Run Strong Contents Introduction Chapter 1 - Easy Chapter 2 - Light Chapter 3 - Hard Chapter 4 - Te Physics of Running Chapter 5 - Shoes Chapter 6 - Your First Run Chapter 7 – Other Running Chapter 8 – Injuries Chapter 9 - Building Strength From the Ground Up Chapter 10 – raining Plan Chapter 11 – Accumulation and Intensification Intensification Plans Conclusion References
Run Strong Contents Introduction Chapter 1 - Easy Chapter 2 - Light Chapter 3 - Hard Chapter 4 - Te Physics of Running Chapter 5 - Shoes Chapter 6 - Your First Run Chapter 7 – Other Running Chapter 8 – Injuries Chapter 9 - Building Strength From the Ground Up Chapter 10 – raining Plan Chapter 11 – Accumulation and Intensification Intensification Plans Conclusion References
Introduction “We are dierent, dierent, in essence, from other men. If you want to win something, run 100 metres. If you want to experience something, run a marathon.” - Emil Zatopek
Running is the pinnacle of human movement. That’s why the whole world stops to watch the 100m nal at the Olympics and why the marathon is the nal event. Deep down inside, we are all mesmerized by this thing that separated separat ed us from our primive ancestors. And because running requires no specialized equipment and we all can run, even if only a lile, li le, we recognize how special fast fast running is. Growing up, I hated to run. I much preferred being in the water. Somehow swimming just made sense to me, and all through school I did well racing in the pool. Like most kids in Australia, I ran when I was required to during our yearly cross-country cross-country compeon, but I was never any good. And no wonder - I only did it that one me a year. For a brief snt, I ran to prepare for the Australian Army tness tests, both in shoes and in boots, with and without a load. All the while, that same feeling of displeasure persisted. I ran because I had to, not because I enjoyed it. As a lifelong student of training, one thing I know is that if someone doesn’t enjoy an exercise plan then they will not sck to it. It should have been no surprise that I didn’t sck to running when I did it with the atude of a surly teenager ordered to clean his room. Somewhere in my mid thires, I started to see that exercise, all exercise, was very technical and I realized there were no worthy movements that were mastered instantly. Even with this new perspecve, running leered at me as if I wasn’t man enough to do it, a beast I had never beaten in bale. Training should improve you, not only physically but also psychologically. To this end, we should test our training by tesng ourselves, and I’ve found no beer way as accessible as Ironman to test myself. Climbing Everest might be beer, but that costs tens of thousands of dollars and requires years of preparaon. Distance events, on the other hand, can be as simple as paying your entry fee and showing up, but I do suggest you get some training in rst. Over the last few years of dedicated run training, I’ve learned more about myself than ever be be-fore. When you’re sll on the run course of an Ironman aer more than ten hours of non-stop movement, the voices inside your head, begging you to quit, are loud l oud and persistent. You’ll You’ll never know more about the kind of person you are than at that moment. These days, running takes a beang in the press. From high-intensity training advocates likening it to exercis ing on a hamster wheel to stascs showing an injury rate as high as eighty percent of all runners every year. Somehow, this most basic of human movements, one of the abilies that separated us from our evoluonary competors, competo rs, has been dismissed as not worthy of our me. There’s no denying that runners suer large numbers of injuries. From foot and ankle problems to knee, hip, and back complaints as well as emergencies like twisted bowels and severe dehydraon, it’s not all a magical journey of self-discovery self-discovery.. You’re You’re going going to spend some me me in a doctor’s doctor’s oce if you take take up running, running, especially if you adopt the typical “go hard or go home” atude of the tness industry. Strength coach Mike Boyle likes to say that the endurance athletes he knows are always waing for their next “-is” to begin. You know, Achil les tendonis, patellar tendonis, laryngis, etc. Well, I have a secret to tell you, one I’ve never seen anyone else address: the reason everyone gets hurt when they get into running is because they’re not ready. It’s that simple. Imagine I walked up to you, taught you to do a barbell snatch, and then told you to put 200kg on the bar and go for it. How do you think that would go? The physics of running is even more extreme than a barbell snatch. For an average 80kg (180lbs) male, that snatch was only two and a half mes his bodyweight. The forces
involved in running are up to three mes bodyweight - with every step. And that’s for running, not sprinng, when the forces increase again. In a 5km race your body will have to deal with massive forces. The same 80kg runner is confronted with approximately 1,800,000kgs of force over 5km. As he runs faster, those numbers increase. Now, imagine running three to ve days per week for a few months. You can easily see why people get hurt. They’re just not ready. This book can help you get ready to run, help you make your body robust enough to deal with the stresses you will put on it. But I’m a realist, so I know you’re probably going to get hurt anyway. I’m just calling it like it is. Running is a lot like boxing - even the best guy i n the world is sll going to get punched in the face. Even the best runner is going to deal with some “-ises,” so I’m going to give you a plan to prevent as many of them as possible. Some of this plan calls for dedicated strength training. If you’ve run even moderate distances for any length of me you know one thing - you get s from running. Lots of repeons through short ranges of moon at low intensies makes the body ghter and ghter. Eventually, you end up at a point where many of your basic human movements are lost or rapidly disappearing. Using the Funconal Movement Screen system and kelebells, I’ve worked out a way to test if you should be running right now or working on your body in the gym. Think of it like a Formula One car. Technicians spend hours in the garage running diagnoscs on those cars before they let them loose on the track. So, like those technicians, you can use a simple check sheet to determine if now is the me to run hard, to run easy, or to do some preventave maintenance before you end up at the doctor. In essence, the training plan I’ve created is a way to prove to yourself that your body can cope with running right now. Another mistake I see recreaonal runners make is doing everything at once. The human body is not capable of recovering from intense strength sessions and intense endurance work at the same me. Unless you’re a genecally gied individual, that’s just not how you’re built. Focus on building your running form so you can get in the necessary miles to become a beer runner. And that’s the third hurdle most people face - they aren’t very good runners. We spend the rst six years of our lives running around and exploring the world, only to be promptly sat down once we start school. From there, your body starts “seizing up.” When you return to running as an adult, the best scenario would be to start with the same body you had as a six-year old, but it’s more likely that you’ve acquired some rust, injuries, or other issues along the way. So, you have the running ability and the resistance to running-related injuries of a six-year-old at best. Would you tell a six-year-old to run for an hour three mes per week? That’s exactly where most running plans begin. Typically, you’re just strong enough to cope with that for a while, unl the inevitable “-is” sneaks up on you and you nd yourself in front of the doctor again. Run Strong will clear up the widespread confusion on how to approach the goal of running beer and faster. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you come from one of two camps - the world of strength training or the world of endurance training. These polar opposite viewpoints don’t do much to help people get started. The strength camp tells people that all they need to do to run beer is to li some weights, that strength rules all other physical qualies and will provide greater endurance. I can recall being told before my Ironman to make sure my deadli was big because it would help me run faster. But I also remember watching the London Olympics a few months before my Ironman and realizing I could likely deadli the enre Kenyan team. In reality, heavy deadlis didn’t seem to help me run any faster. But they were making me red and more likely to get hurt when I went out to run. The endurance camp is no beer. These guys say all you need to do to run beer is to run more. In the case of elite distance runners, that is probably true. Most people are not built like elite runners, though. Most of us are too heavy and don’t have the same economical stride or ability to absorb force like the truly elite. One last thing to consider: what is your goal? So many people are unclear about their goal before they even
start a plan, and then wonder why the plan didn’t help them. Ask yourself now: do you want to be a runner who does some strength training or a bodybuilder who does some cardio? If you want the second opon, then this book may not be a good match for you. It’ll help a bit, but we’re going to run more oen than we li weights or do other strength work, so make sure you have the right book and the right goal in mind before going any further. The goal of this book is simple - take the average person from a non-running start point to being able to run without geng hurt, to run injury free and fast. Along the way, you will learn to use strength training to stave o the most common injuries and enhance your overall running experience and general health. You will not learn to become the most muscular, most hypertrophied piece of meat on the planet who can manage a staggering waddle for a hundred meters or so. - Andrew Read
Chapter 1 - Easy “Think, easy, light, smooth, and fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then work on light. Make it eortless, like you don’t give a shit how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go. When you’ve pracced that so long that you forget you’re praccing, you work on smooooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one – you get those three, and you’ll be fast.” - Micah True aka Caballo Blanco
Modern cavemen are all the rage. Paleo-eang guys with beards trying to reconnect with their inner savages. But are these people missing the most important step? If you want to be an urban caveman, you need to run. Human evoluon took us from monkey to man over the space of about six million years. It’s fair to say we’ve changed a fair bit since then as we’ve evolved to become modern man. The thing about evoluon is that adaptaons never occur on a whim, but always in response to a survival situaon. In other words, we only evolved when one of our kids was a lile bit dierent. But that dierence allowed them to eat beer and, therefore, to have more kids. Before I get into all the reasons why we evolved as runners, let me explain why it’s important to honor this aspect of our lives. Strength training and kelebell expert Dan John has this great expression about tness tools and “killer applicaons.” The Killer App Theory states that every tool has a purpose for which it is best used. A barbell’s killer app is maximal strength work in the squat, bench, deadli, and Olympic lis. The kelebell’s killer app is in ballisc exercises, like the swing, snatch, and jerk, done for a reasonably high number of reps. If you ever nd yourself training with something like a Shake Weight - which has no killer app, no single thing it helps you do beer than any other tool - then you can throw it away. When you realize you only need about half a dozen pieces of equipment, this makes purchase choices for your home gym easy. It would make lile sense, for example, to use a kelebell to try to get as strong as you could with a barbell or to aempt to do barbell complexes for tness. The result would be so much beer if you used the bar for strength and then condioned with the kelebell. But then we run into the next problem. Somewhere along our evoluon we got sick of being outside. Maybe that’s an inbuilt fear from early man needing to shelter from hungry predators, but as we’ve evolved, we’ve stopped going outside. We invented gyms and came up with a bunch of ways to “get er” that didn’t require moving. We came up with “li weights faster” as our means of geng cardiovascular condioning. But while circuit training can have a benecial impact on tness, it will never improve our tness as much as running. Running is a strange acvity in that it will improve all other tness. If you want to have beer tness for grappling or boxing, then you can run, as ghters have done for centuries. Grappling and boxing will not improve your running. Running will improve your rowing and cycling, but not the other way around. For evidence, see Lance Armstrong’s mes from when he decided to run a marathon. And considering the Killer App Theory, it’s prey obvious that the human body was designed with one thing in mind. Don’t believe me? Consider the following: Bipedalism
Humans are highly ecient walkers. This characterisc evolved in response to the need to forage for food over
a larger area than our chimp cousins. The advantage of bipedalism is that it exposes less of the body to solar radiaon (only the tops of the head and shoulders versus the enre back and head in other primates). That allowed early man to travel up to 15km daily, while chimpanzees average only 2km. Bipedalism also exposes more of the body to cooler air currents that exist higher than one meter o the ground. The rate we sweat is an exclusively human trait, and it allows us to cool ourselves eecvely through a combinaon of evaporaon and convecon. Long Legs
Unlike chimps, who have long arms and short legs that make for eecve climbing, we have much longer legs. This allows us to cover long distances eciently. So eciently, in fact, that human locomoon is the ulmate in energy conservaon. It takes nearly the exact same number of calories to cover a given distance running, no maer how quickly you run. Chimps, on the other hand, with their ambling, knuckle-shuing run, use up to four mes the energy to move quickly. Energy Conservaon Within our legs are some amazing mechanical devices that allow us to be much more economical than other primates. Simply running at ninety steps per minute i ncreases leg sness and, therefore, running economy by 100%. This is accomplished through the anatomical combinaon of the foot arch and the Achilles - structures that our monkey forefathers didn’t have. And while modern primates have an Achilles, it is far shorter than human Achilles - 2cm versus 10cm. Big Bus Sir Mix-a-Lot was right, at least from an evoluonary standpoint. Chimps and other apes do not share our prominent glutes. The glutes really only acvate when running, jumping, or moving up inclined surfaces. They are almost completely inacve when we are standing or walking. During running, but not when walking, the center of balance changes from one side of the body to the other as we land on alternate feet with each stride. So not only do the glutes provide much of the power for running, but they also have a role in stabilizing the upper body. The ability to resist rotaon is one that our primate ancestors don’t share. Yet another compelling piece of evidence to show we were well on our way to becoming runners way back when. Note: We also have a ligament that is unique among primates called the nuchal ligament that stabilizes the head while running. As they cannot truly run, neither chimps nor apes possess this ligament. Looking at all the evoluonary changes we’ve gone through, from a completely upright stance to sweang, to the energy-conserving nature of our gait, it’s prey obvious the ability to run far for long periods of me was a necessary adaptaon that allowed early humans to gain access to higher-quality food. It’s the Killer App of the human body. So if we’re looking for the best way to gain tness, as well as reclaim the most integral of human movements, it has to be running. I realize many people can’t run due to injury or dysfuncon, but for everyone else trying to get er and wondering why “liing weights faster” doesn’t seem to be doing much, I suggest running. Running is literally the thing that separated us from the pack and allowed us to become the apex predator of the planet. It allowed us to access food sources at mes of day when other predators were lying in the shade
avoiding the heat (because they walked on all fours and couldn’t sweat). Ignoring running in your own training (provided you are capable of doing so) is ignoring the very essence of humanity and six million years of evoluon. This doesn’t mean you need to go and chase down an antelope or run a marathon tomorrow, but if general tness is your goal, then running should be in your plan. One of the reasons that running has earned such a bad reputaon is that the tness world is sll suering from the tough guy syndrome. Military wannabes wearing taccal pants and shoung at people has become synonymous with training. When we try to take that tough guy atude to running, though, we get hurt. The forces the body must cope with while running are extremely high and the majority need to be handled by the foot, ankle, and calf - areas we seldom target in training because according to the gurus those areas are not “funconal.” Really? What could be more funconal than strengthening the muscles and joints needed to walk or run? A single step for an average male runner creates around 240kg (~530lb) of force. If you consider that at average speeds you will take 1,200–1,500 steps per kilometer, that means even a 5k fun run will have you dealing with 1,440,000kg–1,800,000kg of force. Let me ask you, when was the last me you went to the gym and did nearly 2,000,000kg worth of calf raises? To begin with, not only do we need to slowly increase our exposure to the amount of work required to run, but we also need to work on form. Because when we get form right, we can run light. Much has been said of the barefoot running craze and geng people to change into less-structured running shoes. While I think geng people out of Nike Shox (seriously, did anyone really think they were a good shoe to run in?) and into something a bit thinner, you can easily throw the baby out with the bathwater and go too far. One of the things I know to be 100% true in the world of exercise is that quality of movement trumps all else. The modern world has told us lies me and again when it comes to our training. We have books that “hack” performance and tell us you can do anything as long as you nd the right shortcut. Let me make it simple for you - no, you can’t. Running takes a long me to master. This is why you don’t see marathon world champions in their teens and early twenes. Going by Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule, if we were running ten hours per week, we wouldn’t master the skill for twenty years. If we bump our pracce up to een hours of running per week (a more likely amount with two sessions daily of an hour each done six days per week, with another longer three hour run done on the nal day), that sll equates to over thirteen years of work. And at the speeds that great runners move, that would roughly equal 200,000 kilometers of running - approximately ve mes around the planet. Sll think you can hack performance when it comes to running? Out of all the adaptaons that take place when you run, the most important is your body’s acclimaon to the impact. Have you ever watched a professional ghter shrug o a punch and make it look nonchalant? Yet, if a normal person were hit with the same blow, it would have knocked them over. That’s every step when you run, and elite runners have bodies that are used to the impact. Making your body durable enough and tough enough to deal with this takes me. As a coach of mine used to say, “Running fast is all about pain tolerance.” But if we go down that path to begin with - that every session needs to be hard - then we’ll end up like everyone else who takes up running and winds up in the doctor’s oce. Unlike everyone else, we’re going to be smart, and the rst thing we’re going to work on is easy. You’re not going to nd any sprint plans in this book, nor high-intensity interval training sessions. I simply don’t believe in them for the majority of people.
If you’re like most people and have bought into the “no pain, no gain” mentality, then you already spend far too much me training hard. That’s one thing when you’re in the controlled environment of a gym, but if you take that same atude to running, you’re going to get hurt. Instead of worrying about how to make running harder, we’re going to work on making it easier. We’re going to save all of the hard sessions you need for the gym. Years ago, I heard a joke told by a running coach. He had been approached by a young, talented kid and her parents. Eager for their son to make the Olympics, the parents asked the coach how long unl their kid reached her peak. The coach replied that it would take ten years if she trained the right way and didn’t get distracted. The parents assured the coach that their child was special, one of a kind, and that nothing would stand in her way. They’d make sure she’d do double what everyone else did, that she never missed a pracce, and that her enre life would be consumed solely by running. So, they asked, given all that, how long would it take to succeed? The coach replied that if all that were true - if the child would never miss training, if she would train twice as much and twice as hard as anyone else - then she could expect to be world class in twenty years. Don’t be overzealous. It will come back to bite you later, and all because you weren’t ready. Let the body take me to develop. Take the me to strengthen your ligaments and joints to deal with running. It won’t be an overnight progress.
Chapter 2 - Light “The strength to li every weight you never have is already there. Strength is not built. It’s granted by the CNS.” - Paul McIlroy
Gym folklore has told you for years that you need to train hardcore. You are exhorted to #beastmode to get #demgainz. But what is missing from those statements is a frank admission regarding drug use in today’s tness scene. If you’re basing your training on what any top tness or physique competor is doing, then you need to understand their body chemistry is incredibly dierent from yours. The same goes for any elite-level performer, parcularly sprinters. History has shown repeatedly that if you win the 100m at an Olympics or set a world record, then you are more than likely using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). And with the debacle that professional cycling has become, and more recently the number of Kenyan runners who have also been caught doping, it’s prey clear the endurance world is no dierent. If you choose to use PEDs, that’s ne. Go hard. No judgment from me. However, if you aren’t using them, then you’ll need to rethink your training instead of basing it on what a few top performers are doing. And you’ll need to really rethink your training if you’re over 35. Like it or not, once you pass your mid-thires, me isn’t on your side. You need far more rest and recovery work than you need hard work. Sports science is one of those things that many claim they’re paying aenon to when they write training plans, but once you have a good look at those plans that’s clearly not true. If you had to pick a number between one and 100 that represented your appropriate average intensity for a given year, what number would you pick? Seventy percent of your best? Eighty percent? Maybe, because you’re a super hardcore ninja unique lile snowake who doesn’t share any human biology, you’d pick ninety percent? You might be surprised to hear that seventy percent is the magic number. And this doesn’t just hold true for weight training, but for running, too. The body has this amazing system that allows us to safely perform many dierent physical tasks. Professor of exercise and sports science Dr. Timothy Noakes calls this the central gov ernor theory. It relates to all kinds of internal mechanisms we have in place to prevent heat stroke, manage eort, and limit muscle smulaon. The other thing we get from seventy percent is a repeatable, sustainable eort. As my friend Dan John says, this is “park bench training.” Achieving good results in anything comes from repeatedly doing it. As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” So, the only way to get good at running is to make sure we can run oen. One of the benets of the Hardstyle kelebell system is that we have used the heavy-light-medium approach to building strength for years. For those reading this who have come to an RKC or SFG event, the approach taken during that weekend - of praccing skill, not smoking your self, and focusing on perfecon of movement - will come in handy as we start running. You’ll note as we go through this book that I oen speak about strength. Please don’t mistake my thoughts on strength to be irrelevant to running. The body has one set of muscles and one central nervous system (CNS). Physical training, whether it be endurance or strength based, must abide by the same rules if we want to be successful. We can use the terms heavy, light, and medium to denote either distance or speed, but the result is the same: • •
A heavy run pushes the boundaries of distance and muscle endurance, or has you feeling like your lungs may burst into ames. A light run leaves you feeling fresh and invigorated. These runs ush your legs with oxygenated, healing
•
blood and return the spring to your step. They are both short and low in pace - the running equivalent of yoga - making you feel beer physically and mentally. Medium runs are everything in between. A medium run can be a great addion to your training plan as long as you have truly hard and truly easy runs, as well. The problem for many is that their easy runs are too hard and their hard runs are too easy – essenally always leaving them in the middle ground. This has them never able to make great progress for reasons that will become clear later.
You’ll want far more of the light, refreshing runs in your week than you will the hard, fast ones. And the less experienced you are, the longer you should hold o on hard, fast running. The basic rule for this program is that every heavy session is followed by a light session. The choice then, depending on how many mes per week you run, is all based on how many heavy runs you can handle in a given me frame. But every me you do either a heavy or medium run, you need to follow it up with an easy run to help the body recover. Sunday – Long run (heavy) Monday – Short, easy run (light) Tuesday – O Wednesday – Moderate run (medium) Thursday – O Friday – Short, easy run (light) Saturday – O The purpose of all this is to keep the average intensity of your week within that 70% range. The short, easy runs are like a 60% eort, the medium runs more like 70%, and the heavy runs around 80%. Honestly, no maer how hard you think you’re running, when compared to your maximum heart rate, you’d be lucky to see much above 80% of your maximum on a distance run. Based on the percentages the above training week looks like this: Sunday – 80% Monday – 60% Tuesday – O Wednesday – 70% Thursday – O Friday – 60% Saturday – O The average intensity comes out to 67.5%. This will be explained more later in the program secon of the book, but for now keep in mind that if you do a hard session it must be followed by an easy one. Of course, there is the added complicaon that we want to include strength work, too. Each strength session will count as a hard session. So, we will need far more easy runs in a week than someone who just runs. Many popular running plans encourage you to run harder more oen. But what you’ll noce with those plans is two things: 1. They are all what Dan John calls “bus bench plans.” They have a specic end goal in mind that occurs at a certain date. These are couch-to-5K plans and other race specic plans.
2. There is no menon of what to do aer you’ve nished your race. If you’re smart, what you’ll do aer that race is spend plenty of me at a much lower intensity to allow your body to rebuild. This is what athletes refer to as base building. In classical periodizaon talk, it was called the transion period. The eects of keeping average intensity low over long periods of me can be seen in many great endurance athletes. Lance Armstrong used to say that sessions above seventy percent eroded your tness, while those below built it. Going above seventy percent is acceptable as long as it is followed by adequate recovery to o set the damage caused. This is why elite athletes can keep geng faster. They spend countless hours building tness, and then, when they have enough stored up, they use it up in an all-out eort. But that all-out eort will actually help boost them to another level once they recover from it. But don’t get carried away thinking that if one all-out eort every now and then is good, then more must be beer. It isn’t. Ask yourself this: if the top athletes in the world peak only once every four years, how come you expect to do it far more oen with your lousy genecs? And aer your peak event, won’t you need some recovery work to soak up all that intensity you used on race day? Dr. Phil Maetone, who knows more about heart-rate based training than anyone else in the world, has used simple formulas to keep elite distance athletes breaking records for three decades. The great Mark Allen, a six-me Ironman world champion, used Maetone’s formula to nally break through and own the big island of Hawaii with mes sll unmatched by all but a few of today’s best ultra-endurance professionals. What makes the formula I’m about to share with you ideal is that you don’t need a fancy machine to determine what percentage you should be running at. Forget using 220 minus your age to determine your training percentages or the Karvonen formula. Both are hit and miss anyway. The Maetone formula is simple to use and easy to implement - if your ego can handle it. Here’s Maetone’s 180 Formula as explained in his The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing : “To nd your maximum aerobic training heart rate, there are two important steps. 1. Subtract your age from 180. 2. Modify this number by selecng one of the following categories that best matches your t ness and health prole: A. If you have or are recovering from a major illness (heart disease, any operaon or hospital stay, etc.) or are on any regular medicaon, subtract an addional 10. B. If you are injured, have regressed in training or compeon, get more than two colds or bouts of u per year, have allergies or asthma, or have been inconsistent or are just geng back into training, subtract an addional 5. C. If you have been training consistently (at least four mes weekly) for up to two years without any of the problems menoned, keep the number (180–age) the same. D. If you have been training for more than two years without any of the problems listed above and have made progress in compeon without injury, add 5. For example, if you are thirty years old and t into category B, you get the following: 180–30=150 Then 150–5=145 beats per minute (bpm)
In this example, 145 will be the highest heart rate for all training. This i s highly aerobic, allowing you to most eciently build an aerobic base. Training above this heart rate rapidly incorporates anaerobic funcon, exemplied by a shi to burning more sugar and less fat for fuel. If it is dicult to decide which of two groups best ts you, choose the group or outcome that results in the lower heart rate. In athletes who are taking medicaon that may aect their heart rate, those who wear a pacemaker, or those who have special circumstances not discussed here, further individualizaon with the help of a healthcare praconer or other specialist familiar with your circumstance and knowledgeable in endurance sports may be necessary. Two situaons may be excepons to the above calculaons: • The 180 Formula may need to be further individualized for people over the age of sixty-ve. For some of these athletes, up to 10 beats may have to be added for those in category (d) in the 180 Formula, and depending on individual levels of tness and health. This does not mean 10 should automacally be added, but that an honest self-assessment is important. • For athletes sixteen years of age and under, the formula is not applicable; rather, a heart rate of 165 may be best.” I know right now many people will be thinking there’s no way they can run at those heart rates. To you I say this - consider the source. Remember Maetone has helped endurance greats like Mark Allen and Chris McCormack become mulple winners of the toughest endurance race on the planet. Consider the genec freaks he has had at his disposal to test these ideas, and yet see how conservave they are. If this is how the very best need to train, why are you trying to do more? Is it any wonder you’re not being successful? How long will you insist on slamming your head into that brick wall? For many, beginning to run with this system will be quite frustrang. But now is not the me to dabble and then quit in frustraon a week later. Training like this will take me to adapt to, but the results are signicant. Many people never really stop to think about why they started running in the rst place - to get er. But to become er, we need some key adaptaons to take place. Kenneth Jay, author of The Cardio Code , lists the following adaptaons: “Central eects of aerobic exercise Increased internal diameter of the heart (le ventricle) Increased heart wall thickness Increased blood supply to the heart itself (increased capillary density of the cardiac muscle) Increased contraclity of the heart Increased compliance of the heart musculature Increased stroke volume at rest and during maximal exeron Decreased resng heart rate Increased maximal cardiac output Increased blood volume Increased total hemoglobin Decreased blood pressure Increased Vo2max Peripheral eects of aerobic exercise
Increased number and size of mitochondria Increased peripheral mitochondrial density Increased acvity of oxidave enzymac reacons Increased myoglobin content Increased number of glucose transporters Increased amount of muscle glycogen Increased capillary density Decreased diusion distance between blood and muscle bers Increased insulin sensivity Increased blood ow to working muscles Increased A-V O2-di. during maximal work Increased fat uptake from the blood and oxidaon within the working muscles Decreased use of glycogen during sub maximal long duraon work Decreased lacc acid producon during sub maximal work” Isn’t being able to fully develop all those qualies good enough reason to sck to the plan? Some of these benets, like increased fat adaptaon and decreased reliance on glycogen, will take longer. In fact, those two are the reasons we have long runs in the training plan. To get those parcular adaptaons, you need to train in a way that enables you to nearly exhaust your glycogen supplies. This forces your body to preferenally use fat as fuel. This is the whole point of aerobic training - to beer use fat as fuel. While the Maetone heart rate recommendaons may seem too low for you, the important part to remember is that at a heart rate greater than that you are no longer burning primarily fat for fuel. This leads to all kinds of long-term issues and is the main culprit with many endurance athletes complaining about being fat (or skinny fat). It sets o a chain reacon of problems that will ulmately have your training go down the toilet. (And seeing as how I’m in Australia that means they’ll all be going in the wrong direcon, too). The short version goes like this: 1. When you train at too high an intensity (i.e. above your aerobic threshold) you will burn more carbohydrates, as you’ll need them to fuel your eort. 2. Aer you burn those carbohydrates, your body will tell you to eat more carbs so you have them in store again for the next session. 3. When you eat carbohydrates, your body will decrease insulin sensivity, meaning you’ll need more carbohydrates before your body recognizes that you’ve had enough. 4. Train again and repeat the process. Over me, your body will tell you to eat more and more carbohydrates, most of which you’ll end up storing as body fat. In addion, an unseen side eect of running above the recommended heart rate, and therefore going into anaerobic territory, is that anaerobic work produces high amounts of corsol. Corsol stops your aerobic system from funconing properly in the rst place, leaving you in an anaerobic state even before you begin. That means you are forced to burn more glycogen straight away, which means your body will tell you to eat even more and compound the problem. This evil merry-go-round of overeang carbohydrates, traning anaerobically, and messing up your corsol levels leads to overtraining, thanks to keeping you stuck in anaerobic glycolysis all the me. Have you ever heard people say they got fat during the build-up to a marathon or Ironman? What I’m explaining here is why. They trained at too high an intensity and overate carbohydrates as a result. This is exactly why you’re going to use all of your running sessions as light sessions at the beginning - to break the cycle of anaerobic glycolysis many of you are stuck in. You’re going to use running to reset your body by beeng up your aerobic system. Along the
way, you’re going to lose some weight and gain some strength, while improving your health to opmal levels. When you apply these lters to the way you set up a training week, you can start to put things into a spe cic template that will work. Using my own numbers to create training zones, here’s how a week looks for a 43-year-old with a history of no injuries or illnesses for the past two years, improved compeon results, and more than two years of consistently training four or more mes per week. This gives me a base number of 142bpm. Taking that as the highest I can use in training, we’ll simply make ve zones, divided into ten beat per minute groups. The following numbers are split into the heavy/ medium/ light format. Normally people have two or more training zones above the 142bpm cut-o shown. There is merit to using them at various mes, and we’ll discuss that later, but for now let’s just split everything into these three zones for ease of use. That leaves us with: • • •
142bpm and above = hard/heavy 132-142bpm = medium/moderate 132bpm and below = light/easy
In the beginning, many will struggle to even break into a running stride at the lower end of this scale. That is a sign that your aerobic system is so severely underpowered that you denitely need to work on it. Within endurance circles, you’ll oen hear people talk about how they had to slow down to get fast, yet when we cross over to the tness world, all people seem to want to do is go hard all the me. But going hard all the me means too much me spent training anaerobically, followed by all the downsides about carbohydrates that I discussed. For these people, their aerobic system eventually becomes so weak that they can’t even walk around during their daily life without working anaerobically. This is the hallmark of chronic overtraining and it can take years for your body to recover. A study done on the 2004 US Olympic Trial runners showed that the men spent nearly three quarters of their training me below race pace, and the women spent two thirds of their training me below race pace. Those numbers sound awfully close to seventy percent to me. Similarly, a 2009 study by Seiler and Tonnessen showed that: “Elite endurance athletes perform 80% or more of their training at intensies clearly below their lactate threshold and use high-intensity training surprisingly sparingly. Studies involving inten sicaon of training in already well-trained athletes have shown equivocal results at best. The available evidence suggests that combining large volumes of low-intensity training with careful use of high-intensity interval training throughout the annual training cycle is the best-pracce model for development of endurance performance.” At this point many people will ask, “But don’t I need to run faster to run faster?” The answer is yes, but nowhere near as oen as you think. In fact, only about 20% of your total training me needs to be devoted to faster running. And for older athletes - those over 35 - that number needs to be slightly less due to lowered recovery ability. Far too many people spend far too much me training at high intensity. While you do need some high intensity training to get faster, a lile goes a long way. A 1999 study by Billat, published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, used three dierent groups to test the eecveness of interval training and determine if there was an opmal rao. They ran a study that split training into the following phases:
• • •
100% easy 83% easy and 17% hard 50% easy and 50% hard
“Hard” was measured as 91% of maximum heart rate. “Easy” was below the point of exeron where your breathing changes, called the venlatory threshold. The ndings will shock you: Average tness increased from a VO2max of 71.2 (already extremely high) to 72.7 aer the 83/17 phase - an improvement of 1.5%. Many people believe VO2max to be relavely untrainable, but this study shows dierently, and in already experienced athletes. However, when the training switched to the 50/50 protocol, the tests showed a drop in VO2max to 70.9 - a decrease of 2.5% from the previous level. The answer is clear: too much high intensity training will quickly send you into an overtrained state where you are too fagued to train eecvely. This test was done using four-week blocks for each phase. Not only were three high-intensity workouts per week too much for these high-level athletes, but they were also worse for tness than doing none at all. What most people miss is that there is a threshold where aerobic tness adaptaons are made. That is a point you need not go above to elicit changes in the cells from aerobic training. That cut-o point is 60% of maximum heart rate. My lab-tested maximum heart rate is 183bpm. So to gain an aerobic adaptaon, I only need to get my heart to 110bpm. High-intensity training does smulate greater changes to the mitochondria of the muscle cells than low-intensity training. But that’s not the full picture. A number of studies have shown that low-intensity running helps release large amounts of IL-6 (interleukin). IL-6 is responsible for fague resistance and it’s only gained from longer runs performed in a glycogen-depleted state. In his book 80/20 Running, running expert Ma Fitzgerald explains that, “[A] hard run lasng sixteen minutes may increase IL-6 levels twofold. A one-hour run will increase them tenfold, and a full marathon a hundredfold.” In other words, if you want to be able to go long and far, just like our ancestors did, you need to slow down and run longer, not faster. Another example that clearly displays the benet of a lot of low-intensity work followed by a small amount of higher-intensity work is the famous Tabata study. While many focus on the intervals of twenty seconds of work followed by ten seconds of rest, what they fail to realize is that each session began with a ten-minute warm up at 70% of maximum heart rate, followed by four minutes of the intervals performed at a power output on a cycle ergometer that equated to 170% of the subject’s power at their VO2max. The subjects performed this roune ve days per week with another thirty-minute easy ride at 70% of their maximum heart rate on the sixth day. That means in a given week they performed twelve minutes of high-intensity training compared to eighty minutes of lower intensity work at 70% of their max heart rate. When you compare total me at high intensity to low intensity, these subjects did 85% of their training at low intensity versus 15% at high intensity. This is the most famous high-intensity study ever conducted and it actually shows a greater reason for having the majority of your training volume be lower intensity, especially when viewed in conjuncon with the Billat study menoned earlier. This idea of maintaining lower, more sustainable intensies in training isn’t new, although it may seem like it. The tness world wants to package something short and fast in an eort to make it seem new and science-based. While there certainly are studies that show tness increases from high-intensity training, the reality is that elite endurance athletes, in all sports, have known for decades that the real secret to high performance is sustainability. Stephen Seiler’s work in 2009 showed that “elite endurance athletes perform 80% or more of their training at intensies clearly below their lactate threshold and use high-intensity training sparingly. Studies involving
intensicaon of training in already well-trained athletes have shown equivocal results at best.” To be clear, this isn’t a single sport or a single country that he is talking about. He conducted studies on elite cross-country skiers and found that 70% of their workouts were devoted enrely to low-intensity training. When that was further broken down, he found that 91% of their total training me was spent below the venlatory threshold. Seiler discovered the same thing in rowers, too. Tracking changes in elite rowers in Norway from 1970 to 2001, he found the amount of low-intensity training increased by 67%. This was accompanied by a corresponding drop in high-intensity training of 60%. (Because you can only train so many hours in a given me frame, if you increase one you must decrease the other.) During that me, the number of Norwegian rowers winning internaonal medals increased by 10%. Fitzgerald writes in his book 80/20 that, “By 2001, Norway’s elite rowers were doing an average of y hours of low-intensity training and seven hours of moderate- and high-intensity training per month. That works out to a rao of 88/12.” This was backed up by other studies showing the same thing: • •
•
A 1995 French study tracked training intensity in elite swimmers and found they did 77% of their training at low intensity and 23% combined at moderate and high intensity. A 2007 study in Spain showed that a group of elite cyclists improved while using 78% low intensity in training over a four-month period. But in a following period using 70% low-intensity training, they did not improve at all. Adding 8% extra high-intensity work was too much. A 2012 study following an elite triathlete who placed seventh at the London Olympics showed 74% of swimming, 88% of riding, and 83% of running was done below lactate threshold.
When you train like this, you train in a way that is easy to recover from, boosts health, and strengthens you from the inside out. Don’t fall into the beginner trap of being a slave to your stopwatch or trying to run faster every me you go out. There is a me and place for that later. But in the beginning, focus on building your aer obic capacity with these light, easy runs.
