Tag Archives: Running

Principles of Training, Thinking in Systems

Speaking the body’s language: simplifying training stimulus.

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As your understanding of athletic training becomes more sophisticated, one of the first concepts you come across is that of training stimulus. In simple English, training stimulus refers to what the body gets out of a particular workout.

Discussion of training stimulus abounds in circles that use MAF (Maximum Aerobic Function)—also known as the Maffetone Method—as their main framework for training.

The overarching mandate of the MAF Method is to protect the body. That is the best way for it to tolerate stresses, grow from training, and produce a great race performance. The party responsible for these functions is the body’s aerobic system, which oxidizes fats (burning them in the presence of oxygen) to provide a stable and long-lasting energy supply.

In endurance events, “protecting the body” means that the aerobic system must provide almost all the energy utilized during exercise. In power events, the aerobic system should be buttressing the function of the anaerobic system—which provides vast amounts of quick energy by burning sugars without oxygen—and still be strong enough to take charge for the duration of the recovery period.

For those who have already committed to developing their aerobic systems (by training at a low relative intensity), an issue inevitably arises: in long workouts that should occur theoretically at a low intensity, people accidentally (and often) end up rising above the desired intensity for a few seconds.

This brings up a crucial question: does this change the training stimulus?

There are several ways of answering this question. We can observe whether our speed at the aerobic threshold decreases after a month of training. We can go out and get a heart rate variability app that tracks our body’s autonomic readiness. We can even go get lab tested to see if our VO2 Max has decreased.

(If these terms mean nothing to you, don’t worry. Unless you’re an elite athlete who redlines for a living, they don’t need to. That’s the point.)

The body isn’t a black box. Action and circumstance affect it in ways that we can readily experience (when we know what to look for). A critical caveat: In this post, I’m only discussing the interpretation of experience before and after a workout. Using our subjective experience to measure and manage training stimulus in real time brings a whole other level of complexity.

Let’s abstract away from training for a second, and leave all that exercise terminology behind. Suppose you are on a long, leisurely birdwatching hike. You stop every few minutes to take notes, and you loiter every now and then with your binoculars as you try to make out the species of a bird in the distance. But 4 times over the course of this hike, you saw a novel bird just around the bend. Excited, you raced to take a picture.

How do you return from that hike? You are energized, renewed, invigorated. In spite of those few short sprints, the hike was a “low-intensity” experience.

Here’s another example: you’re back in your hometown after 5 years on a family visit. There’s been parties and get-togethers every day, and you’ve had ample time to catch up with all your friends.

But two things happened: the second day, you had the great misfortune of being mugged. And then the day after that, a former business partner caught up to you at a stop sign. He’s had a spell of bad luck—and in that short encounter, saw fit to threaten you and your family (over what you had thought was water under the bridge).

99% of the time, everything was pleasant and relaxing. But, for 10 minutes, the ground shook. That was enough for you to leave town with a new and unexpected wariness. Even the language—“two things happened”—tells you what the primary experience was.

This is also the case in athletic training. Put another way, the same body that has to glean meaning from that unexpectedly stressful visit (in order to be able to adapt to the next threat) is the same one that you take to the gym or out on the trails. That same body has to figure out whether it makes more sense to treat a particular training event as an “endurance workout” or a “strength workout.”

When a run feels “rejuvenating”—it’s very likely that’s exactly what it’s doing for your body. (The opposite holds true as well.)

You can break down the experience of being mugged in ever finer detail, and identify sensory and psychological stressors, and observe their physiological and neurological effects . . . but you don’t really have to.

Don’t get me wrong—you’ll get far more data about the effects of a divorce or a family vacation if you go get an fMRI every time something happens. That is a fact. (You can probably make better lifestyle choices when you know for sure whether your amygdala lights up when you see pictures of your former spouse.) But you don’t need an fMRI to be spot on—in a general sense—when asked what either experience did for your mental and physical health.

You can say the same about phenomena such as autonomic readiness (of the nervous system), which contributes to produce our subjective feelings of readiness for a wide variety of tasks.

Our experience of readiness doesn’t just happen to co-occur with our physiological readiness. Look at it from an evolutionary point of view: we didn’t have heart rate variability apps or monitors “waaay back when.” Our experience of readiness has to emerge from the fact that our nervous system, metabolism, hormonal system, and motor capabilities are actually ready for whatever it is we feel ready for. This is essentially the same line of argument that Tim Noakes (in his immortal book Waterlogged) uses to argue that the best measure of physiologically relevant dehydration is the subjective experience of thirst.

(In the same book, Noakes also argues that the fact that this even needs to be argued shows just how disconnected from the obvious we’ve become.)

