Roundups

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

So I’m still a bit behind but I’m getting back on schedule. However, I wanted to ensure I didn’t rush my writing about these topics.

Interestingly, within my coaching, I wanted to focus on going a little deeper in a few areas next year. Two of those areas are addressed below. I wanted to focus more on strength training and the mental aspect. I’ll explain more below but I did find it interesting that, as I was thinking about these aspects of training, I came across these.

First, one of my favorite bloggers Alex Hutchinson wrote about age related decline.

The chart he included is very interesting. Basically, peak sprint power drops off rapidly once we age beyond our 30s. Likewise, VO2max seems to have a general downward trend as we age, accelerating as we enter our 60s but generally downward throughout life. Efficiency, on the other hand, declines but less rapidly than the other variables. We also seem to experience a fairly significant drop as we age into our 60s before it apparently levels off going forward.

Beyond that, though, I think it’s interesting what Hutchinson brings up at the end.

So is this a measure of "intrinsic" aging? It’s not that simple. These masters triathletes are certainly fit, but they may well be neglecting the types of training that maintain muscle mass, strength, and power. Indeed, a study back in 2011 (with one of the same co-authors) found that (a) strength training improves cycling efficiency, and (b) the improvements are bigger in older cyclists.

I wanted to add a greater focus on strength training next year because I believe it will take our injury prevention efforts to a higher level. That is still my focus. I believe a basic level of strength makes you more resilient. It allows you to train harder with a lower risk of injury. For the more veteran runners, though, we may have an added benefit of potentially significant efficiency gains. Sounds like a win/win to me and is another reason to believe we’re heading in the right direction.

Second, one of the runners I coach sent me this link to an interesting article about "brain training".

The runners I coach might recognize things I do in parts of this article. The idea of keeping positive is a big one. I always find something positive. I can read a runner’s training log and, in a workout where the runner thinks he or she bombed, see a positive we can take out of the workout. Then I’ll focus on the positive that I see in the workout. Not that we can ignore the misses but, in my effort to always be positive, why can’t we look at the misses and learn from them? Are they negatives if we use them as learning opportunities? See what the runners I coach have to deal with? I guess I know why I’ve been called annoyingly positive.

I think there are a few things every runner can take from this. The runners I coach can expect much greater detail in discussion of this but here are a couple key takeaways I think we can find in this article:

1) Be process oriented, not results oriented. As I often say, take care of the present and the future will take care of itself.

2) Focus on the positive. We all have negative thoughts creep into our minds. No matter how much we practice being positive, they will at times. When things are going good, it’s easy to be positive. What do we do when these things happen? Put a positive spin on it. If I’m racing a 5K and things start hurting late in mile 2, I might for a moment think can I hold this all the way to the finish? Then I turn it around. I’m supposed to be hurting at this point. That means I’m running a good race. Now, let’s keep pushing through this part so I can keep this good race going.

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

I came across some interesting topics in the past week. Here are three of my favorites:

Pain tolerance

I remember for some time hearing about how runners are tough. We can withstand more pain than the average person. The question I always had was whether this was simple correlation or there was some causation involved. Do people who are more tolerant to pain choose running or does running increase our pain tolerance?

Recent research has suggested that running does increase our pain tolerance. Then, the question became through what mechanisms? Does experiencing low levels of discomfort and/or pain in our legs toughen our legs up or does something change in our central nervous systems that allows us to withstand more pain throughout our bodies?

Well, this suggests it’s the latter:

But the volunteers in the exercise group displayed substantially greater ability to withstand pain. Their pain thresholds had not changed; they began to feel pain at the same point they had before. But their tolerance had risen. They continued with the unpleasant gripping activity much longer than before. Those volunteers whose fitness had increased the most also showed the greatest increase in pain tolerance.

Pain thresholds and tolerances were tested using people’s arms, Mr. Jones pointed out, while the exercisers trained primarily their legs. Because the changes in pain response were evident in the exercisers’ upper bodies, the findings intimate that “something occurring in the brain was probably responsible for the change” in pain thresholds, Mr. Jones said.

Interesting.

