If you’ve never heard of the term ‘subjective vitality’, then you’re not alone. We rarely hear it mentioned in everyday health conversations and it probably hasn’t been brought up in your annual doctor’s check-up. Its meaning, though, is pretty straightforward – and potentially useful for runners.

Your subjective vitality is a general measure of your energy, vigour and general ‘aliveness’. That sounds ideal. Where do I sign up for more of that? Well, let’s start with running.

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A new paper Meet the cover star: Milly Pickles lsquo;How I overcame paralysis and ran a half marathon&rsquo identified a dose-response relationship (when increasing levels of something are associated with an increasing or a decreasing possibility of something else) between weekly training frequency and training session duration and the mental health Best wireless headphones.

Researchers studied a group of 5,542 participants, made up of recreational runners all over the age of 18, who ran at least one or two days a week. The group answered preliminary questions about their sporting habits and then completed the (deep breath) ‘Subjective Vitality as a Dynamic Reflection of Well-Being (SVS) questionnaire’ to assess their post-lockdown subjective vitality levels.

To explore the impact of training frequency and workout duration on subjective vitality, researchers asked participants about their age group and sex, training session duration (in minutes) and weekly training frequency (in days) – in both the preliminary questions and the SVS questionnaire.

Following a statistical analysis of this data, researchers identified no significant difference in subjective vitality between men and women – nor between different age groups. Great. Now, we want to know if how many times and for how long we run can increase our dose of that sweet, sweet subjective vitality.

Once outliers (an abnormal-looking result that differs significantly from other values) were removed, the researchers were left with a final sample of 5,478. After analysing the data from this sample, they reported significant differences in SVS based on training frequency and training session duration. Specifically, the researchers found that the more the participants ran per week, the greater their subjective vitality levels. Additionally, the longer the workout was, the higher the levels of subjective vitality. This was the case until levels plateaued at five runs a week and with workouts lasting 90 to 120 minutes.

If you’re aiming for maximum subjective vitality levels, then the results suggest that you would need to do five runs a week at a pace you can comfortably hold for 90 minutes. However, the study authors say that their results should be interpreted with some caution – largely because of the heterogeneity of the sample. In other words, although the participants were mainly recreational runners, their running performance levels differed.

‘The higher the runner’s level, the higher the dose-response relationship needed and the associated subjective vitality enhancement,’ Dr Adrián Varela-Sanz told Runner’s World UK on behalf of the study’s research team.

If you were to run five times a week for 90 minutes, it would amount to 450 minutes of exercise. That figure goes well beyond NHS guidelines, which recommends 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity a week. With this in mind, Varela-Sanz highlighted that although greater training volumes at those intensities will report additional health benefits, we should prioritise training frequency over volume.

Interestingly, he said that doing the same weekly training volume but dividing it up over more training days produced greater benefits. So, for subjective vitality purposes, it might be worth keeping your training load the same but splitting it across more days over the week.

Varela-Sanz also pointed out that because subjective vitality levels plateaued with longer duration workouts around the 91-120-minute mark, runs lasting between 61-90 minutes may produce similar benefits to longer training sessions.

‘Shorter training session durations (for example, 31-60 minutes and 61-90 minutes), and even a lower training frequency, also elicited high subjective vitality scores, which could benefit runners’ mental health,’ he added.

The study authors say that further research is required to determine the optimal training frequency, session duration and exercise intensity to maximise recreational runners’ mental health benefits and endurance performance simultaneously.

For now, though, this is further scientific evidence of what we know already: running has the power to make you feel really good.