Have you seen workouts on social media and thought “wow, that’s a great workout, I should try it”? Or watched one and thought “I’m not working hard enough”?
I’ve been watching recently how common this occurrence is. From “adult onset” runners who haven’t had the opportunity to have a good coach teach them how to build a training plan to younger runners who haven’t yet learned the lessons to people close to runners who want to see the best for their runners and think the answer is what they see on social media.
This is a situation that has been around for a long time, hence the name Instagram workouts and not TikTok workouts. However, the phenomenon is the same as it has been for some time. An “influencer”, maybe even a legitimately good or great runner, shares certain workouts on social media and people swoon over how great the workout is or how hard the individual works.
The problem? You only see a tiny fraction of what they actually do. You only see the “exciting” or “impressive” workouts. You don’t get the full context. You definitely don’t get a runner’s full history that allowed them to build up to doing the workouts you see.
A little history lesson: FloTrack did a “workout of the week” segment quite some time ago that, from what I’ve seen, was the precursor to these Instagram workouts (if someone was doing this before, let me know). They would travel to the top NCAA programs and record one workout a week. The workouts would be insanely impressive but you’d see a single workout for the given team, then nothing else. Maybe an interview would offer a little context but you generally knew little to nothing about how the workout fit into the bigger plan, what was done to prepare for it, or anything like that. You’d just see and be impressed by an amazing workout, then move on.
Now, we get those teams or individual runners sharing more than one workout, which is nice in a way because you get at least a little more context. However, there is still a whole lot of context left out. Why?
Because workouts on social media need to be exciting! Who’s going to want to watch an easy run where you’re just running for 50 minutes at a pace 2 minutes per mile slower than race pace? Those runs and similar ones, while they are an important foundation for the runs that make it to social media, don’t make it because they are boring to watch. Also, who was watching what Katelyn Tuohy was doing 5, 6 or 7 years ago? Sure, she was a phenom from an early age but the foundation for the training she posts on social media now was laid before she had a social media presence. She wasn’t doing what she is now when she was 14 or 15 years old.
So, what should we do with those workouts we see on Instagram, TikTok or other social media sites? Sure, watch them if you want. It is inspiring to watch a great athlete at work becoming even better. However, keep in mind that you’re seeing the workout out of context. Get inspired by the workout, don’t think you can use it as a template for what you should be doing because you are missing so much of the template that you could never piece together the whole picture.
Note: In my next post on April 6th, I plan to write about the pitfalls of recording Instagram workouts and what to keep in mind to avoid those.