Though many runners treat treadmills as a necessary evil, treadmill access is a must-have if you live anywhere that gets extreme cold or extreme heat and want to train seriously year-round. Being from Minnesota (and having coached many runners in the Midwest), I’ve had plenty of experience modifying workouts and training sessions for the treadmill.
On top of that, I’ve just wrapped up a biomechanics study as a part of my PhD dissertation that involved 60 runners completing a treadmill run in a motion capture lab, so I have a lot of experience working with biomechanical data from treadmill running.
When you’re doing treadmill workouts, you can’t always just translate your outdoor workouts 1:1 and expect everything to go well. There are several important physiological, biomechanical, and psychological aspects of treadmill running that differ from outdoor running.
Moreover, I’ve found that a lot of runners have ideas about treadmill training that aren’t in alignment with the scientific research on treadmill running. So, this article is designed to refute some of these incorrect ideas, and provide some guidance on how to incorporate treadmill running, when necessary, into your own training.
Just want to know the most important info before you hit the treadmill? Click the link below to go directly to my seven scientifically-supported best practices for treadmill training.
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