How many times should I run a week? – 04/11/2024 – No Corre

One of the questions that everyone who starts running hopes to see answered is what is the ideal frequency, what is the optimal running dosage. Two, three, five times a week? Every day?

Fortunately or unfortunately, the answer is not unequivocal. It depends on each runner.

It is possible to have general ideas of how much conditioning is being gained, how much effort is too much and, less imprecisely, how much pleasure is involved. But the answer to the initial question remains tremendously subjective.

So let’s try to eat around the edges.

Even though I cannot conceive of running solely as an instrument for something, it can be used for certain purposes.

Exit from a sedentary lifestyle; improved conditioning; enthusiasm for work; weight loss; making new friends; liberation from social networks – or not, given the number of people who post their journeys and tests.

All these gains can come with three weekly practices, the canonical dosage of race advisors.

But running, like any physical activity, should be part of the normal daily routine for all of us. I share the idea of ​​educator Nuno Cobra, for whom physical activity is one of the three pillars of the proper functioning of our body, along with food and sleep.

In other words: it should be as natural and commonplace as eating (well, hopefully) and sleeping. If we eat and sleep every day, we should move every day.

Running nowadays doesn’t come very naturally to anyone, except perhaps for the Tarahumaras, the famous indigenous runners of Mexico, who, in order to carry out their daily obligations, need to cover dozens of kilometers in the middle of cliffs and mountains, and for this reason they run.

(No one asked, but rest assured: they don’t wear sneakers, they prefer thin homemade espadrilles.)

If it is important and rewarding to make physical activity routine, if possible daily, in our case running, this small truism is worth: run if you discover that you really enjoy running.

We don’t always admit that we don’t enjoy something we do, let’s say, voluntarily. When I was a teenager, it took me two months to stop smoking, something that, if I remember correctly, gave me zero pleasure.

(I must have been one of the last idiots of the generation who thought the ogival shape on the Marlboro packaging was cool and the argument that it lifted the consumer.)

“I like to run?” is the first question the goat should ask himself.

And yes, you can only know by trying it.

With all this, it must be said: not even the greatest running evangelist will disagree with the observation that it does very little, or nothing, for the upper limbs. Even certain leg muscles, those stimulated in the abductor chair, for example, are left out.

That’s why it’s great to mix running with other activities, weight training, swimming, pilates, functional training with some emphasis on the arms.

But if you don’t have the patience for any of that and running gives you pleasure and an absurd disposition for everyday life, you can try monoculture. It is good to know, however, that it is recommended to rotate the plantation so as not to tire the soil too much.

A reader of this Sheet informs me that there are DNA tests that help to map the vocation for physical activity. Hit him with a stick.

For my part, I don’t think that knowing your own genetic predisposition is much more valuable than following the old recommendation that Don Juan gives to the writer Carlos Castañeda, when he asks him, at the opening of “The Devil’s Herb”, how he will be able to sleep , directly on the ground, on the threshold of the old shaman’s house:

“Find your point.”

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