If the subjective and the physiological weren’t part and parcel of the same system (to say that they’re “linked” is a gross misrepresentation), we’d all be dead. In other words, our heart rate variability monitor isn’t really going to change until we feel ready—and if it does change but we still don’t feel ready, we can be quite sure that there’s some other measurable physiological parameter out there that explains why.

The biggest mistake we can make is to listen to our pet parameter while disregarding the conclusion of a built-in measuring device capable enough to have outcompeted every other life form on the savannah—a device without which Neil Armstrong would have made it to the orbit but not the surface of the moon.

Recipes, Training Ideas

Reader question: How would I fuel during a long run?

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A couple of weeks ago, SteveL asked me in the comments:

“How would you fuel during a long run?”

Allow me to be a bit tongue-in-cheek here. If SteveL means what we usually do by “long run”—that is, a training run and not a race—my answer is, “with body fat and oxygen.” In other words, not at all.

The physiological details of this are best left to another post, but the short answer is this: the goal of a long run is not just to run for a long time, but to develop the system that helps us run long. Crucially, that system is known as the aerobic system, which you can think of as the system that burns fats in presence of oxygen.

Here’s the critical detail: the fat you eat doesn’t reach your bloodstream for a few hours. So, unless your long run is very long, any fats you ingest during the run aren’t really going to go towards fueling that run.

Let’s discuss the more conventional fuels people use on their long run (sugar-laden fuels such as a 3-6% carb solution or gels). Great for races, but I’ll get to that in a bit. If you ingest them during a training run, you’re enabling your body to lean on its sugar-burning energy system (which it uses for short-duration, high-intensity bouts) for a long time.  This means 3 things:

  1. First and foremost, it enables your long run to be faster than is healthy: you’re liable to do what looks like a long run but is actually a bunch of short, medium/high-intensity training runs that in aggregate masquerade as a long run.
  2. Because you’re fueled with sugar lets your aerobic (fat-burning) system off the hook , which is the system that is supposed to power your long run.
  3. You’re using the short-duration, high-intensity (sugar-burning) system for a what should theoretically be a long-duration, low-intensity activity (which you’re effectively turning into a long-duration, medium/high intensity activity). You’ll wear your body down disproportionately.

To recap: no fuel for long training runs. Fats won’t help, and sugar is counterproductive.

(While the body does burn a mix of sugar and fat at all times, the longer the duration, the more fat should be in the mixture. Because the rate of fat-burning peaks at around 50-55% maximum work rate for most people, very long training sessions shouldn’t exceed this low intensity.)

Fueling during a race

Fueling during a race is different. You’re not trying to train anything here. You’re trying to get every bit of power you can from the machinery you’ve been developing in training, with the provisos that you (1) finish the race and (2) don’t blow the engine.

This means that you want to make sure you’re well-fueled (and you stay well-fueled) during a race. For anything that’s marathon length or below, fats still won’t help. For the vast majority of us, it’s still too short of a race. So, such races are the ones you want to approach with the run-of-the-mill advice on race fueling: your carb solutions and gels work great here.

There’s one consideration: don’t start fueling until you’re 20-30 minutes into the race. When your body isn’t already warmed up, it’s very easy for a shot of sugar to kick up your insulin levels, which reduces your fat-burning ability. But once you’re warmed up and burning fats at a high level, sugar has a much smaller effect.

 Fueling during an ultramarathon

Here’s where it gets tricky. There’s two sets of priorities to discuss: the physiological needs of the body and the practicality of fueling on the run.

The physiological needs:

  • Hydration (water plus electrolytes)
  • Nutrition (the right combination of macronutrients)
  • Digestion (continued function of digestive system throughout the run).

The practicality of fueling on the run:

  • Combining hydration with nutrition.
  • Creating a food that fits easily through the valve of a handheld water bottle.

Here’s a drink recipe which (for me) meets all these criteria:

Basic Ultramarathon fuel 

Ingredients_1

Directions:

  1. Add 1 cup of water into blender.
  2. Add all ingredients (heavier ingredients first).
  3. Blend on low until well-chopped.
  4. Add the rest of the water.
  5. Blend until smooth.
IMG_0506
This is what I use…

Nutrition Facts_1

Nutritional Rationale

Timing:

For a recipe such as this, I usually drink one serving (about 42 oz) over a period of 2-3 hours. This generally takes care of both my fueling and hydration concerns.

This suggestion is a TEMPLATE for people to try out during training runs. It’s important to adapt this or any recipe, workout, training plan, or racing strategy to your personal needs.

Protein

The reason I like including sizeable portions of all 3 macronutrients (carbs, fats, and proteins), is to incentivize the body to maintain the digestive system activated in a low-key but comprehensive way. This applies for protein in particular: while protein will not go towards fueling the body during a race, I put a small amount of it in order to create a more balanced digestion process.