Chapter 3 - Hard “A kelebell is an ancient Russian tool against weakness.” - Pavel Tsatsouline, Founder of StrongFirst
Modern life is fast-paced. We all want a quick x, which has created a mul-million dollar industry around “hacking” performance and training. Sadly, there’s no such thing as a shortcut to physical success. You must put in the work. When it comes to running, rst you need to focus on easy. You’re going to train easy, because if you train hard, you’re going to end up hurt. At age forty, it took me two years to become a procient runner. Two years of run ning a minimum of four mes per week. Two years of nursing parts of my body that were borderline damaged, like my Achilles tendons, which at one point were so tender I couldn’t walk without pain. That’s what happens when you suddenly ask the lower legs to take on a huge amount of work in dealing with deceleraon forces. You do need to have some hard work in your training week. That’s the yin and yang of training - hard and so, all-out and recovery. If you train every session hard, you’ll break. If you train every session easy, you’ll never improve. Finding the right balance is dicult, parcularly if you’re new to running or are returning to it aer an injury. In any given micro training cycle - whether that’s a day, week, or month - you have only so much recovery ability. Think of it as having ten dollars to spend. Unlike how we spend money in our modern lives, there is no credit facility. Once you’ve spent those ten dollars, you’re done. And when your body runs out of “money” to spend on recovery, injury results, so spend wisely. If you decide to spend all of your money on recovering from hard runs, you have nothing le to spend on anything else. If you’re an elite-level runner, you should absolutely be trying to get as fast as possible. But that speed comes at a cost. For every world-class runner on television during the Olympics, hundreds broke down and never made it. Their bodies couldn’t aord to keep paying the cost of such hard training day aer day and year aer year. As I explained in the last chapter, many people make the mistake of “overspending” by cramming too much intensity into their weeks. The human body is the most amazing piece of hardware on the planet. Treated properly, it can outlast any other animal and can stun us with amazing feats of athlecism. If you think of your body as a race car it may help. The best race cars don’t spend much me on the track. Instead, they spend most of the me in the garage. There, technicians check the res to make sure they’re on properly and that the heat and pressure is opmal, make sure the brakes can handle the forces required to slow down from top speed. The technicians make sure the chassis is lined up and all the other important parts of the car are working perfectly. Then, the drivers go out and see how fast the car can go. The moment it comes back from the hot laps, it goes through the process with the technicians all over again - check and assess, check and assess. When was the last me you treated your body like the race car you want it to be? Chances are the closest you come to any form of assessment pre-training is to do some light sets of your rst exercise or a gentle jog. You need to spend me in the garage sorng it all out rst if you want to do the hard, fast stu. Ian King, perhaps the most forward-thinking strength and condioning coach in the world, has said that for every hour of work you need an hour of recovery. For every hour a race car is on track, it is in the garage far more. Earn the fast stu by doing the light and easy stu and the maintenance to keep it all working opmally. In the last chapter, I introduced you to the work of Dr. Maetone. While he advocates a large percentage of training me be done at low and moderate intensies, he also advocates for a small percentage of me spent at higher intensity. You can count either fast running or resistance training as your higher intensity work. Maf fetone’s original plan called for no more than three anaerobic sessions per week. Many people will have blown this by Wednesday if they have a gym session Monday, a run Tuesday, and then another gym session, Spin
class, or similar on Wednesday. Many people think they can do both hard running and gym work in a given meframe and deal with it well. For a short period of me, this might be true. The real queson is what are you doing long-term? What are you doing that allows you to keep training and making improvements for the next thirty years or more? I’ve found the most workable plan to be two gym sessions and one harder run per week. That harder run can either be a longer run to push the boundaries of muscular endurance and fague resistance, or it can be a faster run like a track interval session. Close to a race, the plan may change to a single strength session and two harder runs to boost performance, but that is the limit. I’m aware that many will want more. High intensity and high volume brings quick results, but it also ptoes right to the edge of i njury and burnout. Unl you know exactly how to read the signs your body will give of impending injury, it’s best to stay away from the edge and make haste slowly. When you get to the secon on injuries, you’ll see some ways to start thinking about how to manage this idea of “work.” The body doesn’t deal with every session the same way. For instance, it’s quite normal for me to start my Saturday with a two-hour run before I head to work to train clients. The run is relavely at and I don’t run hard. It’s all about teaching my body to burn fat eecvely and keep moving for long periods of me. That is a stark contrast to a ride I did a couple of years ago with my girlfriend. It was November in Australia and een degrees Celsius (59 Fahrenheit) at the boom of the mountain we were going to ride - a ride that would normally take us the same two hours to complete as my Saturday run. Not a hot day by any stretch, but warm enough. Knowing we’d be climbing, we didn’t wear anything to keep us warm except for shoving a wind vest in our back pockets for the descent. About halfway up the mountain, it started to rain. That’s not such a big deal, so we just shrugged and kept on riding. But as we came out of the tree line, there was all this white stu on the side of the road - snow! It barely snows in Australia even in winter, so this was unbelievable this close to summer. °
We thought we were close to the top, so we kept our heads down and kept riding. Sunglasses came o as the lenses started to fog and then get covered in snow. Hands stopped working. Teeth started chaering. We knew we were close to the summit where there is a café and we decided we’d stop there, eat something hot and warm up, and wait out the snow before coming down. The only problem was that the café was closed. There was no one at the top except us. Given how cold we both were and the prospect of a 22km ride back down into the freezing wind and snow, things were starng to look grim. We put on our thin wind vests. These aren’t meant for cold condions, but to be a windproof layer on slightly chilly days - hardly designed for snow. Going down was horrible. I was shivering so badly I could hardly steer my bike. My hands were useless frozen lumps and I could barely use my brakes or change gears. In fact, my hands were so numb that at one point my bike made a strange clunk and I had no idea what it was. Turns out I had hit the gear lever and changed gears without even feeling it. About 5km from the boom, my girlfriend was in a bad way. She was worse o than me, being a lighter build, and was suering badly from the onset of hypothermia. Knowing she was at risk, I gave her my vest, too, and le her by the side of the road so I could get to the car as quickly as possible. It took me een minutes to get down, throw my bike on top of the car, and get back. The hardest part was geng my cycling shoes o with ngers that didn’t want to obey my commands. With the heater going full bore and the seat heaters on, I raced up the mountain to rescue my girlfriend. By the me I got there, she was delusional. She thought I had only been gone for ve minutes. Luckily, another group of cyclists had come up the mountain and had gathered around her to form a windbreak. Some of them had even been hugging her to give her body warmth. Aer I got her into some dry warm clothes, we went and found a café that was open. We spent about an hour inside trying to warm up, drinking hot drinks, and eang anything we could get our hands on that was hot. It took two weeks to get all the feeling back in my ngers
and toes. I lost three kilograms that day, which also took about two weeks to come back. And for about a month, I was always either hot or cold, as if my body couldn’t gure out how warm I needed to be. That was a two-hour training session, too. So, do you see how one two-hour training session can be so dierent from another? That ride in the cold and snow took a month to recover from. During that me, all I did for my training was just ck the box and take it easy. Nothing over my aerobic cap. No hard strength sessions. Plenty of food and sleep. Now, imagine I dug myself into that kind of hole every week. Are you starng to see how every session can drain you signicantly, even if it’s not as obvious as the snow ride? There’s a well-known Australian cyclist named Brad McGee. He won the 4,000m Individual Pursuit at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. For two weeks aer, he showed an elevated resng heart rate. That’s the eect that a single truly hard event can have on you. Another well-known Australia swimmer named Grant Hacke, one of the greatest swimmers of all me, used to start his tapering for the Olympics over a month away to cope with the massive fague he’d accumulate in the build-up. Many people seem to be stuck on a never-ending loop of needing perpetual recovery. As discussed earlier, they end up in a cycle of constantly needing to burn sugar to deal with the high-stress, corsol-producing training they choose. I’m not suggesng you need to never go hard ever again, but unless you want to spend your life trying to dig yourself out of a hole, learn to embrace the necessary easy side of training. Every week can’t be an eort to see how much you can withstand. The point of training is one thing - to improve. When you’re starng out, don’t worry about how fast you can go. What you need to worry about is whether or not you are enjoying the acvity. Nothing in the world can make you work hard at a voluntary acvity if you don’t enjoy it. And do you think you’re more likely to have longevity as a runner if you come in from each run smiling and feeling energized or come in feeling like you’ve been beaten with a sck? I can tell you now that hard runs on cold mornings that bring on exercise-induced asthma and leave you coughing for hours aerward, or maybe even for a day or two, aren’t much fun. Neither are hard tempo runs that leave your feet feeling as if they’re been baered for a day aer. In the beginning, just learn to enjoy running. Learn to enjoy the sun, or the rain, on your face. Enjoy not being boled up indoors like a science experiment and feel the energy you get from being outside. Noce that the more me you spend outside, the less you will seem to get allergies like hay fever. Learn to appreciate the small things like the wind at your back, a small downhill, or a new pair of socks. Be thankful when a friend or partner noces that your legs are long and lean like a racehorse or that you dropped a few clothing sizes. One of the books that made the most dierence to me as a coach was Enter the Kelebell by Pavel Tsatsouline. The thing that stuck in my head was that Pavel suggested that in your rst year of kelebell training you shouldn’t snatch very much. His reasoning was that it oen proved hard on the shoulders and elbows and was likely to tear up the hands. Running hard is like that. Tissue adaptaon for running takes a long me. Your muscles and cardiovascular system will adapt long before the connecve ssue and joints do. Try to go too hard too early and you’ll pay the price. At some point, though, if you want to make the leap to faster mes and beer performance, you will need to push your boundaries and run harder. There are few experiences I’ve had in life that hurt as badly as sustained fast running. I can ride my bike hard enough to lose vision in one eye and dribble (true story), but it didn’t hurt as badly as running. I can swim unl I vomit and it ’s not as bad. And I can row unl I collapse o the ergometer into a gasping, fetal ball. None of that hurts like running does. When you run fast, the world seems to close in on you. Your wide eld of smuli, normally lled with colors, smells, and sounds, gradually shrinks. Colors become monochromac. Sounds other than the thumping of your heart and the whooshing of your breath cease. Your sense of smell vanishes. Running is incredibly complex for your body to accomplish. When you ask your body to run fast for extended periods, it shuts down all nones-
senal feedback and input. Everything you have goes into forward movement and body control. But within those moments of pain, in your lile cocoon of speed, you’ll be so alive. There are many movement-based groups these days that push the idea of “resets” that get the body out of its daily hunched posion and ready to excel athlecally. The greatest reset of all is fast running. Short snts of hard running will do things for you that no other form of exercise on the planet can do. There is no shortage of ways to run fast - VO2max eorts, Fartlek and interval training, and sprints, to name a few. The basic run plan you’ll use calls for easy to moderate aerobic-only running. For the harder sessions, you’ll use cruise and tempo intervals to add speed. Cruise intervals are short four- to six-minute segments performed at or just above race pace, broken with recovery periods that might range from half to about equal to the work me. Tempo runs are longer segments held for een to twenty minutes, typically at speeds just below race pace. Both approaches serve a purpose if used wisely. Both are faster than your easy aerobic runs, though neither is “fast” when compared to sprinng. Training at higher intensity can sneak up on you. Even a few minutes too long with a heart rate only a few beats per minute too high can cost you later. That great run you had where you smashed your normal loop record, but nished feeling like you had heavy legs? That’s the result of the trauma caused by going too hard for too long or too oen. My two favorite ways to use cruise intervals and tempo runs are easy to follow. For tempo intervals, start with a single een-minute block within an otherwise easy run. It might look like this: •
• •
Run 30 minutes easy to get warmed up. Include a few sets of strides to open up the legs and lungs. (Strides are short bursts of faster running. Not sprinng, but faster than your normal speed. They are the perfect dynamic warm up to fast running.) Run 15 minutes hard. (I would even suggest a pace here based o race mes or projected race mes.) Cool down with 15 minutes easy.
To begin, only add one of these sessions per week and monitor the results. Remember, the intenon isn’t to do the most you can, but the minimum while sll improving. When it comes to using intensity in training, a li le bit goes a long way. As you progress, you could add in a second tempo interval to the same run. Or, you could add it into another run, which works a bit beer as it allows for more recovery between hard eorts. Two mostly easy runs with short segments of faster running are far easier to recover from than a single run with one long, hard segment in it, even though the total amount of hard running is the same. Cruise intervals are parcularly useful to prepare for an event like a Spartan Race, since the obstacles essenally turn the course into a series of shorter runs. I used this strategy with April Dee, who has been the dominant female obstacle course race athlete for three years. We used a variety of ways to create both strength and speed in her training. One of my favorites was a workout called the accordion, shown to me by World Ironman Champion Chris McCormack. The accordion involves running at faster than race pace for half a mile and then slower than race pace for half a mile as a recovery. The average pace will be equal to target race pace. For an added bonus, and because Spartan makes great use of the terrain as an obstacle, I had April do these sessions uphill for the faster segments and downhill for the easy segments to enhance recovery while building strength. The nal type of hard run you will need is the long run. While cruise and tempo intervals challenge you to run faster, the long run will benet you by increasing muscular endurance. Australian Olympian and internaon al running coach Tony Benson wrote the following regarding the long run, “ Virtually every middle and long distance runner and triathlete does a weekly long run and those who do not do one do not convert their 400m speed to longer distances as well as those who do. The greatest benets come from a run of 1:30 to 2 hours at between 70% and 80% MHR or perceived eort.”
Benson also stated the following increases as reasons to add in the long run: • • • • •
Capillarizaon of muscle Number of mitochondria in the cells Enzyme acvity within the mitochondria Myoglobin in the muscle cells Muscle glycogen storage
As Benson explained, “The long run can be viewed as a percentage of the athlete’s weekly volume. Taken this way it will be very individual because it is based on the number of training sessions and total kilometres run.” Benson went on further to say, “A full long run may be dened as a run that equals 20 to 24% of a middle dis tance runner’s weekly volume, 18 to 22% of a distance runner’s weekly volume and 24 to 30% of a triathlete’s weekly volume.” The relavely higher percentage for triathletes is simply due to me constraints. When you are spling available training me between three sports, you cannot do as many sessions for each individual sport as someone who is only running. But when you take into account the extra tness work being done on the bike and in the pool, it means the two runs during the week can be quality focused, just as with the weekend longer run. Using these percentages, it always makes me wonder why a 20km long run is thought of as correct with a total weekly volume of 50km. More realiscally, when your weekday volume is something like 40-50km (~10km daily, Monday through Friday), the longer run should be about 15km, or 25% of your total volume. This will give beer results than a longer distance, as it will decrease muscle soreness and risk of i njury. Remember, we can add stress either in the form of speed or me, so even a long run done solely aerobically will sll place stress on the body. If peak performance at an elite level is your goal, then you need to push both your weekly volume and the length of the long run. Because both give you more me spent running, which in turn increases the skill of your running, you will get beer faster. If your goal is simply to run injury-free for the rest of your life, then a lile less will be beer for you. While the long run is important - it aids in ssue adaptaon, strengthening the bones, ligaments, tendons, and joints - it sll needs to be kept in context when viewed against your overall volume and ability. Avoid adding too much volume during the week in an aempt to oset the loss of miles in your long run. I’ve seen people add me into their warm ups and cool downs to try to oset the loss, too, but they just end up doing too much when they should be having an easy recovery run. One of the main drawbacks people point out with distance training is the loss of anaerobic strength or power. Strength is related to cross-seconal size of the muscle and some loss of size will occur with endurance training. This may be true inially, but will be oset by your gym work. Remember, you’re sll hing it hard in the gym, just not on the track. While cross training can be useful, remember that specializaon reaps the biggest rewards for any single acvity. The more me you spend running, the beer you will become at it. Benson wrote: “It is good to remember that many endurance athletes, such as swimmers and cyclists, have great cardiovascular eciency and strength. It does not help them run at the same level as they swim or ride despite the fact many use running at various mes to increase their stamina because they lack specic running economy - something that can only be developed gradually over years of running.” Paavo Nurmi – known as the Flying Finn - set 22 world records and won twelve Olympic medals. He, too, understood the need for long easy miles. While in the Army, he would rise an hour before reveille and walk 10km in the elds in his boots despite the oen freezing temperatures and darkness of Finnish winters. He also experimented with cross-country skiing aer realizing that many skiers were good runners, but chose to avoid skang, nong that skaters, in general, were not good runners.
Nurmi’s training roune for the 1920 Olympics looked like this: • •
Morning: Walk 10–12km with some sprints to loosen up for the aernoon run. Aernoon: Run 4–7km with fast speed over the last 1–2km, nish with four to ve 80m to 100m sprints. (The sprints are normally referred to as strides in today’s training language).
If we put that into perspecve, it means that in a week where Nurmi walked 50km and ran 22.5km, the total fast running involved was only 7.5km, or roughly 10% of his total mileage. Don’t be fooled into thinking that because he included a small amount of fast running each day that he ran hard every day. This is akin to liing a single hard set in a daily two-hour workout - an amount seemingly insignicant, yet enough to see him run a one-mile world record. The lesson? You need the easy work to help you absorb the hard work. The biggest mistake any new runner can make is to act like a fourth grader in gym class. Remember the rst me you had to run around a 400m track as part of a test for school? It probably hurt a lot and you weren’t so great. Then the teacher made you do it again each week for a month before moving onto another sport. And with no training other than this single regular at-out run you made improvements. It would be fantasc if we could progress like that in all our physical pursuits. If I was sll progressing with my squat the way I was in high school, I’d be squang well over 2,000kg by now. I’d also be running for Olympic gold instead of Usain Bolt. But progress like that doesn’t happen forever. Beginners see progress because they have such a low level of skill at an acvity. Basing your training on what allowed you to progress as a beginner, or worse, as a child, is nonsensical. Would you base your reading list around the books you read as a ten-year-old, too? Would your idea of a good meal be cut-up hot dogs and French fries? Everything else about your life has progressed. So should your outlook on training and the methods you follow. Limit your hard runs to just a few in each training block. I recommend one hard run each week comprised of some faster interval work. This may include some hill work, too, if you’ve got the strength for it. Along with the faster interval run, I recommend a longer run that is up to 25% of your total weekly distance. If you were running four days per week (three runs of up to an hour during the week and one longer run on the weekend), then the longer run should be from ninety minutes to two hours in length. While the longer run should be done at your easy level, it will sll be plenty hard on your body due to the fague you’ll experience.
Chapter 4 - The Physics of Running As someone who spends every day watching people move and then trying to get them to do it beer, I am al ways amazed at the illogical approach many have to exercise. If I asked someone who had never cooked before to make me a three-course meal and told them all they needed to know was how to turn on the oven, I’d be laughed at. But somehow when it comes to exercise, many people think all they need to know is how to e their shoes and they should be ne from there. The problem with running is that it is supposed to be a natural, insncve movement - something we’re all born with. But we’ve got the movement skills of a six-year-old. I can’t count the number of mes I have heard people say something like, “How you run is how you run.” I can’t imagine the reacon if I told people to deadli however they wanted to, yet when it comes to running that seems to be an acceptable response. But nothing could be further from the truth. Running well is every bit as technical and detailed as any other form of exercise. From foot placement to hand posion to breathing, there is beauty and arstry in running. Taking the me to do it well will be a reward as big as improving your squat technique or pronouncing words correctly in a new language. But - and there is a big “but” - there is no evidence at all to show that all these supposed “technique” coaches out there are actually doing any good. In fact, there is research that shows altering a runner’s natural stride and form slows them down and makes them less ecient. Runner and coach Arthur Lydiard hinted at this in his famous Sports Illustrated arcle from 1962. He said: “Forget about form. If a joker throws his arms around, that’s ne, so long as he is t and relaxed. Then he runs smoother and easier, and form takes care of itself. We want the chap who can run for two or three hours and come back looking as fresh as he did when he went out.” The thing that separates the best runners in the world from the rest of us is their ability to hold form while running. This skill is hard won over years of pavement pounding and is one of the main reasons you don’t see many great young runners in distance events. The elite have spent many years perfecng their form, the same way a boxer learns the ins and outs of the ght game. As they’ve developed higher and higher skill levels, they display this by racing faster and further. A good runner is one who has learned what it takes to go fast. When was the last me you went out the door with the sole intenon of guring out how you run and how to run beer? Before any discussion can be had on training plans, pacing strategies, or which shoes to buy, we need to rst look at how to run. It sounds so simple, but trust me, it’s not. My friend Rob de Castella, a former world champion and world record holder, knows a thing or two about running. During one of our conversaons about running, he gave me the simplest truth I have yet heard: “Running is about kicking the earth as hard as you can on each stride.” The physics are simple. The harder you push the earth, the harder it pushes you back, and this results in forward moon. Newton’s third law in acon. But people are usually so distracted while they run that they may not even realize this is what is happening. Perhaps they’re tuned out listening to a favorite track, looking at the scenery to distract from the pain they’re feeling, or busy thinking about how to tackle a problem at work. If I can give you one piece of immediate advice to carry through all your training, it is to eliminate distracons from your running. Focus on making every
step of every run more perfect than the one preceding it. Tune into your body and don’t be distracted. Discussions of running form are usually derailed by minuae. One minute some guy stumbles out of the desert saying he’s been hanging out with some amazing barefooted people who are powered by chia seeds, and the next a Russian guy is talking about energy return, while at the same me there’s a guy in a lab coat telling you the most important thing is the gravitaonal eect of Mars on Earth’s atmosphere and that if you me your running to coincide with the alignment of the planets, you’ll be faster. But a lot of the commentary on running technique is based on personal experience. And in today’s world of informaon overload, we have access to a nearly limitless supply of personal experience, albeit other people’s experience. So let’s make this as praccal and based in science and biology as we can. Aer all, despite all of us on the planet being dierent, we share the same biology, so what works for one body will largely work for another. Underneath the body are the legs. While the mass above the legs is largely non-funconal in relaon to running, the legs need to serve a variety of funcons from support to shock absorpon to force generaon. And during each stride, they’re performing all these acons at once. Underneath the legs is the ground, and as we said before, we need the ground so we have something to kick against to provide propulsion. Running is best described as a series of one-legged hops done in rapid succession: 1. Propulsion and li o: When you push o. 2. Recovery: When you pick your leg up and extend it. 3. Impact and braking: When gravity brings you back into contact with the ground and fricon halts your forward moon. While we could break out here and discuss enough scienc research to make your head spin, the most important takeaway is that your legs essenally act like springs throughout your run. “Tread lightly” takes on a whole new meaning when you start to consider how much impact forces can change your performance. Many running coaches will try to shoehorn you into their idea of a universal good form. Given that we are all built slightly dierently, and that limb lengths, weight distribuon, and even previous injury will change the way we run, trying to achieve some textbook ideal for form isn’t going to work. Not only that, but it will likely lead to injury. I’m not sure perfect form exists in relaon to running for most of us. Everyone is built slightly dierently and we all move dierently based o our athlec history and previous injuries. With that being said there are sll some key points to keep in mind regarding form. Think of these as the big rocks: The Head. Neutral spine is the same posion whether you are standing or running. If you imagine a broomsck held along the spine, it should contact the back of the head, run between the shoulder blades, and be in contact with your sacrum. That’s the same posion we want to emulate while running. The posion of the head can cause problems for people. In the modern world thanks to excessive sing, staring at a computer screen, or looking down at a smart phone, the head tends to be pushed forwards. To counter balance the body, as the head is pushed further forwards the hips are pushed further back. This can lead to never being able to fully stand tall while running, and has the knock on eect of not being able to fully engage the hips. The Shoulders. Hunching the shoulders leads to ineciency. The sness created will prevent you from being
able to swing your arms freely to counter the rotaonal forces of running, as well as stop you from breathing eecvely. While they should round slightly the key is to remember to run tall yet relaxed. The Back. If you run tall and imagine needing to keep the broomsck in place that I spoke of in the paragraph on head posion, you will have the perfect posture wit h your back. You don’t need to run like a soldier standing at aenon, but you shouldn’t slouch. The Arms. The arms should be relaxed along with the shoulders. This allows for the arms to swing freely. The start point of the arm swing is actually the drawing back of the arm. This coincides with the raising of the opposite leg. People mistakenly believe that geng their knee up and through faster will make them run faster. It will, but not for the reason they believe. A faster knee-through moon drives the opposing leg down harder, and the faster you want to run, the harder that leg needs to drive to the ground. Focusing on the drawing back of the arm allows it to swing loosely forward without unnecessary tension. From a point just outside the body the arms will swing slightly in towards the center line. The best cue I have yet heard is from a former coach of mine who exhorted athletes to ick their nipples. If you keep the arms bent at roughly ninety degrees you’ll maintain the best combinaon of relaxed tension needed to run fast. The Hands. The hands should be loosely clenched, as i f holding a small sck in each hand. One well-known triathlon coach, Bre Suon, even makes his athletes run with M&M containers in their hands to enforce this. They are easily spoed even years aer moving on from him as they all run with imaginary M&M containers in their hands with thumbs suspended midair over where the top of the container would be. The wrists, just like you’ll see with the kelebell exercises later, should not be loose and oppy. Every me your wrist bends or the hand ops around you are wasng energy. Like with the back we don’t want joints held rigidly, but there needs to be some rmness. The Pelvis. Many people spend their days in what is called anterior pelvic lt – that is with the pelvis rotated forward. While this may be your natural stance it is not ideal for running. This posion is oen due to overly ght hip exors, the head forward posion menoned previously, or a combinaon of both. This over-ghtness needs to be addressed. Otherwise, the thigh is not free to extend backwards on each stride. For many people, slightly rotang the pelvis forward will bring them back into neutral. A good test for this is that if you push your hips as far back behind you as you can (imagine Beyonce twerking to get this posion) you’ll feel your abs are disengaged. If you begin to pull your hips towards your rib cage, you’ll feel your abs start to engage. When you can feel your abs are lightly acvated you are in a good posion to run, since your legs can swing freely underneath your body. The pelvis and the back must be working together to allow you to “run tall.” The Legs and Feet. Before we discuss how the legs and feet operate we need to dierenate between “ground contact” and “landing.” Merely having your foot on the ground doesn’t equal having all your weight on it. Some great coaches have had the following to say about ground contact versus landing: Toni Ne, a German sports scienst, said that the rst part of the landing phase is with the outside edge of the foot. At 1500m distances and greater, like we are talking about, the contact will be between the heel and metatarsus (forward edge of heel). He explained: “This landing should occur close to directly under the center of mass. Many runners have a tendency to try to posion the foot directly under them, and for slow running this will work, but as you get faster you’ll see the landing take place slightly in front of the body, but with the foot directly under the knee with a vercal, or near vercal shin angle. This puts the runner in the best posion to ulize the body’s elasc recoil system and avoid the braking eects that can
accompany landing on an extended leg in a typical heel striking stride. To reiterate the point on the landing posion, which many will claim is heresy having been told that the foot should always land under the body, Bill Bowerman said that “the point of contact should be directly under the knee.” You’ll note nothing there about the exact placement of the foot under the body, only that the foot should be under the knee. If you spend some me video ing yourself running you’ll note that the only way to run with the foot landing directly under the body is to run in a completely upright, high knee style that oers lile in the way of propulsion and looks like you are trying to step over small hurdles while running.” Percy Ceruy believed that running should be a free and uncomplicated movement. Work on relaxaon before you worry about speed or distance – think easy, light, and smooth. You’ll get to fast eventually, but to start with, work on those three. One of the biggest benets of running slowly is having the mental space to work on the dynamic relaxaon required for running. If you can’t run relaxed and economically at 6min/ km you certainly won’t do it at 5min/ km or 4min/km. One of the reasons running is superior to circuit training for tness gains has to do with how blood can move freely around the body. When a muscle is tensed more than 50%, blood ow is occluded. This is why remaining relaxed is crucial to fast running - if you tense up, then you prevent oxygen from reaching the working muscles. It is this ability to remain relaxed while moving with what might be termed dynamic relaxaon at all speeds that disnguishes faster athletes from slower ones. Exerng and relaxing rhythmically allows the blood to move in and out of the muscle bers more easily during the relaxaon phase. This means a greater volume of blood will reach the muscle bers. The greater the volume of blood reaching the muscles the beer the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the muscles and the more eciently waste products will be removed. Tony Benson, one of the world’s greatest run coaches, had this to say: “First we need to pracce geng the landing right. Start by jogging on the spot and feeling the natural landing posion. As long as you keep your body vercal you will stay on the spot. If you want to move forward simply push your bu forward (don’t arch your back) so you are leaning from the heel not the waist and you will move forward (actually you will accelerate forward) naturally. Now nd a straight line (i.e. as on a track) and start running along it. Have someone check your landing. Your right foot should cover half the line when it lands and your le should also cover half the line on landing. If your feet are not landing in this way or your heel is ok but your toes are poinng out you are not landing under your center of mass. If you are landing in this way the outer edge of the foot will make contact rst because the foot has a natural ten dency to hang that way when relaxed while the backward pulling acon will automacally align the foot into the correct posion. The landing will also be relavely light because the foot is not landing all at once. To run along a line aempng to land at footed would mean you actual ly have to extend the inner edge of the foot down. If your landing is not under, or as close as possible to under your centre of mass it will mean your body falls slightly to the le when the right foot lands and slightly to the right when your le foot lands. This means you are basically zigzagging along the road - which is all cosng me. If you are landing correctly the foot, lower leg and thigh will have been swept backwards at the me of landing because if your landing is not acve the heel will hit rst and the braking eects that accompany a full heel landing will occur. To be successful in achieving a correct landing po sion you will need to develop the power to be capable of applying a millisecond of downward force (remember I said some elite athletes appear to “throw” their arm towards the ground?) as
the lead arm is pulled backwards. The corresponding downward drive of your opposite leg then causes your body to rise. This means your foot has more me to swing back into a posion di rectly under your body. Inially I recommend you think only of applying force with the right arm. Once the technique is mastered the le will copy this acon automacally. Landing under your body means your foot spends less me on the ground than if you land on your heel with the foot out in front of your body because you do not spend unnecessary me pulling your body forward to get into a posion to push o into the next stride. More important ly if you have ever been told to “li your knees up” or to “run tall” ignore these poorly stated di recves because, as per Newton’s law, to focus on liing the legs will cause the hips and indeed the whole upper body to drop.” Perhaps a beer clue as to how we should be landing comes from movement experts such as Ido Portal. While not a runner, Portal’s team has spent me working with parkour athletes to beer understand how we interact with the ground and how we can be beer placed to ulize the natural springiness contained within our bodies. In Natural Born Heroes, Chris McDougall makes note that parkour runners tend to have the same elasc steps that great distance runners have. The key is in two things: 1. Relying on muscle elascity 2. Never allowing the heel to strike heavily or rst Try this drill to understand the correct way your feet should be landing: Stand in what is called a box stance, with both feet parallel and about hip width apart. Raise the heels o the ground as if there was something very thin underneath. In fact, if it makes it easier, nd two dried-up leaves and place them under your heels. Now keep your heels raised enough that they do not make any sound from touching the leaves, but are sll in contact with them. That is exactly the soness we are looking for in foot placement and how our feet should be hing the ground. Touch the leaves, but do not damage them. While the heel will kiss the ground soly when running, and you shouldn’t try to prevent it, you should always return to the mantra taught to me by parkour gurus John Sapinoso and Joseph Bartz, “As quietly as possible.” Imagine you are a ninja hurtling through the night, swi yet silent. Rob de Castella always used to comment aer races how quiet the Kenyans were, both in their breathing and foot strike. Geng rid of the full heel strike will benet you in many ways. When we land with the heel, we rely on the skeleton to take the brunt of the landing forces. But we’ve been given the most amazing shock absorpon system - our muscles. Landing properly will allow the muscles of the feet, lower leg, thighs, and glutes to take the strain in the way they were designed. As an experiment, try landing deliberately a few mes on your heels while barefoot. Now try taking a few steps running like that so you can sense how damaging that can be. Success in running begins with the feet. Running coach Frank Dick stated, “The foot is well equipped (due to its 26 bones) both in strength and mobility to adapt to any type of terrain,” but, “If the heel and no other part of the foot hits the ground rst there is no chance for the foot to accept the inial ‘loading of momentum.’” Meaning, the foot is unable to distribute shock and injury risk is increased. Runners spend years working to develop good foot and ankle strength to help them deal with running hard. According to Benson, “To develop the necessary foot strength you should consider doing special exercises, like toe walking, and/or spending more me bare foot. If you are a triathlete you need to be more comfortable running without shoes than a runner because you have to run bare foot – somemes for a considerable distance – during your actual race”.
Many people make the mistake of going from avoiding heel striking to over-emphasising landing on the forefoot. Do not point your foot down in an aempt to land on your toes or on the ball of your foot. The foot should land at, or almost at as it contacts the ground. Trying to over emphasize a forefoot landing has many runners end up with a calf or Achilles injury. If you were a habitual heel striker, landing with the foot extended in front of the body, you’d be advised to pracce your new landing technique on easy runs. At your limit, you won’t have the mental space to focus on changing aspects of your form. Focus on the feeling of pushing slightly o the thigh on every step to engage the muscles of the legs beer. Tony Benson gave these two great examples of how minimizing ground contact me can reduce race mes signicantly: Example 1. John runs 10k in 40 minutes and his stride length is 1.5 metres. This means he takes 6,667 strides. This in turn means the average me for each stride is 0.360 sec. If John could decrease this me by 0.003 sec (three one thousandths of a second) he would improve his 10k me by 20 seconds. This is a 0.83% improvement that would equal to 15 seconds for a 30 minute 10,000m runner. Equally developing the power to improve stride length without compromising stride frequency and technique will dramacally improve your mes. Example 2. If John could improve his stride length from 1.5m to 1.51m (a 0.7% i mprovement) he would take only 6,625 strides to run 10k. Provided each stride remained at 0.360 seconds he would run 10k in 39:44. For the 30 minute 10,000m runner this equates to 29:48 – a 12 second benet. If John could improve stride frequency by .003 seconds and stride length by 0.01 meter, he would improve his 10k me by a total of 36 seconds and a 30 minute 10,000m runner would improve by 27 seconds.” We also know that by reducing contact me and increasing cadence, we become more ecient. Think of contact me, or the reducon of it, as free speed. And it ’s not just speed you gain, but economy too - meaning less recovery needed aer every session. In the examples above, each stride is esmated at 0.36 seconds. In elite runners, approximately 0.1 seconds of each stride is ground contact me, yet in recreaonal runners that bal loons to nearly double at 0.2 seconds. If you do the math in reverse and gure each stride takes 0.460 seconds (with the added 0.1 seconds of ground contact me) suddenly those mes go out to 51 minutes. Now do you see the importance of high cadence for running speed? We’ve all heard stories of how much force a runner has working on himself or herself. These numbers vary wildly from as lile as two mes bodyweight to as much as eight mes bodyweight for sprinng or downhill running. The thing to remember when looking at these gures is that running encompasses anything faster than a walk as far as researchers are concerned. In other words, when researchers look at the forces exhibited on the body, they look at everything from a slow jog to an all-out sprint. For our purposes, we will talk about running as a pace that is not an idle jog, nor an all-out sprint. It is a pace that can be sustained for a long period of me, while being too uncomfortable to sustain indenitely. When looking at what goes on during running, but not sprinng, the numbers are much less worrying, although sll worth considering. To push o the ground, the average runner exerts a force approximately equal to 2.5 mes his or her own bodyweight. As the runner returns to earth, the impact force is about 1.6 mes bodyweight. Both of these forces occur in less than half a second. So the average runner experiences forces from 125kg (275lbs) to 340kg (750lbs) on each step on level ground. Is it any wonder why people get hurt running?
Going back to Rob de Castella’s words to me about kicking the ground hard on each step, you have to imagine the physics involved for it to make sense. In order to run forward, we need to create both vercal and horizon tal forces, as well as enough space for our feet to clear the ground on each stride. The horizontal force is the “kick.” When we kick the ground as hard as we can, the earth pushes back just as hard as we kicked it in the rst place, and that is where our forward movement comes from. All this kicking leads to the most important thing to learn about running - technique is everything. Plant your foot too far in front and it acts like a brake that you have to step up and over before you can again accelerate and take the next step. Plant it too far behind and you’re likely to fall on your face. The issue with kicking the ground as hard as we can, though, is that many people get caught up pushing hard with the leg. This actually increases surface contact me and slows you down. The more me you spend on the ground, the more me you spend landing, decelerang, accelerang, and taking o again. That means more me experiencing those forces we spoke of earlier, and less me at maximum speed. Think of it like an airplane - you don’t want to spend your whole trip taxiing on the runway, you want be ying. The soluon to this is a stronger, ser spring (our legs). A beer spring won’t collapse like a weak one will, so we need to make sure that our muscles prepared and that we take advantage of some lile known ways to op mize our mechanics. The most important part of this puzzle is to take shorter steps. Yes, I know it will feel like you have to work more to get to the same point. Surely, if you take longer strides it will mean you are kicking the ground harder? It might, but it will also mean you’re staying on the ground longer. The answer is to take shorter strides and get o the ground as quickly as possible. If you’re new to running, some of this is going to be like hearing man just walked on the moon for the rst me. When I rst read it I couldn’t believe some of the numbers I’m about to tell you. Researchers have found if you shorten your stride and run at 180-190 steps per minute (or ninety fooalls on each side to make it easier to count) you become much more energy ecient. How much more ecient? How’s a 100% increase in “spring” sness sound? That’s right, by geng away from long, loping strides and working on shorter, faster steps, what you lose in amount of ground covered, you make up for in a reducon of wasted energy. Less wasted vercal displace ment, less braking forces resisng movement, and less me on the ground. In fact, the full numbers look like this: • • •
32% reducon in ground contact me 76% reducon in total vercal displacement during contact phase (how much you collapse as each foot strikes the ground) 100% increase in “spring” sness
If you’re wondering how much dierence this increase in sness can make, consider some research done by Heiderscheit et al (2011) that showed forces at the ankle, knee, and hip were decreased by simply increasing running cadence 10%. In other words, for runners who are prone to lower-body joint injuries (which is nearly all runners) you can make yourself less injury prone by running with a higher turnover. Add to this studies that show longer, slower steps lead to ring faster. Studies by Duo (2002) and Rabita et al (2011) show that a slow, shuing run consumes more energy per step than the quicker turnover we are aer. That “energy-saving” shue you devolve into is actually making you red faster. Running economy is what will lead to speed over distance, and economy is built from good technique that allows you to maintain high turnover. Note: this will look slightly dierent for everyone, as we are all built dierently. But the key point is the same - all champion runners have high turnover.
