Running News Daily

Pick up your pace with a ladder workout, add some variety to your interval sessions while boosting speed

Ladder workouts are beautifully simple and can be adapted to any training plan. You can run them outside, take them to a treadmill,  or make them into a track or stair workout. The concept of a ladder is simple: each interval gets either longer or shorter (or both), as if you’re climbing up or down rungs. Once you’re familiar with the layout of ladder workouts, they can be fairly simple to create and tweak on your own depending on your running needs. Here are two basic ladder workouts that build on increasing speed.

45-minute ascending ladder workout

10 minutes easy running

10 minutes at half-marathon pace

15 minutes at 10K pace

10 minutes easy running

8-kilometer track ladder workout

1,200 meters easy running

800 meters at 10K pace

1,200 meters at 5K pace

1,600 meters at 3K pace

1,200 meters at 5K pace

800 meters at 10K pace

1,200 meters easy running

Once you’ve mastered these ladder sessions, you can tweak the workouts to make them more challenging by increasing the pace in each portion, the distance (or both, if you’re really ready for a challenge). Remember to follow a speedwork session with any easy or recovery running day, and hydrate well.