The same goes with fiber (occurring mostly in the spinach, blueberries, and chia seeds). Ultramarathoners are prone to cramps, indigestion, and other digestive issues during the race. By putting a small amount of natural fiber in here (not so much that it slows down digestion), we can help “smooth out” digestion during the race.

Electrolytes

As you’ll notice, one serving of this drink has a staggering amount of potassium (almost 1.3g) and a respectable amount of sodium (just over 0.13g). The reason I like this 10:1 ratio of potassium to sodium is because a lack of potassium is linked to muscle cramps, and reduced nervous system function. (This can lead to lower coordination and reaction time, which can cause an injury).

Generally speaking, more potassium is better (up to a point, of course). 130 mg of sodium every 2-3 of hours is quite enough to keep a well-adapted athlete going during a long race.

Carbs and fat

The sugar calories are straightforward: these will go towards topping off your glycogen tank, in order to stave off fatigue and help your aerobic engine continue to burn fats.

Now we get to the tricky bit. Supposing that you drink 1 serving of the recipe in 2 hours, you’re getting around 160 calories of carbs and 155 calories of fats an hour. You might think that’s not really a lot of carbs. However, that’s the reason a majority of the fats in the drink come from medium chain triglycerides (MCTs), sourced from coconut oil.

Why MCTs?

MCTs are relatively easy to digest relative to other fats, and they also become available for fat-burning very quickly upon hitting the bloodstream, helping to increase fat-burning and accelerating the metabolism. In other words, “reducing” the possible sugar content of this drink by balancing it out with coconut oil is an excellent strategy for endurance races.

 

 

Principles of Training, Thinking in Systems

Is there really a difference between “injury-prevention” and “training specificity”?

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A lot of us are familiar with sports specificity: you tailor your training to achieve greater performance in individual sports. Some of us go as far as being “event-specific.” We train trails for trail running events. We practice running the inclines and hill lengths we’re likely to encounter during the event.

But I think that we can take the concept of training specificity a lot further: particularly as it pertains to the realm of injury prevention.

What does an injury mean from the perspective of athletic competency? It means that there was some stress, supposedly germane to the sport, that the body simply could not tolerate. Presumably, this is a stress that the body can (and should) adapt to.

I’m not talking about obscene stresses such as the micro-concussions that have been shown to cause brain damage in football players. I’m talking about simpler things: dehydration and hypoglycemia after a marathon, shin splints, etc.

Let’s take shin splints, for example. Shin splints are reputed to occur due to the repetitive stress associated with running. Shin splints—and the subsequent stress fracture—cause people to lose training time and training quality, increase the overall stress of training, etc.

My point is this: an inability to cope with a particular stress (resulting in an injury) is a bottleneck to development.

If an injury prevents a runner from improving, or puts their athletic future at risk (and it does), then injury-prevention should be at the very top of the priority list. Put another way, injury-prevention is the ultimate sports-specific training: it means training the body not just to get better at the sport, but to train the body to handle the basic stresses associated with the sport.

This is a difficult proposition for many people: it is different on a case-by-case basis. The same symptom (shin splints) can have a multitude of causes. When the issue is the amount of stress, increasing lower-leg strength by itself can solve the problem. But others may need to fix an imbalance between the front and back muscles of the lower leg, for example. Others yet may be erroneously unburdening the big calf muscles by giving the job of knee flexion entirely to the hamstrings.

Failure to address any of these issues can dramatically reduce the training response: tighter muscles and less mobility means less neuromuscular feedback. But a higher heart rate is necessary to drive stiff (and weak) muscles. This means more stress. And because some muscles are stiff, the body geometry is disadvantageous: it isn’t going to align itself (or remain aligned) with the primary vectors of force.

Fixing any of these issues will allow the body to learn from and adapt to the sport. Ultimately, I believe that the runner who “paradoxically” spends time correcting muscle imbalances or strategically strengthening bone, muscle, tendon, and connective tissue—and running less miles because of it—will need to run far fewer miles to observe the benefits of training.

We need to make the choice to not merely roll out our tight quads or hip adductors after the fact. I think we need to address the underlying cause of that tightness (a process which may or may not include myofascial release). And I think that we need to put this within the larger context of our training and racing: in no way does injury prevention or rehab constitute “taking time off” from training.

Preventing injuries and doing the rehab is a much better—and more honest— example of “training the body” than going out and slogging miles that are just going to put us back on the table. In every way that matters, we’re doing the training that our body needs, right now.  Tomorrow, we’ll be able to go out and do the training we want, and achieve the effects that we want.

And how much happier, faster, and healthier would we end up if we can trick ourselves into wanting to do the training our body needs?