Sleep

There has been a lot of talk at various places recently about sleep. Talk of people needing less than they think, getting too much and so on. Personally, I never bought into it. I know that, personally, I don’t function well on less than 8 hours a night and, if I can get 9 or more, I often feel a significant boost the next day.

This article suggests I’m on to something.

After Stanford University basketball players spent five to seven weeks sleeping at least 10 hours a night (when they had been sleeping six to nine hours), their performance shot up like they’d doped. They had faster sprint times and shooting accuracy. They also felt their overall physical and mental well-being improved during games and practice.

So what of all the 7 vs. 8 or more talk? Well, it came from a study that may not have been so well designed:

"It is important to understand that this 7 vs. 8 hours finding was not a carefully controlled study but is an association found retrospectively…this pertains only to longevity," Veasey wrote. It’s entirely possible that illness caused people surveyed to sleep longer, not the other way around.

I mentioned correlation vs. causation in reference to the pain tolerance study. Well, here it is again. The "7 hours is better" line is based on correlation. They didn’t show that 7 hours causes better health or longevity.

Many of us live extremely busy lives. Running is one of many things we need to fit into the day. I’m not going to tell you how much to sleep. However, we put our bodies through a lot. If you have the option to turn in a little earlier or sleep in a little later, take advantage of it.

Remember, sleep is critical to recovery and recovery is a critical part of training. As much as possible, don’t skimp on sleep.

Nonlocal fatigue

Finally, an interesting question to ponder. Does fatigue in our arms affect how our legs can perform? Does fatigue in our legs affect how our arms can perform?

According to this, the answers seem to be yes and no.

Anyway, the basic result was this: Whether you fatigue an arm or a leg, the opposite leg will be tired in a subsequent bout of exercise. Conversely, whether you fatigue an arm or leg, the opposite arm will not be tired in a subsequent bout of exercise. So the arms and legs (or at least the elbow flexors and knee extensors) appear to behave differently with respect to nonlocal fatigue. Why would this be? The short answer is the researchers don’t know.

In short, fatigue in an arm or leg affects the opposite leg. Fatigue in an arm or leg does not affect the opposite arm. Now, there is at least one other study that contradicts the "opposite arm" part of that result so don’t get too excited yet. Also, this finds the result but doesn’t find the reasoning behind the result so we don’t know why our legs fatigue when our arms are exercised.

However, I think this is useful information to be aware of. If nothing else, I think it’s interesting.

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

I’d like to focus on a couple specific topics this week. Two things that I’ve stated frequently at least to certain individuals but I’m not sure I have laid out my points publicly.

Running form

We all know there’s been a lot of talk about foot plant (I hate the term "foot strike" but that’s for another day) in recent years. In short, we’ve been told to focus on landing mid-foot or even forefoot. However, is this where the focus should be?

As some of you I’m sure have heard me say before, I believe we should focus higher. My usual mantra: hips forward, chest up and forward, shoulders low and back. I break this down in the following way:

Hips: You should keep your hips so far forward that it feels like, if you shifted them any farther forward, you would fall on your face.

Chest: Imagine you have a harness hooked up to your chest pulling up and forward at a 45 degree angle from horizontal.

Shoulders: Don’t hunch over like you’re typing on your computer, keep them back. However, also don’t tense them up. Keep them low and relaxed. Sometimes I also say thumbs up. Rotating your forearms so your thumbs are up will help rotate your shoulders to a less hunched over position.

Why am I bringing all of this up? Because Jonathan Beverly discussed the hips part, along with a lot of other good form thoughts, at Runner’s World.

A lot of good stuff about hip and upper body positioning in there. I’m not going to quote any single thing. Just read it all.

Staying hydrated

I’ve long been on the losing side of a debate over hydration. I feel there is way too much focus on hydration. Not that we don’t need to hydrate but we don’t need to replace every drop of fluid we lose the moment we lose it. I remember around 10 years ago someone telling me with great pride how he normally finishes marathons weighing more than when he starts. Really? This is something to be proud of? This is a great accomplishment? How is this going to make me a faster runner?

Well, if you’re into it, here’s the key to hyperhydration: salt.

