The myth of the 10% rule. People who increased the mileage by 50% per week had same injury rate as those that did it 10%.

I realized this was BS years ago.

Well that's good, cuz I'm about to do some irresponsible sh!t.

Look at these studies though. These are runners that started at incredibly low mileage. Some of them started at 4 miles a week. So yeah I can run 6 miles the next week and then 9 miles and then 12.5 and then 18.5 the next week.

But if I go from my current 40miles a week to 60 in ONE week I guarantee you I'll get at least some niggles. So context of studies is EVERYTHING. The takeaway is: A beginner runner starting

runningchick wrote:

Look at these studies though. These are runners that started at incredibly low mileage. Some of them started at 4 miles a week. So yeah I can run 6 miles the next week and then 9 miles and then 12.5 and then 18.5 the next week.

But if I go from my current 40miles a week to 60 in ONE week I guarantee you I'll get at least some niggles. So context of studies is EVERYTHING. The takeaway is: A beginner runner starting

at

A 2008 study.....?

Modern science! You heard it on LRC...eventually.

That's like a Runner's World thing to give people an excuse not to run a lot.

Alllll the miles wrote:

Well that's good, cuz I'm about to do some irresponsible sh!t.

I don't know why, but this post made me laugh out loud at my desk.

The 10% rule never made any sense. As the study shows it's meaningless for low mileage and it's worse for high mileage: following the 10% rule, a person running 100mpw should be able to safely increase mileage to 1,000mpw in 6-months. Really the rule should be don't increase more than 5 mpw for low-mileage runners and 10mpw for high-mileage runners.

Coffee Monster wrote:

Alllll the miles wrote:

Well that's good, cuz I'm about to do some irresponsible sh!t.

I don't know why, but this post made me laugh out loud at my desk.

Me too, it hit the spot.

There's an obvious reason that the 10% rule is bogus: you'd never be allowed to start running in the first place if you followed it.

At some point in your life, you were running zero miles per week. A ten percent increase on zero miles per week is...zero miles per week. The 10% rule literally says that no one should ever run. I guess this would technically eliminate running injuries, but it's obviously not optimal for performance.

Some discussion on mileage increase strategies here:

https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=8519125

Did anyone seriously think this was a rule rather than a very broad guideline?

So the high mileage increase group had more injuries in 8 weeks than the low group had in 13, and this is supposed to be compelling? What do you think would happen given another 5 weeks? Garbage study.

If people followed the 10% rule when they started running, they would never get above 0 because 0 is 10% of 0.

The study is quite pointless.

A simple thought experiment combined with knowledge of the human body can put some reason and logic into where the 10% rule applies.

The rules around increasing mileage are all to do with the fact that your CV fitness increases much faster than the muscles/tendons/ligaments and bone can adapt to the new loads. So holding oneself back can help avoid injury.

Running 3 miles in a week for a healthy weight human does not put much strain on the connective tissue and bones of a human. Increasing that to 7 miles a week or one mile a day would still be well within the stress capabilities of human structural tissues. That is a 233% increase. That could quite easily be followed up with another 3-6 mile increase for an average of 100% increase across 3 weeks with very little chance of injury. The load is still small.

If a runner is doing 70 miles a week then decided to increase to 77 the next then 85 that is a large increase in load on a body which is already significantly stressed. Bones and ligaments have little time to recover and adapt. The chance for injury is much greater than in the former example.

The 10% rule is a joke and everyone with a brain knows it.

ex-runner wrote:

The 10% rule is a joke and everyone with a brain knows it.

It's not a hard and fast rule, it's just a rule of thumb- it's easy to remember and errs on the side of caution.

everyone with a brain knows it.

The 10% group trained 5 weeks longer then the other group. I would think one group training a lot longer then the other group would skew the results. I am not in love with the 10% rule just something I noticed.

Alllll the miles wrote:

Well that's good, cuz I'm about to do some irresponsible sh!t.

Hahahaha

Elvin wrote:

There's an obvious reason that the 10% rule is bogus: you'd never be allowed to start running in the first place if you followed it.

At some point in your life, you were running zero miles per week.

How do you think you got to the egg? Walked?? Hell no. You run to that egg and you get in there first.

I read the study a while back and was comforted that I could increase mileage by 50% for 8 weeks. I'm on my 8th weekly increase now. Here's my mileage, by week:

40

60

90

135

202

304

456

683

1,025

I feel pretty good. I've been eating more gels during my runs, and my nipples and groin are like saddle leather, but other than that, I feel about the same.