Coaching, Principles of Training, Uncategorized

The Overlooked Mystery of Movement, Unlocked: My experience with the Pose Method Sports Technique Specialist Certification

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Movement isn’t generated by muscles.

This is the central theoretical point made by Dr. Nicholas Romanov, founder of The Pose Method, when teaching movement. He points out that the similarities between all the different human movements—swimming, walking, pitching, kicking—run deep, while the differences (which we naïvely believe are the larger part of the equation) are actually astonishingly superficial.

Dr. Romanov makes a critical distinction between movement—the displacement of our body in space (or of another object, such as a ball)—and repositioning (moving arms, hands, legs or shifting our torso around while remaining in the same spot).

Muscles allow us to reposition, sometimes at great speed. But in order to transform repositioning into movement, we need to add another critically important (and almost universally overlooked) component to the recipe: gravity.

Similar to how animal physiology evolved with the assumption that oxygen is a constant, the movement mechanics of all animals evolved with another assumption: that gravity is another constant, which we harness for movement as we harness oxygen for life.

Leonardo Da Vinci wrote: “Motion is created by the destruction of balance.”

What happens when we destroy balance—when we lean juust enough in some direction (say, forwards)? Gravity accelerates us quickly enough that we reflexively throw our foot down to catch ourselves in an attempt to find balance anew. And what if instead of stopping, we let ourselves continue falling? We’ll find that we need to throw down another foot, and another, and another. At that point, we’re running.

All movement begins with the destruction of balance, but there are an innumerable amount of movements that the body can make. The difference between each and every one of them is which position we initiate from.

But how about in throwing? Isn’t it quite clear that we “generate power” from the hips? Let’s see.

We all know the throwing stance: ball in hand at the level of the ear, elbow at ninety degrees and square with the shoulder, back foot pointing to the side and front foot pointed forward. But there’s more. We rotate our shoulders so that they are aligned in the direction of the throw.

quarterback

Our upper body is essentially twisted into a spring, ready to snap back around as soon as we release the potential energy we’ve created.

But in order for this to become a throw, there is one exceptionally important component missing—an action called unweighing. If there’s any shared movement between all sports, this is it. Unweighing is essentially an explosive shoulder shrug—the idea behind it being that initially it’s much easier to reposition a structure like the shoulders (which aren’t weighed down by something on top of them), and then follow in sequence with torso, hips, legs, and feet (which are).

Unweighing happens in a big way in this video of Drew Storen’s pitching mechanics, as well as in just about any video of Usain Bolt.

Once you’ve unweighed, your shoulders are flying. For all intents and purposes, they’re suspended in air. The abdomen isn’t supporting the shoulders anymore. The spine is free to extend, and accelerate the abdomen into the air. Your hips, knees, ankles, and feet are free to move.

Unweighing is the necessary first step to any human movement. While movement is still possible without active unweighing, performance suffers.

But remember, unweighing isn’t the only component: throwing involves a forward step—a momentary loss of balance. With it, gravity gets the perfect opportunity to accelerate our body. The bigger the step, the bigger the acceleration.

“The object which moves most rapidly is farthest from its balance.”

—Leonardo Da Vinci

Movement is in no way “accidental” or “passive” just because gravity is involved: A bigger “fall” in running or throwing means that the appropriate muscles have to contract more quickly in order to negotiate the greater acceleration and help the body travel to another balanced position—a second Pose.

When that foot lands, our leg stops moving abruptly. Milliseconds later, our hips, shoulders, elbow and wrist each come to a stop—and all that kinetic energy gets transferred into the ball, which continues to travel at great speed.

In throwing as in running (as in jumping, punching, and even swimming), every athletic movement is instigated by a loss of balance.

Let’s explicitly state the counterintuitive elegance of Dr. Romanov’s Pose theory: the variety of athletic movements isn’t due to a different “action” or “effort,” but rather that the initial position—the Pose that we lose balance from—and the ending position—the Pose that we travel to in order to regain it—are different.

For any movement, exactly two things happen between Poses: acceleration in some direction due to the force of gravity, and our single voluntary contribution—our only action: an explosive “unweighing” that allows the body to quickly (and reflexively) reposition its parts in its quest to return to balance.

Implicit in Pose theory is this notion: the best way to teach movement isn’t by teaching movement. The way to teach movement is by teaching the initial and ending Pose, teaching how to unweigh, and finally by teaching the conscious mind to let the body do its thing—to get the hell out of its way.

As Bruce Lee once said: “. . .and when there is an opportunity, I don’t hit. It hits, all by itself.”

Biomechanic Issues, Thinking in Systems, Training Ideas

Shoulder (T-Spine) training for runners: Completely overlooked, and absolutely necessary.