How Important Is Eciency? Looking at the world of elite distance racing gives some big clues as to what ideal distance runners look like. At the me of wring, Wilson Kipsang of Kenya holds the world record at 2.03.23. At 1.82m (5’11.5”) he weighs only 62kg (137lbs). He is substanally taller than the previous record holder, Patrick Makau, who is only 1.7m (5’7”) but was also around the 60kg (130lbs) mark. In simple terms, a smaller runner requires less eort to run at the same speed. They simply don’t have to kick as hard on each step to hold their pace. But physics isn’t always so cut and dried, and regardless of size, one human being will burn roughly the same amount of energy as any other provided they are running the same distance. So if you’re looking to lose weight via running, the key is not the speed you run at, but the distance you cover. Humans have it quite lucky in the animal kingdom when it comes to running. Courtesy of our bipedal gait and our ability to sweat, we’re more ecient runners than most animals smaller than a midsized dog. But when we look at the physics involved in our running, a consistent theme is obvious - smaller runners travel further faster. Because of needing to both kick behind as well as create vercal displacement, a bigger runner has to work that much harder on every step to keep up with the smaller one. (And for the sake of this conversaon, “big ger” means the runner weighs more). This problem can be minimized a lile by trying to keep relavely close to the ground. There’s even a mathemacal formula for it. According to Jim Reardon of the University of Wisconsin Physics Department, a runner has to leap 7.5cm (about 3in) into the air in order to cover one body length. Next me you go for a run, think about what 7.5cm looks like. Running coaches have been telling athletes for years to “aen out their stride.” The higher you leap on each step, the more vercal force you need to deal with on the landing. That leads to longer contact mes and more muscle stress, all of which is going to re you out faster. What makes us beer is reducing vercal energy ex penditure and forces while maximizing horizontal velocity. A nal point needs to be made about runner mass. While you obviously have to deal with higher landing forces, the heavier you are there is an even bigger problem when it comes to pacing, parcularly in long races. In his book Faster , Jim Gourley noted: “A 121 pound (55kg) Kenyan racer will produce 983W of heat running at a leisurely 6-minute mile pace (3.75min/km). (Note that while this sounds extremely fast to most of us, the marathon world record is 42km at sub 3min/km pace, so for an elite runner this is almost a recovery run). Meanwhile a 165 pound (75kg) recreaonal runner will produce 1,341W of heat at the same speed”. Tim Noakes has gained notoriety over the last few years in endurance circles for his work on the central governance theory. His idea that the body regulates eort based on managing core temperature has been taken more and more seriously by many endurance athletes and coaches. Breaking down the amount of heat energy developed by Gourley’s hypothecal runners, the biggest dierence is at what pace they begin to struggle to regulate their own heat. For the recreaonal runner that point is at nine-minute mile pace (~5.6km/min). At that point he will start a bale with himself based on pain tolerance and the length of the race. If he chooses to speed up, it is only a maer of me before he is generang so much heat he needs to slow down. Meanwhile our Kenyan racer doesn’t reach this point unl he hits that six-minute mile pace.
The take away is clear. While lower body weights will allow a runner to deal with lower impact forces on each stride, it will also change the rate at which your body generates and expels heat. While there are many sports where being bigger is beer, running is not one of them. If you plan to run far and fast, then you will need to control your diet to minimize your fat mass and overall weight. A bigger runner needs to work 1-1.5% harder for every extra kilogram he or she weighs versus a smaller runner. For me, even at 85kg (187lb) I am forced to produce 20-25% more eort just to run at the same speed as our Kenyan. Any wonder why I can’t keep up? And this eort is magnied if we start running up hills or on more challenging surfaces such as grass or sand. Running is every bit as technical as any other acvity you can nd. It is not a maer of lacing up your shoes, pung on your headphones, and tuning out the rest of the world while you mindlessly plod around the streets. Make an eort to make every step beer than the one before it. Focus on posture, breathing, hand posion, fooall, and how you carry your arms. Most of all, focus on turnover. Your goal as a runner is to keep the body like a s spring to make it an ecient energy return device. A large part of that is a high cadence, as it gives you an increase in sness for no extra physical training. There is nothing else you can do that will make you 100% beer at running instantly. There are many free metronome apps available for phones these days. I suggest downloading one so you can use it in training to monitor your cadence. It’s like buying free speed and injury resistance. Finally, pay aenon to your diet. While many get into running to lose some weight in the rst place, if you want to take it to the next level, you need to pay aenon to diet. Even a few extra pounds of weight will add an enormous burden to the body both in terms of impact forces and ability to regulate heat. Not only are abs built in the kitchen, but so are fast runners. But somemes they’re also built long before that. When I was a kid and was forced to run in my school com peons, it would amaze me how fast some of the kids would run. It wasn’t like I didn’t try hard and wasn’t t, but somehow there were these kids who were blazing fast with seemingly no eort. Naturally, I didn’t like those kids much. As I’ve goen older, I’ve seen this me and again. I train with everything I have and some guy who does half what I have been doing waltzes past me and beats me to the line. Have you ever wondered why some people are so much faster than you, despite seeming to be so similar? How can two people who train the same, weigh the same, and are roughly the same age perform so dierently? Part of the answer is skill. They are simply beer runners and have spent more me praccing to run. I hope to take care of some of that for you with this book and allow you to run more oen without geng hurt. But the other part is all genecs. Like with all athlecs, it pays to have good parents. Some people are born to perform beer. So, the real quesons are what is that factor that separates them and what can we do as runners to bridge that gap? I’m sure if you’ve hung out with any endurance acionados you’ll have heard of the term VO2max. The short version is that VO2 represents the body’s ability to use oxygen. It is measured in units of oxygen used per kilogram of bodyweight per minute (ml O2 per kg per min). Though typically you’ll just see a simple gure aached to it, without any idenfying abbreviaons aer. For instance, I’m a 57. The tables below, adapted from Wilmore and Cosll (2005)[2], detail normave data for VO2 max (ml/kg/min) in various populaon groups.
Non Athletes
Age
Male
Female
10 - 19
47 - 56
38 - 46
20 - 29
43 - 52
33 - 42
30 - 39
39 - 48
30 - 38
40 - 49
36 - 44
26 - 35
50 - 59
34 - 41
24 - 33
60 - 69
31 - 38
22 - 30
70 - 79
28 - 35
20 - 2
The following are the VO2 max scores for a selection of the top female and male athletes. VO2 max (ml/kg/min)
Athlete
Gender
Sport/Event
96.0
Espen Harald Bjerke
Male
Cross Country Skiing
96.0
Bjorn Daehlie
Male
Cross Country Skiing
92.5
Greg LeMond
Male
Cycling
92.0
Matt Carpenter
Male
Marathon Runner
92.0
Tore Ruud Hofstad
Male
Cross Country Skiing
91.0
Harri Kirvesniem
Male
Cross Country Skiing
88.0
Miguel Indurain
Male
Cycling
87.4
Marius Bakken
Male
5K Runner
85.0
Dave Bedford
Male
10K Runner
85.0
John Ngugi
Male
Cross Country Runner
73.5
Greta Waitz
Female
Marathon runner
71.2
Ingrid Kristiansen
Female
Marathon Runner
67.2
Rosa Mota
Female
Marathon Runner
Age
Male
Female
Baseball
18-32
48-56
52-57
Basketball
18-30
40-60
43-60
Cycling
18-26
62-74
47-57
Canoeing
22-28
55-67
48-52
Football (USA)
20-36
42-60
Gymnastics
18-22
52-58
Ice Hockey
10-30
50-63
Orienteering
20-60
47-53
46-60
Rowing
20-35
60-72
58-65
Skiing alpine
18-30
57-68
50-55
Skiing nordic
20-28
65-94
60-75
Soccer
22-28
54-64
50-60
Speed skating
18-24
56-73
44-55
Swimming
10-25
50-70
40-60
Track & Field - Discus
22-30
42-55
Vo2 values comparison from sport to sport. Sport
35-50
Track & Field - Running
18-39
60-85
50-75
Track & Field - Running
40-75
40-60
35-60
Track & Field - Shot
22-30
40-46
Volleyball
18-22
Weight Lifting
20-30
38-52
Wrestling
20-30
52-65
40-56
Maximum oxygen consumpon (Vo2max) values in elite runners. Athlete
Vo2 max value
Major performance
Reference
John Ngugi
85.0
5 mes world X-C champ
Saln, Larsen, et al (a990)
Dave Bedford
85.0
10 km WR 1973
Bergh (1982)
Steven Prefontaine
84.4
1 mile 3:54:6
Pollock (1977)
Henry Rono
84.3
10km WR 1978
Saln, Larsen, et al (1995)
Said Aouita
83.0
5km WR 1987
Zur & Hymans (1991)
Gary Tule
82.7
2:17:00 marathon
Pollock (1977)
Kip Keino
82.0
2km WR 1965
Saln & Astrand (1967)
Don Lash
81.5
2 mile WR 1937
Robinson et al (1937)
Craig Virgin
81.1
2:10:26 marathon
Cureton et al. (1984)
Jim Ryun
81.0
1 mile WR 1967
Daniels (1974)
Steve Sco
80.1
1 mile 3:47:69
Conley et al. (1984)
Joan Benoit
78.6
2:24:52 marathon
Daniels & Daniels (1992)
Bill Rodgers
78.5
2:09:27 marathon
Rodgers & Concannon (1982)
Mahews Temane
78.0
21km WR 1987
Coetzer et al. (1993)
Don Kardong
77.4
2:11:15 marathon
Pollock (1977)
Tom O’Reilly
77.0
927 km in 6-day race
Davies & Thomson (1979)
Sebasan Coe
77.0
1 mile WR 1981
Zur & Hymans (1991)
John Landy
76.6
1 mile WR 1954
Astrand (1955)
Alberto Salazar
76.0
2:08:13 marathon WR 1981
Cosll (1982)
Johnny Halberstadt
74.4
2:11:44 marathon
Wyndham et al. (1969)
Amby Burfoot
74.3
2:14:28 marathon
Cosll & Winrow (1970b)
Cavin Woodward
74.3
48 to 160 km WR 1975
Davies & Thompson (1979)
Kenny Moore
74.3
2:11:36 marathon
Pollock (1977)
Bruce Fordyce
73.3
80km WR 1983
Jooste et al. (1980)
Grete Waitz
73.0
2:25:42 marathon WR 1980
Cosll &Higdon (1981)
Buddy Edelen
73.0
2:14:28 marathon WR 1963
Dill et al. (1967)
Peter Snell
72.3
1 mile WR 1964
Carter et al. (1967)
Zithulele Sinqe
72.0
2:08:05 marathon
Coetzer et al. (1993)
Frank Shorter
71.3
2:10:30 marathon
Pollock (1977)
Willie Mtolo
70.3
2:08:15 marathon
Coetzer et al. (1993)
Derek Clayton
69.7
2:08:34 marathon WR 1969 th (Table from Noakes, Lore of Running , 4 edion, p. 40)
Cosll et al. (1971)
This all leads to an interesng point. While I am superior to the average couch potato, I am far behind the best. And despite my high VO2 in comparison to many of my peers, I am unable to turn that into race success. My results for anything that involves running are always mideld and always have been. So is my problem lack of ability to use oxygen or is it something else? Looking at the table above - which includes athletes from many sports, not just running - you see athletes from cross-country skiing top the charts. However, you don’t oen hear about an ex-cross country skier suddenly running world championship winning marathon mes, do you? As a further example, Lance Armstrong was reported to have a VO2 in the 90s. Yet, when he tried running, he put in a relavely pedestrian 2:45 marathon. There’s clearly something else missing from all these calculaons. VO2 is said to be largely untrainable, and relavely set based on your genec makeup. However, it sll can be changed via specic training – potenally increasing between 5 and 15%. Using myself as an example, that means I could go from a 57 to a 65.5. That’s an enormous jump and would have my projected marathon me drop from a 3:06 to a 2:46. While I’d sll be forty minutes or more behind the winners, that would be a big step up in ability. So don’t write o your ulmate speed just yet. Having said that, like with anything physical, there is an upper limit you can get to with your running. The following table is based on informaon from many leading running coaches and sports sciensts. My point in sharing this is not to dishearten or upset anyone, but rather to be clear about honoring the body and understanding that if you train smart and within your limitaons, you’ll be able to run enjoyably and injury free. But if you don’t heed this advice and choose to train at a pace beyond your capabilies, the result will be injury. If, for instance, your best sustainable pace is a 5min/km, why would you think trying to train at 3min/km is a good idea? Translang that back to liing terms, that is like having a 100kg 1RM and trying to do a 160kg li. Madness, right? The following table denotes VO2max and projected best possible mes for various distances: Vo2Max
1500m
5km
10km
21km
42km
90.5
3:12
12:00
24:57
54:50
1:54:53
82.4
3:28
13:00
27:01
59:25
2:04:31
75.5
3:44
14:00
29:04
1:04:02
2:14:09
69.7
4:01
15:00
31:08
1:08:40
2:23:47
64.6
4:17
16:00
33:12
1:13:19
2:33:25
60.2
4:34
17:00
35:17
1:17:58
2:43:01
56.3
4:51
18:00
37:21
1:22:38
2:52:34
52.8
5:08
19:00
39:26
1:27:19
3:02:06
49.7
5:25
20:00
41:31
1:31:59
3:11:35
47.0
5:42
21:00
43:36
1:36:36
3:21:00
44.5
5:59
22:00
45:41
1:41:18
3:30:23
42.2
6:16
23:00
47:46
1:45:57
3:39:42
40.1
6:33
24:00
49:51
1:50:34
3:48:57
38.3
6:51
25:00
51:56
1:55:11
3:58:08
36.5
7:08
26:00
54:00
1:59:46
4:07:16
35.0
7:25
27:00
56:04
2:04:20
4:16:19
33.5
7:42
28:00
58:08
2:08:53
4:25:19
32.2
7:59
29:00
1:00:12
2:13:24
4:34:14
30.9 8:16 30:00 1:02:15 2:17:53 (Table modied from Daniels and Gilbert, Oxygen Power ).
4:43:06
And this leads to some interesng observaons. First, if you have a best 5km of 20:00 how come your projected best marathon is 3:11:35? This is mostly because races aren’t run in a vacuum. Along with basic physiology, there are other factors to consider, such as fueling and heat regulaon, as well as muscle fague. If you extrap olate your 5km out to marathon distance by mulplying it by 2.5, you’d have a 2:46 marathon. According to the charts, this would be akin to going from a VO2 of 49.7 to 60.2. It would be nice if it was that simple, but pacing for a longer event obviously involves running at slightly slower speeds compared to shorter events. Second, too many people get caught up in trying to run faster. Sure, you need to spend me running faster, and we’ll get to that, but if you’re going to run a 3:11 marathon, a pace of 4:30min/km, is there really any advantage in trying to train at 3:30min/km pace? It’s simply too fast. Somemes in the gym we can li things a few mes and no more. But imagine if you had a deadli maximum of 100kg for 5 reps. You might get 120kg for a single. Now, imagine I asked you to spend an hour trying to li that 120kg. That’s what running at 3:30min/km pace will do for you if you’re a 4:30 runner. It’s simply too hard for your body to deal with. Third, don’t get too caught up in looking at these tables and forcing yourself to run a pace you’re not ready for yet. There’s a big dierence between a twenty-minute 5km and a 3:11 marathon. Developing the basic muscle endurance to even run that far to begin with will take you some me. Sure, I know there are many couch-to-marathon programs, but none of them will ever have you run a 3:11 from a zero starng point regardless of how good your innate abilies may be. Accept that success at an endurance sport is about spending me doing the acvity. Good distance runners take a long me to build and develop the mental and physical strength to push hard for many miles, both in training and racing. Because, don’t forget, by the me you actually run a marathon you’ll have run the equivalent of about ten of them leading up to it. Drops in Performance with Aging One of the sad parts about geng older is having to watch those damn kids beang you at things. While many
of the younger generaon will believe this is a case of the “older you get the faster you were,” there are de nite physical changes as we age. One of the biggest has to do with recovery. Due to a decline in many factors, the body simply can’t deal with the same training loads it could in your twenes. Typically, older runners nd they can’t handle either the volume or frequency they once could. The truth about training that no one ever seems to menon is that it isn’t the only part of the equaon when it comes to increasing performance. Without recovery there wouldn’t be any change, as it is during the recovery process that the body adapts to the training load. A secondary consideraon is that as we age, the body loses its ability to deal with the impact forces involved with landing. Some of this has to do with loss of muscle bers. Aer age y, there is a 15% loss of strength per decade up unl age seventy. Aer seventy, another 30% of muscle strength is lost. While both slow and fast twitch muscles are lost during the aging process, the fast twitch (type II) bers also diminish in size. It’s primarily this that decreases the body’s ability to deal with the shock of landing on each step. Yet another good reason for long-term runners to include strength training in their regimen. Older runners nd that it is the longer distances - those beyond 10km - that are the most dicult to recover from. And this is not just an issue for average runners either, or those taking running up later in life. Bill Rodgers, whose name you can see above in the list of elite VO2 measurements with a 78.5, tried to break the world record for the marathon for his age group at y. As Timothy Noakes retold the story in his book, while Rodg ers was on track early on, he had to abandon the race at the 30km mark because “the sness and soreness he experienced prevented any realisc aempt at breaking the record.” In fact, runners who reach elite level at an earlier age are usually unable to connue performing at a high standard later in life due to the damage caused from their intensive training and frequent racing. A study from 2000 by Lambert and Keytel showed runners have a window of about een years before they can no longer connue running hard. Doing anything well takes me, and so it is with running. Accepng early on that your pace won’t be high will have you able to run injury free and to develop your muscles and body far beer than if you had to take a week o every month because you’re overdoing it. Seng a realisc training intensity and distance can be easily done by following the charts above. In later chapters, I’ll go over some specic training plans to help you get to your goals, and some of these sessions will also help improve your top-end abilies.
Chapter 5 - Shoes “I have the idea that running shoes are based on a kind of cult idea - that our feet are awed and we need shoes to correct those aws. The shoe companies are in the business of selling shoes. But there’s no evidence from running shoe manufacturers that they’re right. There’s no scienc data that running shoes reduce injury.” - Christopher McDougall, Born to Run
If aliens landed on our planet and were interested in running, they’d be convinced we were all mad. Twenty years ago, companies were bringing out shoes that had shock-absorbing springs in the heels. Compare that to today’s growing selecon of minimalist shoes. Which one is right? If you’ve read Born to Run, you may think injury-free running is as easy as slipping on a pair of barely-there running shoes. But the answer isn’t as easy as that. Back when Nike was making the most awful athlec shoes ever created (Nike Shox), they were sending truckloads of them to the University of Oregon for the track team. But when Nike execuves visited the athletes, what they found upset them. The padded super-shoes had been discarded, and the athletes were being made to run barefoot. Sacrilege! Vin Lananna, Associate Athlec Director for the University of Oregon, said, “I can’t prove this, but I believe when my runners train barefoot, they run faster and suer fewer injuries.” Now, Nike isn’t comprised of idiots and it genuinely tries to create products that help you achieve your best athlecally. So, when confronted with the situaon, they asked for help in designing a shoe that mimicked the natural movements of the foot. And so the Nike Free was born, the world’s rst (modern) barefoot shoe. Since that happened over a decade ago, the market for barefoot shoes has boomed. We now have everything from Vibram FiveFingers to Vivobarefoot and many other brands. What spurred this market was McDougall’s book Born to Run and the idea that when the research was examined not a single shred of evidence existed to suggest any shoe would reduce the risk of injury. The reason for this is simple - running injuries are rarely caused by an acute incident such as stepping on a nail and having it go through your shoe. Most running injuries are caused by technical faults or alignment errors in the human body. Therefore, for a shoe to be eecve as an injury deterrent, it would need to change motor paerns and teach beer ones. When was the last me you were oered a running clinic or physical therapy session to go with your new shoes? But don’t think that swapping out your padded super-shoes for a thinner, aer shoe will change things, because unless you change your mechanics, all you’ve done is swap one set of problems for another. One of the biggest issues with running in thickly padded shoes is that you lose sense of the ground and muscle ming can be altered. But if you swap to a minimal shoe, then the issue becomes not being able to absorb force well enough and you sll end up injured. The fundamental, underlying issue with either shoe choice is that unless you x your problems - both mechanical and propriocepve - you sll end up hurt. In truth, no one can provide a shred of evidence to show that a parcular type of shoe will increase or decrease your risk of injury, or that one shoe will make you faster over another. If you think about the huge amount of money spent on the development and adversing of products (and those ads include scienc claims), that reeks of suspicion to me. As evidence, look at what recently happened to Vibram. The company elected to pay out nearly four million dollars to people who bought their shoes under the adversed claims their running would improve through the use of Vibram’s toe shoes. That payout happened because there wasn’t a shred of actual evidence to support those claims.
Forefoot Versus Heel Strike This all becomes further complicated when people start dissecng fooall. The barefoot advocates tell you to run as if you are unshod. If you picture it i n your mind, you’ll have a so, delicate strike, landing on the front half of the foot. The barefoot/forefoot strike fans will tell you this minimizes injury, and that it is a self-liming technique because you will need to stop running earlier as your musculature won’t be up to the task of dealing with this technique for long periods of me. But in reality, you won’t be geng in much of this style of running because you will likely tear a calf or strain an Achilles. On the ip side, if you wear cushy, well-padded shoes you are more likely to heel strike. The problem with heel striking is that you usually land on an extended leg with the foot placed in front of the body. This means you have no shock absorpon ability from your muscles and you will rely on the skeleton to do it all instead. That jarring is going to take a toll on you. The other issue with heel striking is that with the foot in front of the body, you need to get the body up and over the leg before you can accelerate again on the kick poron of the stride. In essence, you slow down at the beginning of each step, and then need more energy to get back up to speed on every stride. But the biggest misunderstanding most suer from is that you run “barefoot” by being up on your toes and only strike the ground with the front half of your foot. That’s not the case at all. If you stand at the halfway mark of any marathon, you can count as many elite runners landing on the front half of their foot as on the heel. And if you watched the last ten kilometers, you would see very few actually landing on anything other than what resembles a at foot. This erroneous argument against heel striking is based on people landing with their foot out in front of them, which forces the body to use the skeleton as the shock absorber. But in reality, in a good distance-running landing, the heel does touch the ground, just not rst. The forefoot takes the inial impact, and the heel kisses the ground. The body rolls over the planted front half of the foot before toeing o, and the process starts again. In The Pose Method of Running, Dr. Romanov wrote: “…the runner is perfectly balanced on his or her support. A direct line of the body goes through from the head, through the shoulders and buocks all the way to the ball of the foot that is in contact with the ground. The heel of the support leg is slightly higher than the ball of the foot and may even lightly touch the ground, but the weight of the body always rests only on the front part of the foot and not on the toes.” So don’t try to land only on the front half of the foot. The outside edge of the foot should hit the ground rst. As full bodyweight comes onto the foot, i t rolls inward, toward the big toe, and the heel lightly kisses the ground, giving the appearance from the side of a at-footed landing. Transioning to Minimal Shoes Despite what barefoot shoe retailers imply, you can’t just slip o the heavy, s shoes you’re currently wearing and run like the Tarahumara. Well, you can try, but you’ll likely end up at the doctor’s with a calf tear, plantar fasciis, or Achilles problems. If you’ve spent all your life in so padded shoes, then you’re not going to be running a barefoot marathon anyme soon. The makers of Vivo recommend that while transioning you keep running in your normal shoes and only use their shoes for daily use - standing, walking, etc. This allows the feet to acclimate to the new levels of strength required from minimal shoes. For me personally, even this can be too much when my running volume creeps up close to a big event like a 70.3 or Ironman. When my run volume is low, I spend my day at work training people going barefoot or wearing Vivo shoes. But when I am running a lot, I need a dayme shoe that has a small heel to give my calves and Achilles some
respite from the pounding of running. For these mes, I work in a pair of Nike Free Flyknit 4.0, which have a fantasc elasc heel that doesn’t irritate my Achilles i ssues. But I don’t run in these shoes. They’re for standing around training people. Transioning from a normal shoe to a minimal one requires the same degree of cauous eort that beginning running does. I recommend people go back to a walk/run plan and signicantly reduce mileage.
One pathway to train slowly toward running in a more minimal shoe: 1. Gain strength in the lower body and core musculature. 2. Gain strength in the feet by following an all-day plan like Vivo’s and saving your feet by running in regular shoes at the beginning. 3. Weight-bearing movement with lower impact forces (walking or elliptical—lower impact activity provides a more gradual transition to weight-bearing activity with less under foot). 4. If that goes well (no aches, pains, or injuries), focus on learning to run with less shoe cushioning. Many running coaches have their athletes run barefoot, but always on grass, sand, or slight inclines and not as the main practice. At the end of each run, short barefoot sessions working on form, posture, and foot and ankle strength will go a long way toward keeping you injury free, whether you choose to go minimal or not. Does It Matter?
Remember there is sll zero evidence to suggest one type of shoe works beer than another. If you aren’t a lifelong runner, and don’t have the build to go with it, then there’s a fair chance you should steer clear from trying to run appreciable distances in minimal shoes. It’s likely to end in tears. You’ll be beer o nding a moderate-drop shoe with decent padding in the forefoot to cope with the increased impact forces from being larger than the stereotypical elite runner. The same goes if you’re coming to running late in life without a background in any kind of running sport. It’s going to take me to build technique and strength, and frankly, you’re going to need the padding provided by normal shoes. I know barefoot culsts will scream at me for saying it, but the fact remains that no elite runner races barefoot. The only signicant barefoot racer of modern mes was Abebe Bikila who won the 1960 Olympic marathon barefoot. (Note: he won his historic double gold in Tokyo four years later wearing shoes.) These days, you’d be hard pressed to nd anyone running fast who is also barefoot. So have condence in normal running shoes they’re not the devil they are made out to be. When it comes to shoes, there is only one thing I know to be 100% true - nd a pair that ts you and keep wearing them. Finding the your Goldilocks shoe – the one that is just right for you - can take considerable eort. What feels comfortable in the store, or during the short treadmill test some stores allow you to do, may prove to be uncomfortable aer twenty minutes of real-world running. The right shoes won’t rub and you’ll be able to run all day in them. Finding the right shoe may mean you end up with a closet full of the wrong shoes that have only been worn a handful of mes. Buying new shoes is cheaper than surgery, though, so invest in footwear rst. My go-to shoe is a Saucony Kinvara. They t me so well I didn’t get a single blister during a year of training for Ironman or during the race itself. Good socks were also a big help. I’ve never understood why people spend a hundred dollars or more on shoes, and maybe hundreds more on orthocs, yet spend nothing on socks. A good pair of socks is like having good suspension on your car. For my money, there are only two worthwhile brands - Thorlo and Wigwam. I’ve used both to race pain free over the half marathon and marathon distance.
Forget the hype when it comes to shoes. Don’t buy something just because you like the colors. If you choose based on fashion, then I hope you like the look of your doctor’s waing room, too, because you’re likely going to end up there. Buy shoes because they t and allow you to run comfortably and pain free.
Chapter 6 - Your First Run “You have to wonder at mes what you’re doing out there. Over the years, I’ve given myself a thousand reasons to keep running, but it always comes back to where it started. It comes down to self-sasfacon and a sense of achievement.” -Steve Prefontaine
Whether it’s with a Tough Mudder, a marathon, or a local sprint triathlon, many people take the step to get into running each year. Aer they sign up, they search online for free programming (because running is so simple no one should need to pay for advice) and nd something called a “couch to (insert name of distance here).” Unfortunately, these programs are terrible and make a few bad assumpons. The rst is that everyone starts with a clean bill of health. Most people think that means they have no heart or lung problems, but they’re missing one vital aspect of the equaon - the rest of the body. If you’ve done nothing but sit at a desk for years, you’re not going to be ready to run unl you get the kinks out of your body. Something as simple as the amount of ankle dorsiexion you have can make a tremendous dierence in your running. Try this test: Place one foot at on the ground and push your knee as far forward as you can unl the heel is just about to come o the ground. Make sure to push the knee out in line with the lile toe, not over the big toe or inside of the foot. Now, measure how far forward your knee has moved. If it’s less than four inches, you have a decien cy. If you see a signicant dierence when comparing le to right, that’s even worse. So, let me tell you what happens because you lack adequate movement at the ankle. Your body needs to nd that extra range of moon somewhere else. Maybe it’s in the toes, or foot, maybe it’s your knee, maybe it’s your lower back. Somewhere, your body is going to nd the extra inches of movement you don’t have in your ankles. At 1,200-1,500 steps per km, that adds up to a massive amount of potenally damaging movement in the wrong place. It’s these sorts of calculaons that made me realize starng running isn’t as easy as lacing up your shoes and heading out the door. There are three disnct stages you need to go through as a runner. The older you are, and the less history of running you have, the longer you’ll need to spend on each stage. Stage 1
This stage begins when you decide that, despite never having run signicantly, you’re going to enter a race or maybe just begin running to get in shape. But let’s be realisc - are you actually ready? Probably not, if you’re like most of the rst mers I meet. This stage has two components. The rst is to get an FMS (Funconal Move ment Screen) done and begin geng your body to a solid starng point. The second is building form. Because every body is individual, I will not go into what you may need as far as correcve exercise, but what I will do is talk about the process to starng running. I am not a huge believer in any of the popular running methods. There is no evidence that people who run with POSE, Chi, or any other style suer fewer injuries or go faster. There are some basic guidelines to form and the secon earlier in this book is all you need. Ingrain what was said and focus on those points while running - resist the urge to zone out. Every single step should be an eort to make that step beer than the one before. I also advise not listening to music for the same reason. It’s too distracng. If you were a beginner in the gym, no one would think to load you up with a maximum weight straight away. Yet, when you tell people you want to run the rst thing they say is, “You should do sprints.” I believe that to be the single stupidest piece of popular advice in today’s tness industry. Sprinng puts an enormous strain
on the body, far more than a heavy squat or deadli session ever could, with loads of up to eight mes body weight. Compare that to a “heavy” squat session for a beginner that wouldn’t even have full body weight on the bar, and you start to see how damaging urging an underpowered and poorly aligned novice to sprint can be. The top minds in movement all say the same thing - develop mobility, stability, and propriocepon, then strength and power, before nally adding endurance. But you can build mobility and stability concurrently while learning how to run at the same me. The best way to do this is a walk/run program. Perform each session three mes per week. Begin with ve-minute sets. Week 1 – Jog 1/walk 4 x 6 Week 2 – Jog 2/walk 3 x 6 Week 3 – Jog 3/walk 2 x 6 Week 4 – Jog 4/walk 1 x 6 In week ve, the intervals go to ten minutes. Week 5 – Jog 6/walk 4 x 4 Week 6 – Jog 7/walk 3 x 4 Week 7 – Jog 8/walk 2 x 4 In week eight, increase your interval me again. Week 8 – Jog 12/walk 3 x 3 Week 9 – Jog 13/walk 2 x 3 Week 10 – Jog 14/walk 1 x 3 You’ve gone from thirty minutes total, to forty, then 45. Now, extend the sessions to an hour. Week 11 – Jog 17/walk 3 x 3 Week 12 – Jog 19/walk 1 x 3 Week 13 – Jog 60 minutes That’s the end of Stage 1. While it may seem like a long me to get to jogging for sixty minutes, if you’re taking up running later in life (and sorry to say, but that is age 35 and up), this will be an injury-free way to get you running non-stop for an hour. The injury issues can be compounded more if you are either overweight or carrying a large amount of muscle. Take your me geng through stage one. If you are indeed carrying too much weight, use this me to get your diet on track and get rid of that excess. Stage 2
Now you’re able to run for an hour, headed for running for an hour twice a week, plus a ninety- to 120-minute run on another day. For people who queson the long run, this is one of those “you just have to trust me” things. Unl you’ve done the long sessions and see what happens as a result, you won’t understand. Once you do these weekly for a few months, you will understand. The mid-week runs should be easy, nasal-breathing runs. The weekend run is easy as well, but the last twenty to thirty minutes should be a lile bit harder - a tempo interval. At this point, there should be only a limited amount of intensity. In gym terms, you’re sll in the three sets of ten phase – needing easy volume to further hone form and build the body. We sll need a solid foundaon of running skill before adding intensity. Before people jump all over me, realize that the most important thing about running distance is that you can maintain
foot and ankle control and midline stability for periods of me. The stabilizing muscles of the body are all slow twitch and need to be trained that way. The aachments, too, take a long me to adapt, so this phase is sll part of our breaking-in process. Sck to this phase for six months. It makes an ideal winter preparaon period for a summer event. While the trend in training is to exhort people to push hard in the short term with their training and perform seemingly endless condioning rounes designed by Satan’s drill instructor, there is another way. Here is Dr. Maetone’s own words on the dierences between the aerobic and anaerobic system: “For a workout to be truly aerobic, you should be able to exercise the same way for many weeks and months with connued benets. And, when you’re nished each workout, you should feel great—not red or sore, and certainly not ready to collapse on your couch. Nor should you have cravings for sugar or other carbohydrates—your workout should program your body to burn more fat, not sugar. Burning too much sugar during a workout means it’s anaerobic, using up stored sugar (glycogen). It can even lower blood sugar. The result is that you crave sweets. This is a key to dierenang an aerobic exercise program from an anaerobic one. While even a hard weight-liing session can produce some of these benets short term, it does not in the long term. Eventually, even moderately anaerobic workouts soon can reduce fat burning and even lower the number of aerobic bers your muscles contain. Sciensts have demonstrated this fact. They have measured this decline. It’s not something based on anecdotal evidence. I have measured it too, in couch potatoes, aerobic dancers, walkers, and professional athletes. In a laboratory or clinical seng, the process of fat burning can easily be measured with a gas analyzer—a device that assesses the air you breath. By comparing the amount of oxygen you consume from the air, and the carbon dioxide your body expires, one can determine quite ac curately the amount of fat and sugar you burn. As exercise improves fat burning long term, it reects improvements in the aerobic system. Not so with anaerobic exercise.” This is why many runners have to give up eventually – they’ve simply pushed too hard for too long. In Lore of Running, Noakes states that most runners have a career span of only about twenty years. It is so noceable that a champion runner at twenty will no longer be a champion runner at forty. And the race winners at forty will be beaten by a new crop of sixty year olds who likely took up running already in their late fores or ies. Fast running is hard on the body. If we look back to old mers, like Paavo Nurmi, they advocated the use of long walks to help build the body. Did these men, without the aid of labs and the sophiscated measuring devices we have now, intuively gure out that the best way to run well was to boost the aerobic system with long, easy sessions? Arthur Newton, whose career spanned thirteen years between 1922 and 1935, walked nearly 47,000km during this me. “There was a denite purpose to this walking, viz., to make me used to being on my feet nearly all the me.” During Stage 2 I suggest performing a Maximum Aerobic Funcon (MAF) test. The MAF test is designed to show you how ecient you are aerobically. Remember, we spend more than enough me on anaerobic work with strength training. But with the ease of modern life, most of us barely use our aerobic system, and our long-term health suers because of it. The MAF test is a simple and eecve way to measure both your aero-
bic ability as well as what we could call your running economy – that is, the pace at which you can run for substanal periods of me fueled by fat. Sustainable running is all about using your most powerful weapon – the aerobic system – as eecvely and as oen as possible. To perform the MAF test: For best results go to a local running track that is at so the test is conducted consistently each me. It is possible to perform the test on a favorite loop that has natural undulaons, but for the best results nd a track and perform the test there. Warm up thoroughly – at least ten to een minutes is needed to get your body working properly. Begin with a few minutes of walking, gradually speeding up unl you feel the need to break into a jog. Run three miles (each mile is four laps of the track). Record your pace for each mile. The speed of your run is determined by using the 180 Rule for your heart rate. The goal is to nd how fast you can run aerobically, not how fast you can run. When performed properly, the rst mile will always be the fastest and the last the slowest. If that’s not the case, then you likely haven’t warmed up enough. Perform the test regularly during the year to track progress. In the beginning, you will get faster quite quickly. Then, like all training improvements, progress will come more slowly. Aerobic improvement is possible over many years, so the trend should always be that you see improvement from year to year. If you perform a MAF test and the results are worse than the previous test then you are probably overdoing things and need to back o. The importance of the MAF test can’t be stressed enough. You’re going to need to spend a lot of me running with a heart rate monitor to get a feeling for how hard you should be running. (Or not, as you’re likely to nd as you might even be forced to walk in some cases to maintain the low heart rate). Every grade of heart rate matches a certain pace for a given tness level. Let’s break these rst stages of run ning into three disnct zones. Using my numbers as a reference again: • • •
Light aerobic – 122bpm and below Medium aerobic – 122bpm-132bpm Hard aerobic – 132bpm-142bpm (142bpm is the number I get using Maetone’s formula)
Each of these eorts – light, medium, and hard – will correspond to running at a certain pace. You have only one choice when you decide to go down this path and that is to wear a heart rate monitor. These days most people seem to be overly concerned about their pace (how long a given kilometer or mile will take them). Pace is important, and it will help to gure out target mes for races and harder intervals later on, but in the beginning, it is mostly going to get in the way because of the tendency to race oneself, even on a recovery or easy run. Something in the human mind tries to turn every event into a compeon and the result is you coming in from a run that was supposed to be an easy run boasng about how fast you were. No one hands out gold medals in training. The purpose of training is to build the body, not test it. Tesng comes later if you decide to race. The problem with tesng yourself or trying to beat a pace target on most of your runs is that you need easy eorts to recover from the harder ones. If you turn every run into a race or eort for a personal record, then you’re on the fast track to burnout. If you watch your heart rate monitor, you will be able to ditch it prey quickly as you’ll start to see what kind of pace you run at each corresponding heart rate. As your tness improves, so will your paces. Don’t be surprised to see these paces drop every few months when you redo the MAF test. Stage 3
Now you’re ready to get serious and add some speed work. Don’t be foolish and go run some 400m intervals, though. The purpose of speed work is not to run at out, but to teach the body to run at a slightly higher pace than what you can right now. Most people never get faster. They simply run farther. So their 5km is half of their 10km me, which is only marginally faster than their half marathon me. The goal of a speed session is to do some quality work at higher than target race pace. We’re not talking about sprinng, we’re talking about run ning distance. The two, while similar, are poles apart just like a Top Fuel drag car and an SUV. Do one quality speed work session per week at most. At this stage, you’re likely up to four runs per week: • • •
2 x 45-60min easy runs 1 x longer run of 120mins with last 30 minutes hard 1 interval or hill session
I’m well aware that many running plans feature far more high-intensity work than this, but the boom line is that the harder you train, the more likely you are to break down. Running isn’t an all-or-nothing deal. You don’t have to run as fast as you can and try to beat your PR every me you lace up your shoes. In fact, I’ll bet that if you ditch the Garmin more oen, you’ll enjoy your running far more. When it comes to tness, the one thing that trumps everything else is consistency. Rule number one at my gym is simple – turn up. If you take care of that, we can take care of the rest. And so it is with running. If you run so hard today that you are sll sore and beaten up a few days later, then you won’t be running much. As with most things, the key to geng beer at running is to do it more oen, not less. This modern idea that you need to og your body every me you train and that you must be on the verge of tasng pennies aer every run is awed. I read an arcle that studied how the top Kenyan runners trained. They spent 85% of their year doing ninety-minute runs that were no harder than 70% of their maximum heart rate. The other 15% was hills and speed work. That’s a prey good guide for the rest of us, and mirrors the informaon shared earlier about how much intensity is needed in a given week. Broken down into a biweekly (fortnightly) format of running every other day, you’d have seven runs in that me. That would give you six easy aerobic runs using the 180 Formula and one hard interval or hill session each week. Start with one every two weeks and see how your body copes, as well as how eecve they are. The thing about intensity is that a lile bit goes a long way. The same can be said of training sessions, too. The goal isn’t to see how much training you can t in a given meframe (although I’ll admit, that is fun). The goal is to see how much of which kind of training gives you the best results. If you’re looking to be healthy, you probably won’t ever need to run hard again. I can say that when I’ve prepared for a race it’s always been with the idea of going as fast as I could on the course and the training has reected it with plenty of me spent going hard. However, when those races have nished and I’ve been free to “just train” again, I’ve been so happy and relaxed to go and run without worrying about my pace, if I was geng faster and stronger, or what the race condions would be like. Moderaon isn’t much en vogue when it comes to training, but I’ll happily wager that you’ll be in beer shape at forty, y, or sixty years old if you make an eort to move every day and not miss sessions versus going all out for twelve weeks once a year in preparaon for a fun run. In Lore of Running , Noakes talks about the transion from jogger to racer to runner. This is essenally the transion from stage one to stage three menoned above. Joggers are those who have just taken up running, and like everyone with a new hobby, they are lled with enthusiasm for their new passion and will take every opportunity to tell anyone within earshot. And why wouldn’t they? In the early stages, they’ll have lost weight and they’ll be feeling beer than they have in years from having just reconnected with their own evoluonary history. As soon as the Jogger decides to enter a race, he or she becomes the Racer. The Racer has no concern
for health, only for performance. Performance is oen found at the expense of health. I would suggest that a vast majority of the reported injuries from running are from Racers, not from Joggers or Runners. While racing can do wonders for the mind – giving it thrills, adventures, and challenges – at some point a Racer will mature and evolve into a Runner. The Runner is unconcerned about speed or health, as he or she has developed both already through his or her running evoluon. Now the Runner runs because it brings peace and fuses mind, body, and spirit together. If you ever get the chance to hang out and run with experienced ultra runners, then you will see this rsthand.
