Running 6 or 7 days a week?

day completely off is detrimental, your legs get stiff and you don't recover any more than if you'd done a short run

Your body doesn't know what a week is. What I mean by that is, it doesn't "reset" after Sunday and get you back to full strength on Monday.

Eventually, your body will need to rest, and that may mean 48 hours or even more time for your body to respond from training. But training, by and large, is about being able to stress your body and have it recover quickly.

That's why you see a lot of guys who double 5-6 times a week. They have trained to a point where their body essentially recovers in 12 hours the way that most people take 24 hours. So they are able to get more work n each day.

So to answer your question of "What level of runner do you have to be before you start running every day...?": You just need a be a little bit better. I say jump into it, and in 3-4 weeks, it will not seem strange at all.

Pay no attention to all the "high mileage" advocates on this board. You can have immense success on three days of training per week: One intense interval workout; one tempo run; one long run. Ride a bike or do some other sort of cross-training on the non-running days. But the running days have to be very high quality.

That will get you where you need to be as a high school runner. You may need to bump up your running to 5 days/week if you complete beyond high school, but there's no need to run more than 65-70 mpw. Anything beyond that is just junk mileage.

vr3cf1dw wrote:

My High School team has always run 6 days a week (excluding Sunday since its against the law to hold a school organized sports practice on a Sunday) and used the reason that you need to rest once every week. On LetsRun I see so many threads where people's schedules consist of running every day of the week and only take a rest day once a month or not at all and they just take a super easy run that day instead. What level of runner do you have to be before you start running every day and don't need that rest day anymore?

If you really loved running, you'd find a way to work out 8 days a week.

Most of the time I run 6 days a week, and it's not really because of the rest, it's because having that 1 day gives me a day to push in any of the "life happens" stuff.

So if I need to schedule a doctor appointment, car work, meet friends etc.. I push it to that 1 day I have off from running.

Quality Over Quantity wrote:

Pay no attention to all the "high mileage" advocates on this board. You can have immense success on three days of training per week: One intense interval workout; one tempo run; one long run. Ride a bike or do some other sort of cross-training on the non-running days. But the running days have to be very high quality.

That will get you where you need to be as a high school runner. You may need to bump up your running to 5 days/week if you complete beyond high school, but there's no need to run more than 65-70 mpw. Anything beyond that is just junk mileage.

Nice troll. But just for fun- name a successful HS runner who runs only 3 days per week.

Jon Lennon wrote:

vr3cf1dw wrote:

My High School team has always run 6 days a week (excluding Sunday since its against the law to hold a school organized sports practice on a Sunday) and used the reason that you need to rest once every week. On LetsRun I see so many threads where people's schedules consist of running every day of the week and only take a rest day once a month or not at all and they just take a super easy run that day instead. What level of runner do you have to be before you start running every day and don't need that rest day anymore?

If you really loved running, you'd find a way to work out 8 days a week.

I work out 10 times a week.

Better than you wrote:

I work out 10 times a week.

Yeah, but how many days?

If you really feel the need for a day off take one. Otherwise you should run every day and twice on at least some of those days.

Name a HS runner who anyone cares about (other than their parents and a handful of college coaches who in turn nobody cares about).

There are maybe 12 runners on Earth that matter... the rest of us are middle of the pack.