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The benefits of lower-body training have always been obvious for runners. For the past few years, we’ve seen that the ill-defined and ill-understood “core” has come into its own as a legitimate focus of attention for runners who want to better their athletic situation.

The shoulders are just as important as the core—and yet almost completely neglected.

Most of us who are a little bit studied in the science of running know that arm swing is largely passive—a way for the body to contralaterally balance the movement of the legs. So why should we even worry about the shoulders?

We should care because of how they are connected to the body and how they affect the areas around them. The shoulder region is also known as the “T-Spine”—the T-shaped structure created by the backbone, the shoulder blades, and the collarbone (and of course, the hugely complex array of muscles, tendons, and ligaments that contribute to its function).

If any one of the muscles implicated in T-spine function is impaired, functionality of the entire structure goes down the drain.

scap-muscles

Developing T-Spine functionality is important not only because the shoulders and arms are part of the body (and are needed for running well) but because in that immediate vicinity is the ribcage—and the ribcage houses the lungs and the heart, which are the main facilitators of the aerobic system (a.k.a. the distance runner’s main engine).

Bad T-spine function isn’t isolated to runners—it’s one of the biggest motor problems in the general population. In this sedentary world, our brains never had to understand how to use this complex (yet astonishingly elegant) interface between the arms and the torso.

Think about what happens when someone has bad general stability (they are “klutzy”), and their stability is challenged by walking on a balance beam or a raised log: they tense up and are unable to complete the task—or alternately, grossly underperform relative to someone with better motor control.

The same thing happens to the T-spine, particularly in a dynamic, repetitive-impact sport such as running. (Imagine, if you will, the same log or balance beam shaking repeatedly).

When faced with this kind of challenge, any impairment in function causes the T-Spine to seize up and refuse to move.The arms stop being able to swing freely. The “natural” arc that the arms would follow passively (if there was total freedom of movement) gets altered. Because the arm swing directly counterbalances the movement of the legs, either the legs move differently to match the different arm-swing, or the movement of the body stops being in sync with the forces traveling through it.

As is the case with Mr. Shutterstock here.

These are the building blocks for a running injury. (But it gets worse).

Since the shoulder blades sit on top of the ribcage (and the rest of the T-spine mechanism is literally all around it), the ability of the ribcage to expand and contract is immediately impaired. The diaphragm must work harder to make the lungs expand. Less oxygen permeates the body (with more effort), resulting is less aerobic development. In the long-term, improvement stagnates.

A mechanical problem can have far-reaching consequences: it can (indirectly) impair the body’s ability to utilize energy.

Or it can force a hopeful distance runner to think that they “aren’t made for endurance.”

The problem becomes exacerbated for broader-shouldered runners (like me) who lose upper-body mass due to the natural emphasis running places on the lower body system. These runners have comparatively more bone mass up top, which means that they need comparatively more muscle mass in order to keep that heavier structure mobile and stable.

When the T-Spine is neglected, muscle strength may drop to the point that it takes a lot more effort to keep this structure stable. Adding distance (or increasing power) may cause the weakened structure to seize up.

A seeming conflict of interest arises here: stockier runners have an increased need to lose weight to improve running economy. Keeping the muscle mass necessary to stabilize the T-Spine may mean that they won’t be as fast, at least in the short term.

The thing is, it’ll open up oceans of future potential. Usually, the main bottleneck for the development of a distance runner isn’t their weight. As Gray Cook said in a recent interview on T-Nation, “Technique is always the bottleneck of limitation.” This is true even when applied to something as basic as T-spine mobility. If the body—or a part of it—can’t move right, that athlete is never going to fulfill their potential.

T-Spine function is not the only problem plaguing runners. But how many runners may be plateauing because of this—and don’t know it?

UPDATE: While we can’t pinpoint the origin of Mr. Shutterstock’s problem from a picture—the problem may originate in the pelvis, for example—it is plainly evident that the shoulders, arms, and the entire T-Spine isn’t moving correctly.

UPDATE 10/22/15: Matt Whitehead from Oregon Exercise Therapy shared an excellent article about many of the specific postural imbalances associated with T-Spine dysfunction. He makes a great point about the “dos” and “don’ts” for correcting these kinds of problems: “[Nike athlete Mary Cain’s] coach can drill her over and over about swinging her arms straight forward and back, but it just won’t happen until her upper body posture is improved.”

Thinking in Systems

High-intensity fitness culture, explained in systems: Physiology, evolution, overtraining in ultrarunners, and what it means for the rest of us.

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In the modern approach to training and fitness, the idea that you should (or need to) train at a low intensity is utterly neglected. This neglect is a huge problem. It benefits the few, and harms the many. And even when this philosophy works, it only does so up to a point.

