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Fitness Treadmill

If you're already a gym regular you won't need to be told that aside from injury the biggest threat to success is boredom. Walkmans and TV screens may help distract you but they're there because cardiovascular work like cycling on an exercise bike or plugging away on the rowing machine can soon become mindnumbingly dull.

Worst of all has to be running on the treadmill - a term which is in itself a byword for tedious and grinding routine.

That's partly because it's so easy to fall into the common trap of thinking that treadmill running is about one of two things: either running faster, or running for longer. Running faster certainly ups the heartbeat and gets the lungs working but it's intimidating for newcomers, hard to keep up for long, and eventually hits a ceiling as you find your top speed (or in some gyms the speed limit of the machine itself). Running for longer is great for stamina, burning calories (running is one of the most efficient calorie-burning exercises in the gym), and developing those slow twitch muscle fibres. Which would be great but for the fact that on a treadmill there isn't so much as the slightest shift in the scenery to relieve the tedium of endlessly legging it like a particularly large upright hamster.

Which is where fartlek comes in. All right, all right, settle down at the back there. Yes, it may sound silly but in fact it's Swedish for speedplay (rather than something you'd find in the Ikea catalogue). The technique is credited to a Swedish running coach, Gosta Holmer, who was responsible for producing a swathe of speedy Scandinavians who promptly walked (very quickly) all over the competition in the 1950s. The idea couldn't be simpler - more varied, more interesting and more challenging running results in better runners.

Most of us, left to our own devices, tend to do the same kind of run over and over. That becomes particularly clear in the gym where the majority of treadmill sessions involve dialling in a speed and plodding away until the assigned time is up. Which is OK up to a point, but ultimately only trains you to do that exact same run, at that exact same level of effort.

The idea of fartlek is to vary pace and effort, rewarding bursts of extra hard work with recovery periods at an easier rate. That's the speed part of speedplay. The play part comes in by throwing in an element of unpredictability. Fartlek runners in the open air may decide to sprint to a lamppost and then take it easy to the next one as a means of varying the effort. To add to the fun, fartlekers might decide to run faster as soon as they pass, say, a man with a dog, and not slow down until they pass the next baby-buggy. As a result fartlek sessions are not measured in distance covered or speed but in the time of the session.

FARTLEKING AROUND

In the gym there aren't usually a lot of babybuggies or men with dogs, but what you do have is a treadmill capable of different speeds and angles of climb. Instead of your normal run, try warming up gently for five to ten minutes then increasing the gradient dramatically for five minutes, or sprinting the next half a kilometre at a speed a good couple of notches up from your usual. As for the element of the unexpected, you usually have a whole gym-full of suspects who can unwittingly be roped in. You've probably upped the tempo at some time because you got a bit competitive with the person running on the machine next to you. Or there was someone passing by who you wanted to impress. Well it may be childish, but it's not necessarily bad technique. Try setting a goal like sprinting for as long as the huge guy in the corner can manage to bench press those car-sized weights. Or give yourself a rest period jogging gently for as long as that lycra-sheathed individual takes to get a drink at the fountain.

Whatever it takes. A good session should include a mix of alternated easy running, hard running, hill climbing, walking and absolutely flat out. What you should resist is the temptation to jog along idly, sprint for a minute at the end, and declare that you've just completed a half-hour fartlek session. How much you get out depends very much on how much you put in.

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