However, is such a significant focus on hydration really beneficial?

Even when the cyclists were dehydrated by 3 per cent of their body weight, their performance was unaffected, contradicting decades of warnings that dehydration of more than 2 per cent slows you down.

Combined with plenty of information on how elites tend to lose a higher percentage of their body weight than non-elites (some upwards of 5% body weight) during marathons, this should be telling us something. Maybe we don’t need to focus on hydration quite as much as we’ve been led to believe.

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

This week, no deep insights into how to race faster but I think some interesting research/thoughts on how to be more healthy.

Running vs. sitting

We all know running is good for our health and spending too much time sitting is bad. How do the two counteract each other, though? For a long time, people believed running would be like a bullet proof vest, protecting us from the harmful effects of being too sedentary. Then sitting became the armor piercing bullet that could negate all the effects of running and then some, basically making running meaningless if you sit the rest of the day.

Not surprisingly, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

According to a research team from the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center, each time unit of sitting cancels out 8 percent of your gain from the same amount of running. In other words, if you run for an hour in the morning, and then sit for 10 hours during the day, you lose roughly 80 percent of the health benefit from your morning workout.

While that’s hardly a pretty picture for runners who are sedentary during the rest of our lives, it’s not quite the bad picture that was painted for us before (and I use "our" and "us" for a reason – I’m not nearly as active as I should be outside of my running life, I spend far too much time sitting).

Fortunately, there were some useful strategies to try to overcome these issues also given:

The team from UT Southwestern advises that office workers (and home workers) employ a number of strategies to avoid excessive sitting time. The list is becoming standard these days, and includes: walking up stairs at work rather than taking elevators; standing while talking on the phone; holding walking meetings; sitting on a fitness ball or using a standing desk; taking a lunchtime walk; and using pedometer to log your daily step count.

“We found that when someone’s sitting for a long time, any movement is good movement,” says co-author Jacquelyn Kulinski, M.D. “If you’re stuck at your desk, stretch, shift positions frequently or just fidget. They all improve fitness.”

Next time I’m fidgeting at work, it’s not because I’m nervous or struggling with a concept. I’m doing it for my health.

Abdominal bracing

How many of you have heard that, when you want to lift a heavy weight or do crunches or something like that, you should draw in your belly button to support your back?

Yeah, me too. That has always been the go to advice. Well, maybe it’s not the best advice.

This article makes a very good case for abdominal bracing instead of pulling your belly button in, which the author calls abdominal hollowing. What is abdominal bracing?

Think about what you would do if you were to prepare yourself for someone to punch you in the gut. You would immediately tense and stiffen you core to brace for the impact. This is exactly what abdominal bracing is, a term first coined by Dr. Stuart McGill of Canada, a leading expert in spine mechanics.

That description is probably about as good as it gets. The case being made in favor of this is very convincing. Personally, I’m rethinking my beliefs on this one. It makes a lot of sense.

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

I’m writing this before heading out for a camping trip. I’ll be packing up my tent for the return trip home when this appears so sorry if I seem a little short this week.

Leucine

We all know by now that taking in a protein/carbohydrate combination as soon as possible after a run will improve our recovery, right?

Well, now we know that leucine also plays a role.

First, what is leucine? In short, it’s an essential amino acid that the human body can’t produce so we have to get it from our diet. For more, see this Wikipedia article on it.

The good news? The super recovery drink known as chocolate milk has some leucine in it. Not quite at the levels used in the study but it’s there at some levels. Other options would be soybeans (chocolate soy milk?) and peanuts (some people like peanut butter as part of a post-run recovery meal). Again, you can see the Wikipedia article for more sources.

Endurance vs. speed

The eternal debate: how much endurance training do we need and how much speed training? It’s all about finding the right balance. Unfortunately, in today’s world, too many people want debates to be far more polarized. So we end up hearing that the best way to improve your aerobic capacity is HIIT training and you don’t need to train with long, easy or moderate workouts if you just do your HIIT training.

Steve Magness, one of my favorite bloggers, explored this in the context of the recent World Cup. Not surprisingly, he came to the conclusion that it’s all about finding the right balance.