A recent article in Outside Magazine bit into this issue with great abandon. The Outside article discussed the extreme example: Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) in ultrarunners. Many elite ultrarunners have become seriously overtrained, finding that their legendary competitive and running ability evaporates almost overnight. And we see this sort of thing across the board: in crossfitters who get exertional rhabdo; in recreational runners that start too hard. But why does this happen?

Our present fitness culture has an extremely damaging “more is better” and “no pain, no gain” mentality. If your favorite sport is HIIT or CrossFit, you’re prompted to increase the intensity, to “feel the burn,” and to “not feel your legs after leg day.” You name it, it’s out there. If your favorite sport is running, everything around you tells you to collect miles like they were baseball cards—the more the better.

The problem is this: whether you’re an elite ultraunner or someone who is just looking to shed some pounds, the amount (or type) of training that society pushes you towards typically means a lot of stress. It’s not that you won’t get quick results with that high-intensity training program (or by going out and clocking as many miles as you can). It’s that in doing this, a majority of people cross a stress threshold beyond which it’s impossible to keep these gains. It happens to Joe Smith at the gym, and it happens to the ultrarunner.

But in order to understand why it happens (and why you can’t cheat your way around it) we have to discuss a critically important biological system known as the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal, or HPA axis.

The HPA axis is the system that creates the autonomic stress response (ASR)—which kicks up the organism’s stress levels (think: alertness) in order to survive a challenge to its existence. Let’s put this in a real-world example: alertness alone isn’t enough for an antelope to escape a lioness. There are two more components to ASR: First, the antelope’s heart rate has to go through the roof in order to bring a high volume of blood to the muscles. Second, the antelope’s anaerobic energy system—which burns sugar without the presence of oxygen, kicks in.

There’s another energy system available to the antelope: the aerobic energy system. It burns a much more plentiful resource—fats—but it takes some time. The fats have to be broken down into sugar, transported through the bloodstream to the muscle fibers, and combined with oxygen inside the mitochondria, before they can be converted into energy. Typically, it takes the aerobic system 15 minutes to get to full burn. But the antelope doesn’t have 15 minutes. It doesn’t even have a few seconds for the initial gulp of oxygen to reach the muscles through the bloodstream. There’s a lioness charging towards it at 40 mph. It needs energy now.

lion hunt
Or towards a water buffalo.

Stress, a high heart rate, and the anaerobic system are hardwired together in every animal. This wiring has to be absolutely reliable. If it wasn’t—if, given certain conditions, you could get a high heart rate and stress but no spike in anaerobic activity—you will die. As far as your body is concerned, in a “real-world scenario” the price for not having these three things occur together every time, with utter certainty, is death.

That’s what your body is thinking—thanks to your HPA axis—every time you get too stressed. Your HPA axis has to assume that there’s an imminent threat to your life, and make all of your internal systems react accordingly. If not, you will die.

The anaerobic system takes over to ensure the immediate survival of the organism. It doesn’t just happen to burn the fuel we use in the short term (sugar). We are wired so that when our bodies are thinking and acting in the short-term (that is, prioritizing escape from a threat over long-term health) we use the anaerobic system.

On the other hand, when our bodies are behaving with the long-term in mind, we use the aerobic system. In the long-term, it doesn’t matter if all the energy isn’t available right now—we’re not running away from anything. On top of that, we have fats, which is a more reliable and plentiful energy source. Sure, it takes a little bit more time to get energy from fats than from sugar, but time is something we have.

But that’s not all: there are reasons to NOT use the anaerobic system in the long-term. Burning sugar without the presence of oxygen wears down the engine: it accumulates protons—hydrogen ions (H+)—which cause the body’s pH to fall, becoming more acidic. (The idea that lactate is the culprit of muscle acidification is a misconception: the presence of lactate predicts, rather than causes, proton-based acidosis in the body).

In the short-term, the antelope’s body doesn’t care about its pH balance. If it doesn’t move, NOW, that lioness will take it down. The temporary acidification of the body is a small price to pay for escape. If everything goes as planned, 45 seconds from now, the antelope will have a chance to calm down. Its stress levels will drop, it’s heart rate will slow down, and a powerful aerobic base will kick in and all the lactate will get churned through the muscle mitochondria and converted into more energy. The proton build-up that happened during the chase will be quickly negated. In that process, a final acidic by-product will come out in a form that the body is designed to quickly and competently expel: CO2.

As soon as the body’s short-term survival has been secured, and it starts thinking in the long-term, it uses its aerobic system.

