What Actually Makes You Faster
Speed comes from systems adapting over time, not from the one trick you're looking for
Last week, someone asked me how they should be breathing while they run.
It's a reasonable question. People ask questions like this all the time. What's the right cadence? What's the best stretch before a run? Should I be landing on my heel or my forefoot?
Underneath all of these is the same real question: how do I run faster?
When I watched this runner move, the breathing wasn't the issue. They ran upright, almost stiff through the hips, with a short stride and barely any push off the ground. Their breathing pattern wasn't holding them back. Their form was. And even if their form were perfect tomorrow, that alone still wouldn't make them significantly faster.
That's the part that's hard to hear. Getting faster usually isn't something you fix with one change. It's several different systems in your body adapting over time, and no single tweak substitutes for that process.
Here's what's actually involved.
Form Efficiency
How you run matters, but not because good form is fast by itself. It matters because bad form wastes energy.
The runner who asked about breathing ran upright with minimal hip extension and almost no push-off. With every stride, they absorbed impact without converting much of it into forward motion. Their body was working hard and getting relatively little in return, distance-wise.
Efficient running form generally means a slight forward lean from the ankles, a fuller extension through the hip on push-off, and a cadence that allows the foot to land underneath the body rather than out in front of it. None of this is about looking a certain way. It's about reducing the energy lost to braking forces and wasted vertical movement, so more of what your body produces turns into forward speed.
Cleaning up form is genuinely useful. A runner with better mechanics will feel smoother and waste less energy at any given effort. But fixing form alone has a ceiling, because it doesn't change how much fuel is in the tank to begin with.
Cardiovascular Adaptation
This is the system most people think of first when they want to get faster, and for good reason. It's a major part of the equation.
Your cardiovascular system adapts to training by increasing the amount of oxygen your body can deliver to working muscles and how efficiently those muscles use that oxygen to produce energy. Training increases your heart's stroke volume, so it pumps more blood per beat. It increases capillary density in your muscles, so more blood vessels are delivering oxygen to muscle fibers. It increases mitochondrial density inside those fibers, so more of the cellular machinery that converts oxygen and fuel into usable energy is present and working.
The practical result is that a pace that used to require a high heart rate and heavy breathing starts to feel sustainable at a lower heart rate. Your body is doing the same work with less strain, which means there's more in reserve, allowing you to go faster.
These adaptations come from consistent aerobic training over weeks and months. Easy runs, longer runs, and controlled harder efforts all contribute, depending on which specific adaptation is being targeted. None of it happens quickly, and none of it happens from a single workout, no matter how hard that workout is.
The harder a pace feels relative to how fast it actually is, the more likely it is that the cardiovascular system hasn't yet built the capacity to support that effort. No breathing technique changes that. Time and consistent aerobic work do.
Muscular and Structural Adaptation
The other half of the physical equation is what's happening in your muscles, tendons, and joints.
Running fast requires your muscles to repeatedly produce more force per stride without breaking down. That requires specific adaptations. Your muscle fibers become better at recruiting more fibers per contraction, producing more force from the same muscle. Your tendons and connective tissue become stiffer and more elastic, which improves the efficiency of the stretch-shortening cycle that happens every time your foot hits the ground and pushes off. Your bones increase in density in response to repeated loading, which is part of what allows your body to handle higher training volumes without breaking down.
A short stride and minimal push-off aren't just a form choice. They're often a sign that the muscles and tendons haven't yet built the force production and elasticity that a longer, more powerful stride requires.
This is why strength training, hill work, and faster-paced running all play a role in getting faster, separate from the cardiovascular benefits they also provide. They're asking your muscles and connective tissue to produce and absorb more force than easy running does, which drives the adaptation that lets your body do that more easily over time.
This adaptation is slower than the cardiovascular changes. Cardiovascular gains show up over weeks. Tendon stiffness and muscle fiber recruitment take months. A single hard workout doesn't build either one. Repeated exposure over a longer timeline does.
Training Modes, Not Magic
Form efficiency, cardiovascular adaptation, and muscular adaptation aren't separate paths you choose between. They're three systems that all need to develop, and different types of training drive different combinations of them.
Easy running primarily builds a strong cardiovascular base.
Tempo runs and threshold work push your cardiovascular system closer to its current limits, training it to clear metabolic byproducts and sustain harder efforts for longer, while also demanding more from your muscles.
Short, fast intervals and hill repeats emphasize muscular power and recruitment, while also training your cardiovascular system to recover quickly between hard efforts.
Strength training in the gym directly targets the muscular and structural side of fitness.
Running drills like high knees, butt kicks, and bounding improve efficiency, letting you make better use of whatever fitness you're building elsewhere.
A training plan that includes a mix of these gives each system what it needs. Each mode is doing something the others aren't, and getting faster means all of those systems need to move forward together.
The Question Underneath the Question
When someone asks how they should be breathing or something similar, what they're really asking is how to get faster without waiting. That's not a criticism. Everyone wants the version that takes less time.
But breathing technique doesn't increase your stroke volume. It doesn't increase muscle fiber recruitment. It doesn't make your tendons stiffer. Those changes only come from training that asks those systems to adapt, repeated consistently, for long enough that your body actually responds.
The runner who asked about breathing didn't need a better breathing pattern. They needed time and a training plan that builds all three systems together.
If you're looking at your own training and wondering what to change, the question isn't which single thing to fix. It's whether your training is covering all three systems over time. Are you running enough easy miles to build a strong cardiovascular base? Are you including some harder efforts that push that base further? Are you doing anything that asks your muscles and tendons to produce more force than your easy runs do, whether that's hills, strength work, or faster running? None of these need to be complicated. But all three need to be present, and each needs time.
The honest answer to "how do I get faster" is never going to be quick, and it is never going to be one thing. The work you put in is going somewhere, even on the weeks it doesn't feel like it.
Even on the runs that feel like nothing changed, something is adapting underneath, waiting for enough time to add up.
If someone asked you what your training was building right now, could you answer them?