If you’re a functional fitness athlete, chances are you’ve got a problem, and you don’t even know it. You’re really neglecting a huge aspect of your fitness, and it’s impacting your WOD performance more than you know. It’s…..running! Keep reading to see why running matters, and how it can help you on even the heaviest metcons. Plus you get a free 8 week running plan!
Rest assured that I’m not some skinny fat running nerd that’s trying to turn you into an endurance specialist. I’m a huge, hunky, fintess nerd, who many have compared to Rich Froning (unfavorably). I’m also the guy that’s trying to fix your conditioning so you can start kicking Carl’s ass in the 6 o’clock wod.
We athletes, have developed a somewhat myopic idea of what our training should look like. When I started doing functional fitness in 2007 it was much more bodyweight, and endurance based. Gradually over the years we’ve seen a transition to a more lifting centric version of functional fitness.
This is because strong athletes do better at life, but we as a community have taken this a bit far. I can tell you from personal experience that I’m just as guilty as anyone, and I should know better.
From around 2008-2013 I was training for the Marine Corps and I used functional fitness to do that. Due to my job requirements I had to maintain a high level of endurance and could run 3 miles in about 20:30 at that time. I also had a 2:58 Fran time, but I couldn’t squat more than 315 or so.
Fast forward 9 years and I can squat 405, my Fran is about 2:56, but my 3 mile is roughly 24 minutes. What gives? I’m much stronger, and I have a better Fran, but my run sucks!?
In this case I can very confidently point to my detrained aerobic and anaerobic systems, especially in the running domain. Effectively I’m using my stronger muscles to overcome my weak energy systems. This is why I’m actually faster at Fran now, but if you put my conditioning from 10 years ago with the strength I have now, I’d beat Matt Fraser I’m sure of it!
You’re probably saying great Jake, you suck, and we know this, but what does that matter to us? Well I will say in my professional coach and programmer guy opinion, that the whole of the functional fitness community has this problem.
Ask any athlete what kind of wods they least like to do, and the answer is almost always a running workout. And God help the coach who programs a run longer than 800m. There will be endless bitching and moaning.
If you want to learn how exactly to create your own custom workout program, including the step by step process we use to create awesome programs on this site. Check out my ebook!
Concurrent Endurance and Strength Training
In the academic world training both strength and endurance styles is called concurrent training. This has been much better studied than functional fitness and there are some studies that we can lean on to guide us in our program design.
This study compared Functional Endurance Programming (CFE) vs traditional Polarized training. CFE did 5 days per week of training 2 running, 1 wod and run day, and 2 wod only days. The polarized plan did 5 days per week of running.
There was also a notable style difference. CFE recommends a very high intensity in their running intervals, and rarely programs easy runs. Polarized training is mainly low intensity runs with a smaller percentage of high intensity.
I bet you expect me to tell you CFE won, well they didn’t and that really doesn’t matter. The polarized group improved their 5km run time by 6.20%, and the CFE group improved 5.49%. Statistically this isn’t much of a difference, but the polarized group ran a total of 283 min/week on average vs the 117 min/week for CFE. CFE obtained nearly the same result with 41% of the volume.
This study also compared high intensity interval training HIIT to more traditional cardio for power lifters and strongman athletes. They found that HIIT training yielded the better results.
It’s pretty clear that we need conditioning, and it needs to be intense. Without further ado, here is the 8 week running plan for functional fitness.
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Eight Week Running Plan for Functional Fitness
This plan is designed primarily to increase your overall conditioning through the use of running. Obviously you will get better at running, but I’m not trying to turn you into the terror of the local 5k circuit.
This plan is also designed to be added on to your current program, whether that is Tier Three programming or something else. You should choose the days you want to run on.
I also recommend you separate your functional training from your running by 3 hours or so, but you can perform the running wod at the end of your regular session it’ll just suck the life out of you.
You should perform a 1 mile time trial so you can get an accurate snapshot of where you are with your running. Many of the intervals will be based off of this pace, or your 5k pace. You can use this handy calculator to find the perfect pacing for the workouts.
Here is the PDF of the running plan for functional fitness.
WEEK 1
As you can see, there will be 3 days of running per week, and most of it will be on the higher intensity side, but pay close attention to the instructions as this shouldn’t be max effort all the time.
WEEK 2
This week increases in volume and intensity. If you have the ability to do the tabata day on a treadmill I highly recommend it. This is more effective than just running hills, but if you don’t have a treadmill you can still see great results with a good old fashioned hill.