But if you are under chronic stress, your body never gets a chance to think in the long-term. Remember that stress, an elevated heart rate, and anaerobic function cannot be untied. If you are under stress all the time (even if it’s work stress), you’ll have at least some anaerobic function. Your body will be burning more sugar and less fat. As you use the aerobic system less and less, it will grow less inclined (and less capable) of fueling your daily activities with fat. You’ll have to rely on dietary sugar to keep your energy levels up. You’ll burn even less fat. You’ll slowly and steadily gain weight. But your body will also have a higher proton concentration than it should. It’ll remain more acidic. You’ll wear it down, putting yourself at risk of chronic disease.

Just look at how this snowballs. The media (and your peers) are kind enough to pelt you with exercise programs that promise quick, short-term gains! You can see where this is going. You’re piling acute stress on top of chronic stress. Your problem wasn’t the excess fat itself: it was that your long-term energy system—the aerobic system—was compromised. And those quick, short-term gains that you’re promised? You might get them, but at the cost of keeping them.

Yet again, you’re using the short-term energy system. Yet again, you’re training your body to think in the short-term. The energy system that is responsible for your body’s long-term upkeep is incompetent. By definition, you’ll be unable to maintain that level of activity in the long-term. You’ll lose those short-term gains.

Period.

The problem isn’t that you’re flaky, or that you’re not an athletic person, or that you’re not determined. No amount of discipline or determination will be able to overcome the fundamental problem: that you trained for the short-term instead of the long-term.

Defining our Terms, Thinking in Systems

Is “being slow” a protective measure for runners with bad form?

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We runners—and the scientists that study running—cannot seem to get away from talking about form. Across all sports, we have discussions about “good” or “bad” form. In running we don’t: we argue that all runners are different—that somehow, in running we are all unique. In principle, I think this is a little odd: when we’re trained correctly we all swim alike, golf alike, punch alike, but not run alike?

Maybe there is no right way. Maybe there is.

In recent posts I’ve made the argument that, for all sports, “good form” means “the musculoskeletal configuration that can produce the greatest power output.” I believe that we should adopt the same standard for running. I believe that if we don’t, we are depriving people of the guidance they need to achieve their athletic potential.

There are several reasons for this. As I discussed in earlier posts, the first and most important reason is because across sports (whether they be power or endurance sports), the winner is the one who can generate the most power—technically, who can produce the most work (or energy) in the shortest amount of time. This is obvious in track and field sports, but it holds even for the ultramarathon: the best ultramarathoner is ultimately the one who converted more energy into forward motion in the shortest amount of time.

But there are deeper reasons: For example, a reduction in power output—running slower, that is—can be a protective measure.

The brain has excellent muscular inhibition capabilities. In a well-known lecture, Gray Cook eloquently describes how, when certain shoulder problems exist, the brain reduces the body’s grip strength if and only if the hand rises above the shoulder. When the brain detects that there’s a problem, it inhibits muscular activation that would allow for a behavior that could result in damage: gripping something heavy above the shoulder level is dangerous with an unstable shoulder, and so the brain disallows it.

Running, an activity in which the body incurs an astounding amount of shock and load, should follow the same pattern: if there is an important mechanical or neuromuscular pathology, the brain will limit the energy available to power the running gait.

Yassine-diboun
Yassine Diboun, one of the heroes representing the US in the 2015 IAU Trail Championships. (This is NOT a slow runner).

Suppose that someone toes the starting line on a marathon (or a 5k, for that matter) with unstable hips, dumb glutes or abdominal muscles that don’t know how to stabilize the spine in relation to a pelvis (and lower extremities) that are going to be contralaterally loaded with up to three bodyweights per stride. In that situation, it is completely reasonable for the brain to execute a similar calculation to the one that Cook describes in the abovementioned video. However, instead of reducing the power output available to the hand and forearm muscles, the brain inhibits muscles related to gait (whether they be the weak muscles themselves or other muscles up or down the kinetic chain).

Either way, those muscle imbalances are reducing power output, effectively producing a “slow runner.”

But lets think of the implications of this: How many runners are protecting themselves from injury by being slow?

Let’s put this question in a more compelling format: how many runners with a high risk for injury are remaining untreated (meaning that their athletic development is being compromised) because they have been conveniently categorized as “slow runners”?

We shouldn’t just say that the correct running form is what “feels right”: suppose that a golfer has poor sensation in their external and internal obliques. Would the proper golf swing “feel right” for them? Absolutely not! That golfer must go to a health specialist to integrate those muscles functionally into the rest of the body. Then, that musculature must be trained to produce the golfing swing that can generate the most power.

Similarly, establishing the “correct” running form as the one that allows people to produce a greater power output allows us to guide people towards greater athletic performance.

But there’s more: remember that inhibitory reductions in power output are a protective measure. This means that the process of “running the right way” will center around eliminating neurological, muscular, and skeletal imbalances and their resulting gait pathologies. That way, all protective reductions in athletic output will be minimized. More people will be fast, and they’ll be fast because they’re less likely to be injured.

