 hard minutes, which counts as 120 toward your 150. What counts as exercise? has the rule.

Does more running mean more benefit?

The studies couldn’t see a clear extra drop. In 2020, a team pooled 6 cohorts with 232,149 people. Any running went with 27% lower risk of death from any cause, 30% from heart disease and 23% from cancer, against no running. When they looked at how often, how long, how fast and how much people ran, none of them showed a clear trend. Their conclusion was that running even once a week beats not running, and more isn’t necessarily better.

One big study didn’t find it. In 80,306 British adults, swimming, cycling and racket sports went with lower risk of death, but running showed no clear difference. We’d still go with the pooled review, since it combined 6 cohorts and 232,149 people, but it’s a reminder that these are studies of people who chose to run, and runners differ from non-runners in other ways too.

How do you avoid getting hurt?

New runners get hurt a lot more than experienced ones. In a 2015 review, people new to running had 17.8 injuries for every 1,000 hours of running, against 7.7 for recreational runners.

The usual advice is the 10% rule, adding no more than a tenth to your distance each week. When Dutch researchers tested it on 532 new runners training for a short recreational race, the 13-week plan built on the 10% rule didn’t help: 20.8% got injured, against 20.3% on a standard 8-week plan. About one in five got hurt either way.

What does seem to make a difference is the big jump. In another study, 874 new runners wore GPS watches for a year and 202 of them got injured. People who added more than 30% to their weekly distance over two weeks had more of the overuse injuries that come from distance, like runner’s knee and shin splints, than people who added under 10%. It was an early study and the result was borderline, but the authors’ advice is easy to follow: keep each two-week jump under about a third.

A picture from daily life

Building up your running is like turning up a speaker. Go up a notch at a time and it sounds great at a volume that would have hurt your ears on day one. Jump from 2 to 10 and something gives. The 10% rule is one way to turn the dial, and a run-walk plan is another, and the evidence says the size of the jumps counts for more than the exact rule.

Will running ruin your knees?

For most people it seems to go the other way. In a 2017 review of studies with 125,810 people, 3.5% of recreational runners had arthritis in the hip or knee, against 10.2% of people who didn’t run and 13.3% of elite and international competitors. The authors couldn’t tell whether running caused any of it, since earlier injuries and other things could explain part of the difference. But the picture of recreational running wearing out ordinary knees doesn’t show up.

What comes after 5K?

Once you can run for 30 minutes, you’ve got the base, and what you do next depends on what you want. For health, keep running two or three times a week, mostly at an easy pace where you can talk in sentences. That’s the steady cardio that builds most of your fitness (zone 2, in plain words).

If you want to get fitter or faster, make one run a week hard. Across 28 trials, steady training raised VO2 max by about 4.9 ml/kg/min and interval training by about 5.5, so the hard session adds a bit on top of the easy ones. Hill repeats, a few fast minutes in the middle of a run, or the Norwegian 4x4 all work. Steady or intervals? has the patterns, and vo2max.guide has the fitness number and the 4x4.

A 10K or a half marathon is the same idea stretched out: one longer run a week, added to slowly, with the same small jumps.

What we still don’t know

All of the death-rate studies here followed people who chose to run, so they show lower risk in groups, never a promise to one person. Nobody has run a trial of the NHS plan against other ways of starting, and the injury studies used different definitions of an injury. What they agree on is the shape of a good start: slow runs, walk breaks, rest days and small jumps.