WEEK 3
This week is as intense as it gets. The speed requirements are probably about as fast as you can manage given the specified volume. This is why you don’t want to treat these intervals as max effort because the first few will be really fast and then 4-8 will be worthless. Stick to the plan!
WEEK 4
This week is more or less a deload. This gives your body time to rest and repair from the running, and is actually where your improvements come from. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have any intensity, just a lower overall workload.
WEEK 5
This is the start of the last cycle, and as you will notice it is intense. This cycle is designed to increase your running speed which will cause your body to improve it’s ability to buffer lactate, as well as other metabolic waste products. By now you should be feeling much better in your wods as well.
WEEK 6
This week should feel very hard but doable, especially since you have been doing some hard running for about a month and a half at this point. You might find that some of your higher volume lifting sessions do impact your runs and vice versa. This is ok, just be smart when you do the runs, and complete it as best you can.
WEEK 7
This is the last, most intense week. I’m not going to lie, this is going to suck. There will be much bending over with hands on hips. Just get through it because the PRs are coming.
WEEK 8
This is the final deload. Take it easy and just follow the plan, because next week you will be doing another time trial. I recommend you wait three days after your last session then repeat your time trial.
You should aim for about a 5% decrease in overall running time.
Final Thoughts
You need to be smart with this running plan and realize that you probably won’t be setting too many lifting PR’s during this time. You should still perform heavy lifts, to maintain your proficiency with them, but running will slow down strength progression slightly. It doesn’t halt or reverse them like many gym bro’s erroneously believe when programmed smartly.
Don’t be afraid to eat more carbs for this program. I recommend you use the nutrition calculator to get a good idea of where you need to be with your nutrition.
Like always, work hard, ask any questions in the comments below, and remember, I never asked your safe word!
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Awesome!! So glad you did this. I really like how you did the explanation of what each run is (ie, VO2 max, speed day, etc.). It helps tie in with what you talked about in the ebook which was also a great buy.
However, will there be an update for the ebook which will include this new material (crossfit endurance and programming it)? I ask because I wanted to know if this would work best during a hypertrophy phase or the strength phase on the lifting side of things? How many WODs per week per each phase (hypertrophy/strength) in addition to these runs?
Finally, will this improve a 3 mile run time?
As of right now i’m not planning on adding to to the book. It might be a stand alone publication at some point however. I have found that adding it to strength training works the best as running can inhibit hypertrophy more so than strength. Try offsetting your cycles where you start run wod 1 on the second week of a strength program. That way you aren’t running hard and lifting hard on the same day.
For the hill sprints. What distance/time? Is it 20 seconds?
For these just pick a medium size hill thats decently steep and hit it about 90% effort. It’s not tabata at this point. Just challenging hill sprints.
Kinda confused by your article.
The one thing I always learned was to run a lot of easy miles at low effort to improve the aerobic base.
I would think the anaerobic base is already covered thanks to the wods we do.
Thats a fair point Hans. You are correct most WODs do cover anaerobic training, but a lot of the adaptation you receive is domain specific. A good example of this is Lance Armstrong. He was the best cyclist in the world, and he ran a marathon in 2hr 40 min which is a good time, but nothing amazing. Training is domain specific so if we want to improve running we need to work all energy systems in that specific domain. Jogging, all the way to sprinting.
Just curious but does the order matter? For example, start with column 2 first in the week then column 1 and 3 etc.
Each Column is a day. Day one on the left, day to the right etc.
Is there anyway that we could do this but on the assault bike (due to winter weather and the fact that I want to get better at it)?
If so do I do a mile test on the bike first or a 2 mile? How could I correlate your weekly program if to fit a bike? Pace? Etc
You sure could do this for assault bike. Just translate the intervals and tests into the equivalent interval by time. If a mile would take you about 8 minutes to run then you could do something like 8 min for max cal. A 400m run might take you 1:45 so you would do something around a 2 minute interval on the AB. Have fun!
hello i do comptrain should i skip some of the workouts to do this program i feel like it will be too much what you think? thanks for sharing this !
Actually probably not. I’d skip workouts that play to your strengths and sub in the runs.
Thank you Jake, im on middle of first wee so far so good, you think this will help me with my barbell cycling at all? like being able to hold on to the bar longer? or thats a different type of endurance work that needs to be practice separate. thanks again for the program im enjoying it.
It probably won’t help with barbell cycling unless your are talking light weights with very big sets. Most athletes put the weight down because of local fatigue in the active muscles and grip. It’s generally not their aerobic energy system limiting them.