Biomechanic Issues

Athletic performance is not about efficiency. It’s about power.

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One of the most oft-used pieces of artillery in the debate of minimalism versus maximalism, forefoot versus hindfoot, and barefoot versus shod, is the discussion of efficiency. Numerous studies have come out that rank the efficiency of these running types against each other, and consistently find that shod/hindfoot/maximalist tends to be more efficient.

(For the record, I think that the first camp that made the efficiency claim was the barefooter/forefooter/minimalist one. For reasons discussed below, that was a bad call).

Anyhow, it’s time to put this discussion to rest: Better athletic performance has never been a function of efficiency, when efficiency is defined as “lower energy consumption for a given speed.”

It has, however, always been a function of increased power output.

Before going into the science of it, let’s discuss how this makes sense from a logical perspective. Time has alwasy been the primary form of currency. A powerful runner can finish a race and begin recovery much more quickly than a slower runner. This frees the powerful runner from the effects of the race much more quickly, and reduces the time that it takes for this person to engage fully with a new task, relative to a less powerful runner traveling the same distance.

The benefits of this are as obvious as they are many, whether we be talking evolutionarily, or in terms of the body’s economy. This also holds when you look at how we define performance across all sports: increased power (and not increased efficiency) begets greater performance. Whether it be during a running race or a baseball game, whoever can apply the most energy effectively in the shortest amount of time towards achieving the goal will come out on top.

(I’ll discuss the deeper implications of this sentence in another post.)

The science corroborates this theory. In Running Science, Owen Anderson is quite clear: “The marathon is a power race.” He discusses at length how the idea of doing long, slow training for what is (presumably) a long, slow race is superficially logical but ultimately flawed. While developing aerobic capacity is immeasurably important for the marathon, as speeds get faster, greater power becomes more and more important.

The importance of power holds even for the ultramarathon. Numerous studies have been done confirming the idea that phyisological indicators of power maximums—peak treadmill velocity and VO2 MAX—correlate strongly with ultramarathon performance.

The sports technique (whether it be running technique, golf technique, swimming technique, etc.) that lends itself to the development of greater power, and not increased efficiency, can be judged to be “better,” given that what makes us universally better at sports is the application of greater power. As this article finds, more runners rise onto their forefoot the faster they go. Landing on the hindfoot is reserved for the slower crowd.

But there may be other, more insidious problems with seeking efficiency in lieu of (or at the cost of) power. In my last article I wrote how, if increasing efficiency is our primary goal, at some point we are going to be sacrificing power—basically engineering our own performance losses.

It’s fine with me that some people genuinely don’t want to seek greater performance, and rather run (or do other sports) for maintenance, rather than increase, of fitness. But this discussion of performance brings up a series of questions that I believe are legitimate: is heel-striking a “running style,” or is it a biomechanical feature—a hallmark—of subcompetitive fitness? Are heel-strikers slower, or does heel-striking make the runner slower (or alternately, become a barrier to improvement)?

I believe that this discussion merits an extensive inquiry into why heel-striking is the form of choice across a majority of runners. Is this the case because more efficient is better? Or is it the case that a majority of runners are lacking in the aerobic, muscular, or metabolic power necessary to sustain a more costly technique—one which constitutes the gateway to greater athletic performance?

These are not rhetorical questions, and they are certainly not answers. However, we treat the literature’s findings in regard to efficiency as if it somehow settles the footstrike debate (or lends evidence either way). It’s time to open the discussion again, and do so by asking questions that are more relevant than efficiency to the human body’s design, as they are to its athletic performance.

Uncategorized

Please, leave your robotic performance-enhancing devices at the starting line.

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Scientific advances in assistive devices such as supportive robotic exoskeletons can have great benefits for people with irreversible musculoskeletal problems or severe movement impairment. These devices may have excellent military applications.

In this post I’ll discuss something different: the claim, as covered by an article in Outside Magazine, that these devices have a legitimate and lasting place in the domain of athletic performance.

In a word: no. In two: bad idea.

Continue reading Please, leave your robotic performance-enhancing devices at the starting line. →

Coaching, Principles of Training

Athletics’ dysfunctional marriage: can injury prevention be reconciled with performance training?

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Show me a runner. You’re showing me someone who’s run through pain. Isn’t that true? When you’ve been in the middle of a long run and felt the beginnings of a shin splint, you’re finally in the club. But we can’t stop now! There’s miles to be logged. Our marathon training plan says 60 miles a week, and this long run is 17.

We’ve faced with having to ask the dreaded question: should I choose to continue this training, or should I choose to prevent the injury?

Continue reading Athletics’ dysfunctional marriage: can injury prevention be reconciled with performance training? →