Here, David Nilsson, one of Sweden’s best long-distance runners, describes a typical training week in his life.
David uses a weighted blanket from Novista to recover as effectively as possible. More effective recovery allows you to train more and harder, thereby increasing your maximum performance.
With temperatures hovering around zero degrees this week in March, I suspect there may be more runners and fitness enthusiasts than just me who are struggling with motivation. For me, it helps immensely if the days of the week don’t all feel exactly the same, but instead offer varied workouts in terms of setting, pace, surface, or approach.
I’d like to share this with you by describing a full week’s worth of workout days to provide various examples of how you can potentially vary your workouts—partly to stimulate your body, and partly to spark your curiosity or a desire to experiment.
Monday
The week began with a warm-up session on a treadmill in a climate-controlled room. The temperature was 28 degrees, and the session consisted of 70 minutes of running, 25 of which were on a so-called self-propelled treadmill.
In the heat, my heart rate rises faster than at normal temperatures, so I start these workouts at a slow pace so that my heart rate can gradually increase as the workout progresses, as my speed picks up and I lose fluids. This was my first heat workout of the year, and each week I’ll increase the temperature by another degree. A tip to make it more bearable is to set up a fan—which I did the following week—and that allowed me to keep going for a full 90 minutes!
Tuesday
After resting for the rest of Monday—since the heat was something new for my body to adapt to—I started Tuesday by running for 60 minutes on an anti-gravity treadmill. On this type of treadmill, a bag around your waist inflates to the desired weight—which this week was about 60 kg (90% of my body weight, which is 67).
For 40 minutes, I ran progressively—that is, at an increasing pace—and then, toward the end of the workout, I increased the intensity by 1% of my body weight for every minute that passed. Even at 96–97% of my actual body weight, my thighs felt incredibly heavy—which, interestingly, shows just how quickly the brain adapts to different levels of exertion. As I jogged back down, I gradually reduced the weight by kilogram after kilogram until I weighed barely half of my actual weight. A very strange feeling!
In the evening, I did a more traditional running workout: 25 sets of 400 meters on an indoor track with a 30-second rest between sets. I had company for most of the session, and it was also nice to take a break from treadmill training for a while.
Wednesday
The next day I was pretty worn out, so I waited until after lunch to run for a little over half an hour on the treadmill, slightly increasing both my pace (3:50 min/km) and the incline (2.5%) to get a bit more of a workout than just a recovery run.
I wrapped up the evening with a 12-km run at a four-minute pace, also on a treadmill, with a challenging hill toward the end where I increased the incline by 0.5% per minute up to 8% (a short stretch of which corresponded to my “threshold heart rate”).
Thursday
Thursday consisted of two high-altitude workouts that I can do using a treadmill connected to a high-altitude simulator. The first workout consisted of a 10-km fartlek in 45 minutes, and the altitude was set to nearly 4,000 meters above sea level. The fartlek consisted of 15 x 1-minute intervals at a moderate pace (3:30), followed by 2 minutes at a fairly slow pace (4:15/km), and my heart rate was between endurance and threshold training levels.
Tonight’s workout was split with just under half at high altitude (2.5 + 1 km) and just over half at low altitude (5 km straight out). Between these three intervals, I took a 500-meter jog break. The goal of my high-altitude training in general is to make my heart work harder—that is, to beat faster. At the same pace, there’s a difference of about 15 beats per minute between using a mask and not using one.
Friday
The next day consisted of three shorter runs spread out throughout the day as progressive recovery runs. The distances were 10 + 10 + 7 km, and the average pace was 4 minutes per kilometer (though it often dropped from 4:30 to 3:30/km).
Saturday
On Saturday morning, it was time once again for indoor running on the 200-meter track. This time, the focus was on longer intervals with slightly longer rest periods (5 x 2000m, 90-second rest). On the second-to-last and last intervals, the pace picked up significantly, and in the end, I felt like it was the toughest workout of the year so far!
Late in the evening, I ran for 45 minutes again on the self-propelled treadmill, but this time at a normal indoor temperature. The advantage of this treadmill is that the stride both changes and improves significantly compared to a regular motorized treadmill.
Sunday
On Sunday, my legs felt really heavy, but I still managed to run about two mil outdoors with a running buddy in the morning. The rest of the day I rested up for the coming week, which, in addition to these activities, will also include high-intensity interval training, backward running, and water jogging in both deep and shallow water!
Tip!
I hope you’ve gotten some new ideas for your own training, and if you have access to a treadmill with a downhill incline, I’d also recommend running at a 1.5 to 3% once or twice a week to prepare for spring training, which will largely be conducted outdoors. Perhaps with additional elements like running on marshland or sand?
I sleep with a weighted blanket because it helps optimize my recovery. To put it simply, recovery takes place while you sleep, and the better your sleep, the more effective your recovery.
With the weighted blanket, I fall asleep faster in the evenings and sleep more deeply. Since I sleep both longer and better, I recover more effectively, get more out of my workouts, and always have plenty of energy for my next session.