Chapter 7 – Other Running “Son, remember your courage with each step.” - Spartan mother to her son
Not too long ago, the only opons for runners were fun runs and marathons. But these days there is a nev er-ending list of choices – ultra marathons, obstacle races, adventure races, triathlons, trail runs, running WODs in CrossFit, and events that range from 5k to marathons. On top of that, there are military-type events such as SEALFIT or GORUCK. And then there are the people who need to run to stay in shape for actual military service, selecon, or law enforcement. If you can’t nd an opon in that list you don’t enjoy, you’re dead inside. Each of these oer unique challenges and some, like the military ones, have the added problems of running in boots, carrying weapons, or wearing load in the form of a pack or body armor. Others, like CrossFit WODs or the obstacle races, have extra challenges like the need to do various resisted exercises or navigate obstacles. But the one thing they all have in common is running. Whether you like it or not, if you want to be truly t, you need to be able to run and run well. Under Armour said it best, “Athletes run. Period.” Obstacle Course Racing (OCR)
OCR has taken o in a big way since 2009 when Spartan and Tough Mudder came on the scene. Beginning from a rst event with 500 competors, Spartan had nearly a milli on people worldwide toe the starng line in 2014. The reason why is simple – the courses are challenging in a variety of ways allowing competors to test their tness in more ways than just liing weights in the gym or running in straight lines. The biggest dierence between OCR and most tness acvies is that it occurs in more than one plane. Most gym exercises are done facing forward, oen bilaterally to save me, and on a at, non-slip oor. As Joe DiSte fano of Spartan Race said, “Most training is way too concentric and sagitally biased. Spartan Race is a ton of mul-planar isometrics and eccentrics.” Perhaps the two biggest dierences are the need for high levels of grip strength – the bucket carries in Spartan Races are now around 50lb (25kg) and some other obstacles, like the Tyrolean Traverse, can see you needing grip strength for four to ve minutes (and usually aer already running 10mi (16km)). That kind of grip isn’t built with a few farmer walks. The rope climb is another great example of the need for superior grip strength. With thousands of wet, muddy racers aempng the obstacles on the same day, you’re likely to nd the rope is wet by the me you get to it. That means you’ll need far more grip than when you pracced in your gym all clean and dry. The course itself will also be substanally dierent from a normal fun run or marathon course. Selecvely chosen for hills and with the addion of water and mud obstacles, these races won’t have you running a me close to what you normally run. For a Spartan Super, I am roughly an hour slower over the 14km than if I were just out for a run. One of the biggest challenges for many runners is that because OCR courses are essenally a series of mini-workouts with running breaks in between, you will need to break yourself of the steady training you’ve done to this point. This also leads to a dierence in the way you need to fuel for these events. I wouldn’t normally recommend the use of a carbohydrate supplement like gels in a short 14km run, but on a race like a Spartan Super or Beast, you will absolutely have a higher need for carbohydrates than normal. With up to 25 obstacles in a 14km course, you are essenally doing repeat 800m intervals broken up by another high-intensity acvity. With the average race me being around two hours and forty minutes, you will certainly need a lile extra fuel. Joe DiStefano said, “If a few sets of thirty burpees will ruin your weekend then stay at home. You need to be
t enough that you have burpee immunity.” One of his favorite ways to develop the kind of tness needed for these races is to strength train aer a run, rather than in a separate session or even on another day. This gets you used to running and sll being able to shi to a higher gear when needed. OCR races are good fun and quite addicve. Like fun runs, you will nd events that range from 5km up to 21km and 42km (the famous Spartan Beast and Ultra Beast) as well as 24-hour events like World’s Toughest Mudder and True Grit in Australia. The strength, speed, and tness needed to do well at these events will take some me to develop, so don’t be discouraged if you’re not that fast at many of the obstacles the rst few mes. As an example of how much your mes can change, April Dee – the top Spartan Race female for the last few years – runs 7:30min/miles normally, but that pace drops to around 10:30min/mile during a Beast. The terrain and the obstacles add an extra y percent to the duraon of the run. Don’t forget this in your training for the event – make sure to add extra me to your long runs. Keep it in mind also when you calculate your fuel and water needs for the event. Ultra Marathons
You can’t be an expert in everything. You should feel comfortable turning to dierent sources in nding support for your training programs. In this instance I turned to my friend and Leadville competor Aaron Pierson who was kind enough to provide a lot of his insight and experse here. Ultra marathons have been gaining popularity among runners looking for a new challenge. By denion the ultra is dened by any distance further than a standard marathon with the most popular being 50km, 50 mile, 100km, and 100 mile. Just the idea of entering one of these races causes most people to ask why. My answer is if you have to ask why you should run one, then you’re probably not ready. Compleng an ultra is 90% mental and takes a “special” type of runner willing to endure an incredible amount of discomfort. Unlike running 5Ks, 10Ks, or even a marathon, the ultra requires a level of dedicaon few are willing or able to commit. It takes planning, somemes as much as an enre year. Building the aerobic base alone can take months of dedicated training. Most races also involve more than just running. They oen require crews and pacers to help the runner succeed. Crews are used at specied aid staons to help refuel and exchange gear. Pacers are oen used during the 100K and 100 mile aer the halfway point to help movate and ensure the safety of the runner. Training runs need to be used to test out both the type of fuel you will use and the ming you will use them. Your crews will need to be educated in this, as well. The pacers should be hand picked and have a basic understanding of what you are experiencing. You will go through extreme highs and lows. There will be mes when you feel as if you could run forever followed immediately with such doubt that you wonder if you can take another step. Training for an ultra is obviously the most me consuming part. In many ways it is more of a lifestyle than a program. For those looking to make the jump to ultra running, it is recommended you complete at least one marathon prior. However, I don’t believe that needs to be the case. Instead, you should have at least a few years of solid running behind you. The weekly mileage required can be extremely stressful on the body. For somebody new to running this is a recipe for injury. When I talk to people looking to run an ultra, the rst thing I ask about is their current mileage. I am a big believer that you must rst have a minimum weekly base of at least y miles and the ability to run at least een to eighteen miles at one me. To me, this is more important than having run a full marathon. Once the decision has been made to run your rst ultra, it’s me to choose the best one for you. Usually this means having enough me to train appropriately. Most people use the 50K or 50 mile as a starng point. As-
suming you are already running an average of y miles each week then sixteen to eighteen weeks out should leave plenty of me. If you want to run far, then plan to put in the miles in training to build the necessary endurance. Plan on building up to a minimum of 75 to eighty miles per week with two back-to-back long runs. The higher mileage weeks will build your aerobic base, while the two back-to-back long runs teach the body to run on red legs. There are many theories on how to build your weekly mileage without injury. Most people follow a simple 10% rule. This means increasing your weekly miles by 10% each week unl you reach your desired distance. I prefer to follow a dierent method and nd it works quite well. I will build my miles each week at a much greater rate, but take every fourth week as recovery, followed by another build up. For Example: Week 1 - 55 miles Week 2 - 65 miles Week 3 - 75 miles Week 4 - 55 miles Week 5 - 65 miles Week 6 - 75 miles Week 7 - 85 miles Week 8 - 65 miles This ladder idea allows for a faster increase in mileage, yet sll allows the body to get some much-needed rest. Both ways have proven eecve, but it’s up to you to decide what will work best for your training. The back-to-back long runs are the single most important days, in my opinion. Like I menoned above they teach the body to run on red legs. This also forces faster recovery and helps simulate race like condions. If you are new to the idea of back-to-back long runs, then plan to do your rst day 60-70% less than your second. Each week build the rst long run by one to two miles. Spend enough me around runners and you will nd they talk about one of two things - their upcoming race or their current injury. Somemes injuries are unavoidable, but most of the me they can be limited or at least the risk can be reduced by adding in some basic strength training. The more miles run each week, the more important this becomes. The problem comes with the increased miles equaling less me for anything else. For this reason I prefer to keep things short and simple. One of the most common injuries runners face is chronic ITB issues. By adding in a few simple exercises twice a week you can reduce the risk of a potenally race-ending are-up and maintain muscular strength for later stages of the race. Sample Workout: Warm up: • Roll out glutes with lacrosse ball • Stretch glutes • Single leg hip bridges • Lateral leg raises • Bodyweight single leg deadlis • Face the wall squats
Workout: Day 1 • 3 x 3-5 single arm overhead press (oponal) • 3 x 5 single leg deadlis • 3 x 10-20 push ups • 3 x max reverse rows Day 2 • 3 x 3-5 single arm overhead press (oponal) • 3 x 5 mul-direconal lunges • 3 x 10 walking farmer lunges • 3 x 5-10 pull ups This is a basic strength program designed to reduce the risk of injury. As the body fagues, form begins to break, placing you at an increase risk. Single leg exercises are key to running injury free. Remember the point of strength training for ultras is not about geng stronger. It’s simply staying strong enough to connue run ning. Ultra running can be a very lonely sport. The majority of your training and racing will be done alone. Learn to embrace the solitude. It’s only then you will begin to see the real answer to “why.” I’ve never met anyone who decided to run his or her rst ultra to “get in shape.” They say hours alone on the trails have a way of peeling back the layers of a person. I believe most ultra runners are in search of something more than simply running farther. For each person the journey is dierent, but nearly everybody eventually nds out who they really are. Many people consider this the spiritual side of running. When the body gives way to the mind and you are free to reect on life. I know for me personally this has been the greatest piece, or maybe I should say peace, of running. Trail Running
Trail running is a breath of fresh air if you’re used to pounding the pavement for all your miles. There is something that can’t be beat about being away from everyone, the silence only broken by your breathing and your fooalls on the dirt. An added bonus for trail running, apart from all the alone me, is that it doesn’t aggravate the body as much as normal running. Most runners get in the habit of doing the same training loops over and over again. While this can be convenient and comforng, it also usually leads to staleness, boredom, and somemes injury. These injuries can be caused simply from doing the exact same thing over and over again. The body doesn’t like performing the same paern monotonously over and over again and much prefers some variety. Trail running helps here because every single step will be slightly dierent. Each me your foot hits the ground the body will go through a complex series of adjustments to make sure your foong is secure and the right muscles are acvated. Some steps will be shorter and lighter, others longer, and others may be a small hop as you leap over a stream or rock. There can be incredibly steep hill secons, too. My favorite trail loop near my house has a hill so steep you can’t walk it at footed, and in secons you can touch the ground in front of you without bending over. These changes to your stride lead to less overall muscle soreness. A two-hour trail run is nothing at all like a two-hour run on pavement around your neighborhood. The soer surface helps, but it has a lot more to do with not repeang the same exact acon thousands of mes. The biggest dierences for trail running come down to two things. First, the sense of being connected to the planet. I’m no hippie and I’m not going to get all touchy-feely on you, but when you’re on a trail up on a mountain and completely on your own, you’ll understand what I mean when the sun comes up. Even a cold-hearted
type-A personality will have to pause to stare at the world unfolding from darkness in front of his or her eyes. The second big dierence is shoes. Most trail running shoes tend to be slightly thinner in terms of padding than regular road shoes. This is to help the body sense and adjust posion on each step depending on the surface. The tread tends to be soer, too, so you have more grip on steep secons or loose terrain. Those who are built to run and are light and owing in their stride won’t noce too much dierence, but for heavier runners, this may present the same challenge as trying to transion to minimal shoes. Namely that you will have to take it slowly and build your mileage carefully as otherwise you’ll overdo it and possibly wind up hurt. Selecon Events – SEALFIT, GORUCK, and Military Training Nothing messes up a body faster than running with boots on while carrying load. These days, boots are much higher quality than they were even ten years ago, but there is a world of dierence between a light, exible shoe and a boot that restricts the movement of your ankle nearly completely. When you add all the pack work that goes with military selecon-type events, the problems magnify. Pack work tends to break the body down quickly if you’re not careful. I’d recommend doing only one ruck per week for your event and do the rest of your loaded work with a weight vest, as it is much easier on the body. My basic training for SEALFIT Kokoro camp entailed daily walking in my boots with a weight vest and one long ruck on the weekend. I ran ve days per week, mostly easy aerobic runs, but with harder short interval sets thrown in to ensure I had some good leg speed. A good rule of thumb, from all the military personnel I’ve ever known, is to be able to run a two-hour half marathon comfortably. However, don’t neglect the need to do some faster work, too, as you’ll also be required to run at-out as various mes. In Breaking BUD/S by DH Xavier, it’s recommended that in addion to your daily runs, you add in two to three sprint sessions per week focusing on running as fast as you can. Like with our break-in running plan, don’t jump straight into these. Sprinng is incredibly demanding on the body and muscle tears are highly likely if you aren’t accustomed to them. A great break-in plan to sprints is to begin with 5 x 50m with a walk back recovery. A good rule of thumb is to take at least a two to three minute break between each sprint just like you’d do between your heaviest sets in the gym. Add one 50m sprint per week unl you get to 10 x 50m. At that point, you can start adding distance. My personal favorite is a combinaon of heart rate based sprint interval training, which also happens to be a great way to bring down your 5k me. The roune is performed over three non-consecuve days. The three days feature 100m, 200m, and 400m sprints, all with a ninety-second recovery. Aer ninety seconds you do another sprint if your heart rate has come back down below 120bpm. If it hasn’t, you’re done for the day - cool down and go home. If it drops below 120bpm, then keep going unl it fails to drop fast enough in the ninety-second recoveries. Here’s how it might look: Day 1: 12 x 100m with 90sec recovery. On 13th rep HR at 90sec was 122bpm. Cooled down with 2km easy run. Day 2: Easy aerobic 5km run. Day 3: 7 x 200m with 90sec recovery. On 8th rep HR at 90sec was 123bpm. Cooled down with 1km easy run. Day 4: Easy aerobic 5km run. Day 5: 5 x 400m with 90sec recovery. On 6th rep HR at 90sec was 122bpm. Cooled down with 2km run. Day 6: Long easy 2hr run, with 20min hard running and 10min easy cool down. Each week you’ll noce you can add more and more reps. Don’t be surprised if these sessions start to take
a long me as your tness improves. I’ve previously hit 22 x 100m, 16 x 200m, and 12 x 400m in a six-week block. Aer six weeks, cycle o this protocol and make sure to have a couple of weeks of easy running. If you’re o to do SEALFIT’s Kokoro or similar, then you will need to spend me running in both boots and sand. Hopefully, you’ve spent enough me geng your boots to t right as the smallest niggle can become an incredibly painful blister once you add water and/or sand. Once again, high quality socks can make a massive dierence to your feet and ability to put in miles comfortably. Running in sand can be problemac as the longer contact mes mean more stress on the lower legs. Your calves and Achilles will take a huge amount of stress, so it’s best to build slowly. I advise geng used to sand running in the exact same way you got into running in the rst place - with a walk/run plan. Give yourself plenty of me to prepare so you are ready to run regardless of terrain. When it comes to boots, treat them like you do your running shoes – choose carefully. If you’re heading o for military selecon, you will have to wear what you are told, but for civilians wishing to do Kokoro or GORUCK, you are free to choose. Fit is even more crucial in a boot than it is with shoes. There is a good chance you may not be able to take your boots o for days at a me, so they need to t well, be comfortable, and be extremely well broken in. My current favorite boot is the LALO Shadow Amphibian. They’re pricey, but once you wear a pair, you’ll see why they cost double most other boots. In a close second is the Salomon XA Pro Mid GTX. These are actually beer for my feet, but because they’re Gore-Tex, they can’t be used in all condions and won’t drain well if they get wet. One of the boots that has a good reputaon currently is the Nike SFB. Truthfully it’s not a bad boot, but once you’ve tried a pair of the Salomons or LALOs, you’ll see the dierence. All three of these boots are light and exible enough, with adequate room for the foot plus a decent pair of socks. Foot care is a major piece of the puzzle for many to tackle when it comes to being in boots for extended periods. I can’t stress enough how important having healthy feet is if you plan to do any of these events or join the military. An easy soluon is to buy the GORUCK foot care kit so you have everything you need at hand always. At the very least, you’ll need needles to pop blisters, alcohol swabs to dry them out, some kind of athlec tape or moleskin to cover them with (do not use stretchy athlec tape like Rock Tape for this, as it will peel o), and foot powder. To toughen my feet, I would rub them with methylated spirits every day. It sounds weird and it makes your feet smell funny, but it’ll nearly completely stop you from geng blisters. One nal point on foot care is to avoid pedicures. The last thing you want is so feet with no calluses. Instead, you want them tough like rocks so they can handle the abuse they’re going to receive. A last piece worth menoning is the diculty faced in running while holding a weapon. For this, I advise carrying a sledgehammer while running so you’re used to not being able to use one hand properly and having a small amount of weight to carry. You’ll see it makes a huge dierence. While geng ready for Kokoro, I was always surprised I never got arrested as I would run or walk to work each morning carrying a sledgehammer. I can only imagine what the police would think of a six-foot guy wearing black pants and running in the dark carrying a hammer.
Chapter 8 – Injuries “It’s a mental bale trying to come back from injuries and I don’t feel like having that mental bale with myself.” - Maurice Greene, 2000 Sydney Olympic Games 100m champion
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you’re planning to run, you’re going to get hurt. Odds are not heavily in your favor of going from not being a runner to gliding like a gazelle through a marathon. Runners suer from all sorts of injuries, ranging from minor ones such as blisters to more painful ones like ITB syndrome or Achilles tendinis. During my lead-in to Ironman, every single run felt like someone stabbing me in both Achilles tendons with every single step unl I was warmed up. That warm-up process couldn’t be improved by any kind of stretching, rolling, or acvaon exercises, but it also never got any worse. I had to learn to manage it, which included daily work on strength and exibility, twice-weekly massage, and dry needling. And that’s part of the life of a runner. Don’t wear your injuries like a badge of pride, as if being hurt is some kind of entry test into a secret sub-three-hour marathon club, because it isn’t. The foundaonal reason to run is the same as to be involved in any form of exercise – to improve the body and mind. Mens sana in corpore sano – a healthy mind in a healthy body. If running, or any other acvity for that maer, is hurng you, then you need to reevaluate the process. While I think there are some tness acvies, Olympic weightliing springs to mind, that aren’t well suited to many because of mobility restricons, I believe running is something all able-bodied humans are capable of if they aack it the right way. As with all sports, there are injuries that are common among parcipants. The injuries listed here are both the most common and usually the most treatable using a combinaon of extra focus on stretching and mobility work, strength training, and a change in volume and intensity of training. The comments below (in italics) were made to me by one of the world’s leading sports therapists, Greg Dea, who was kind enough to share his insights in a series of conversaons we had. Greg was the head of Sports Medicine for the Instute of Sport in the Northern Territory in Australia before relocang to China to head up the sports medicine department for the Beijing Sports Commission via EXOS. There is actually signicant research to indicate that higher training loads are associated with higher injury risks in running sports. Gabbet (2004) showed that a reducon in pre-season train ing loads reduced injury and resulted in greater improvements in maximal aerobic power. The reducon of training load by 10.6 – 15.7% reduced the incidence of injury by 39.8 – 50%. Foster (1998) showed that the incidence of injury and illness are highest when training loads are highest. Wollin (2009) also showed that high training loads have no correlaon on placement in the English Premier League – strengthening the argument that more is not beer, and that high volume is the only key to success. The point made by Wollin(2009) is perhaps the most important. I know many runners who have been told not to run “too much” by their doctors or therapists and yet have headed out the door to get in a “quick” six ty-minute run. Brandishing their injuries as if connuing to be in pain is something to be proud of, they run on thinking themselves to be true tough guys. For many, the idea of reducing training volume is tantamount to asking them to slit their own wrists. Injuries don’t happen because you’re in good shape. They happen because you aren’t ready. You aren’t ready for that much speed work or that much volume. You aren’t ready to run twice in one day. You aren’t strong
enough to deal with the impact forces. The reason you become injured is always the same - you aren’t ready. Gabbe and Domrow (2005) showed that players who completed less than 18 weeks of training before suering their rst injury were more likely to sustain a subsequent injury. In other words, a progressive, systemac approach over four or more months goes a long way towards injury prevenon. In this case – lifeme training volume, or having a big base of (similar) training is incredibly helpful. Also another reason not to jump into a running plan designed for a runner if you’re a beginner. Running injuries seem to be treated quite dismissively by non-runners. I went to the doctor for a small calf tear and literally had the doctor laugh at me when I asked for a treatment plan to prevent it happening again. His response was, “What do you expect? You’re over forty and you’re running.” Needless to say, I never went back to see that doctor again despite his impressive credenals. If I had to give you one rule when seeking advice for running-related injuries, it would be to only take advice from doctors and therapists who run and treat runners. The sad fact is that most of the world, including healthcare professionals, are couch dwellers these days. Those of us who wish to move, run, and exercise are a minority. Don’t allow yourself to be treated like a minority, and don’t take as gospel the advice of a non-running physician. There is a culture amongst the medical profession that the physician just needs to amuse the paent whilst he heals himself. Our jobs as therapists, coaches, and indeed as runners ourselves must include idenfying modiable risk factors and to modify them! The most important element of injury prevenon or rehabilitaon is always the same - being a good detecve. No one knows your body beer than you, and no one else felt what you felt when the injury happened. Injuries are usually not random, unrelated incidents, or acts of God. Injuries occur because you did something your body wasn’t ready for. Usually the causes are simple. Maybe your shoes were too worn, the wrong type for you, or you swapped to a dierent pair. Even more likely, you did something dierent recently such as adding an extra session because you had a key race coming up, or added some intensity in the form of hill runs or track work. Seemingly unrelated factors can oen cause or contribute to injury. In my own case, I started suering Achilles tendon problems because of a change to zero drop minimalist shoes during my workday. I used to work in a pair of Reebok Nano 2.0s and found them to have just enough heel and overall padding that I could be on my feet for hours and not have any problems. (FYI: their latest iteraon, the 4.0, is far too struc tured and s in my opinion and I have swapped to Nike Flyknit Free 4.0s as my work shoes). Even though the Nanos worked ne for me, I wanted to look cool so I bought a pair of Vivo shoes and started wearing them. Despite not running at all during this period, I woke up one day and had an inamed Achilles tendon. The at shoes had put too much stress on that area. For weeks, I couldn’t gure out what had happened unl I put my old work shoes back on one day and the pain was instantly reduced. A few weeks in my old shoes, and with a lile help you’ll read about later, and the problem was gone – and all with no reducon in training load. The right shoe, both in training and for day-to-day acvity can make or break you as a runner. Dib, et al. (2005) found that injury could be caused by colder temperatures as this causes de creased shock absorpon of running shoes. For many years the medical eld has been focused on xing orthopedic issues rather than guring out what caused them. For example, a young pro triathlete came to me wanng to avoid surgery. He had iliobial band (ITB) syndrome of such severity that he couldn’t run at all. Even walking caused him pain. Once I assessed him, it was easy to see why. Surgery may have xed his ITB, but it wouldn’t have addressed the underlying cause of his problems. We spent a couple months geng his body working right again before he went o for surgery. The end result was faster rehabilitaon me, as well as a quick return to form post-surgery.
Focusing solely on the biomechanical reasons for injury may lead to madness. With the possible excepon of elite runners, we are all suering from any number of things that put us seconds away from disaster every me we put on a pair of shoes. Remember that there is no such thing as perfect form or perfect mechanics. You will need to nker and experiment with both your form and the shoes you wear to nd what works well for you. Don’t be misled by someone else, who is built dierently, giving you advice. It may have worked perfectly for him or her, but may create bigger problems for you. Running injuries seldom are the same as an injury from a sport like boxing, where there is a single moment that causes the injury. It is possible that you turn your ankle violently on a trail or even stepping o a curb, but it’s far more likely that the path to injury is gradual, typically passing through these four stages idened by Noakes in Lore of Running : 1. An injury that causes pain aer exercise and is oen only felt some hours aer exercise has ceased. 2. An injury that causes discomfort, not yet pain, during exercise, but that is insuciently severe to reduce the athlete’s training or racing performance. 3. An injury that causes more severe discomfort, now recognized as pain, that limits the athlete’s training and interferes with racing performance. 4. An injury so severe that it prevents any aempts at running. Most people ignore the early warning signs of stage one. Like a warning light on the dashboard of your car, these lile aches and niggles are signs that things could be bad if you don’t aend to them soon. Treatment for stage one injuries won’t require me o from running, and the only concern is to monitor them so they don’t degrade into a more serious injury. As an example, leading into Ironman, I had some Achilles tendon pain in both legs. Once I was warm the pain went away and didn’t increase either during or aer my run. With a good treatment plan of some eccentric work, massage, and dry needling, the pain was actually diminishing despite increasing volume in the late stages of race preparaon. I was pain free and in beer shape race day than I had been only two months prior because I took appropriate acon at stage one. If it had been a stage two or stage three injury, I would have required dierent treatment and a dierent training approach. One of the main problems with running injuries is that they rarely are a result of a catastrophic event, like our boxing example. They usually result from running out of capacity to withstand injury. I rst learned of this concept from Dr. Stuart McGill. He uses it to explain back trauma and says that we only have so many exion events we can tolerate. This applies to single training sessions, a 24-hour period, a week, or even a lifeme. Think of it as currency. Once we spend it there’s lile chance to get it back. In the case of running, many of us overspend and wonder why we have essenally gone broke. The body has no credit card opon available to allow you to keep spending. For some me, I’ve been telling people that training is really only half the picture. Many will automacally assume that diet is the other half, but you’d only be half right there, too. Training, or the posive eect of training, is the combinaon of work and rest. Rest is a combinaon of our two main sources of recovery – food and sleep - plus other smaller factors. The mistake many people make when trying to aain a higher level is to automacally think what they must be missing is work. There is an old joke about a runner who goes to a famous coach and asks how long it will be unl he becomes world class. The coach responds, “If you run ve mes per week you’ll be world class in ten years.” The athlete responds by asking how long it will take if he trains harder, hing twice as many sessions per week. The coach replies, “Twenty years.” On top of the tendency to do too much, many athletes have started to slow down a bit thanks to age. They also probably don’t eat that well, and likely don’t get enough sleep, either. Most athletes seem to think the equaon of training and adaptaon is an addion problem. As in:
Training adaptaon = Work + Rest It’s not. It’s mulplicaon. Training adaptaon = Work x Rest Imagine that if you are doing things right – eang calorie-dense, clean food and sleeping eight hours each night – then the rest poron of the equaon is equal to one. If, however, you start to slip on either of those two factors, you’re short-changing your progress. Let’s imagine two scenarios: In the rst scenario, we have an athlete who is “doing it right” – geng eight hours of sleep, the right amount of good food, smart training. Her equaon looks like this: Training adaptaon = Work x 1 She’s the excepon. More commonly, people are me poor, prone to bad food choices from stress, sleep only six hours a night. That equaon is more like this: Training adaptaon = Work x 0.6 This is the point where it becomes easy to get it really wrong. The results aren’t there, so more work is added. While that will get a short-term increase, the reality is that more work needs to balanced by more recovery. An increase in work can’t pay o without a corresponding increase in recovery. The right answer for many, then, is to cut back the work so it matches the recovery methods. At this point, the body is able to super-compensate in response to training and return for the next session, or the next training cycle, in a more advanced state. Then I realized this was wrong, too. The work part of the equaon is not as simple as what you lied and for how many reps, or how far and fast you ran. If you’re ghng against mechanical issues – T-spine mobility that is causing shoulder impingement for instance – you’ll never be able to add more work anyway. Adding recovery in the form of massage or therapy will help, but the main issue is that you need to add movement. This means what we should be talking about is: Training adaptaon = (Movement Skill + Training) x Recovery One of the most amazing things I’ve seen over the last few years has been the rise of movement schools such as the Funconal Movement Screen (FMS) and Animal Flow. These systems help people to regain lost movement. Being able to touch your toes again is a prey posive thing for most people, but there is a far more benecial reason to add movement to your life if you’re seeking a performance increase. Range of moon gives you the freedom to greater express your training. If you only have half the range of moon you should at any joint or through any movement, then you won’t have much space to develop power. It’s like trying to make a car get up to top speed in your living room – there isn’t enough space. But give it some room, take it out on the freeway, and suddenly you can go as fast as you dare. Range of moon does exactly the same thing for you. Most mature athletes won’t be adequately recovering because they suer from range of moon deciencies. If this is you, focus on recovering range of moon rst and foremost as these factors have such a massive impact on the rest of the equaon. You can get away without paying too much aenon to this while younger but past 35 you need to be sure to pay enough aenon to these two vital areas. Here’s a simple chart to track recovery. The goal is to add your points up to 1 for each day during normal training:
Protocol
Value
2hrs compression garments
0.1
Massage
0.25
Ice bath
0.25
Contrast showers
0.25
Normatec MVP system
0.25
20min gentle walk
0.25
Foam roll
0.1
9+ hours sleep
0.5
Meditaon
0.1
Proper diet
0.25
Targeted ROM work
0.25
Alcohol
-0.25
You can see in a given day, even nine hours of sleep (likely broken into eight hours of sleep plus a nap) as well as eang will only give you a score of 0.75. To make the nal jump to full recovery you’ll need some kind of targeted recovery work such as a contrast shower or recovery exibility work. If you start tracking your recovery like this, you’ll quickly see areas where rapid improvement can be made. The majority of older athletes need more focus on recovery and mobility and this tracking process will help with the former. But this isn’t the full picture. This depicts only how to adapt to the training load, and assumes that all sessions are equal. The reality is that a thirty-minute easy run is much easier to recover from than a two-hour run or a hard gym session. Ian King, one of the world’s foremost strength coaches, believes that for every hour you spend training you should spend an equal me on therapeuc means to balance it out. I’m not sure that in the modern world everyone has so much spare me that they can aord to spend an equal amount of me recovering, but there are ways to help the situaon. Keeping the same formula as above, here are some rough ideas on how much recovery is needed from various training sessions. Please keep in mind these are not hard and fast numbers, but based solely on what I’ve observed in others and experienced myself. Event
Work cost
Run 1 hour
1.0
Run hard track session
1.5
Run 30mins easy
0.5
Long run (2+ hours)
2.0
Strength session
1.0
You can see how it could be easy to under-recover from a hard week of training that might include mulple gym sessions, daily runs, and a longer run on the weekends. During intense build periods, such as before a major event like an Ironman or marathon, you will most certainly need extra recovery. That is why the weeks before a race are at a reduced volume - so you can taper and rest up adequately before the big day. The whole package together can combine to oset most of the damage caused by hard training. Sleeping nine hours every day (eight hours at night plus a daily nap), eang well, drinking enough water, massage, and stretching are your primary recovery tools. Neglect one, or a few, at any me and you will likely nd yourself in stage one injury territory quickly.
When people neglect sleep an interesng thing happens. The body goes into a stressed state and increases producon of corsol. Many in the tness world fear corsol, mostly because it acts in opposion to one of our primary good hormones, testosterone. However, corsol is a performance booster, but only in the short term. Ever had a terrible night’s sleep before a big event and sll had a personal best performance? That’s corsol in acon. In the short term, we can burn the candle at both ends and see a sharp rise in abilies. That’s actually what most training plans seek to do – push you into the red zone to force greater performance from your body. But stay there too long and the wheels start to fall o. The only way to oset something as simple as not geng enough sleep is to eat even beer than usual while backing o on training. That equaon always needs to be balanced. The noon of capacity then is basically how much work we can cope with in a given me frame and what recovery methods we use to oset it. For big events like a marathon, Ironman, or Spartan Ultra Beast, it is enrely possible to carry some recovery credits into the race itself. This is what is commonly called tapering and it is nothing more than storing up as many recovery points as possible close to a race so you can push hard in the event situaon. One thing that can help oset injuries when running is that you have a choice of training surfaces. Running on hard ground like sidewalks, roads, and tracks can be taxing on the body. But changing that for grass, and dirt trails can decrease the damage done by an otherwise idencal session. Alberto Salazar, head coach of the Nike Oregon Project and former marathon world record holder, said that if Mo Farrah were training 100 miles each week of distance running, he would only do a total of ve of those miles on a hard surface like a road. The rest of his mileage would be made up of grass, dirt, and wood chips to lessen the damage to the body. Only in the nal weeks before a big race would they switch to some bigger miles on the road or track, and the main purpose was just to familiarize the body with the pounding it was going to take during the race itself. Perhaps we need to add these to our chart: • •
Run on road, beach, or track 0 Dirt, grass, sand track (not the beach) -0.25
I also nd that running on my treadmill is far soer than on the road, but am aware that a heavily used commercial one in a gym will be about the same as running on hard surfaces. Shoes, too, can make a dierence in how our body copes with training stress. A thin, at running shoe, like the many barefoot or minimalist shoes now available, will add addional stress while soer, more padded running shoes (what we’d call “normal” shoes) will decrease the shock absorbed by the body. Shoes that are worn out will obviously add stress, as will swapping to a shoe that doesn’t suit you. Here’s how shoes aect the picture: • • •
Worn out shoes +0.1 Racing ats/ barefoot shoes +0.25 (unless thoroughly condioned to run in them) Ill-ng shoes +0.25
When it comes to running shoes, it is best to try to own as many as possible. I tend to buy them in groups of either three or four and will always have two pair in use at the same me. Using two pair at once allows the pair I ran on yesterday to decompress while I use the other pair today. And when I am breaking in a new pair because one of my two normal pairs is in need of change I don’t just throw away one and start at the same distance in the new pair. Instead I slowly start using them. First I wear them during the day for one or two days to soen them up. Then I’ll wear them on a short run or two. I’ll wear them at least four mes before I wear them on anything longer than a one-hour run. Give your body me to adapt to the new shoes as i f starng over and you’ll minimize the chance of injury from swapping shoes. (I also have a set of shoes that I wear in the gym that I don’t run in.)
With all this talk about injury and the likelihood of it, you’d be inclined to think it’s beer to just stay on the couch. But it’s important to realize that few running related injuries are actually serious enough to need surgery – if you seek the counsel of a knowledgeable running doctor. It’s esmated that 75% of running injuries are curable with a rehabilitaon plan of up to eight weeks in length. (Pinshaw et al. 1983). There are however excepons to this rule as Noakes pointed out: •
Injuries that occur in runners with severe biomechanical abnormalies. These runners are likely to become injured whenever they train with any kind of intensity. This represents only a limited number of runners, far smaller than most believe.
•
Injuries that result in severe degradaon of the Achilles tendon. There is a growing appreciaon that most injuries to the Achilles tendon are due to degradaon of the tendon (tendinosis) and not inammaon (tendinis) (Khan et al. 1999). Degenerave condions tend to heal poorly, requiring more pro longed periods of rest than do inammatory condions. In addion, the prospects of a complete cure without recurrence are rather small.
