Running Speed
Running is one of the best forms of exercising, as it is an excellent calorie burner. Moreover, you can tone up your body and at the same time increase your overall body resistance as well as strength, by running on a regular basis. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who believe that they cannot take up this form of exercise, because their running speed is very slow.
However, this is not necessarily true. While you may not be able to match the pace of the fastest human running speed anytime soon, it is quite possible for you to build your stamina and improve your speed over a period of time, so that you match the average running speed for people. The average running speed in people is anywhere between 12 and 15 miles per hour.
However, a good speed for running varies from one person to the other, because running speed is dependant on several factors that include age, gender and fitness levels to name a few. Typically, men tend to run faster than women do and as people cross a particular age, their running speed tends to get slower. Of course, it is only natural that beginners will run a lot slower than someone who has been running for a while. Therefore, it is best to gauge the speed, which you can run at, in the beginning and then gradually try to improve it.
There are certain exercises that can help you increase your running speed to a great extent. In order to increase your running speed you should activate the fast twitch muscles that are present in your legs. Most long distance runners and sprinters have more than the normal percentage of fast twitch muscles that can give them a burst of speed in power lifting as well as shorter sprints. Some of these exercises that can help increase running speed include hip joint extensions, step ups, lunges, heel raises, hamstring curls (on a machine) and hip joint flexions. What you can also do is practice running in deep sand so that the bulky muscles in your calves are utilized.
In order to check what your running speed is, you can use several online running speed calculators, where you need to know the distance that you ran and the time that it took for you to cover the distance. If you are using a treadmill for running practice, it will calculate and tell you your running speed automatically.
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