Rethinking the 10% Rule

You Should Know: It’s fall, and that means we’re heading into marathon season. If you’ve ever trained for a long-distance foot race, you may know about the “10% rule.” This rule says that runners should limit increases in volume to 10% week over week, lest they suffer overuse injuries. But new data suggests we’ve been thinking about volume all wrong, and increasing your weekly volume by more than 10% isn’t the figurative death sentence run coaches believe it is. 

Going Deeper: One researcher tried to prove the 10% rule and couldn’t. Instead, he found that increasing the volume of a single session — not the volume of an entire week’s worth of training — made runners significantly more susceptible to injury. In other words, upping the distance of your long run by more than 10% from one week to the next is more likely to result in injury than bumping your total weekly volume up by 15%. 

Takeaway: What you do in a single day could have a bigger impact on your body than what you do over the course of a week — think carefully about pushing any given workout far past your usual effort level. If last week’s run was 10 miles, for instance, cap this week’s at 11.

Bottom Line: Gradual progression is key to improving performance while minimizing injury risk, but a 10% weekly increase doesn’t appear to be the limiting rate for runners.