•
Injuries that occur in those who start running on abnormal joints, in parcular the hips, ankles and knees. Typically, these runners come from another sport such as soccer, rugby, or football and have suffered from a previous injury and likely undergone major surgery. The joint is never the same again aer surgery, and by the me these people begin running, usually in their late 30s, their joints have degraded to the point that they are painful during running.
The biggest factor in the successful resoluon of running injuries is from hands-on care from a good therapist. The physician or therapist must be prepared to listen and take note of all factors that predate the injury – vol ume, intensity, shoes, terrain, sleep, diet, etc. The most useful tool any medical praconer can have is their ears, not an expensive machine. Again, as noted before, if the injury is sll in stage one (which is likely), then it will be easy for the therapist to manage it and support the runner through an easy rehabilitaon process. This will be further inuenced by the praccal experience of the doctor or therapist, and his or her own experience with running and running related injuries. Do not let your therapist focus only on where there is pain. Yes, by all means get rid of the pain and inammaon, but do not rest unl the root cause is discovered. You must learn to treat the cause, and not the eect. Inammaon is the natural healing response and should be allowed to happen, but we get wor ried about it when it persists longer than several days, or gets so high that the chemicals in the inammaon process cause an ache that wakes you at night, interrupng healing and increas ing sensivity at the area of injury. Also, there’s some evidence that says non-steroidal an-in ammatory drugs delay healing signicantly. Don’t be misled by a sore muscle and think that it is the culprit. In most cases sore muscles - for example, having a calf that is only painful on the right side - are not indicave of the muscle being weak. Far from it. In most cases these muscles are complaining because they’re overworked. Think of it like this. Imagine you’re the boss of a company and have hired two new employees. Each day you come in and employee A is checking Facebook, drinking coee, and sending text messages. Meanwhile employee B is going like a bat out of hell to do his work as well as the work of employee A. Every day this goes on – employee A is the king of Facebook and coee breaks while employee B is killing himself tryi ng to do his job in addion to A’s so that all the work gets done. At the end of the month when you sit both A and B down
to nd out what they think about working for you, who do you think complains? It’s not employee A. He’s busy having the me of his life because you’re paying him to do nothing! Meanwhile employee B is lled with anger and complains loudly, begging you to kick A in the bu so he doesn’t have to do two people’s work. Your job when you have a sore body part is to nd out which bit of you is acng like employee A. You need to get everybody on board so you can work eciently. But while you’re waing to sort out the injury, don’t completely rest. The human body is like a shark – let it sit sll too long and it will die. (Okay, it won’t really die, but it will certainly seize up.) Your body is connually adapng to what you do. If you sit sll long enough your body will get really good at sing sll. And becoming ecient at sing sll won’t help much when it comes to running. In fact, for most injuries in the early stages complete rest will not help. Running, like all endurance acvies, ends up having its athletes develop a minor form of dependence. Remove the drug and sooner or later either the runner will snap and go do something that will likely be too much or their partner will force them out of the house because they have become unbearable. Not only that, but a treatment plan devised around not running will fail the moment the runner begins running again. Once the stress is reapplied to the body, which has not been allowed build up exposure to it during therapy, the inial injury will likely immediately return. Many alternaves exist these days to work the heart and lungs sll while taking the load o the body. Opons include: • • • • • •
Cycling Swimming Rowing Water running Walking Ellipcal trainers (Yes, they do serve a purpose and running rehabilitaon is it.)
If the athlete goes through a period of restricted running and the injury does not improve, then either the diagnosis was wrong or the treatment is wrong. If the athlete has been doing the right thing, and not overdoing the use of running during treatment, then the issue should be resolving. There are no other opons. Failure to improve is either on the doctor or therapist’s head for making a mistake with diagnosis or treatment, or on the paent’s for not listening. There are no other opons. Common Injuries Before we get to running-specic injuries we need to cover the most common complaint rst. DOMS, or delayed onset muscle soreness is typical when performing a new acvity or a familiar acvity at higher levels (either through extra volume or intensity than accustomed). DOMS is that sness and soreness that typically comes within 24 to 48 hours aer introducing the new acvity. When beginning running it is not uncommon for people to experience acute muscle soreness in their calves. Let’s quickly do some math: Even on a short 5km run, which would be like running for thirty minutes for most new runners, the runner will take about 6,000 steps. On each step, he will have to deal with two to three mes body weight. For an aver age person, that means 240kg (530lbs) on every single step. Mulplied out, that’s 1,440,000kg (3,168,000lbs). When was the last me you went to the gym and did nearly 1,500,000kg for calf raises in half an hour? Is it any wonder you’re sore? This is exactly why I always advocate geng into running with a walk/run plan to slowly get the body accustomed to this shock. Note that there are some types of training that seem to result in far more DOMS than others. If you’re seeking to reduce the amount of DOMS from running, consider the following:
1. Reduce distance. Reduce downhill running or exercises with large eccentric (lowering) components, although research has shown that a single bout of downhill running can protect the body against further DOMS relang to the downhill eort itself for up to six weeks aer. 2. Use weight training to increase the strength of the quadriceps muscles and calf muscles. Use of an-inammatory medicaons seem to have lile eect on reducing muscle soreness, but their use for about two weeks before an event has been shown to signicantly reduce muscle damage (measured by lowered readings of creane kinase). However, given that many distance athletes may already be self-medicang heavily with pain killers and the like, this method is not recommended. The eects of dehydraon are magnied while consuming high levels of pain killers and an-inammatories and kidney damage can result. Plus, see the above reference about the eect of an-inammatories on muscle healing. Massage and ultrasound have shown no clear evidence that they help healing. I always wait unl all muscle soreness is gone before having a massage aer an event. My raonale is that if I have muscle damage and/or soreness it is like having a rubber band with lile frays in it. If I let someone rub and pluck at those frays they are likely to worsen, making the problem worse, not beer. Muscle tears
If you’ve ever wondered if you tore a muscle or if you just had severe DOMS, then trust me, you didn’t tear a muscle. A tear is like someone stabbing you in the area with a hot knife and that pain will last a couple of weeks, not days. As someone who has had more than half a dozen calf tears I can tell you that if you tear a calf you are unable to run on it any further. However, as someone who has also torn his hamstring o the bone, leaving the enre thing intact but pulling bone o with it, I can tell you that a complete tear doesn’t hurt at all. That is because a complete tear will also tear all the nerves that supply sensaon to the area. No nerves, no pain. So that’s a lile posive to take away from a massive injury. The signs of muscle tears are usually quite obvious. Along with acute pain it is normal to see bruising appear quickly. There is an immediate loss of funcon. Using my hamstring as a barometer for muscle tears, I was able to see bruising within twenty minutes on the back of my leg. Aer wrapping it up overnight, I woke the next morning to nd my enre leg was black, including under my toenails. A muscle tear is like tearing a bag lled with blood. The bruising is the blood escaping from the bag, which is why you can see it suddenly. Immediate treatments for muscle tears are ice, elevaon and compression. Heat will make it feel beer but will actually speed up blood ow to the area, increasing swelling and inammaon. Most muscle tears are thought to be the result of muscle imbalances between opposing muscle groups or lack of strength in a parcular muscle group. Common muscle tears for runners are calves and hamstrings, although hamstrings are more common in sprinters and team sport players due to the higher speeds they use. Treatment of a muscle tear must include a plan that xes any muscle imbalances. While it used to be advised that complete rest was the best method, newer methods include eccentric strength training and a vigorous stretching program once cleared to do so by your therapist. One thing to be careful of when stretching an injured muscle – do not do it while the injury is fresh. People oen think that because something is pain free that the healing is done, but that’s not true. Imagine if I cut you with a knife. It would take me for that wound to stop bleeding, and further me for it to scab up. Once the scab was formed it would be s and ght for a period, before it had healed enough for the scab to fall o. At that point you’d have a sll relavely freshly healed wound, but the skin would have integrity again and you could work hard without tearing it. If you start to stretch the skin while the scab is sll in place it will rip and
you’ll need extra healing me. That exact scenario is going on inside your body when you tear a muscle. Healing takes me and if you try to stretch the muscle too soon aer the inial spasm phase you will tear that lile scab again. Because the muscle will have shortened while in spasm, you will need to get some length back to it via a stretching plan, but you will need to wait unl given the all-clear by your therapist. Muscle tears come in three grades. A grade one tear is what could commonly be called a strain. Typical rule of thumb for a grade one tear to heal is three weeks. A grade two tear will require four to six weeks. A grade three tear is as bad as it gets and includes total tears, like with my hamstring. A grade three tear will likely require surgery as well as a substanal rehabilitaon program. It was three months before I could start rehab, six months unl I could train again, and twelve months before I was allowed to train with normal intensity. Once the inial healing has taken place it is normally advised to undergo an eccentric training program. Two examples: For calf tears, the normal protocol is to raise up on two legs, take one foot o the ground, and then slowly low er the heel to the ground. Repeat for sets of thirty reps, three mes on each leg. These are actually part of my ongoing maintenance plan for myself these days and I will randomly do sets throughout the day to safeguard my lower legs from any more troubles. With the obvious reducon in fague tolerance to high reps, there’s an associaon between reduced calf endurance and medial bial stress syndrome (MTSS). My take on it is that if you get a calf strain/tear, rebuild fague tolerance to minimize likelihood of suering shin pain aer the calf tear. The associaon was those who averaged 3 sets of 23 reps were more likely to suer MTSS than those who averaged 3 sets of 33 reps. So for me I use the max reps for 3 sets as a test from me to me on myself. If I don’t get over 30 for 3 sets, I’m working on it And aer achieving 3 sets of 30+, the transion to hopping in training is obvious, or double leg skipping to single leg skipping. But a test of risk for future injury is a lateral hop test performed as follows: Get two strips of tape, lay them parallel 40cm apart. Have the athlete hop from outside one strip of tape to the outside of the other strip of tape re pevely as many mes as possible in 30 seconds. Count the reps. Repeat the other side. Normal is 5% or less between both sides. For hamstrings, perform the following exercise lying face down on a bed or sofa: Flex at the knee and then kick the leg to extend it. Before it gets to full extension brake the fall of the leg using the hamstring. Aim to put the brakes on about twenty to thirty degrees before full extension is achieved. Inially, three unweighted sets of een reps are recommended every other day. You will nd that even ny weights can be eecve for these and even the strongest runners may only need up to 5kg aer an extended period of training them. I have seen a lot of informaon regarding hamstring strength in relaon to sprinng, but have never found any reliable informaon on the same subject when it comes to distance running. A general rule of thumb for sprinters is that hamstring strength should be 70% of quad strength. Meaning, if your front squat is 100kg, then your Romanian deadli should be 70kg. However, I also know many high-level team sports coaches who
deal with athletes who do repeated sprints during matches who suggest the number is more likely to be 80% for safety. One AFL team suered a string of injuries before strength and condioning expert Dean Robinson – a strength coach so talented he was nicknamed the Secret Weapon – was employed. He found they were doing Romanian deadlis with an empty bar (20kg) while hing anything from 80-100kg for front squats. Over the course of a year that rao was slowly built up to 80% and the following season the athletes experienced zero so ssue injuries from running. The best I can suggest is to try to achieve balance. Remember that distance running is quad dominant, as you never work through a full range of moon in either exion or extension. Therefore, your primary aim should be to “unglue” the front of the hip via stretching and myofascial release, then strengthen the back of the leg. The hips, hamstrings, and calves are what hold you together as you run, yet most strength plans focus on adding more work to the already overworked anterior of the legs. Remember our employee scenario – when one employee starts to complain and feel s or overly ght, it is not a sign of weakness. Rather, it is a sign that another muscle is weak and not doing its job properly. The other thing to keep in mind is that running is a single leg acvity. In eect, it is a series of one-legged hops unl you nish your run. Standing or absorbing force on a single leg not only includes elements of exion and extension of the hip but also prevenon of rotaon and core stability. This is why a smart strength plan is a preempve strike against injury. Making sure all of these movements are strong enough to withstand the stress of running is your frontline defense against injury. ITB (Iliobial band)/ Hip Many runners suer from sore iliobial bands (ITB). The I TB is a thick band of fascia that connects the outside of the knee to the outside of the pelvis, running over the hip and knee joints. As the leg swings during running, the band moves from behind the femur to in front of the femur. One older suggeson is that the connual rub bing of the band over the lower femoral epicondyle combined with the repeated exion and extension of the knee during running may cause inammaon. This idea is shiing due to more recent research. Fairclough et al (2006) published a study stang that ITB Fricon Syndrome is not fricon at all, but a compression type of tendinopathy. He wrote, “We would thus suggest that the ITB cannot create friconal forces by moving forwards and backwards over the epicondyle during exion and extension of the knee. The percepon of movement of the ITB across the epicondyle is an illusion because of changing tension in its anterior and posterior bers. Nevertheless, slight medial-lateral movement is possible and we propose that ITB syndrome is caused by increased compression of a highly vascularized and innervated layer of fat and loose connecve ssue that separates the ITB from the epicondyle. Our view is that ITB syndrome is related to impaired funcon of the hip musculature and that its resoluon can only be properly achieved when the biomechanics of hip muscle funcon are properly addressed. The ITB is aached not just proximally and distally, but if you think of it as a at band, there’s a piece that is perpendicular to this that is aaching to the femur along its length. This is super s. And since it’s aached to a piece of ssue that can’t lengthen - i.e. the femur, then the ITB can’t actually lengthen or shorten. Hopefully you can see why the trusted foam roller does lile to help with this condion. A foam roller will do lile to x your injury when it involves tough connecve ssue. At best, you can hope for a temporary alleviaon of the pain, but you won’t have xed the problem. A runner who is experiencing ITB syndrome will usually be unable to run due to extreme pain on the upper
outside of the knee, but may well be able to walk or perform other acvies. Notably, walking down stairs can trigger it. If you are borderline for ITB syndrome, or suspect a are up is likely, minimize downhill running. Once pain has surfaced, the runner is usually unable to connue running at all. One possible short-term soluon is running up hill or indoors on a treadmill set to an incline. Because the pain may not present except when running, athletes oen avoid seeing a doctor. As a runner, you should be concerned about what ails you. Pain that is present only when you run is sll pain and needs assessing by a therapist. Diagnosis is oen as simple as being asked to go for a run and then poinng to exactly where the pain is. ITB issues can oen be brought on by a shoe change done to address a dierent problem. It is not uncommon for someone to have bought a new pair of ser shoes to x a problem lower down in the feet, to return not long aer with ITB issues. Noakes makes the recommendaon that injured runners should resist the inial temptaon to immediately buy new shoes. ITB problems seem far more likely in less experienced runners. Messier et al. (1995) found that runners who had higher training mileages - meaning they were also running slower - as well as those who swam were far more likely to suer from this problem. Triathletes, then, are at the greatest risk for ITB syndrome as they usually are less skilled runners and will spend a lot of me swimming. The combinaon of ankle exibility needed for swimming and the sness needed for running can be a dicult double act for any athlete from novice to master. It’s important that triathletes have a quality-focused run-training plan to oset the potenal for this condion, as well as a preempve strength plan to oset any potenal problems cropping up. Interesngly, ITB syndrome seems to pop up most as inexperienced runners start to increase their mileage close to a big race. The me frame seems to be within two or three months of the key event. It is even more likely if the long run is longer – up to two or three mes – than the single longest other run during the week. If you sck to the plan outlined later in the program secon of this book, then you should be able to avoid this piall. Another large part of the cause of ITB syndrome is muscle imbalances in the hips. The best way to describe it is that if the muscles at the hip are too weak and have too much slack in them, then the ITB will take on the tension the hips should have, and next thing you know, the ITB is pulling on your knee. But it could just as easily be hips that are overly ght and need stretching, too. ITB issues may be the easiest of all running-related injuries to x. Research shows that nearly 100% of paents can be xed within a me frame of six weeks to six months. Poor biomechanics can also be to blame for ITB syndrome onset. The control of the hip may not be up to par – a common problem with many distance athletes – and the resulng collapse can put the body into a posion it shouldn’t be in. This is exaggerated during running because of the thousands of reps per side that are possible per run. The issue can be exacerbated in mul-sport athletes because cycling is oen the root cause, and the same mechanical faults can be seen in the pedal stroke, which can again be magnied many thousand mes even during a short ride. A great example of this was Lance Armstrong. During his reign of victories in the Tour De France, his team was aware of a slight inconsistency with his pedal stroke. But there was no need to correct it because at the end of each day he would stop all acvity, get o his bike, and hop straight onto the massage table to have it xed up. But when he started becoming interested in triathlon again, parcularly the longer races, this small issue needed addressing so he could run well. So if you’re a mul-sport athlete and have ITB issues, it is well worth your me to check bike posion, cleat posion, riding mechanics, and volume/intensity, as any may also be the culprits for your ITB problem. The knee and ITB can be a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem. Valgus collapse at the knee can be caused by weak feet that allow for excessive pronaon, but it can also be caused by weak hip rotators that allow inter nal rotaon of the femur. Somemes it is dicult to tell if the problem is occurring up- or downstream of the symptom. The problem at the hip can also manifest in another way that is not as obvious. In good runners, the feet are not placed in line with each other when striking the ground. Imagine running along a painted line, like
the lines on a tennis court. Good runners will run with each foot hing the line, but not crossing over the line, nor fully covering it. Basically they’ll be hing the outside of the line on each step with the le foot touching the le side of the line and the right foot touching the right side of the l ine. A poor runner will run almost as if on a ght rope with the feet both landing on that line. This is precipitated by the athlete undergoing increased hip adducon (movement of the thigh toward the midline) on the paw-back poron of the movement. As the rear leg crosses over the midline, it forces the front foot into this posion. As the foot lands crossing over the midline we see a contralateral pelvic drop. Interesngly, one of the world’s leading run physiotherapists, Brad Neal, said that, “ The tension within the ITB will only increase when the origin and/or inseron are moved further apart.” When you combine a landing posion with the front foot passing over the midline with this contralateral pelvic drop, you do exactly what is quoted as increasing strain on the ITB. Treatment for the pain should sll remain the same, but me spent with a running coach and/or performing video analysis would also be me well spent. Without xing the mechanical error causing the issue, you will only end up suering from it again unl it is xed. And there’s some evidence that an-inammatories - specically ibuprofen, is eecve at in hibing the reacons that occur in tenocytes (tendon cells) in the rst 2-3 days aer an acute irritaon. Other an-inammatories don’t have this eect. And it’s not because of an an-inammatory eect, it’s because ibuprofen is inhibitory to tenocytes. So this 2-3 days of unload, with inhibitory meds, seems to be very eecve at reducing/ abolishing the irritaon. The contribung factors need to be sorted though as Fairclogh men ons – address hip funcon. While geng ready for a 70.3 race on short noce, I dramacally increased my bike mileage in a short me – ve rides in six days. By the end of the h ride, I was starng to get that lile niggle in the outside of my kneecap so I went to work on it. I didn’t have mulple days I could aord to have my leg immobilized for so I opted for another trick from good friend Perry Nickelston. I call it the Two Day ITB Cure. Having been warned by my body that if I kept pushing something truly bad would happen, I immediately dropped the riding out of my training plan for a day. If something hurts you, why on Earth keep doing it? It was Sunday, exactly a week away from my half-Ironman, and I was ready to pull out rather than risk more serious problems. R – Release the muscle Following the RAIL system, created by Perry Nickelston, the rst thing I had to do was begin release work. ITB issues are usually caused by something at the hip not working properly. That means that although I did foam roll my ITB, it had almost no eect. I tried a few dierent things, and aer each I would get up and walk around to assess what had the best eect in terms of minimizing the catch at my knee. The thing that made the most dierence was a ball in my glute. The next thing that had the biggest impact was the pigeon stretch. Knowing what muscles do is important if you want to stretch them because the best way to stretch a muscle is to do the exact opposite of its funcons. The hip (glute medius) performs hip extension, external rotaon, and abducon. Pigeon puts the hip in exion, a bit of internal rotaon, and adducon. So it t perfectly in this situaon. But that’s not the end of it, as I also wanted some active stretching to bridge the gap between release and activate (step two in the RAIL system). The best opon for the full process used is to read The Two Day ITB Cure on Breaking Muscle. A – Acvate the Released Muscles
So, we’ve done release via a combinaon of changing ssue tone with the ball along with passive and acve stretching. Now, according to Perry, we need to acvate. This was done by lying face down and going through hip extension, external rotaon, and abducon. For many, especially long-term cyclists with ght hips, you may need to stretch the hip exors and quads to be able to extend your leg o the ground. I – Integrate into a Standing Posion Now you need to integrate. I chose the single-leg deadli for this because it hits many muscles at once and gets us into a standing posion to check our funcon. Regardless of what posion you use to integrate, you must return to standing to see if the process has been successful. L – Test with Locomoon The next step is to test with locomoon. Walking and running are the two most important primive paerns we have. There’s so much talk about rolling and crawling, but those paerns are used developmentally to get us to walking. So when you rehabilitate an injury, make sure you can return to pain-free walking and running and you’re not just le endlessly crawling around on the ground. I performed this series three mes a day for two days and was 100% pain free aerward . In the days since, I have ridden again and been pain free, and my running has been pain free, too. Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome Patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) was originally thought to be due to a degeneraon of the carlaginous ssues that line the knee joint, kneecap, bia, and bula. Its original diagnosis was chondromalacia patella – a pre-arthric condion. There are a few problems with this. First, it suggests that anyone who develops PFPS must also ulmately develop arthris in the knee joint yet no evidence supports this. Running does not increase risk of knee osteoarthris. Remember that. Anyone fear mongering by telling you that running will lead to osteoarthris in your knees is either uneducated or believes old wives’ tales. Having said that, elite runners do show an increased risk of osteoarthris in the hip joints from years of intense training. I have traces of arthris in my hips from a lifeme of kicking and squang. From my point of view, anyone who trains hard is probably at risk of some arthris later in life – but you won’t get it in your knees from running. The pain of PFPS can be noced aer running a certain distance and not as a result of trauma. It can be found around the area of the kneecap, more specically the lower lateral (outside) border of the kneecap where the patellar tendon aaches. PFPS is a lile odd in the way it can be treated. Runners who suer from PFPS can be treated with shoes or orthocs that counter pronaon, which suggests the problem itself is caused by excessive muscular acvity associated with high levels of ankle pronaon. Runners who suer from pronaon are oen thought to have weak or oppy feet, yet studies on PFPS show that runners suering from it actually pronate less than average. In fact, studies show that runners with “higher arched feet, who replaced their shoes more frequently, pronated less through the rst 10% of stance, and had weak knee extensors” were most likely to experience PFPS. (Duey at al. 2000) Longer-term study has shown that simply increasing the strength of the quadriceps on the aected side was a good predictor of recovery, suggesng that muscle balance and strength are of utmost importance, as they are with most running related injuries. Yet another great reason to have a preempve strength plan in place. The Q angle – that of the angle between the quadriceps and the kneecap – can be a determining factor, too. Noakes cites that people with a Q angle greater than 22 degrees are more likely to suer from this issue. Given that normal values are 14 degrees for men and 17 degrees for women, you would think there should be no great risk. However, females are likely to exhibit valgus collapse more, which will eecvely increase their Q angle, as will running “on a ght rope,” as described in the ITB secon above. The cure is to turn to a shoe
designed to x ankle pronaon, even though it seems counterintuive given what we know about PFPS suerers pronang less than normal. The use of an-pronaon shoes cures 68% of runners aer a single visit in less than four weeks. The use of orthocs cures 80% of runners. Like with all running injuries, it is oen the sudden increase of volume and i ntensity that seems to be the trigger. Varied training or racing surfaces have been known to do it too, with road camber being a parcularly common cause. Treatment is simple – strengthen the quads, feet, and ankles and limit pronaon. Use of orthocs in the shortterm works, but ulmately you will be beer o if you take responsibility for the issue and address it so you don’t need a crutch. Cauon should be used when adding mechanical aids to your gait. There is some evidence to show they work, but there is as much, if not more, evidence to show that orthoc aids and moon control shoes don’t do anything other than line someone else’s pockets. Your best bet is to address your strength and movement issues rather than spend money on a mostly worthless product. Plantar Fasciis Plantar fasciis, or more correctly plantar fasciopathy (as an –is sux denotes inammaon of the area), is so common in runners it has even been called “runner’s heel.” The plantar fascia (PF) is constructed of the same thick ssue type as the ITB and shares some common traits with ligaments and tendons. Pain oen rst forms near the front of the heel on the boom of the foot during running and later becomes more noceable when geng up in the morning forcing the suerer into a painful at-footed shue as he or she tries not to extend at the ankle or push o with the big toe. The PF itself is made up three strands, with the central one being the largest and most prominent. As the foot bears weight, the PF undergoes a ghtening, and it ’s been esmated it carries as much as 14% of the total load of the foot. During gait, the PF rst elongates, storing energy like a spring. Then, as the toes are dorsiexed in the propulsion phase, the PF tenses, shortens the foot, and acts as a windlass. Its funcon is ed to that of the Achilles as there is a connuous fascial connecon between the two. As such, the Achilles is oen a target for treatment of PF condions. Again, the most likely causes are a sudden increase in mileage or intensity or a shoe change. A number of other risk factors have been linked such as: obesity (BMI >30), Achilles tendon ghtness, reduced ankle dorsiexion, and foot posture, with high arched, s feet being more problemac than a aer foot. PF issues can take a long me to resolve – six to eighteen months is common. Perhaps the number one reason for this is that aected runners are not discouraged from running, as long as the pain is stable. On a scale of zero to ten, with ten being unbearable pain, runners are encouraged to connue as long as the pain doesn’t go beyond ve. Given the way pain can change motor control, I feel that this is seng people up for further trouble in the future. Common treatment is to stretch the calf complex on the belief that the Achilles tendon needs to be unloaded. I would suggest that what is most important is that people’s feet work properly. When the feet are inexible, the muscles are forced to work overme to deal with the lack of range of moon from within the support structure itself. Stretching the muscles that are responsible for ankle range is ne, but only addresses 50% of the problem – the other 50% of your plantar and dorsiexion comes from movement within the foot itself. We’ll look at some drills later to address this issue. One of the biggest culprits causing PF is a switch to barefoot or minimalist running. I know it’s sexy right now to run in the thinnest, aest shoes possible, but you’re not a Tarahumara tribe member, and chances are you’re too heavy and your feet are too weak to deal with that kind of stress. Barefoot running can take years to get ready for, and with the increased loading on the forefoot when running in minimal shoes, parcularly on harder surfaces, the calf complex is overloaded. If your feet are ght and s that problem will be doubled.
The best strategy is to reduce training load by using soer surfaces such as grass and dirt to train on (but not sand as that may make the problem worse), decrease volume, and add in stretching for the calf complex as well as mobility exercises for the foot. During this period, care must be taken that pain isn’t increasing in the PF, and this may mean an abbreviated training schedule for an extended period of me unl the PF heals. Lower Back Many runners suer from lower back issues. Usually this can be narrowed down to three likely causes: • Tight hip exors • Poor posture • Disc degeneraon Because distance running is conducted through a limited range of moon for long periods of me the muscles tend to shorten and become ght. The weird thing for many people is discovering that your hip exors aren’t very good hip exors when you stand upright. The psoas, the muscle commonly thought of as our prime hip exor, has an aachment on the front of the femur, but the other end is aached to the spine. In fact, it has an aachment on each of the lumbar vertebrae, meaning it has ve mes more opportunies to pull on your back than it does on your femur. What compounds this is that the psoas only works at a joint angle of more than ninety degrees at the hip. That means that unl your thigh is parallel to the oor it ’s not even working as a hip exor. Remember what I said about it not working well when standing? Now imagine you’re in a crawling posion, like most animals, and noce how easy it is to get the thigh beyond that ninety-degree mark? And in this posion our abdominal brace has a lot more feedback thanks to the acon of gravity and we can use that to shield our spine, rather than rely on the psoas to brace for us. Muscles don’t like doing two things at once and, now that they’re free to ex the hip, noce how much more easily it moves than when you’re standing? But how oen do you run and need to ex beyond ninety degrees at the hip? I would suggest never, which is one of the reasons this issue ares up. A bigger cause of it is purely environmental, though. Spending so much me sing, the hip becomes used to a certain length being correct for the hip exors and they shorten accordingly. Then, when we want them to lengthen to accommodate our stride when running, they’re not quite long enough. The result is a really s band aached to your leg, and when that leg swings backward and that s band is pulling on the spine where it is anchored. Now mulply that by 1,500 steps for every kilometer you run, and you can see how that becomes problemac. The biggest issue, then, is that mobility of the hips and quadriceps muscles needs to be addressed. In many cases, a few minutes spent daily on stretching both will alleviate back pain. For triathletes this problem can be magnied by long hours spent in the saddle hunched over aero bars. This closed posion combined with the hunch of the back is like a double whammy and you need to spend me addressing it. In fact, if you are a triathlete, I have some bad news for you – there’s a fair chance your bike is messing you up long term. Sing has been called our generaon’s smoking by some, and while I’m not sure that is accurate, it does put into context how damaging the eects of prolonged sing can be. When you add in poor posture on long rides on top of sing for work, you can see how our seated posture is potenally the biggest problem we have for our backs. Spending me reversing it via stretches that get your back into extension, such as cobras, is the answer. Yet I oen see cyclists taking a break and bending over and touching their toes to stretch when that is the last thing they need. Disc degeneraon by itself isn’t necessarily an issue. Many people have lower back disorders yet are asymptomac. However, it can be ared up from me to me, parcularly with those who have to spend hours sing either for work or cycling, and then can cause referred pain known as sciaca. This pain i s associated pain following the distribuon path of the sciac nerve (buocks, posterior thigh, calf, and heel pain). While there may be no way to x degenerave discs (yet), there are ways to help prevent the pain and inconvenience
caused by them. A solid strength and exibility program will do wonders. A client of mine who was urged to have three lumbar discs fused via surgery and had been riddled with pain for eight years become 100% pain free in three weeks following a simple combinaon of deadlis, kelebell swings, and abdominal work. It can be that easy. Personally, I had good success with using a small amount of neural mobilizaon when I had a small disc problem caused by sness from riding. Four weeks of simple “ossing” and the problem was completely gone, and now I use some of these techniques as part of my warm up and to stay supple throughout the day. You can nd these techniques in the exercise secon. Achilles Tendon
For many runners the rst sign of an Achilles tendon injury “comes out of nowhere” as they take their rst steps in the morning. As you sleep, your feet are pointed and the calf muscles ghten, up making it feel as if we’re walking with blocks of wood on the ends of our legs. As athletes we tend to ignore minor aches and pains as consequences of an acve lifestyle. Many of the warning signs of impending Achilles tendon issues are there, if we look for them. First, we need to disnguish between an –is and an –osis. When you see tendonis it indicates that there is inammaon in response to micro tears of the tendon caused by overloading. This is dierent from a tendinosis, which is a breakdown of the structure of the tendon in response to chronic overuse. While both present as pain, the treatments are dierent so it is important to make sure the diagnosis is correct. To further complicate maers, it is also possible that the pain is caused by where the tendon itself runs through the sheath. Again, treatment is dierent for an Achilles tendon issue – either micro tears or degrada on - versus an Achilles tendon sheath issue. Another possible problem that can occur is the complete rupture of the Achilles tendon. Trust me when I say this – if your Achilles tendon snaps, you will not be le in doubt. You will fall to the ground as if shot by a sniper. Recovery from a complete rupture will require reaachment or repair surgery and it will be around twelve months before you are be ready for regular training again. Achilles tendon issues, both –ises and –osises, are simple to detect. Pain will be localized to the area of the Achilles tendon. If you pinch the area you’ll nd it incredibly tender. A paral tear of the tendon will feel the same way so you’ll need a professional diagnosis and scans to dierenate. A complete tear will be obvious as there will be a gap in the tendon and you’ll be unable to walk with normal gait on the aected side. Over the last decade or so there has been a considerable change in the understanding of Achilles injuries due to the nding by Khan et al. (1999) that inammaon (tendonis) isn’t present. On microscopic examinaon it has become evident that the collagen structure itself has begun degenerang and that scar ssue has begun forming. My belief is that many paents suering from Achilles tendon issues are being misdiagnosed and therefore mistreated, so the issue never seems to go away. Peak age for Achilles troubles is between thirty and y years old. Given that most of the problems are to do with degeneraon of the collagen structures and this occurs as we age, it is natural the issue should be evident in aging runners. There are studies showing that runners who have run far and fast are most likely to suer from these problems compared to others who either take up running later or who have not pushed their limits as much. One of the possible causes is that we tend not to use the muscles for propulsion as we run, but instead tend to bounce o our tendons. There is a correlaon between age, how much stretch can be achieved in the tendons due to loss of collagen, and running speed. There are other factors, though, usually cited as: ght, inexible calf muscles; hypermobile feet; and overly s feet. In other words – every single person who runs may get Achilles tendinosis. Having suered from Achilles tendinosis leading into Ironman – brought on by a big increase in mileage – I’ve been through all the tests and treatments you could imagine. My feet are s, and the calf is forced to take the brunt of much of the shock absorpon that my feet won’t.
Looking back, what strikes me as odd is that not one therapist did much other than oer me what amounted to a Band-Aid to treat the issue. One therapist did some great work on breaking up my feet so they were more exible; however, there was no plan in place to make my feet more exible long-term. Just this idea that my feet were s and they would remain that way forever. Tendon problems should be treated with care as they can quickly go from an -is to an -osis, meaning that long-term damage has been sustained. When pain rst felt in the area, rest must be taken. This shouldn’t be a few days, or even a few weeks - but a few months. I know this is painful news for runners (excuse the pun) but isn’t it beer to take a few months now rather than risk not running altogether in a year or so? Studies have shown that eccentric strength training of the calf muscles is an eecve way to rebuild tendon cells. These same studies have shown that in injured runners eccentric calf strength – the strength that stops your foot slamming into the ground on each step and helps you absorb the impact forces – is lower than in healthy runners. Heel lowering exercises should already be in the arsenal of all runners. If you’re not doing them and Achilles tendon issues arise, add these exercises immediately. Remember that an inammatory condion – tendonis – will sele in three to six weeks. Anything that takes longer is not an –is, but is a degrading condion and needs to be addressed dierently. Given that the majority of Achilles tendon problems are not inammatory, the use of ice and an-inammatory drugs such as ibuprofen, etc. is unproven as part of a treatment plan. The rst step has to be to limit or stop running immediately. My personal preference is that at the rst signs of soreness in the area that the runner rest for one to three weeks. During this me, do acvies that do not load the Achilles tendon as much like cycling and swimming, although you may need to alter cleat posion when riding to prevent any further damage being done. You’ll also need to make sure to only ride sing as standing may make it worse too. A note on corsone injecons into an area that is suering from a tendinosis. Given the condion is one of degradaon and a corsone injecon is designed to break down ssue to prevent further inammaon, it is enrely possible that a corsone injecon could make the Achilles tendon more likely to rupture in the injecon site. Keeping injuries in stage one is vital if you are keen to resume running soon. Achilles tendon issues are no dif ferent. Injuries that are managed well in stage one do not usually linger and no great changes need to be made to training plans. One thing I have found parcularly useful for myself as well as those I train is to never wear minimal shoes. Many “funconal” trainers these days get their clients to wear “barefoot” or minimalist footwear with zero drop soles. This puts the calf and Achilles in a stretch all the me, not just during running and stops it from healing quickly. The best bet is to nd a shoe that you can li weights in that has a bit of a heel, but that isn’t too cushy. This allows the calf and Achilles tendon to relax a lile when you aren’t running. For me, this lile change allowed my Achilles tendon to go from painful to pain-free in just two weeks. Noakes has this as a guideline for Achilles problems in Lore of Running: Stage 1 (morning discomfort in tendon) Rest one week before resuming running training as before. Stretch calf muscles for a total of 20 minutes daily. Try new running shoes that prevent pronaon. Add 7 to 15mm heel rise to running and street shoes (either by using shoes with higher heels or by using inserts). Monitor injury progress with pinch test. Use physical therapy and drug therapy if costs permit.
Stage 2 (pain during running, but not aecng performance). Connue approach for stage 1. Modify training to reduce speed work, hill running (parcularly downhills) long runs, and weekly distance. Try an orthoc. Physical therapy. Stage 3 (pain during running that is aecng performance). Connue as for stage 1 and 2. Rest for 3 weeks. Try regular cross fricon massage to break up scar ssue build up in area. Aer 3 week rest, resume jogging, cycling, swimming (no serious running) unl injury reverts to grade 2, then try serious running only when injury reverts to grade 1. Stage 4 (running impossible) Try approaches for stage 1, 2, and 3. If these fail, visit an experienced orthopedic surgeon. Consider surgery only when all other techniques, including repeated sessions of cross-fricon massage, have not worked. Oen, the tendon pain occurs aer a temporary increase in tendon loading, for example – in crease in speed, volume, frequency of running, or even something as sneaky as running on a cambered surface, like road running where the road slopes a lile to drain water, then when you run back home, you cross the road only to end up having the same camber. Be careful also of the “usual run” that has no change in any of those parameters, but follows on from a period of stress in other ways, eg. When you’ve not fully recovered from a faguing event. Here’s the responsible advice – don’t be the person whose Achilles tendon pain comes from a medical prob lem where a tness soluon isn’t right. A quick check with your responsible health praconer is the rst step. The good news is that tendons don’t like to be rested, so you’re not going to be expected to simply not do anything. They don’t get beer with rest, they get beer with modied load. They get beer with beer movement and beer load tolerance in other parts of the body. They will, however, benet from direct treatment, so get ready to step up and help your lile buddy. In the Funconal Movement Systems, one of the principles that guide clinicians and coaches through injury and movement problems is the three steps paradigm of Reset, Reinforce, and Reload. This applies to Achilles pain too. The Reset means when someone does something to you that removes pain or restores movement you couldn’t do yourself. With advances in self-help, we can use many tools to reset ourselves. When it comes to pain in the tendon, for mine, it comes down to whether you have just had pain in the last 24 hours, or whether it’s been hurng beyond 2 days. If it’s a fresh Achilles pain, within a day, the acve ingredient in simple over-the-counter med icine Ibuprofen has been shown to quieten down the tendon cells that spew out a dierent water-aracng-protein – the reason for the swelling. You’ve got to block these cells right away
– if you miss using ibuprofen straight away, you’ll have missed the opportunity to minimize the tendon swelling in the short term. If it isn’t a fresh Achilles tendon pain, the biggest bang-for-buck thing you can do is consider, with your local doctor who’s experienced in sports injuries, the use of GTN patches. GTN, or Glycerol Tri-Nitrate, is usually used to treat angina, as it releases nitric oxide, which opens blood vessels. It’s not clear why opening blood vessels helps Achilles tendon pain, but it certainly does. So many of my Australian Football player athletes with Achilles tendon pain have had their pain abolished within a couple of weeks – if you think that’s a long me, it’s not – these tendons can be painful for weeks to months. You’ll need a prescripon from your doctor, who should be famil iar with its use in Achilles tendon injuries. If your doctor doesn’t know about it, go to one who does, or provide them with this arcle to study. Conclusion
Many doctors will dismiss running and tell you to quit. However, the human body has been around for a lot longer than podiatry, orthocs, doctors, and any other modern treatment – and we are here today because the body learned during evoluon how to cope with running. In other words, we were designed to run. Any treatment plan that doesn’t include running in the midterm is bound to fail. By all means, remove it if you’re suering from acute pain, but if your doctor’s treatment plan revolves around not running, when you eventual ly return to it you’re likely to get hurt again. Keep weight bearing acvity in your plan as much as possible, and running, at least a lile bit, will help get you back to full tness sooner rather than later. It’s in your best interest to seek out doctors who are runners too. There are plenty of sports doctors who don’t run and who have excellent reputaons among endurance athletes, but if you can, nd a doctor who pounds the pavement with you. An insider will always have a deeper understanding than an outsider. While there’s plenty of research to show that all the methods shared above can and do work, there is also evidence to show that in some people they don’t. The GTN patches menoned have an 88% chance of success over a three-year period. That means that 12% of paents won’t improve over the same me. While unlikely, it is possible you are one of those people. Don’t despair, though. What I’ve found is that if you’re serious enough about roong out the cause of your problems then you can always nd a way forward. Whether it’s running on soer surfaces, doing a bit more preventave strength work, using any or all of the methods discussed above, or geng rid of your current clinician in favor of a new one, there is always a way forward. Experts in any eld are hard to nd. It took me twenty years to nd the trusted team of massage therapist, physiotherapist, and sports doctor I use now with all my clients, and I found plenty of unacceptable ones along the way. One bad run doesn’t mean the end of the world, and nding one bad doctor doesn’t mean all are quacks. The good ones are out there. The best starng point I can recommend is via the Funconal Movement website and searching for an SFMA cered clinician in your area.
Chapter 9 - Building Strength From the Ground Up Strength is one of the key factors in athlec success. I don’t believe it is number one, as many would suggest, but it is certainly important. The general ow of athlecism moves from gaining mobility and stability to developing strength. Then we can worry about endurance. The easiest way to think about this is in terms of each running step requiring, as a minimum, the power to absorb the landing forces and then hop onto the next leg. If you can’t perform a single hop well, the chance of doing many thousands of them is slim. The qualies needed to run well, in order of importance: 1. Mobility/stability 2. Sport skill (running drills, in this case) 3. Strength and condioning 4. Sport specic training (actual running) Many people get this all backward and start with run-specic training, yet have a body that is ill-equipped to deal with it. Sport-specic training is the peak of the pyramid and only represents the nal few percent of what is possible. As an example, many people rush to get to plyometrics, yet Mel Si wrote in Supertraining, “Because plyometric acons involve a powerful eccentric amorzaon phase terminang in an explosive isometric contracon, a primary requirement for anyone contemplang the use of classical plyometrics is a high level of eccentric strength and explosive isometric strength.” Because plyometric exercises depend on power – the use of strength quickly – there are two factors at play. Both maximal strength and speed can be trained to accomplish this, and as most people have a higher ceiling for gains in maximal strength than they do in speed, it’s beer to spend me on maximal strength than on speed development. This is another perfect example of regular strength and condioning being needed before the addion of sport-specic training protocols. But what happens if you try to add strength when moon is limited? We’ve all seen those guys in the gym who throw 400kg on the leg press and barely budge it. Load shortens range. We can also think about load as stress to the body. Running, and in parcular running fast, is just a dierent type of load on the body. If you have lim ited range standing sll, then you’re going to have even more limited range once you start running. Self-Assessment of Range of Moon Because our sense of where our body is (propriocepon) stems largely from our range of movement, we need to be sure that all joints are able to exhibit funconal range to get the best out of our body, before we add stress/load. The following are full range of moon for the major joints: Hip – Flexion to 125° Extension to 10° Add/abducon to 45° Knee – Flexion to 130° Ankle – Plantar exion (toes pointed) to 0° Dorsi exion to 30°
These are “normal” ranges. As briey discussed above everyone will be slightly dierent and may exhibit the range at a slightly dierent point. Lacking total range should be seen as a warning sign, though. For instance, if hip exion/extension is 125° to 10° - a total range of 135° - and you exhibit only 90° i n exion and nearly 0° in extension, then you have a problem. Either your stride will be cut short because you lack the ability to create normal movement, or you will create full range movement but from the wrong place. And eventually, that will become an injury. While normal ranges are important in the upper body, too, they’re not as important for running. However, one that is important as an injury prevenon checklist is the amount of trunk exion and extension you have. Two simple tests will help make sure that you have normal range: 1. The toe touch is a great simple tool to assess how much exion you have. You should be able to touch your toes and you should see a uniform curve of the back through all segments. 2. The back bend is also a useful test to check back extension. With arms up in line with ears you should be able to bend backwards to 170°. The ASIS (front of the pubic bone) should clear the toes, the border of the shoulder blades should clear the heels, and there should also be a uniform spinal curve. If your arms can’t even stay in line with your ears while doing this, you lack normal range, too. If you don’t meet normal range requirements, go and nd an SFMA/ FMS cered praconer straight away and address these issues. Movement comes before physical training, and without meeng the baseline requirements, you are seng yourself up for injury before you’ve even put your shoes on. FMS – Funconal Movement Systems No commentary on strength and condioning training would be complete without menon of some type of screening.. The modern world ruins us for most acvity, and for running in parcular. Our bodies - historically strong, supple, and capable - are becoming slow, lethargic, and weak. Our movements are becoming more and more restricted. A far cry from the apex predator we evolved to be. I begin every inial appointment with a new client with a movement screen. I don’t even ask about his or her past other than a quick queson or two about previous serious injuries. I have so much faith in the screening process that I know the screen will show me what is wrong far beer than most people will be able to tell me what they think is wrong. As an example, it is not uncommon for people to have major surgery and forget all about it once the pain has subsided. I was doing a screen on a new client a few years ago and he had very limited thoracic movement. When I asked him if he’d ever taken a big fall, crashed a bike, or anything like that, he replied that nothing like that had ever happened to him. But again and again this problem became obvious, and then about twenty minutes into what was now a full-on correcve exercise session he told me he’d had a massive aorc failure and they’d entered through his back, cung through ribs, to put a four-inch hose into his heart to replace his aorta. Who’d have thought that having people move your ribs, cut a massive hole in you, and sew a new main artery to your heart could cause so many problems? Because it no longer caused him any pain, he had forgotten about it. But the body remembers and it works to protect these areas. It does this by liming your movement in some way so you can’t end up in a range where you might hurt yourself. The FMS is a system developed by Gray Cook to check how well you can perform key athlec movements like the funconal leg paerns of squat, hurdle, or lunge, as well as the building block fundamental paerns of reach, ex, extend, and rotate. Back in 1994, Cook scribbled out some notes on some paper napkins and the screen was born. It contains seven dierent movements. Many of the movements contain many of the other
elements. For instance, the lunge paern also tests shoulder mobility. The hurdle step is tesng hip exion and extension, as well as rotary stability and trunk stability. While there are ways to cheat one test, there is no way I’ve yet seen to cheat all the ways in which each movement is being tested. In other words, you may fool the tester in one movement, but the aw you just hid will be evident somewhere else. What makes the screen so useful as an assessment tool is that it tests le and right independently in most of the movements (except the squat and trunk stability tests). For runners this is of vital importance as we operate always on each side independently, thousands of mes in a row, on each run. A small dierence spoed during tesng will be magnied by the volume of reps done while running, and these small dierences can become massive injuries or highlight an impending one. The goal of screening is to place a client or athlete into one of three groups: Acceptable screen – cleared for acvity. Unacceptable screen – at risk for injury unless movement paerns are cleared up. Pain with screen – needs to see a therapist, preferably an SFMA qualied praconer who is also a runner. This point cannot be made too clearly. Do not get treatment from a non-running physician. While they may be hard to nd, you will always be able to nd one if you search hard enough.
The problem that many sll have is one of reduconist science. This is what happens when a therapist or trainer starts to pick the body into small muscle groups and worry about the performance of a single muscle over another. But the body doesn’t work in muscle groups. It works in movement paerns as a cohesive enty. Real funconal training isn’t about isolaon or guring out whether someone isn’t ring some ny obscure muscle group. Real funconal training is about whether or not your body can perform enre motor paerns eecve ly. The idea that there is a perfect way to look when performing any acvity is awed. Due to limb length dierences, gender, and other variables, everyone will look slightly dierent when performing a task. And because of that, muscle acvity to create that movement will be slightly dierent for everyone. This is another reason why cookie-cuer running form is impossible to achieve. Some trainers will have you believe that if you hold your body an exact way that you will run faster. As discussed in the form secon, there are some similaries between good runners, but beyond those everyone will have an individual style. Trying to force someone to run a certain way or to mimic another is fraught with disaster. It may make them faster, but it may slow them down, too. For instance, when I run easy I can hold my arms close to my body and they just move forward and back, with my thumbs held loosely as if I’m holding two scks in my hands. My hands pass by my nipple, as if I’m trying to ick them. But when I run faster, at my steady half Ironman pace, my hands draw small circles on each swing which helps to counter the force I am making in the lower body that is caused by the extra eort being made on each stride. Is it textbook? No, but when I run this way I am more relaxed. Because I’m more relaxed, I can run faster at the same heart rate and with less fague. Many chase running form rst, but that is a mistake. Remember that our connuum of training begins with mobility work and then connues to stability. The most likely cause of a runner failing the screen is lack of mobility. This limit of mobility impedes stride length and posture. Once mobility has been brought to an acceptable level, then the runner needs ample stability, both in single-leg stance and posturally, to cope with the demands of running. From there we can add run specic drills and training, as well as tradional strength training to complement and e the whole thing together. But movement comes rst and always rst. In fact, if there were a single thing I wish more people would focus on it would be quality of movement.
I’m not going to break down the enre FMS process here, as it is something that needs to be done in person. If you’ve run the self-assessment listed above (or by following the process in Athlec Body in Balance by Cook) and found glaring trouble spots, then nd an FMS or SFMA trainer before worrying about more advanced steps. Think of the screen as the cornerstone of all the work we need to do to become a good runner. Without a solid foundaon all you’re building is a house of cards. While I’m not going to break down the enre screen, I am going to discuss why the fundamental paerns, commonly called the “boom four,” of the FMS are so important. These four paerns are the building blocks of more complex movement and contain many parts that relate to your performance not just as a runner, but also as a human athlete. If you struggle with aspects of these tests you will denitely struggle once you start to apply more pressure in training. Shoulder Mobility and Breathing
The shoulder mobility test is vital for runners. You could be forgiven for thinking that running is a leg driven acvity and that what goes on beneath the waist is of the most importance. But that’s not the case. Along with reaching with the arms, which is a vital acon in running since arm drive that creates the leg drive and also helps balance the body, the muscles of the upper torso play important roles in your ability to hold posture, as well as breathe correctly. It may sound strange, but I will bet large sums of money that the vast majority of you right now are not breathing correctly. Here’s a test: Are you breathing through your mouth or your nose? If you breathe mostly through your mouth there is a great chance you aren’t breathing correctly, and maybe even can’t breathe correctly without needing retraining. You may sco and wonder how an adult could not be breathing correctly having done it for twenty, thirty, or forty years, but it’s true. Our sedentary lifestyles have made us terrible at the most important thing we do. Let’s try another test. Go and stand in front of a mirror and take several big deep breaths. Watch to see whether your shoulders rise and fall. If they do, you’re not breathing right. The muscles of the chest, back, and neck are not our breathing muscles. They’re the muscles we use for posture, to reach, pull, and push. If you’re using them to breathe how much can they possibly help you while you’re reaching, pulling, or pushing? Muscles are just big springs. And like springs, once they’ve been shortened by use they don’t have much force if you try to shorten them again for a dierent use. Think of the suspension of your car. If you hit a bump in the road and the suspension shortens, it will come back to the right length quickly. But, if you hit another pothole immediately aer the rst one, while the suspension is already boomed out, what happens? Maybe you blow a re or damage a wheel rim as those parts struggle to deal with the forces the suspension should have coped with but couldn’t. Unlike a car, you don’t have wheels or res to take extra strain for you. You just get injured. But how can you get hurt from breathing? There is one central muscle we should be using to breathe – the diaphragm. It aaches to the ribcage and connects to the rest of the trunk musculature. From there everything else either connects to the ribs via the shoulder girdle or hangs o the hips. In other words, if our diaphragm is not working properly, and we have
created a dysfuncon further along the chain, everything else will be aected. Imagine you’re running along, feeling good, with relaxed shoulders. As you start to push the pace, do you hunch your shoulders and start to breathe in through your mouth in a panicked panng acon? As you now e up the shoulder muscles, your arms aren’t free to swing. You’re wasng energy and becoming inecient, slowing yourself down. So let’s learn how to breathe right. We’ll do three drills, each slightly more advanced than the last. I’m going to introduce you to four postures that are eecve for working on dysfuncon, and you’re going to be seeing a lot of them in this chapter. • • • •
Posture #1 – lying Posture #2 – quadruped Posture #3 – kneeling Posture #4 – standing (the only truly funconal posture)
The rst drill begins lying face down on the ground: Cross your arms and rest your forehead on the backs of your hands. Draw breath deeply through your nose and try to ll your belly with air. You should feel it push into the ground as you breathe in. Now blow out, hard, like you’re blowing out candles on a birthday cake. If you can’t get the feeling for it, place something with a lile weight on your lower back (a heat bag works well for this). The extra feedback you get from the slight weight should help give you more of an idea where you should feel muscles working. While you’re doing this, take note of your upper body, in parcular the thorax (your rib cage area). Nothing in this area should be mov ing or tensing. In fact, if you do this right, you will feel your upper body relax and sink in toward the ground. The next step of this is to introduce what the SEALs call box breathing. We’re going to use a four-count to make this work. Breathe in for a four-count, hold your breath for a four-count, breathe out for a four-count, and hold the exhalaon for four before beginning again. Do this for four minutes. As with the basic breathing, focus on not allowing the muscles of the thorax to sen up and acvate. They should be completely loose and relaxed. Many people will nd a short session daily of box breathing helpful to relieve tension headaches brought on by over acve upper body muscles. As well, the deliberate deep breathing will help to oxygenate the brain and can make you far more producve. It has the opposite eect when you are stressed and can calm the body and mind. If you ever watch great athletes before they perform you’ll oen see them with a thousand yard stare, seemingly miles away, yet with deep focused breathing, steadying their mind, relaxing the body, and boosng oxygen before they begin. The second exercise is the same as the rst, except instead of lying face down we’re now going to lie belly up. Take your ngers and dig them up and under your rib cage, so they point back toward our head. When you breathe in correctly in this posion your ngers will be pushed out of your abdomen by the contracon of the diaphragm. As you breathe out and your belly relaxes they’ll end up back under your ribs again. The reason this exercise goes second is that there is less feedback in this posion, so make sure you are able to belly breathe correctly using the rst drill before you begin this drill. You can turbo boost this drill by using a common drinking straw. Take a straw and sck it in your mouth. Breathe deeply through the nose as always and then exhale through the straw. You’ll nd you need to work far harder to breathe out with the straw. The nal drill is in done in a kneeling or standing posion. The signicant dierence in these postures is that
there is no feedback from the oor for our breathing and the muscles we use for posture are not relaxed as they are on the oor. So you will need to have mastered diaphragmac breathing lying on the oor before it’s worth moving to either of these more funconal postures. Using the turbo charge straw drill in either of these will also highlight how much we need our abdomen when it comes to breathing. Once you’ve done four minutes of box breathing, stand up and noce how much more relaxed your upper body feels. It’s not unusual to see massive changes in upper body movement just from doing these simple drills. Let’s do a quick recap various upper body structures and their involvement with running. The Head. Neutral spine is the same posion whether you are standing or running. If you imagine a broomsck held along the spine it should contact the back of the head, run between the shoulder blades, and be in contact with your sacrum. That’s the same posion we want to emulate while running. The posion of the head can cause problems for people. In the modern world thanks to excessive sing, staring at a computer screen, or looking down at a smart phone, the head tends to be pushed forward. To counterbalance the body, as the head is pushed further forward, the hips are pushed further back. This can lead to never being able to fully stand tall while running, and has the knock on eect of not being able to fully engage the hips while running. The Shoulders. Hunching the shoulders leads to ineciency. The sness created will prevent you from being able to swing your arms freely to counter the rotaonal forces of running, as well as stop you breathing eecvely. While they should round slightly, the key is to remember to run tall yet relaxed. The Back. If you run tall and imagine needing to keep the broomsck in place that I spoke of in the paragraph on head posion, you will have the perfect posture with your back. You don’t need to run like a soldier stand ing at aenon, but you shouldn’t slouch. The Arms. The arms should be relaxed along with the shoulders. This allows for the arms to swing freely. The start point of the arm swing is actually the drawing back of the arm. This coincides with the raising of the opposite leg. People mistakenly believe that geng their knee up and through faster will make them run faster. It will, but not for the reason they believe. A faster knee through moon drives the opposing leg down harder, and the faster you want to run the harder that leg needs to drive to the ground. Focusing on the drawing back of the arm allows it to swing loosely forward without unnecessary tension. From a point just outside the body the arms will swing slightly in towards the center line. The best cue I have yet heard is from a former coach of mine who exhorted athletes to ick their nipples. If you keep the arms bent at roughly ninety degrees you’ll maintain the best combinaon of relaxed tension needed to run fast. A good cue I got from triathlon coach Ben Hammond is to imagine you are icking your nipples as you run. If it brings a smile to your face while you run it’s sure to relax you too. Remember the whole point of our breathing exercises was to allow the muscles of the upper body to remain relaxed so they could easily do their job for us while running. If you tense up and use your neck, back, and shoulders to breathe, your posture and arm acon will be s and uneconomical. The FMS scores you between a 0 and a 3 for each test. A score of 3 represents the best possible score, a 2 is adequate range, and a 1 is inability to perform the movement suciently. A 0 is reserved for pain being present with the movement. Your goal for the screen is not to be a 21 (seven tests with a possible maximum score of 3 in each gives a total of 21), but to be a 2 for all movements, on both sides equally. In the case of the shoulder, a score of 2 on each side means you can get your hands somewhere between one hand span apart and
one and a half hands spans apart when reaching them together behind your back. In extreme cases of imbalance I have seen a runner who had a fairly large dierence in shoulder mobility with one arm signicantly less mobile than the other. This was extremely evident when we tested, but also visible when she was running. The unequal arm acon made her run lopsided. Not surprisingly, she was suering from pain in one calf as it was hing the ground much harder to cope with her out-of-balance arm acon. We focused on breathing and did some of the thoracic spine mobility drills that follow and she went from limping while walking to pain-free while running – all because we got her body lined up properly. Acve Straight Leg Raise I don’t want to call one of the tests the most important for runners, because people will take that to extremes, but the acve straight leg raise test may well be that test as it tests both hip exion and extension. Why are both so important? To run we need to be able to li one thigh up, exing at the hip, while the other extends. If you look at the ASLR test sideways you’ll see that the posion looks quite like the running stride. And that’s exactly why it is so important. Normal for hip exion is seventy degrees while lying. Here’s where it starts to get tricky, though. If you can li your leg to seventy degrees on your own, while keeping the other leg in place on the ground, then that’s great - move on. If you can’t do it on your own, but you can with someone else’s help then you have a motor control problem. If you can’t do it at all, you have either a ssue extensibility dysfuncon (TED) or a joint mobility dysfuncon (JMD). Having a TED isn’t the end of the world, as they’ll respond to so ssue work (myofascial release and massage) and then to motor control training (which ulmately becomes strength training). But a JMD might be a problem. We’re not all built the same. We’re close, but some of us simply have joints that prevent us from doing certain things. Distance running occurs through minimal ranges of moon so you shouldn’t have a JMD in the hips that aects running. If you suspect you have a JMD, then seek out an SFMA professional who can treat you and recommend opons that won’t hurt you. The same as we have a desired degree of hip exion, we also need a certain range of moon in extension, as that is the power producing part of our stride. Ten degrees is the number we’re looking for in prone (l ying on stomach, li your leg as high as you can with it kept locked out). Why is this important? The simplest answer is that your ability to ex and extend at the hip will largely determine the stride length you’re capable of before you start compensang with other areas, such as your lower back. The test also allows us to check whether or not you’re capable of bracing your spine while exing and extending at the hip. Again, if you can’t brace while lying sll, how do you expect to keep your spine neutral while countering the forces of running? Using breath once again as a self-assessment, you can also make sure that you aren’t holding your breath during the test. If you need to hold your breath to help you ex and extend the hips, how long do you think that will be last while running? Ten seconds? Thirty? In any case, you’re not going to run far injury-free if you need to hold your breath to move. Having easy, relaxed breathing during all of these screens is important. Trunk Stability Push Up Growing up I had many athlec heroes, and one of them was World Ironman champion Chris McCormack. When it comes to running his favorite cue is simple – run tall.
Likewise, leading triathlon coach Darren Smith tells his athletes, “Running requires eecve balance and body posioning holding a strong core and a gentle lean from the chest. Think of a basketball as your core and to apply more force (go faster) you want to increase the pressure in the core, thereby creang more spring/ bounce on the ground.” See that once again the use of breath becomes a key component of our athlec movement. The trunk stability push up (TSPU) test is one of two FMS core tests. Let’s think of the TSPU as our “hard” core and the following rotary stability test as our “so” or reexive core. The TSPU is about our ability to maintain rigidity while our limbs are seeking to disrupt it – the true measure of core stability. When you look at running you’ll see that not only does our core have to resist forces created by the arms but also by the lower body. This ability to stay tall and “inated” in the abdomen is key to running well. The moment you start to slouch, hunch, or collapse through the trunk your speed will start to drop. The humble push up can show us many failings we have as runners before we even head out the door. Show me a runner who cannot do at least a few perfect push ups and I already know he or she will have trouble while running. I’m also reminded exactly why the military prize push ups so much. With all the running and rucking they do in basic training, the constant push ups are serving to strengthen the core muscles needed. (Although I’m not sure they would realize that.) One nal p with the TSPU test is that it comes with a corresponding clearing test for back problems. Lie face down on the oor and push up, extending the arms but leng the hips sag – the cobra stretch. If anything hurts in this posion you need to get o to an SFMA trained clinician and get it checked out. Rotary Stability
If the TSPU is a test of our ability to exert maximal tension to stabilize the spine, then the rotary stability (RS) test is how we deal with reexive stability needs. RS is what you need when you’re walking along and accidentally bump into someone. Instead of allowing your body to be pushed o course or swung around violently the body automacally res up the core muscles and keeps you heading straight. At higher levels it is an athlete shrugging o a tackle. It is also your ability to fully counter all the rotaonal forces created by your arm swing when running hard. There’s a reason why sprinters have good abs. On closer inspecon, you’ll also see that an acceptable score on the RS looks like a cross-body paern. This cross-body paern is how we create gait. When we walk or run we use a paern that is an acve X. This X uses one arm and the opposite leg. Over the last few years there has been more and more research and interest in the use of primive paerns. These paerns follow a developmental sequence from rolling to crawling to standing and then walking – just like our four postures we menoned above. The RS test is oen worked on by using these paerns, and rolling is a great test not just of our reexive control, but also our motor control. Many people will “log roll,” locking their enre body up to turn over. But, this whole-body sening is a reversion to the TSPU “hard” core paern and actually indicates an under-performing “so” core. In this rolling posion, the body should roll like a wave with movement coming from each spinal segment. The spine has 24 arculang vertebrae. The lumbar spine is responsible for only a small amount of movement (roughly thirteen degrees) with the remaining degrees of rotaon (a total of roughly 100 degrees in a funconal adult) coming from a combinaon of hips and thoracic spine (when viewed standing). As we’ll be lying to roll, the greatest amount of movement should come from the thoracic spine, with each segment being able to rotate between seven and nine degrees. That means a single healthy secon of your thoracic spine is capable of producing more rotaon than nearly your enre lower back is. It also means that if you have a locked-up thoracic spine – as many desk dwellers do – and you want your body to move freely and athlecally, then we will need to work on that. (As an aside: can you see how golf leads to many lower back injuries? People s -
ened from sing, with a thoracic spine that won’t rotate like it should, trying to force the swing from their lower back). Rolling gives us the opportunity to check our ability to rotate as well as assess the motor control we have while doing so. Gray Cook said, “Rolling is a basic demonstraon of motor control and segmental sequencing. This sequencing is demonstrave of the ming and coordinaon that work behind the scenes in both stac and dynamic demonstraons if stabilizaon.” It can also be a great reset post-training to sele the nervous system. One of the things about our bodies is this memory of our past. Things that gave us pleasure and were enjoyable as a small child will always bring us back to a happy place. While many may sco at the idea, remember that while people will happily advocate a physical cool down, many forget about both a neural and psychological cool down. Back in the old days of maral arts, when live blades were used and a pracce session could kill you or sever a limb, it was common for praconers to enter the dojo and do breathing exercises much like box breathing. This served to calm and focus the mind, to mentally prepare for combat, and to separate the rest of life from training. Maral arsts then underwent a thorough physical warm up before slowly returning to rest and again performing box breathing to calm the mind before reentering daily life. You don’t go back to casually speaking with your wife moments aer dealing with razor edged weapons only inches from your vital organs. The nervous system – and rolling is a good representaon of where our nervous system is up to right now – needs to be brought to the boil for opmum eect, and then brought back down, too. If you’ve ever had a really good training session and then been unable to fall asleep aer you know what I mean. We can roll using either the upper extremies or the lower ones to guide the movement. The key is that the rest of the body remains relaxed and that we observe good segmental movement. Many will cheat and unconsciously push a hand or foot into the ground to help at some point during the roll. The other telltale sign of poor control is holding the breath mid-roll. This is supposed to be a relaxed drill and needing to hold your breath is a sign of altered motor control and a signal that your only core strategy is one of high tension. High tension certainly has a place in athlec movements, but how long do you think you can brace your spine as hard as you can, or hold your breath for, while running? Sooner or later that high-tension strategy is going to run out for you and what will remain is compensaon or a new injury. I cannot stress enough that rolling, and the RS test in general, should be one of your highest priories. Foot and Ankle Preparaon The foot is perhaps the most complex anatomical structure on the body, comprised of 26 bones, 33 joints, and more than 100 tendons, ligaments, and muscles. It is largely constructed around three arches, which provide structural support as well as a spring-like mechanism that we use for gait. With so many moving parts it is easy for things to go wrong. Have a think about how much me people spend doing thoracic spine mobility. Then consider the thoracic spine only has twelve joints and doesn’t take on anywhere near the force the foot does when we move. When was the last me you addressed foot mobility and movement prep? The start of all good running begins at our feet and how we connect to the ground. Despite what the running shoe companies will tell you, there is no magic shoe that will cure all your problems, parcularly if your feet are no good. You’re far beer o spending money to sort out your feet than throwing it away on an expensive pair of shoes. The right connecon to the ground begins with neutral feet poinng straight ahead. A quick look at people’s
feet will show you how few people actually stand with feet in neutral. While there i s a degree of turnout/external rotaon that is considered normal when squang, there is no degree of acceptable turnout when running. The forces of running and the number of repeons performed mean that small discrepancies in form are magnied, even on short runs. For many the best preparaon for running is to focus on spending as much of the day as possible with feet poinng straight ahead with zero turnout. This means that aenon needs to be paid to walking and standing to ingrain good habit. If you can’t do it standing sll with no pressure on you, how do you plan to do it when you’re fagued and running hard? By placing the feet in the correct posion you line up the joints on your body to move eecvely and pain free. Therapy guru Kelly Starre says the body is designed to last us 110 years. So how come so many people need knee and hip surgery much sooner than that? The answer is that when they spend me with their feet rotated out they are placing undue stress on all the other joints of the body - just like a race car with the wheels not poinng in the same direcon. Not only that, but without our feet poinng straight ahead we are also unable to properly xate and stabilize the spine. Don’t believe me that your feet are the starng point for athlec movement? Try this experiment: Get down on the oor in a push up plank posion. (i.e. the top of the push up). Imagine screwing your hands into the ground and wedge yourself between your hands and your feet. Acvely push back from your hands toward your feet while driving forward from the feet into the hands. Brace the abs as if about to be kicked in the stomach and tense the glutes as hard as you can. Get a mental snapshot as to how ght you can make yourself. Now assume the same posion, except this me rotate your hands so your ngers point all the way back to ward your feet. Rotate your feet out so the toes point directly out to the sides and the insides of your feet lay at on the ground. Now go through the same drill. Wedge yourself (if you can), and then try to brace the spine and ghten the glutes. If you can even achieve any of that, it’s nowhere near as good, is it? That’s because you’ve used up all the possible stability you have by placing your hands and feet into extreme posions. Once you turn the feet out it is impossible to switch the glutes on much, as they are already being used to create that external rotaon. Without the glutes you can never achieve a full abdominal contracon to brace the spine. When you run with turned-out feet you switch o the glutes, leaving you without the majority of your power and support. You’d think the back would be the most likely part of the body to cave in if you tried to run like this. The truth is many of the lower limb injuries faced by runners are as a result of proximal weakness. I want you to remember this phrase, “Distal pain or ghtness is caused by proximal weakness.” In other words, if you get soreness or restricon in your toes, plantar fascia, ankles, Achilles, or calves it is likely because your midsecon and glutes aren’t working properly. If you’re not familiar with the joint-by-joint approach it oers an easy explanaon to the above. Our body is an interconnected series of mobile and stable joints. Some, like the hip or shoulder, require large degrees of mobility to work through their full range. Others, like the knee, would suer catastrophic injury if they were to move the same way. But those that are mobile are mobile because the joint before was stable and oered a strong base of support. As the saying goes, “You can’t re a cannon out of a canoe.” The chain begins at the big toe, as you can see from the table below.
Big toe
Mobile
Foot
Stable
Ankle
Mobile
Knee
Stable
Hip
Mobile
Lumbar (lower back)
Stable
Thoracic (upper back)
Mobile
Scapulae
Stable
Shoulder
Mobile
What runners should take note of is that their body will oen feel the exact opposite of this list. It ’s not unusual for toes to feel s or feet to be collapsed. Hips can feel s and upper backs ght and immobile. Flip that list around and reverse the sequence, beginning with a s big toe, and what do you nd? You get a collapsed, mobile foot. You get a s ankle, Achilles, or calf. You have a sore knee from it being overly mobile. In other words, you are aempng to get movement from the knee it isn’t designed for because you lack it elsewhere. Your hips will be s and dysfunconal. The lower back will be bendy but not oer the support it needs. Next thing you know, you’re being treated for plantar fasciis again and being told to quit running. This is why the tradional methods of treatment need to be bypassed for athletes. Yes, the pain needs to be treated, because pain will alter movement paerns and mechanics it has to be xed before rehabilitaon can begin. However, it’s not as simple as, “If your knee hurts then do x.” Merely geng rid of the pain hasn’t done anything to x the underlying movement issue that caused it in the rst place. And because of the sheer volume of repeons that runners put in even slight deviaons in good form quickly lead to injuries. The foot has three major points of contact during running – the calcaneus, the lateral aspect of the foot around the base of the h metatarsal, and the big toe. Many will say the heel should not touch down during running and refer to the numerous barefoot methodologies that state this. But the fact is if you watch the best runners in the world over longer distances you will clearly see that rather than land solely on the forefoot as the barefoot purists state, what they really do is land almost at footed. The whole foot touches down, with the heel lightly kissing the ground for a brief instant. The weight is over the front half of the foot as the foot then rolls along the lateral aspect and then pronates so you can roll over the big toe. If your big toe lacks the movement it should have, then you will need to make that movement up elsewhere. That could be in the foot, in the lower back, or even in your head placement. But next thing you know you’ve got a s, but pain free, big toe and a painful neck you’re having massaged. The big toe is an oddity to humans among our primate family. Unlike the rest of our kind we don’t have a prehensile big toe but instead have a short stubby toe designed to be strong and elasc with unrestricted movement. Charles Darwin wrote in The Evoluon of Man, “The great toe, which forms the fulcrum when standing or walking, is perhaps the most characterisc peculiarity of the human structure.” The loss of elascity and movement in our toes hasn’t been helped by the modern sports shoe industry. The use of overly padded, rigid, or restricve shoes has done lile to help our feet retain sound funcon and has only served to deaden our contact with the ground. This arcial encasing prevents the big toe from actually contacng the ground, leading to decreased use of the elasc potenal of the foot and the big toe. These same shoes also oer lile in the way of freedom of movement for the other toes. Watch a child the
next me he or she is barefoot and see how exible and mobile the toes are, with the big toe set slightly apart from the rest of the foot and rooted to the ground. Dr. Nikolai Romanov, creator of the POSE method of running, says of the toes, “Let’s start with anatomy and look at the foot structure. The rst fact is that the toes are the smallest parts of the foot consisng of several small secons of bones (phalanges). They are located on a distal part of the foot and with no big muscles around them. The second fact is that our toes are separated from each other, in comparison to metatarsal bones. Just from these two facts a reasonable queson arises. How could the smallest parts of the foot, not supported by the power of muscles and separated from each other, be responsible for the biggest force pro ducon for the forward propulsion of the whole body? It doesn’t look smart from the Nature’s point of view. So, how could the toe-o thrust take place without any eort applicaon at this part of the foot? Just think for yourself. In addion to this, we can use the data found in the research in the former Soviet Union, which compared the quickness of dierent parts of the body, and showed that the foot is the slowest one among all of them. This fact again makes us wonder: how could the slowest part of the body produce the fastest phase of its movement in running? So what is the most logical funcon of the toes in running? The rst one is balance maintenance. This funcon is not a big surprise. Indeed, it is very easy to see how the toes could execute this role just by staying barefoot on one leg. By the way, if you want to test your ability to do the push o with your toes, it is a good me and posion to try it. I hope even a mere visualizaon of it will help you to make your conclusion. The second important funcon of toes is the percepon of the body weight locaon, and the di recon of its shi. By perceiving the body weight locaon, the toes are helping in stabilizing the foot and indirectly the whole body posion on the ground. When they become tense (because they “want” to parcipate in support) on a slippery surface like ice, mud, wet oors, then they couldn’t execute their main funcons, so the foot and leg muscles are taking this role. As a result of this funcon transfer, our calf muscles (soleus and gastrocnemius) get mostly aected (over loaded) and get sore. In order to avoid this negave consequence, we have to release our toes from the load (support funcon) and this will release the tension of calf muscles. Conclusion: Our toes do not directly provide the support and push-o acon, but they work as a percepve system for maintaining the balance and stability of the body on support.” Carson Boddicker of Boddicker Performance wrote: “When the big toe does not extend well during late stance, plantar exion torque decreases and occurs in a delayed fashion (Hall, 2004), knee exion increases (potenally as a result of tension from the distal end as the calcaneus raises early), and hip extension decreases. To compensate, there must be an increased drive of the hip exors to advance the leg. When the foot is xed upon the ground, this contracon creates potenal for lumbar rotaon and lateral exion can occur stressing the intervertebral discs and potenally leading to low back pain and dysfuncon (Kapandji, 1974). Add to that the possibility of the body compensang with an anterior lt to facilitate hip exion and you have a gamut of issues that sounds a lot like the makings of Janda’s lower crossed syndrome with excessively toned hip exors, inadequate gluteal strength, and pos sibly an increased full body anterior lt placing the plantar exors under excessive load. It is very
common in the running world. Addionally, the early knee joint exion and limited extension of the hips can beget a loss of transverse plane stability possibly as a result of ineecve use of the “screw home mechanism” at the biofemoral joint and ineecve acvaon of the hip exten sors. Put all of the above together and you have a recipe for increased forces at the PFJ, shearing across the iliobial band, potenally increased contact pressures at the anterior hip capsule, ex cessive acvaon of the deep hip rotators forcing the hip into a hyperextended posion causing decreased sacral rotaon during gait, low back pain, and SIJ instability.” To get our big toes working properly we’re going to use a simple trick I learned from my good friend Perry Nickelston of Stop Chasing Pain – we’re going to mobilize the toes. But geng the toes moving isn’t as simple as other body parts like the wrists or ngers. Instead, we’re going to have to help them out with something called acvated isolated stretching. Acve isolated stretching (AIS) combines two things at once to make stretching more eecve: First, you are deliberately using strength to move. Imagine you want to stretch your hamstring. You sit on the oor with your legs out in front of you and have someone push down on your back. This is called passive stretching, as the movement is being provided by another force. This can apply to gravity, too, in stretches where you allow yourself to slump forward like in a relaxed toe touch. Acve stretching is done by using an opposing muscle group to gain range. It works on a thing called reciprocal inhibion – when one muscle group tenses, the opposing one is forced to relax. Using our hamstring stretch as an example again, again, but this me lying on your back, imagine raising your leg as high as you can without using your hands. That’s acve stretching. For most of us there will be a dierence between our passive and acve exibility. That’s okay and perfectly normal. Having said that, the gap between our acve and passive range is oen where we get injured, so we do want to make that gap as small as possible. To use AIS on the toes, sit so you’re comfortable and place one foot on the other knee. Grab around one big toe loose enough so it can sll move, but rm enough that you can exert exert a lile force on it. Extend your big toe (that means li it up, not curl it down) using only the muscles of the toe to do so. At the top of its range of moon I want you to pull lightly on the toe to add a bit more range. Do ten reps. Staying on the same side aer you’ve done ten reps you’re now going to just pull on the toe with it completely relaxed and get even more range. Do ten more reps. Go back to using AIS and do another ten reps now before changing feet. The next exercise we’re going to do is to help get the foot moving correctly. The foot, like the hand, should be capable of many small intricate movements. Watching most people’s feet, they’re like a blob of meat at the end of their leg. But geng the foot moving is far simpler than many realize. Begin by being seated, barefoot. Place the foot you are going to work on in front of you on the ground and raise the heel. Noce how the arch instantly forms beaufully, beaufully, even if you have so-called “at feet”? This, by the way, is why most podiatrists shouldn’t be trusted as they’d usually sell you an expensive pair of orthocs to cure your so-called at feet. The reason your feet aren’t working properly is simply due to muscles that have gone to sleep. It’s me to wake them up. With your big toe on the ground, and the all toes relaxed, make lile circles with this foot. It’s important to
keep the foot lined up right for this to work. When you’ve got the posion right your heel will be raised, all your toes on the ground will be relaxed, and if you look on the inside front of your ankle bone you’ll see a lile hole formed. If you can’t see that lile hole adjust your foot posion unl it appears. Perform Perform two sets of twenty reps on both feet. Now we’ve got the big toes working and we need to do some ankle preparaon. I always have to shake my head and laugh at the Internet gurus who will tell you that isolated training can’t be funconal. In many cases the fastest way to bring up weaknesses is targeted isolaon training. The ankle is responsible for much of how the rest of the body is held while running. An ankle that doesn’t provide good informaon informaon to the rest of the body is a weakness. And an ankle that doesn’t move well is one that cannot pass on informa informaon. on. The more you work your ankle through a variety of posions, the more movement feedback it can deliver. Imagine the rst me you drive to an unknown locaon. You mostly only noce the relevant turning points as you’re so focused on following the direcons. But once you’ve made the trip a few mes, you start to noce other things on the route, like a primary school, a pedestrian crossing, or a service staon staon.. In much the same manner, if your foot and ankle have been locked into s shoes for much of your life and you’ve spent a lot of me sing down the amount of informaon the foot and ankle pass on i s limited. Like the driver heading somewhere for the rst me all the informaon they’re capable of focusing on is the bare essenals. But pracce moving your feet and ankles through a variety of posions daily and you will nd the amount and quality of feedback you get from the ground becomes substanally higher. This results in fewer injuries, which over the long term results in beer health and faster running. For these drills you’ll need a wall for balance that is sturdy as you will have most of your bodyweight against it. The rst series is in four parts and covers ankle dorsiexion and plantarexion, plantarexion, as well as inversion and eversion. For those who don’t speak training geek, that means we’re going to work on pulling our toes toward us, poinng them away, and rolling the foot in and out. These are the four basic foot posions. Inversion and eversion are oen posions posions people nd themselves in as they injure themselves. While spending a lot of me in these delicate posions can lead to problems the fact is if you run trails you will nd yourself there sooner or later so you beer make sure you’re strong and can handle the forces involved with running safely. Ankle Series One Step one: Lean one: Lean with your back against a wall so your legs are locked and feet are at on the ground. The more you lean and the further your feet are away from the wall the harder this exercise exercise will be. Pull your toes o the ground as high as you can so only your heels are on the ground. Perform 15 reps. Step two: Turn two: Turn 90 degrees so you are side on to the wall and one shoulder is against it for support. As before, your legs will be locked and feet at on the ground. This step is in two parts. The rst part is to take the outside foot o the ground so all your weight is on the inside foot. Once you’ve done that roll that foot toward the wall so you end up on the outside edge of the foot. Perform 15 reps. Now lower that outside foot and take the inside foot o the ground and repeat the process except except this me you’ll be rolling onto the inside edge of the outside foot. Perform another 15 reps. Step three: Turn three: Turn another 90 degrees so you are now facing the wall. Walk your feet out unl you can only just get both feet at to the oor. If you’re ght through the calves this won’t be far at all, but for most people this should end up being about 30 degrees. Place both arms on the wall for support and perform 15 reps liing your heels as high as you can before lowering them fully on each rep. Step four: Turn four: Turn another 90 degrees so you are facing the opposite way to the direcon you faced for step two.
Repeat step two but on the opposing sides. As a bare minimum, you need to do this series every day. Once you develop some strength and movement in the foot and ankle you’ll be surprised how resilient you become when running. The foot will be able to feel and react with much greater ability to changes in the road surface surface or trail and the rest of you will too as a result. The next step is the icing on the cake. But don’t make the mistake of jumping straight to this step. Get some cake cak e rst. The cake is ankle series one and the big toe AIS work. Don’t neglect those to chase something that will have the appearance of being more advanced because it comes later. It isn’t. If anything, ankle series two is less advanced and less essenal, parcularly if you’re following the strength-training template outlined later. Ankle Series Two This series is designed to amp up the feedback coming from the ankles while taking a big step up in terms of how this all relates to running. Unlike ankle series, one we’re going to do everything on one leg. To further complicate complicat e maers we’re going to perform all these drills with a slight elevaon el evaon of the heel so we’re on the ball of the foot. There’s no need to try to get the heel o the ground as much as possible because that’s not how we run, but we can get some extra strength work for the calf while we’re doing these. The tle is a bit misleading because even though we’re we’re standing on one foot with the heel o the ground, we’re really training the hips. Healthy knees require smart joints above and below them, as the hips and feet controll the moon of the knee. But let’s keep them grouped together so all the pre-hab focus is in one place. contro •
• • •
Step one: Stand near a wall with a so touch against it for balance. Eventually Eventually the goal is to be able to do these without any balance help at all, but to begin with you’ll need the wall for assistance. Raise the heel slightly so it i t is about an inch o the ground. Raise the non-support leg out in front of you 10 mes. Step two: While sll standing on the ball of the same foot, raise the leg straigh straightt out to the side 10 mes. Step three: While sll standing on the same foot raise the leg behind you as much as you can 10 mes. Step four: Repeat all three three steps steps on on the other leg.
Ankle Series Three This series is reserved for people who start to struggle with shin splints or small calf tears. Despite what many think, shin splints in the early stages aren’t caused by weak bialis anterior (the muscle at the front of the shin). Although that muscle does become inamed, it does so because the calf isn’t strong enough to do its fair share of the work to stabiliz stabilize e the lower leg. As the main muscle that performs plantar exion (the acon of poinng your toes) when you hit the ground on every stride the calves have to work hard to prevent the foot from smashing into the ground on every step. Strengthening your calves is a quick way to stave o injuries that can otherwise sideline you for weeks or months. The muscle soreness associated with running is almost enrely associated with the thousands of eccentric contracons that the calf/ foot has to cope with. To help to strengthen the lower limbs to deal with this I give my athletes the following plan before we start any running: Eccentric calf drops 1 – Begin by standing facing a wall, feet together. Raise up to your toes on two feet but lower only on one. The
secret here is not to “lower” but to “drop.” You need to almost try to force the heel of the working leg into the ground as hard as you can. At the very last fracon of a second you stop the heel, rapidly decelerang it. Repeat this sequence – up on two, drop down on one. 3 sets of 25 reps each leg. It is important to note that these should only be done on a at surface. There is no need to try to increase range of moon yet. Eccentric calf drops 2 – There is no need to rush into this stage and to be honest I have barely used it. I include it because it was in my original plan, and those who know beer than me recommend it. With increased ROM, be very cauous as adding range to the drop can lead to big increases in soreness or even cause injury. This exercise is performed the same as the rst progression except except you will be increasing ROM by standing on a step or an incline. Weighted calf drops – I am about to commit exercise heresy, but there is actually one good use for a Smith machine beyond a coat rack and this is it. Because of the nature of the exercise, the potenal for the lower leg to absorb so much force, it is important that to really streng strengthen then and bullet proof the lower legs for maximum eect we need to add load. Unfortunately Unfortunately standing on one leg with load on your back isn’t very safe but using the Smith Machine here works a treat. Return to at ground for this opon – do not use an increased ROM no maer what. Given the loads that the lower legs cope with during running are up to triple body weight you can use a lot of weight for this exercise. I have gone up to double body weight for sets of 4-6 reps for 2-3 sets at a me. Unlike the other two opons, which can be performed daily, use this only twice per week. Perform exactly as you would for the other two opons – raise on two, down on one catching the heel just before it hits the ground. Reset and repeat and for the desired reps. Do not go high on the reps with this opon, as injury is likely to follow. Now that we’ve covered the basics of movement-based strength training, let’s look at what exercises we should be doing to support running. There’s There’s a real dierence between a runner who does some weights to help running versus a strength athlete who does some running. It’s important to gure out which one you are ahead of me so you are comfortable with your running and the type of training you should be doing. One of the greatest mistakes I see people make is to speak to a strength trainer for advice on how to support their running. While a guy who is a pure strength athlete and does nothing other than li weights may have great knowledge about resistance resistance training, he will know next to nothing about what it feels like to run for two hours. Not only that, but he’ll have no empathy at all for why you can’t deadli heavy the day aer your twohour run. Out of all the suggesons I’ve seen for runners there is one that is easily the most stupid of all – build your deadli to run faster. In some cases this is based o Barry Ross’s work with elite sprinters. While he has had great success with it, the simple fact is that running distance is dierent from sprinng. What works for one doesn’t necessarily apply to the other, just like the res you need for the family car are dierent than those on the Formula One car. I can tell you now that moderaon in the gym is going to be your friend just as much as it is out on the roads
when you run. As you develop as a runner and some of your runs get longer and longer you will nd the fague in your legs prevents you from doing too much heavy lower-body strength work. In addion, you will nd that your back becomes a bit s thanks to having to hold your posture for long periods of me. Those two things make liing in the gym hard, and, in parcular, make the deadli a recipe for disaster. A beer soluon to our strength training need is the humble kelebell. Here’s why: • •
Kelebells are small. You can push them into a corner when not in use and not take up an enre garage like a barbell set. A single kelebell can be used for a huge variety of exercises for both upper and lower body.
The FMS system has a saying that the boom four screens x the top three. The boom four screens involve hip exion and extension, shoulder mobility and stability, and trunk and rotary stability. A single kelebell allows you to address all these with every single rep of most exercises. This is what true funconal training is – strengthening paerns we need in a funconal upright stance. The way it works is simple once it has been explained. The test of someone having adequate hip exion and extension is to put them in a situaon where they are asked to express these quickly. The kelebell swing does exactly that. Addionally, because the top of the swing is the equivalent of the plank, it also gives us the trunk stability component. But to address the other two components of shoulder mobility and stability, as well as rotary stability we need an exercise that hits these aspects too, and the two-hand swing can’t do that. A one-hand swing gets you close as it gives you the hip exion and extension component as well as shoulder stability (proved by maintaining a packed shoulder as taught in the RKC) and tests an-rotaon, too, as you try to maintain proper alignment. But it doesn’t test shoulder mobility. The only way to really test that for sure is to go overhead. Given the snatch is a swing that ends up overhead, it is a logical choice. And it has the added benet of giving us plenty of grip (another facet of shoulder stability) and some incidental condioning, too. So, the strength program I’m going to share with you begins with an exercise everyone knows well – the get up – and has some added bonuses thrown in that will help hit as much as possible while leaving you as fresh as possible for actual running. As well we’re going to use two single leg lis – the single leg deadli and the King deadli – to give us strength and stability in single leg stance. We’ll work the squat too, but we won’t be using heavy weights. Experience has shown me that trying to squat heavy and run far leads to injuries quickly. Then we’re going to add the snatch in that we get all those benets we spoke of above in a single exercise and minimize how much me we spend on strength work. Finally, we’ll use some core work to build a rock-solid midsecon so whatever force we produce at the ground we can use higher up. Because some people won’t be ready for some of the exercises listed for a variety of reasons, I’ll give you progressions built, literally, from the ground up. Some of these will be loaded and others unloaded, and some will even have what is called “paern assistance,” which is a fancy way of saying we’re going to use an external im plement to help you achieve the right posion. There is a natural ow to these progressions and even if you’ve mastered the main exercise, the earlier steps make excellent warm ups and back o sets. When it comes to power producon Sir Mix-a-Lot was right – big bus are where it’s at. The glutes provide the majority of power in the extension and stance phases of running. What most people miss is that there are mulple gluteals and all serve a purpose in running. Glute maximus is the muscle you sit on, and rightly is considered the most powerful muscle in the human body. It provides force for extension acvies, i.e. those that require the body to be pushed away from the ground. Running, jumping, skipping, and kicking are all examples of extension acvies.
But there are two other muscles that make up the glute complex – glute minimus and medius. In easy terms, we have a big, medium, and small glute. That’s all those terms mean – biggest, middle, and smallest. While glute max normally receives all the aenon athlecally when it comes to running, we need to remember that minimus and medius also play important parts. Together these two smaller glute muscles serve to externally rotate and abduct the thigh and prevent the pelvis dropping on the opposing side during each stance phase. The important part about this is that while you run you also need to oppose these forces. So the muscles must work eccentrically to prevent internal rotaon and adducon to keep you running straight and level. The diculty becomes that most runners tend to have dysfunconal glutes from so many years of sing at desks and from performing movements that are both low speed and low amplitude. Glute max is only ever used when at full extension or exion, i.e. in the top and boom posion of a squat or deadli or during a sprint up a set of stairs. When operang in the middle ground like you do when running distance, you tend to start using other muscles instead. The main culprits here are the hip exor muscles of psoas, tensor fasciae latae, and rectus femoris. The result is that these muscles become short, ght, and weak while the glutes become long and weak. Because of the way the body works when you have weakness proximally, or close to the center, you will have pain or sness distally, or in the extremies. It’s not uncommon for someone to have a sore plantar fascia or Achilles because they have weak glutes. Because the glutes aren’t doing their job properly and providing stability, the body seeks out extra sness from somewhere else. Next thing you know something that is supposed to be stretchy and springy becomes locked down to try to make that sness you’re lacking closer to the core. I started working with a good friend of mine who is a spine and movement specialist on this some me ago and we’ve created a series of exercises to build glute funcon. Many will be familiar with the clam exercise if they’ve had therapy before, but the clam is only a starng point. Like you saw in the injury secon regarding the Two Day ITB cure, we need to acvate the muscles, then integrate them. That process needs to be done in a variety of postures to re-teach the body how to achieve opmal funcon. Clam
Begin lying on your side with legs bent. If you were to draw a line extending from the trunk, the knees would be in front of the body but the feet would be in line. From this posion, rotate forward slightly, maybe ten degrees, so you’re slightly falling forward. When you’re in the correct posion you’ll feel that the outside of the boom glute has to work to hold you there – but that’s not all we’re going to do.
From this posion, slowly raise the top knee upward, hinging from the outside of the hip, making sure not to move anywhere else. Many will cheat here and if you watch these people, you’ll see the waistband of the pants move as they hike with their hips or abs to create the movement. For many you’ll barely move the leg at all. That’s a sign of how bad your glute funcon has become. Perform sets of ten to 25 reps at a me, and aim for y to a hundred reps daily. Jane Fondas
Unlike those waste-of-me aerobic moves from the 80s, the Jane Fonda actually has some technique to it. Just like the clam, if you want to get the most return from this move pay aenon to the ne details. Get in the same start posion as the clam – lying on your side, slightly rotated forward. Unlike the clam, though, extend your top leg so it is straight and in line with your body. For best results the leg should lie just behind the heel of the boom leg. Once the leg is straight turn the leg from the hip so the foot is pointed down. It’s important not to just angle the foot to do this but to make sure the enre leg is rotated. Hinge from the top hip and perform straight leg raises – just like Jane Fonda – but with some smart use of muscle soware in place. Just like the clam, sets of ten to 25 reps per set work well, and a daily dose of 50 to 100 reps. ExRoAb
ExRoAb stands for extension rotaon abducon. This lile gem was taught to me by James Dunne of Kinec Revoluon – one of the world’s best running coaches. It forces the glutes to work in every aspect they can, so don’t be surprised by how hard this can be. A few reps will be enough to feel like someone set a blowtorch on your hips. Lie on your stomach with hands folded and your head resng on the backs of your hands. It’s important not to arch up from the lower back as that can be used to disguise how much movement you’re geng from the glutes.
Raise one leg slowly, making sure to keep it locked out. You’ll nd if you get to about the point where the toes of the raised leg are even with the heel of the leg on the oor that’s about as far as you can go. From there rotate that foot out as far as you can by rotang from the hip, just like you did for the Jane Fonda, except this me we’re turning the foot out, not in. Once you’re in this raised leg- foot out posion sweep the leg out as wide as you can. You’ll nd this likely isn’t very far. Once again, sets of 10 to 25 reps are fantasc, with daily doses of 50 to 100 reps. These three exercises – the clam, Jane Fonda, and ExRoAb - should be done daily. You’ll be amazed at some seemingly unconnected issues they seem to solve. I’ve seen everything from lower back complaints to Achilles issues to shoulder soreness all disappear once the glutes came back online. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of these movements. The next step in developing the glutes is to go from lying to quadruped. Don’t rush the steps. If you can’t handle 100 reps of all three exercises in a day, then go back and earn the progression. Trust me, it’s worth it. Fire Hydrants
The quadruped progression is a variaon on the re hydrant I’ve been using with athletes for years. It’s far harder than it looks and most people can’t even do ten reps without giving up. Like I said – earn this progression with the work on the oor rst. The progression from oor to semi-weight bearing is an important one. On the oor, the core isn’t forced to acvate and you can deal with geng the target muscles ring properly. But this next step forces some acvity in the shoulders and hips by making them stabilize while gravity is acng on you. This is the start of integrang stability and movement at the same me. Despite what many believe, you are never working solely on mobility or stability at any one me. From a quadruped posion, bring one knee as far forward as it can go without moving anything else on the body. You shouldn’t look like a twisted pretzel while doing this. Once the knee is pulled forward past the hip, rotate it to the outside, exactly like the clam. If you can’t raise the knee very far up, don’t worry; it will improve as your strength grows. With the knee up as high as possible, push back from the heel unl the leg is straight. It’s important to push back from the heel. Try doing it with your toes pointed and see the dierence it makes in how ght your glutes feel. Now push from the heel as if pushing away a heavy object behind you. Noce how they switch on much more? That’s exactly what we want.
Repeat this knee forward, external rotaon, extension acon for 5 reps. Now reverse it and perform 5 more without leng any part of your leg touch the ground. Now extend the leg straight out to the side with the toes poinng forward and raise the leg straight up in the air as high as you can without twisng. Keep the toes poinng forward the whole me. Perform 5 reps. Without leng the foot down perform 5 small circles both forward and backward with the enre leg in this extended leg posion. Now you can rest.
As you gain strength you will add reps and work up to sets of 10 to 20 reps per movement per side. Perform all the reps on one side before doing the other leg. Single Leg Deadli The single leg deadli is one of the most underused exercises in the world. It can x so much, even bad arches in the feet, yet many ignore it in favor of movements like the barbell deadli simply so they can use more load. But the body doesn’t recognize load, only muscle acvaon and movement paerns. As one of my teachers, Ido Portal, says, “Bro, show me your paerns.” The single leg deadli (SLDL) is one of those exercises that will build sound movement in opposing hip exion and extension, just like we need for running. Ulmately, we’re going to build to performing it with the weight held on the opposing side of our body so that we link the upper body in through a s trunk – again, just like we need for running. If you follow the progressions outlined above you should be ready to go straight to single leg deadlis. However, if you nd your control is sll shaky and you’re struggling to perform it well, here are some easy steps to help you master the SLDL quicker. Progression one: Lying leg raise with paern assistance Part of the diculty with the SLDL is having to ex and extend the hips simultaneously. Many people lack the range to do this, and part of that is due to lack of core acvaon. This drill will force your core to switch on and allow the legs to move freely. Once this has been ingrained, then you are ready for the next step. The sequence of movement is always the same – push down with hands on the band to acvate the core then raise the leg. Lower the leg, and then release the hands. It is important the core is always switched on while the leg is raised. Don’t make the mistake of disengaging the hands and core before lowering the leg.
Progression two: Bird dog with band resistance Like with the progressions for the glute exercises, the natural progression is from oor to quadruped. In this case we’re going to use a band to give some extra resistance while the opposite hip is forced to stabilize – exactly like in the SLDL. Many forget that in the SLDL, despite the support leg working to stay extended, it is also important to extend the back leg as hard as possible at the same me. I n fact, because the drill mimics running so much, it is the back leg that will be extending, not the support leg. This drill will help to engrave that in your mind so when you nally get to standing you’ll push hard on the back leg, working that extension aspect as much as possible.
Progression three: Half kneeling halo While we didn’t use any work in half kneeling for the glute exercises, it makes sense to use it for the SLDL progressions. Working in half kneeling can show you how much you’re compensang for lack of hip control with your foot and lower leg. The set up for half kneeling is simple. Start in the boom of a lunge posion. The top leg should be bent at ninety degrees at the hip and the ankle should be under the knee. The back leg should have the knee on the ground directly under the hip. In terms of how wide the stance should be, the saying is, “as narrow as you can be, as wide as you have to be.” The best posion will be with the inside of the foot in line with the inside of the down knee. Almost, but not quite as narrow as if you were trying to balance on a ghtrope. From this posion you should be able to remove the front foot for short periods without falling over. The majority of your weight – over eighty percent of it – should be on the down knee. Pick up a light kelebell by the horns so it i s booms up. The base of the bell should be at nose height in front of your face. Take the bell toward the front leg and maintain that same nose-high orientaon throughout. Don’t be lazy in the wrists or let the bell bang into you. When the bell comes back around it should be right in front of your nose again.
Progression four: Sck single-leg deadli As we progress to standing, we’re going to use a sck to ensure a neutral spine. While many will display great form up to this point, once we get to standing, they suddenly let it go and compensaons start happening all over. The sck should rest against the back of the head, run between the shoulder blades, and between your glutes. You must maintain those three points of contact at all mes. If you don’t, you’ve come out of neutral spine somewhere and need to correct it. Remember the point you learned in the band dog exercise – the hip that extends back needs to push hard. Keep that leg in line with the torso at all mes and push back from the heel. Maintain the sck’s contact with
the three points at all mes. Do not move on to using weight unl you’ve mastered this.
Progression ve: Single-leg deadli (SLDL) The main thing to remember is not to forget everything you’ve paerned with all the previous steps. From the lying glute acvaon exercises through to the last step – just keep doing the same thing. Begin with the kelebell on the oor on the inside of the support foot. Every rep begins and ends from the oor. If you’ve jumped to this step too quickly and don’t yet have the range and control to work from the oor, then go back and follow the earlier progressions unl you’ve got that ability. As a marker, the rst progression needs nearly ninety degrees of exion to allow this to happen. In the FMS scoring system that would give you a score of 3/3 for acve straight leg raise, which is as good as you’ll ever need if you’re not a gymnast. Extend one leg back behind you, pushing from the heel, and keeping the leg in line with the trunk as you get into posion. Grasp the handle of the bell with your hand and ghten everything – imagine pung the shoulder blade of that side into the hip pocket of the other hip. If you’re set up with le leg down, you’ll grab the bell with your right hand. Pull that shoulder blade down toward the le hip – connect the upper and lower body together. Don’t hold the bell in one hand, op through your midsecon, and then wonder why your legs can’t manage to nish the reps. Your body must learn to work together as a single unit.
Progression Six: King deadli One of the great perks of coming up with an exercise is geng to name it. While this exercise has more recently been called the airborne lunge or shrimp, its actual name is the King deadli, and it was created by Aussie strength genius Ian King. The King deadli is like a lunge with the back foot completely o the ground – a true single leg exercise that incorporates all the muscles of the legs in addion to forcing you to work hard to counter the rotaonal forces. At the beginning, you may nd the move is actually easier with a slight counterweight held in front of you. You’ll nd an unloaded version of this dicult unl you build adequate ankle mobility and strong glutes. You can also make this exercise easier by reducing the range of moon slightly by using a pad or similar as a target for the elevated knee. The converse is also true – to make this exercise much harder, stand on a slightly raised plaorm to force increased range of moon. A single leg decit deadli. To begin, stand on one leg with the other foot o the ground. Slowly lower yourself toward the ground by bending at the hips and knee of the support leg. Pull the elevated foot’s heel toward your glutes rather than let it droop toward the ground. Don’t worry if you need to lean forward to accomplish this. You’ll actually get increased glute acvaon when you stand because of needing to extend the hips more to counter your forward lean. Perform all your reps on one leg before repeang on the other side.
Get Up The get up has risen from obscurity over the last few years to be placed at the top level of athlec strength training. I can remember a me only ve years ago when the only people who understood how to do get ups were RKC kelebell instructors. These days it is part of the FMS curriculum and high-level strength coaches like Mike Boyle advocate using it. The basic stages of the get up are: 1. Roll to press 2. Elbow 3. Tall sing 4. Side kneeling 5. Lunge posion 6. Stand One of the things people oen lose while doing the get up is a neutral wrist posion. There is no kelebell exercise where a bent wrist is a good idea. While it’s a natural posion for most barbell exercises, the load is displaced dierently. With the bar the load travels directly down the line of the forearm so the bone supports it. However, with the kelebell the load is actually on the back of the wrist pulling your hand back all the me. Because of the way kelebells are shaped, the forces on the wrist are very dierent than with a barbell and you will eventually end up with problems if you don’t address this right from the start. Funnily enough, these issues don’t appear at the wrist but usually show up as elbow injuries such as golfer ’s elbow (medial epicondolys). Personally, I can’t believe anyone gets hurt playing golf and it’s even more embarrassing if you get a golf injury while training with kelebells. Moral: don’t allow your wrist to bend.
Snatch
The kelebell snatch has long been touted as the czar of all kelebell exercises. I’m not sure I agree with that as I think some exercises suit some purposes beer than others. Just like you can’t have a “best ” tool – because each tool only suits a single purpose – you can’t have a “best” exercise. That being said, the snatch covers many bases. As outlined above, the snatch contains many elements at once allowing us to be me ecient in our assistance work. As an added , it is beer for your tness than swings. So as a way to incidentally help your cardiovascular condioning for running it is superior. Kenneth Jay, author of Viking Warrior Condioning, wrote: “Running is the standard: Running = 1.0 Snatching = 0.9 - 0.96 (if done fast and extremely relaxed... if using too much tension it will drop
to about 0.8 or so). Swings = 0.77 (give or take 0.05 and it has to be smooth, relaxed and rhythmical).” The reason is down to contracon of muscles diminishing oxygen consumpon. Put in simple terms, a contracted muscle prevents blood from owing through it. If blood ow is restricted, then so too will be the amount of oxygen used by the muscles. Only rhythmic acvies performed at a high pace like running, riding, and snatching can really increase tness, and even then, the snatch sll isn’t as good as running. The kelebell snatch is one of those exercises that seems to have a mysterious air about it, usually because people think it is the most advanced skill to learn. Naturally we all want to aempt the hardest thing so we tend to gravitate towards it. But the snatch is actually simple to learn if you have put in enough me with swings and get ups prior. The swing teaches the hinge acon and the get up teaches you where the lockout should be. My personal record for teaching the snatch is four and a half minutes to an RKC and marathon run ner Glenn Munso. But we had already spent nearly six months on swings, presses, and get ups so all that was le was to ll in the middle. To perform the snatch: • Swing a kelebell back behind the legs and overhead in one uninterrupted moon to lockout. • Catch the kelebell soly on the back of the arm. • At the lockout the arm must be in line with the head and vercal. • Make sure the body is moonless and the bell is xed in place before dropping it for the next rep. • Pull the kelebell down and back between your legs for another rep. The key with the snatch is not to make it a giant swing that ends overhead. That’s a quick way to hurt yourself as the bell comes whipping around and slams into you. It ’s a vercal acon more like a child raising his hand in class than a swing. Drive the bell with the hips and then quickly ask the queson to the teacher by pung your hand straight up in the air. Pop, pull, and punch. To really get the tness benets of the snatch, you don’t need to snatch heavy. The study done on the snatch’s ability to increase VO2max was done with men using a 16kg bell and a 12kg for ladies. But the caveat is that the speed of repeons needs to be fast, just as if you were running. You’ll nd more detail in the program secon, but just keep in mind you need a bell you can snatch seven mes in een seconds. If you are unable to perform the snatch because you lack the shoulder health to do so, you can substute the one-arm swing instead. The one-arm swing also makes a good substuon if your hands are geng beaten up from snatching. If your hands are really beaten up, you can change down to the two-hand swing but this should be a last resort. You just don’t get the same benets from two-hand swings that you do from one-arm swings. One-arm Swing The one-arm swing is an important li to learn, as the acon is the same as for the snatch. In fact, in the RKC we oen talk about the snatch being a one-arm swing that ends up in a dierent posion. The swing itself is a very athlec acon similar to jumping. To begin, place a kelebell on the oor slightly in front of your feet. • Stand with a shoulder-width stance and bend from the hips. • Grab hold of the kelebell and connect the enre body together. To learn how to do this properly see the secon on the plank.
• • • • • • • •
Hike the kelebell back between your legs and then extend the hips and drive the bell to lockout, exhaling as you do so. Keep the back neutral throughout. Don’t let the kelebell collapse you on the backswing. The feet should be completely planted throughout both the up and down swing. Keep the knees in line with the toes at all mes. Pack the shoulders by shrugging down and back. Imagine locking each shoulder blade to the opposite hip. Make sure the handle of the kelebell passes above the knees. If it goes below the knees you are likely to end up with a rounded back. Arms should remain straight at all mes. The lower leg should remain vercal or nearly vercal throughout. If your knees come forward you have turned it into a squat and not a swing. The body should nish in a straight line at the top of the swing with ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders all in a line.
Breathe in on the way down through your nose, and exhale out through your mouth on the way up. Make sure to contract the abs and glutes hard at the top of the swing, just like in the plank. In fact, try to make the top of the swing feel exactly like you did on the plank. The one-arm swing oers nearly all the benets that the snatch does. It has the added benets of being much easier on your hands and forearms while learning, too. If in doubt, use swings over snatches and seek out an RKC instructor to teach you how to correctly perform the movements. Both the swing and the snatch can be used as a means of geng some tness work if you are forced to lower
your running volume due to injury. In parcular, this is good for those with ankle or foot injuries as the acon uses the same hip extension movement needed for good running, but because the feet are planted on the oor they won’t get banged up. While these ballisc movements can never replace running they can help to minimize any loss in tness while you’re recovering. Core
In the tness eld you’ll hear many speak about “core training” and what their idea of it is. Mostly what is writwritten is garbage. So let me make it clear for you. Core training is anything that trains you to prevent rotaon and/ or exion of the spine. It’s that simple. So can a single leg deadli be thought of as a core exercise exercise if we maintain neutral spine and do it correctly? You bet. What about the get up? Is that a core exercise? Absolutely. Even running well can be considered core training if you do it right. In fact, I’d argue that running is the single greatest core acvity on the planet. Like with the other acvies and other aspects of the body, we’re going to build the core from the ground up. Straight bugs
Lie face up with arms and upper thighs at ninety degrees to the oor. Place a yoga block or similar between the elbow and knee on one side. Note I said the elbow and knee and not the forearm and the thigh or any other variaon you can come up with. From this posion squish your lower back into the oor – you should be able to do this with your head sll at on the oor. If you cannot, you need to do some mobility work before you worry about strength work – remember the ow is mobility -> stability -> streng strength. th. Now extend the free arm and leg as much as possible so they are parallel to the oor. Keep the lower back in contactt with the ground the whole me. Only go as far as you can while maintaining that posion. Don’t be contac surprised if at rst you can’t fully extend the arm or the leg due to weakness. You You may also need a serious bout of upper body stretching to gain the movement movement needed to get the arm in line with the body when extended.
Diagonal bugs
The diagonal bug is performed exactly the same as the straight bug except that you’ll now hold the yoga block between the elbow and the opposite knee. This is an important step as it starts to teach the body to brace while working in a cross-body paern – exactly what is needed during running.
Axial rolling
Rolling is one of our earliest movements in life. As a child, you started on your back and prey soon you were were rolling onto your belly so you could eventually work our way toward crawling. As we age we start becoming fewer pieces. The spine is meant to move segmentally. You have 24 vertebrae, with seven in the neck, twelve in your thoracic spine, and ve in your lower back. Each of those is capable of movement. Yet for many of us, we have become three big chunks – neck, thorax, and lower back. Even worse, others have become one solid, fused piece of meat. While I’ve spoken about the body needing to learn to be one piece, it also needs to learn to move fully and freely again. To begin, lie on your stomach. Extend your le arm in front of you so that it forms a straight line with the rest of your body and place your right arm out to the side at ninety degrees. Turn your head as far to the right as you can - aempt to see your le shoulder. As you turn your head allow your right arm to sweep backwards at the same me. Keep looking for your hand so that your head keeps turning. Resist the urge to kick your body over by using your feet or pushing your thighs into the ground, allow the rota rotaon on to come solely from the sweep of the arm. But don’t throw the arm - no using momentum.
To reverse the movement, do the same thing but going from your back to your front. The roll should happen incrementally increment ally by segments, not with the body moving l ike one big chunk. We call this log rolling – when the body moves as if it is one big piece. Think of your core as made up of two separate movement types. The rst is s and hard. It’s what you do to brace yourself during a heavy squat so your body doesn’t collapse. But you also need a so, reexive core. Imagine you were walking down the street and someone bumped you. You’d be able to take the force of the movement, absorb it, counter it, and keep moving forward. That’s a reexive core acon and you need it in running to deal with changes in foong, surfaces, and other slight variaons in every step. Without the ability to perform axial segmental segmental rolling, you may as well be the Tin Man trying to run fast. Plank
The plank is perhaps the most useful core exercise on the planet. The reason is simple – it means you can eecvely stabilize your spine. If you cannot, you’re going to have all kinds of troubles when you start running.
Many people perform planks poorly, and as with the other exercises the devil is in the details. Most planks are soggy noodles, like a suspension bridge built of rope, rather than a solid s object. Begin with forearms on the ground, elbows directly under your shoulders. Your forearms will form a triangle with your ngerps together. Apart from your forearms the only other thing on the ground should be your toes. From heels to glutes to shoulders the body should form a straight line. This is where most people stop and by doing so prevent themselves from gaining the most benet. The goal of the plank isn’t to see how long you can endure being propped up on your elbows, but to develop maximal tension through the body to lock the spine in place. The RKC Hardstyle plank is the gold standard worldwide for planks. Bret Contreras did a study on it and found the RKC plank developed four mes more lower ab recruitment, three mes more external oblique, and two mes more internal oblique than a standard plank, involved substanally more glute max acvity than a stan dard plank, and prevented lower back pain by teaching proper hip extension mechanics. The dierence is that instead of just lying there on your elbows doing the bare minimum, you need to work much harder. Begin by locking your hips and ribs together by slightly rotang your pelvis. You’ll note that as you start to rotate your hips toward the ground your abs will come on incredibly hard and your glutes will tense. Please note: this isn’t a posterior pelvic lt. This is merely bringing the pelvis out of the anterior lt most of us are stuck in and back to neutral. You cannot maximally tense the glutes and abs in either posterior or anterior lt. The sign that you are back in neutral will be the extreme tension you can create in these areas when you do this. Along with the glute and ab tension you need to lock the legs hard, as if pushing your feet back against a wall. At the same me “pull” your elbows towards your hips to re up the lats. At this point you will noce that nearly every muscle in the body has been switched on. Welcome to the hardstyle plank. Crawling
Crawling has become quite a popular trend in training over the last few years. Like rolling, it is a basic developmental paern that builds many more dicult movements. As the rst contralateral movement we do that has gravity acng on us, it teaches us a lot about hip and shoulder stability while teaching the core to brace the spine while the hips and shoulders ex and extend. Sounds a lot like running, right? But while crawling is a great exercise for these reasons, our goal isn’t to become the best crawler in the world. As Ido Portal says, “All that me crawling and people sll move like babies.” As human beings, we are designed to be upright bipedal creatures, so while we need crawling for the cross-body benets it gives us, we also need to get to standing and performing the harder movements of walking and running, too. Crawling is literally so simple a baby can do it. Begin in a quadruped posion with hands under shoulders and knees under hips. Move the opposite hand and knee at the same me. This is i mportant – the hand and foot must leave the ground and return to the ground together. I see many people crawling, or doing what they think is crawling, and their hands and feet are moving separately. Think about the way you walk for a moment. As the leg swings through so does the opposing arm. The arm doesn’t arrive before the leg, nor does it move separately. If one arrives before the other, you are moving four limbs individually, not two pairs of opposing limbs. It’s important to keep this element present while crawling.
It serves no purpose if you crawl badly, just like it serves no purpose if you do any of the exercises listed badly. Your end goal is to move beer and by moving beer run beer and become human again, instead of devolv ing into the slumped cube-dwelling slug the human race is becoming. Along with spending an undue amount of me on crawling itself, the other big disagreement I have with some trainers is the concept of loading them. Crawling is done as a neural drill. You don’t load the central nervous system (CNS). You force the CNS to learn by adding complexity. Once basic crawling becomes easy for you, I’d suggest checking out some of the work by Ido Portal on locomoon, Mike Fitch’s Animal Flow , or Ground Force Method . All are excellent and seek to add complexity rather than load. Remember, crawling isn’t done to make you strong but to get your brain ring properly.
Chapter 10 – Training Plan It’s easy to get confused when you start looking online for training advice. There’s no shortage of plans, advice, or methods. But which one to pick as the starng point? Let’s split this into two possible starng points. The rst is for true entry-level runners. If you’re just geng into running, either for the rst me or aer a considerable layo, then you’re best to start with the plan out lined in the “Your First Run” chapter. This walk/run plan is the perfect starng point. While it may seem overly cauous and slow, it is the only way I’ve found to get people running without any pain or injury. I’ve even put experienced runners on it when it ’s been obvious they were severely over trained and needing a break to allow their body to sele down before a problem occurred. For those who are running regularly, I have a second starng point. However, if you’re not yet running pain free for up to an hour at a me, you’re not in this second category and should go back to the rst point and begin with the walk/run plan. If you are able to run for a certain period of me, but less than an hour, then start the walk/run plan at your current level. As a reminder, here is the walk/run plan: Week 1 – Jog 1/walk 4 x 6 Week 2 – Jog 2/walk 3 x 6 Week 3 – Jog 3/walk 2 x 6 Week 4 – Jog 4/walk 1 x 6 Now, we need to start adding me to the intervals and push that out to ten minutes: Week 5 – Jog 6/ walk 4 x 4 Week 6 – Jog 7/ walk 3 x 4 Week 7 – Jog 8/ walk 2 x 4 Increase interval me again: Week 8 – Jog 12/walk 3 x 3 Week 9 – Jog 13/walk 2 x 3 Week 10 – Jog 14/walk 1 x 3 Increased interval me again. You’ll noce we’ve gone from thirty minutes total to forty to 45 minutes. Now, we extend out to an hour of total me. Week 11 – Jog 17/walk 3 x 3 Week 12 – Jog 19/walk 1 x 3 Week 13 – Jog 60 minutes Once you can run for sixty minutes pain free, you’re well on the way to lifelong tness. Remember, your goal isn’t to run as fast as you can each me we run, but at a pace where you can hold a panng conversaon with someone. If you are using a heart rate monitor, then use the Maetone guidelines of 180 minus your age. If you’re just geng into running, don’t forget the modiers based on number of sessions or how many mes you may have been sick in the past year. While heart rate isn’t an exact measure – you won’t explode if you run at one or two beats per minute faster – it does give you a concrete method of assessment. Over me if you see you are running at a faster pace at the same heart rate, then your training is going in the right direcon. For those who are able to run for sixty minutes three mes per week without any problems we can start at Stage 2. This is going to feature daily work in the form of either strength training or running. Because I’m such
a good guy, I’ll even let you have one day o per week. My advice is to take the day o as the day aer the longest run. Trust me, you’ll appreciate it, especially at the start. It takes a fair while to get used to the sness from longer runs. That being said, these days I tend not to take any days o and just have light, easy days aer my longest runs. Regardless of whether you take the day completely o or choose to have a light day, make sure you never have a hard day aer a long run. Big sessions should always be followed by easy sessions. The format for Stage 2 is simple. We want to do two easy runs of up to an hour in length and one longer run of 90-120 minutes. While we’re sll going to use the Maetone formula as the maximum heart rate for the hour runs, we need to drop it a bit for the longer run. There’s a big dierence between running for an hour at 140bpm and two hours at the same intensity. As discussed in the “Light” chapter, you need zones other than the one you do most of your sessions at. To start with, calculate your Maetone number. That is the upper end of your aerobic training and the point you’ll spend most of your running at. Using my number of 142bpm as an example, here is how my zones end up: • • • • •
122bpm and below zone 1) = light aerobic training 122bpm – 132bpm (zone 2)= moderate aerobic training 132bpm – 142bpm (zone 3) = hardest aerobic training 142bpm – 165bpm (zone 4) = cruise and tempo interval training 165bpm+ (zone 5) = high intensity running
I am aware there are a seemingly innite number of ways for people to classify training zones based on heart rate. To be honest, most of it is fairly arbitrary and given individual dierences there is no one-size-ts-all plan. The rst three zones are all aerobic. While zone 3 is stated as “hardest aerobic,” it is sll an easy session in comparison to me spent in zone 4 or 5. Zone 1 oers lile for performance but is useful for recovery. Remem ber Nuurmi and Zatopek? They spent many hours walking in what would have been zone one. Don’t discount me here as a means to boost your aerobic system without stressing the body too much. For me, as lile as 110bpm will keep my aerobic engine online and not allow detraining. The increase in ranges once past the aerobic training zones are for two reasons. First, it’s dicult to run within only a couple of beats of a goal when you’re pushing hard. Second, at around 90% of your maximum heart rate (in my case, 183bpm) is the point at which you reach your anaerobic threshold. This is the point where your body starts to ood with lactate and your brain starts to send you messages to slow down. While you can’t run for long at this point, the tness gains at or around the anaerobic threshold are signicant if used wisely. More on that in a moment, but let’s return to the heart rate needed for longer runs. For long runs, I’d suggest using a heart rate at the high end of the zone 2. Many of you will need to walk on even the slightest hills to stay within that zone. Yes, I know it is frustrang and I know you’ll want to push harder, but trust me when I say that learning to slow down will give you bigger rewards long term than running faster will right now. With some pracce you’ll be able to feel what heart rate you are at without needing a monitor. I know if I breathe only through my nose while running that I am well under my 142bpm benchmark, and more likely around the mid 130s. Goals for Stage 2 – three runs per week for a total of 4 hours, performed as 2 x 60 minute runs and one longer 2-hour run. Stage 3 is where the real fun begins. I’ve found the best way to use Stage 3 is to divide it into two secons. In strength and condioning, it is normal to alternate between periods of volume and intensity. These periods are oen termed accumulaon and intensicaon.
Accumulaon in running can be risky as sudden jumps in mileage can lead to injuries. However, the surest way to improve your running is to run more. Given all that, we need to be sure that while adding miles we don’t spend too much me training too hard. For the accumulaon period, we’re going to limit the training heart rate to only the aerobic zones (1–3). Don’t worry, we’re not going to stay here too long – only six weeks – so you won’t lose any speed. We’re also going to do strength work at the same me and use plenty of kelebell balliscs to keep up the anaerobic side of your training. The basic plan is to run ve days per week following a 1:2:3 format. The basic unit will be the short run, which is half as long the medium run, along with a long run that is three mes longer. The week will follow this ow: 1-2-1-3-1. If we take a 5km run to be the short run, that puts the medium run at 10km and the long run at 15km. Both of these will be followed by an easy 5km recovery run. This allows you to be covering 40km with lile diculty and allows for a lot of recovery. If you’re using me for a measurement instead of distance, this could equate to a thirty-minute run, a sixty-minute medium run, and a ninety-minute long run. Because we’ll also be running easy the whole me, the overall stress on the body will be low. Just a reminder – the maximum heart rate you should be running at during this me is your “180 – age” number. This period is all about adding base and miles, not about running hard. All the training stress comes from me/distance rather than speed. Follow this format for six weeks at least. You’ll be surprised at how easily you’ll gain tness without picking up nagging injuries. In fact, this plan will allow you to develop an incredible base level of tness while staying injury free. This is prey much my maintenance plan year round. I take it one step further and swap one of the easy runs for a ride just to give my legs a bit of a break from the stress of running. (If you try this, I nd a ride of double the me feels about the same in terms of stress to the body as long as you keep heart rates in the same zone.) The next step is the intensicaon plan. This isn’t the me to go nuts and try to run every workout as hard as possible. Rather, it is the me to solidify the gains made in the accumulaon phase. But the goal is sll to keep relave intensity low. I am a big believer that a large majority of the week’s training should be moderate and at a level that feels like a seven out of ten for intensity. You’ll nd, once you get used to it, that this will mean a large percentage of your running me is spent at the moderate to hard aerobic zones. However, you do want to turn up the heat a lile bit, so you’re going to use some interval training. You going to take clues from an old standby in the tness world that is hardly ever used correctly – the Tabata protocol – for guidance on how to structure your training. The original Tabata plan was not a random mish-mash of exercises done for twenty seconds of work and ten seconds of rest. It was a single set of six to eight highly intense intervals done at a specic power output. But the point many forget is that it also included more than a lile easy aerobic work, too. In fact, the Tabata protocol is a much beer adversement for the power of sustainable eorts than it is about the ecacy of high intensity work. Regardless of what side of the coin you choose to look at, the one thing the protocol does show is the power of combining mostly easy work with a small amount of very hard work. Just know that the most successful high intensity training plan ever studied in the history of sports science only uses 15% of the week for high-intensity training. Hopefully by now you’ve become smarter about why and how to use intensity and this will be the nal nail in the con for trying to run unl your lungs burst into ames every me you step out the door. The easiest way to use this powerful bit of knowledge is to put a small amount of hard work into each run. But the quesons remain: how much is enough and how much is too much? Experience has taught me it’s far beer to do a lile less than it is to accidentally do too much and wind up on the sidelines for weeks or months nursing an injury. I
like to make about 20% of my weekly volume be hard running – enough to smulate the body but not enough to annihilate it. Think of the stress of hard training in the same way you think about how much water you need to drink. In a given me frame, there is an amount of water you need to drink. Any extra will not be absorbed and will pass right through you. Except when it comes to training stress, it doesn’t pass through you – it exhausts you and leads to possible injury. So the amount of hard training we’re looking for is the amount we can absorb and no more. As I’ve wrien earlier in the book, I don’t believe we need a high amount of hard training. This 20% number seems about right for most people. It can be adjusted up or down slightly, but “slightly” means only a lile. It doesn’t mean you should try to get in 40% of your mileage as hard training. It means that maybe instead of 20% of your weekly volume being hard, maybe it’s 22% or 23%. 30% in this case would likely be too much, as well. But in the same vein, 10% would be too lile unless there was a race coming up you wanted to peak for. How do you track all this? First, let’s say that by the me you get to this point, your weekly standard run is a 45-minute aerobic run. That makes the medium run a ninety-minute run, and the longest run 2 hours and 15 minutes. But in our standard 45-minute run if we take 20% as being hard then that equals 9 minutes. (And 15 minutes for the medium run). But what about the long run? I’m a big fan of not adding speed work to the long run as I think you already get enough stress from the length of the run without having to add extra diculty. But in order to allow you to keep to the theme of adding intensity during this phase, I advise no long running – the medium runs will now be your longest runs. Don’t worry about losing tness – if we add some faster running into the ninety-minute runs they’ll be more than hard enough. Here are some sample runs: 45-minute sample runs • 20-minute zone 3 running • 1km hard, followed by 1km zone 2-3, followed by another 1km hard • 10-minute zone 2-3 warm down • • •
10-minute zone 3 warm up 18 x 30s hard: 30s easy (or rest completely if using a treadmill) 15-minute zone 3 easy running
• • •
20-minute zone 3 running 3 x 3min hard followed by 1min easy 14min zone 2 warm down
60-minute sample runs • 30-minute zone 3 running • 4 x 3min hard followed by 1min easy • 15-minute zone 3 easy warm down • • •
20-minute zone 3 running 24 x 30s hard: 30s easy 16-minute zone 3 running
•
10-minute zone 3 running
• 1min @ 8% gradient followed by 5min at in zone 3 • 2min @ 6% gradient followed by 5min at in zone 3 • 3min @ 4% gradient followed by 5min at in zone 3 Repeat for two rounds • 8-minute zone 2 running In this sample, the extra intensity comes in the form of adding hill work – perform the enre run at the same speed. 90-minute sample runs • 40-minutes zone 2 running • 20-minutes zone 3 running • 15-minutes hard running • 15-minutes zone 2 running warm down • • • • • •
20-minute zone 3 running 1min @ 8% gradient followed by 5min at in zone 3 2min @ 6% gradient followed by 5min at in zone 3 3min @ 4% gradient followed by 5min at in zone 3 Repeat for three full rounds 7-minute zone 2 running
One of the biggest things people make a mistake with is they think the more hard runs they put into a given week the faster they’ll progress. Well, perhaps, at least for a while. But then something will complain and you’ll nd yourself on the sidelines. The real secret of training is consistency. And the best way to ensure consistency is by doing sessions that are repeatable at a sustainable intensity level. Now you’ve seen some samples and we’ve talked about the use of volume and intensity periods, so it’s me to put it together and create a plan. I have to be frank - I don’t like short-term plans like you usually nd in training books. I don’t believe tness is anything other than a lifelong pursuit. But, I do believe you can make substanal changes to your body and tness in short periods of me if you go about it smartly. The main dierence here is that I believe the use of alternang volume and intensity periods are sustainable longer term. And it’s this longer-term approach that will have you in great shape not just in a few weeks but also in a few years, and hopefully even into your ies, sixes, and beyond. Making sure to deliberately go through unloading periods will keep your body fresh and injury-free. The tness world is lled with power mantras like “go hard or go home.” The reality is those people you see displaying great tness, health, and running prowess into the second half of their life have made sure to balance “hard” with “easy.” Every me you try to ascend to a new peak, you must allow yourself me in the valley that follows. That is the way of nature – peak and valley. If you don’t allow this deliberate descent into a valley, you’ll never reach the next peak. Good planning will allow you to build to greater peaks each me. This is how great race performances are made – gradually building tness over me with each peak being slightly higher than the previous. Given enough me, everyone can become substanally faster and er while remaining injury free – providing they make sure to always go through a deliberate deloading valley aer each peak. One of the things I always look for as a trainer and athlete are coincidences. I think of exercise like a crime report. If twenty people see a hit and run, they’ll all say something a lile bit dierently to one another. One will have seen a red car, the next a green one. One person will say it was a male driver and the next a female. But as you interview more and more people, you’ll start to see a thread of commonality – this is the truth. When a majority of people saw it happen and their reports confer, then you can surmise the truth. Exercise is no dier-
ent. Everyone wants to treat strength and endurance training as two separate enes yet we have one brain, one set of muscles, one CNS, and our bodies cope with training roughly the same way regardless of if we’re male or female, black or white, or something in between all of those. When it comes to exercise, one of the commonalies is that both top endurance coaches and top strength coaches say the same thing about what is needed to get to absolute peak shape – it takes about three weeks. That doesn’t mean you can get o your coach aer not having exercised for twenty years and be ready for the Olympics in three weeks. It means if your body is ready, thanks to having spent a lot of me gradually accumulang tness, then you can reach peak tness in just three weeks. The plan that follows has a six-week accumulaon phase followed by a six-week intensity phase. If you have no immediate race or event planned, cycle straight back to the accumulaon phase and keep repeang the process unl you have an event close. Once your event gets closer, you will need to tack on a three-week block of race specic work. This is the me to add in speed work – the icing on the cake. But you have to make the cake rst, and that is done by spending me on the accumulaon and intensicaon blocks.
Chapter 11 – Accumulation and Intensifcation Plans I am assuming by the me you get to this plan you can run for an hour pain-free, mulple mes per week. For some, this will be where you are right now, and for others, this may be the work of a year or more to get here. I did Ironman in March of 2013 with no signicant running background since the late 1990s. While I nished, I wasn’t running well by any stretch of the i maginaon. It took me about six months to get to the point of painfree running. Now, a couple of years later, I am even beer able to deal with running and can run not only on successive days without any injury concerns but also mulple mes per day if I choose. This mulple sessions per day thing, called double spling, is a useful trick. Looking through books like Lore of Running by Noakes and Faster at Fiy by Friel, there is an obvious common thread – running too much as a mature athlete will break you. But if you sck to runs of less than 10km at a me, which have a low recovery cost, you can run many mes per week. One of the ways around this is to run twice in a single day. Each small run has a ny recovery cost, meaning you can run again the next day, too. Like all skills, the more oen you pracce that skill, the faster you become more procient at it. Mulple daily runs are a quick way to build skill while minimizing injury risk. This pracce also lessens muscle soreness and overall fague as each session costs relavely lile. A thirty-minute run is nothing compared to an hour run. And two thirty-minute runs in the same day doesn’t leave you feeling the same the next day as a single sixty-minute run. Accumulaon Plan The Accumulaon Plan features a basic run of thirty minutes performed ve days per week. However, on some of the days the plan has extra running to make up the necessary me for us to accumulate extra volume. By keeping the runs shorter, thanks to this two-a-day training, you will minimize the need for recovery and maximize your gains. While in this phase, we’re also going to perform short strength-training sessions three mes per week. Most strength-training plans make mistakes in one of two ways: either they are lled with frilly, nonsense exercises or they resemble something a powerlier might do. As with all things, the right dose is somewhere in the middle – a moderate training plan in the gym works well when trying to push up another area of performance. In my experience, while heavy liing can be benecial, it can also cause more problems than it is worth and the extra stress in the gym can lead to injuries on the road. The strength-training sessions will be done on the lightest running days. Every day begins with a small amount of work on your hips and core – these are the power plant of your athlecism and the areas most likely to suer weakness from prolonged running. Nearly everyone has some degree of glute inacvity these days due to our sedentary lives. The only way to overcome this is with frequent doses of exercise. This kind of work is common in rehab training and that’s exactly what most people need. If you take the me to do the following daily, you’ll feel much beer for it. • • • • • • •
Foam roller – quads, hamstrings, calves, ITB, and thoracic spine. Total me 5 minutes. Clams – 1 set of 10-20 reps on each leg Jane Fondas – 1 set of 10-20 reps on each leg Fire hydrants – 1 set of 5 reps of each movement (circles forward and back, straight leg lis to the side, and small circles done with a straight leg directly to the side) ExRoAb – 1 set of 10 reps each leg Sck SLDL – 1 set of 10 reps each leg Crawl – 10m forward and back
Total me spent, including the foam roller work, will be around 15 minutes. Aer this, you’ll be good to go. The rst me you follow this preempve movement work and then go for a run, your body will feel very dierent from what you may be used to. Pro p: If you have a lile spare me, try to do this as a cool down from each run, as well, as it speeds recovery and gets everything working properly again post run. Strength Training
Because our focus is on running and not on strength building, we’re only going to hit the gym twice each week. If you’re diligent and perform all the daily work listed above this will be enough to maintain strength and keep you injury free. The boom line is you can’t build strength while trying to build running at the same me, so don’t try. Our basic formula for strength training is going to look like this: • •
Get ups x 1 rep each side Single-leg deadlis x 5 reps each side
Perform these as a mini-circuit. Do a get up on each side, then do 5 reps of whichever SLDL variaon you are able to do well. Don’t immediately go for the most advanced version. The trick with the SLDL progressions is to nd one that challenges you but doesn’t have you falling over every rep. For most people that is likely going to be with the earlier progressions rather than the King deadli. •
Kelbell snatches – 7 reps in 15 secs of work, 15 secs of rest. If you’re not ready to snatch then use onehand swings.
Perform these as a mini-circuit, too: • Roll x 3 each way • Crawl x 10m forward and back • Straight bugs x 5 each side Week 1: Do 3 rounds of get ups/ SLDLs. 10 rounds of snatches. 3 rounds of roll/ crawl/ bugs. Week 2: Do 4 rounds of get ups/ SLDL variaons. 10 rounds of snatches. 3 rounds of roll/ crawl/ bugs. Week 3: Increase snatches to 12 rounds. Week 4: Increase snatches to 15 rounds. Week 5: Increase snatches to 20 rounds. Week 6: Keep everything as it was for week 5. The snatching is hard. A massive anaerobic eort. But by using the gym me to get our hard training in, we’re actually able to run in an easy and relaxed manner, decreasing the risk of injury. Running plan: Week
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
1
Rest
30min run, zone 3.
AM – 30min run, zone 3. PM – 30min run, zone 3.
30min run, zone 3.
Rest
AM – 30min 30min run, run, zone zone 3. 2. PM – 60min run, zone 3.
2
Rest
30min run, zone 3.
AM – 30min run, zone 3. PM – 30min run, zone 3.
30min run, zone 3.
Rest
AM – 30min 45min run, run, zone zone 3. 2. PM – 60min run, zone 3.
3
Rest
30min run, zone 3.
AM – 30min run, zone 3. PM – 30min run, zone 3.
30min run, zone 3.
Rest
AM – 30min 45min run, run, zone zone 3. 2. PM – 75min run, zone 3.
4
Rest
30min run, zone 3.
AM – 30min run, zone 3. PM – 30min run, zone 3.
30min run, zone 3.
Rest
AM – 30min 60min run, run, zone zone 3. 2. PM – 75min run, zone 3.
5
Rest
30min run, zone 3.
AM – 30min run, zone 3. PM – 30min run, zone 3.
30min run, zone 3.
Rest
AM – 30min 60min run, run, zone zone 3. 2. PM – 90min run, zone 2.
6
Rest
30min run, zone 3.
AM – 30min run, zone 3. PM – 30min run, zone 3.
30min run, zone 3.
Rest
90min run, zone 2.
30min run, zone 2.
Please note the use of the 1:2:1:3:1 format. As well, noce that in weeks ve and six the longest run (ninety minutes) is done at a slightly lower heart rate. The nal run for the week is at the same heart rate. Do not try to make these runs any faster. The longest run already has added stress from the duraon, and the nal run on Sunday is a recovery run to help you loosen up s muscles. You should walk in from your Sunday run feeling like you could have gone much faster. Save that feeling for week eight, which will be the start of the intensity plan. The week following this rst six weeks of accumulaon work should be a recovery week. You’ve worked hard and it’s okay to let the body rest and recover. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in their training is to push when they should be resng. If training has been going well - and it should be by this point, because we’ve slowly been adding volume without too much extra stress from speed work - then your inial reacon will be to test it out. Don’t test it out. Resist that urge to take your tness for a test drive and see what you can do. The Olympics is lled with athletes who took their tness for a hard test drive a day or two before their event and ruined the last four years of preparaon. Rest in week seven so you can really see what you’re capa ble of in another six weeks aer we add speed work. For week seven, perform only two thirty-minute runs. I would suggest Tuesday and Saturday as the best choices so the runs are as spread out as possible. One of two things will happen on the Saturday run. Either you’ll feel like you could run as fast as you want for as long as you want or you’ll feel sluggish. Neither is good or bad, but take note of which you feel. If you’ve completely recovered in the ve days prior, you know that’s roughly how long you need to rest up before a major event. If you’re sll feeling a bit sluggish, then you know you need a few days more. One nal point on this type of training. If you aren’t interested in racing, or don’t have an event soon, sck to this style of training for as long as you want. Once you’ve built your body to this point, you’ll feel t and healthy without any injuries as you haven’t been pushing the boundaries yet. You can cycle through the Accu mulaon Plan as many mes during a year as you wish as there’s no risk.
Intensicaon Plan While I’ve spent the vast majority of this book telling you to slow down and run easy, the fact is if you don’t teach yourself to run faster then you’ll likely never get faster. Because that’s how most people run regardless of distance – at the exact same pace. Running fast may be the hardest thing we can do that doesn’t require specialist training like ghng or gymnascs. Running fast is both physically and neurologically hard. In fact, there’s nothing I’ve yet found that hurts more than hard running. And that’s probably the reason why so many avoid it. But then there is the other side of the coin. Many people try to spend all of their training me running as hard as they can. While you will improve quickly in the beginning by following this method, unless you’re of unique genec gis it (and you) won’t last. Even the great Emil Zatopek, the father of interval training and one of the greatest runners of all me, couldn’t last long while undergoing his all-fast-all-the-me training. This same arc could be seen in other runners trying to follow in his footsteps – a meteoric rise and fall comprising of great results but a quick burnout. The Intensicaon Plan has fast running in it, but the base of it all is sll easy running. If at any point during the program you start to feel burned out or unduly fagued, then you need to go through this quick decision making process: Am I just a lile red or am I close to exhausted? If you’re just a lile red, you can sll run. But keep the enre run easy and don’t do any intensity work for the session. If you’re on the verge of exhausted then perhaps it’s best to skip the whole day. Remember the overall purpose is to build tness. If you feel you are one run away from being sick or injured, then take me o. Only professional athletes should be training under huge fague and stress. The reality for mature athletes is that less is oen more. I’ve had great results in the past from a single really hard run each week with all my other runs being easy. But these days I nd my best results come from a lile bit of hard running in each run – but never more than about 20% of the total me spent running. Like in the Accumulaon Plan, we need to structure the speed work so it has a natural ebb and ow. But unlike the Accumulaon Plan where we used a 1:2:3 system to create a volume base, we’re going to use a light/medium/heavy system for this. The breakdown of how much me we spend running hard is simple. 20% of a 60-minute run is 12 minutes. Let’s count the full 20% as a heavy session, or the maximum amount of hard running we want to perform at any given me. That means we can use 9 minutes and 6 minutes as the medium and l ight sessions (when based on a 60-minute session). Those numbers – 12, 9, and 6 – correspond to 20%, 15%, and 10%. As an example, let’s just say you perform three runs per week that are sixty minutes each for a total of 180 minutes for the week. If you followed this format of heavy/light/medium, you’d have undergone 27 minutes of hard running for the week out of your three hours of running, for a total of 15%. That leaves us with a few extra points up our sleeves, which we’re going to use in the form of the hard run. And now you’ll see why we need easy runs. Here is a sample week:
Day
Run
Minutes hard/ % hard
Total me
Monday
60min with 6min hard
6/ 10
60min
60min with 12min hard
12/ 20%
120min
60min with 9min hard
9/ 15%
180min
Long run, 90min.
30/ 30%
270min
Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
In this example, I’ve shown the total me spent running for the week as a cumulave total. If we were to just use the three x 60 minute runs with the 6/9/12 minutes of hard running as our only running for the week, we’d end up with 15% of the week having some intensity. But adding in the long run changes everything – and you are going to be running longer. Even if the intensity is kept low during these runs, you will nd the nal third will be tesng. This is even more so if you are not familiar with longer runs. The rst few mes you run for two hours or more you’re going to feel it the next day. For that reason I have counted the last third of this run – 30 minutes total me – as having intensity. If we add up the total me spent running with intensity for the week, then we get to 57 minutes out of 270 minutes total me. That gives us roughly 21% of our total week as having intensity. This is the limit of what we can deal with for the long term and not suer injury or burnout. For many, parcularly those without a decent running history, this number will need to be less. Using one of the keys from the Accumulaon Plan, we can add in easy runs that have lile to no recovery cost and allow us to slightly reduce the overall percentage of intensity work. If we take that same week but add in two 45-minute runs that are purely aerobic and easy, see what happens to our gures: Day
Run
Minutes hard/ % hard
Total me
Monday
60min with 6min hard
6/ 10
60min
Tuesday
45min easy
0/ 0
105min
Wednesday
60min with 12min hard
12/ 20%
165min
Thursday
45min easy
0/ 0
210min
Friday
60min with 9min hard
9/ 15%
270min
Long run, 90min.
30/ 30%
360min
Saturday Sunday
In this example, we have a total of 360 minutes (six hours) of running for the week with a grand total of the same 57 minutes of hard running. But while we have sll done as much hard mileage, we have added some extra easy work in to buer it. The total percentage of hard work in this week is only 16% (15.8% to be precise).
As you get er and more accustomed to running, you can t in more and more hard work, but you also do it by adding in more easy work to buer it in the way depicted. That’s one of the reasons you need to run so much in the Accumulaon Plan – so you can absorb the hard running by adding in easy miles when needed. This is one of the key points of peaking for an event – the addion of tness while minimizing the risk of injury from pushing harder and harder. The six-week Intensicaon Plan below is hardly the only way forward. There are many ways to create pro grams and improve tness and speed. But what I’ve outlined is a way to keep the vast majority of people injury free while steadily improving their running. Usually, the moment people start to push harder for an event they wind up hurt. As the athlete, your goal is to restrain yourself from doing as much as you can. Instead, do only what is needed. If three repeats of 400m are enough to help you get faster, why would you do four or ve? You may be pleasantly surprised at how lile hard work you need in comparison to what you think, not to menon how good your body feels in comparison to the soreness and sness that usually comes from hard running. You’ll see the plan is based on either two or three quality runs during the week and a longer run. No, you don’t get to escape the longer run because you’re focused on faster running. It will be cut a bit shorter but it’s sll important for it to be in there. Noted running coach Tony Benson says that for best results a runner needs to perform a long run on 45 out of 52 weeks of the year. The real dierence in the Intensicaon Plan is the introducon of the quality runs. Typically, you’ll see some of these workouts turn up as track workouts in other plans. There’s nothing wrong with that and I use a track at various mes in my own running because there is one within a ve-minute drive from my house. But the reality is that with the advent and improvement of GPS watches, you no longer need a track for any kind of workout other than a me trial, where the track allows you to run the exact same course every me (such as for a MAF test). With that in mind, as well as the fact that it is far nicer to run with a changing view, the quality runs are all me-based rather than distance based. For me, it is far easier to track and manage me-based training than distance-based training. I’m sure I’ll have people send me emails about how most elite runners track distance and not me, but you’re not an elite runner, are you? Too oen I see people worrying about what an Olympic champion is doing. It’s a bit of a stretch to be concerned about what the champ does when he or she is hing 200km of running per week and you’re doing twenty or thirty, isn’t it? And me is just an easier and more convenient metric to measure. During this period, drop the strength training to only two sessions per week. Reduce the snatching to 5 sets of 10 reps done without any me focus and resng as much as you need between sets. The strength work now is like a pit stop for a race car. Use the gym me to make sure everything is funconing properly and to re up any muscles that might be lagging as a result of the running. Keep doing the daily foam roller and glute acvaon exercises – they’ll help to keep you injury free. If your calves or feet start to play up, follow the feet and ankle rounes and do the eccentric calf drops from the programming secon. While it may seem laborious, all of this stu will help keep you injury free, as well as keep the rust o. Remember – race cars spend more me in the pits than they do on the track, so use your non-running me to constantly ne tune your body and keep it running well. Running plan: Week
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
1
Rest
20min 45min easy run easy warm zone 3. up, then 3 x 3min hard with 1min easy recovery between each, then 10min easy cool down.
10min zone 3, then 2 x: 1min @ 8% gradient 5min at in zone 3 2min @ 6% gradient 5min at in zone 3 3min @ 4% gradient 5min at in zone 3
Rest
90min run, 60min zone 2, 12 x 30s hard: 30s easy, 18min easy running cool down
30min run, zone 2.
Rest
90min run, 60min zone 2, 12 x 30s hard: 30s easy, 18min easy running cool down
30min run, zone 2.
Rest
90min run, 60min zone 2, 15 x 30s hard: 30s easy, 15min easy running cool down.
30min run, zone 2.
8-minute zone 2 cool down. 2
Rest
20min 45min easy run easy warm zone 3. up, then 3 x 3min hard with 1min easy recovery between each, then 10min easy cool down.
10min zone 3, then 2 x: 1min @ 8% gradient 5min at in zone 3 2min @ 6% gradient 5min at in zone 3 3min @ 4% gradient 5min at in zone 3 8-minute zone 2 cool down.
3
Rest
20min easy warm up, then 3 x 4min hard with 1min easy recovery between each, then 10min easy cool down..
60min easy run 10min zone zone 3. 3, then 3 x: 1min @ 8% gradient 5min at in zone 3 2min @ 6% gradient 5min at in zone 3 3min @ 4% gradient 5min at in zone 3 10-minute zone 2 cool down
4
Rest
20min easy warm up, then 3 x 4min hard with 1min easy recovery between each, then 10min easy cool down..
60min easy run 10min zone zone 3. 3, then 3 x: 1min @ 8% gradient 5min at in zone 3 2min @ 6% gradient 5min at in zone 3 3min @ 4% gradient 5min at in zone 3
Rest
90min run, 60min zone 2, 18 x 30s hard: 30s easy, 12min easy running cool down.
30min run, zone 2.
Rest
90min run, 50min zone 2, 2 x 10min hard/ 5min easy, 10min cool down
30min run, zone 2.
Rest
Short easy run or race day.
Race day or rest.
10-minute zone 2 cool down 5
Rest
20min easy warm up, then 3 x 5min hard with 1min easy recovery between each, then 10min easy cool down.
60min run with 20min easy, 2 x 10min hard/ 5min easy, 10min cool down
10min zone 3, then 2 x: 1min @ 8% gradient 5min at in zone 3 2min @ 6% gradient 5min at in zone 3 3min @ 4% gradient 5min at in zone 3 8-minute zone 2 cool down.
6
Rest
20min easy warm up, then 3 x 3min hard with 1min easy recovery between each, then 10min easy cool down.
30min run with 30min run, 10min easy, zone 3 or 10min hard, rest. 10min easy.
Intensity breakdown Week
Total of hard running (min)
Total amount of % hard running running (min)
1
27
266
10.1%
2
37
266
10.1%
3
39
307
12.7%
4
67
307
12.7%
5 6
53
310
17%
Race week
You’ll note the intensity never goes above 20% of the total running me of the week. That is intenonal. Most people spend too much me trying to run hard and wondering why they never improve. At any given me, there is only so much you can absorb as far as training load goes. Trying to cram a plan wrien for a high school miler onto a forty-year-old body isn’t going to do very well. You’ll be surprised at how much you can improve from liming the amount of intensity (and then wonder why you’ve been smashing yourself to pieces all these years). Don’t forget that if you feel like you need to drop runs out of the week, your percentage intensity will change. If you drop an easy run the day aer a hard session because you feel too s or sore to connue, you will sig nicantly change the average intensity for the week. Those easy runs are there to oset all the hard work. If you’ve goen to the end of the program but didn’t parcipate in a race – whether it is a fun run, 10K, or Spartan Race – an alternave is a me trial. I have several loops near my house that I know the distances for and at the end of each speed cycle I will test myself on one of them. If I do a longer test one cycle, the next me I will choose a shorter test. The reason behind this is prey simple – I don’t want my longer runs to be the same pace as my shorter runs. The only way to make sure of this is to do a me trial. Over me, your results should obviously trend downward if training has been consistent. Once you’ve nished the Intensicaon Plan, whether you race or me trial or not, take a week o and cycle back to the Accumulaon Plan. This constant back and forth between the two allows you to build gradually without risking injury too much. Mature athletes may nd they need extra recovery weeks. There is no shame in this. I oen nd a plan I’ve wrien for myself as an eight-week plan becomes more like a ten- or eleven-week plan as I need to put in extra recovery weeks. So don’t take the six-week blocks as set in stone. Feel free to add recovery work as needed. A logical place for recovery, given that the blocks are six weeks in length, is at the end of every third week. So the Accumulaon Plan becomes seven weeks plus a rest week at the end, as does the Intensicaon Plan. Another alternave, for those with less work capacity or who are perhaps a bit older, is to add a recovery week every two weeks instead of every three. This makes the plans into eight-week blocks with a rest week aer each. A recovery week and a rest week are two dierent things. A rest week is a week of pung your feet up and not geng sweaty. A recovery week is a week of light training. A good general rule of thumb is to sll train but at around 60% of what you normally do. A 60-minute run becomes a 45-minute run. 3 sets of strength work become 2. Alternavely, you could do the same amount of work in the gym but use 60% of your usual weight. Recovery workouts should leave you feeling invigorated and fresh, chomping at the bit to do more. But be paent and disciplined in your recovery weeks – the payos are long term. If you travel oen for work, and I sympathize, one thing to consider is that oen you have forced rest and re covery periods. When I have to y to the United States for work, I know I will miss two days of training hanging around airports and ying, so I factor that into my overall plan. I usually try to me my recovery weeks for when I go on trips so I don’t feel guilty if I don’t have much me to train. I know it’s actually part of my plan to take it easy that week. When I return, it will be back to pedal to the metal and I will be able to make the most of having rested the week before.
Conclusion Running is one of the most primal acvies you can do. Unl you’ve been alone on a mountain path somewhere as the sun rises with no noise around you other than nature, your fooalls, and the sound of your own breathing, you won’t understand how powerful something as seemingly simple as running can be. It’s en vogue these days for people to talk about hard and so resets of the body, using various developmental paerns such as the rolling and crawling we saw in the program secon. But running is the most powerful reset buon you can push. It’s hardwired in your DNA to run far. If you add in making an eort to reconnect with nature as part of your running, the experience doubles. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that aer years of sing on a couch, you’re ready to run. Chances are you’re not. That’s not being overly dramac. The risk of injury to new runners is high. Take the me to slow ly adapt to the stresses of running, and you’ll nd you can run pain free as oen as you’d like. Even given my troubled start before my Ironman, I’m now pain free and able to run daily if I wish, provided I am smart about how far and how hard I run each me. Running has become a great metaphor for life for me. Every run will always have a lile bit of hard work in it, just like life. Somemes the hardest part is just pung on a dierent set of shoes and geng out the door. Other mes it’s a specic workout with hard intervals or hills in it before an event. But the struggle is always worth it, and as with everything, the harder you work and the more consistent you are, the beer the results. Don’t be in a rush to run further. You’ve got the rest of your life to run. Take the me now to learn to do it right – light, easy, and smooth – the payo is tremendous.
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Chapter 9 1. Jay, K. Viking Warrior Condioning. United States: Dragon Door Publicaons, 2009. 2. Kapandji, I .A. The Physiology of the Joints III: The Trunk and Vertebral Column, 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1974. 3. Si, M. Supertraining. Supertraining Instute, 2003. Chapter 11 1 Friel, J. Faster aer Fiy: How to Race Strong for the Rest of your Life . Boulder, Colorado: Velo Press, 2015. 2. 9. Noakes, T. The Lore of Running. (4th edion) Reardon: Oxford University Press, 2001.
