Migrating over to CompleteCoach.pro

This wordpress.com site is going well, but I’d like a little more control over the configuration, and I also want to start future-proofing what I might want to do with the blog. So, I have decided to migrate this over to CompleteCoach.pro

You shouldn’t notice any difference, but by the end of the month, I will most likely stop posting here and be posted exclusively over at CompleteCoach.pro

If you are an email subscriber, I’ve already migrated your subscription over to the new site – I hope this is OK. Please feel free to unsubscribe if it isn’t. If you are following this blog, I’d appreciate it if you could come over to Completecoach.Pro and start following me there. As far as I can see, there is no easy way for me to do that for you.

Hope you carry on reading and following me over at the new site – CompleteCoach.pro

Survive and thrive when you feel like things are getting on top of you

Things can feel like they are getting on top of you for many reasons. From the news of  death of a loved one or loss of a job – from the collapse of a relationship to financial problems. When you are feeling like things are running away from you, it can feel like an emotional hurricane is ripping through your  mind and body, hurling painful thoughts and feelings in all directions.

Here are some things you might like to try when you feel like this:

Slow your breathing
• Take a few deep breaths, and mindfully observe the breath flowing in and flowing out. This will help to anchor you in the present.

Take note
• Take note of your experience in this moment. Notice what you are thinking. Notice what you are feeling.  Notice what you are doing. Notice how your thoughts and feelings are swirling around, and can easily  carry you away if you allow them.

Open up
• Open up around your feelings. Breathe into them and make room for them. Open up to your thoughts too:  take a step back and give them some room to move, without holding onto them or trying to push them away. See them for what they are and give them space, rather than joining and over-identifying with them.

Pursue your values
• Once you’ve done the above three steps, you will hopefully be in a state of mindfulness. The next step is to respond to the crisis by pursuing a valued course of action. Connect with your values: ask yourself,

‘What do I want to be about, in the face of this crisis?

What do I want to stand for?

How would I like to act, so that I can look back years from now and feel proud of my response?’

Feeling more centred and calm, and being able to see your emotions as something apart from you, that doesn’t define the totality of you – these skills will help to get you into a better frame of mind to accept your thoughts and feelings and start to be able to engage with your situation.

(Adapted from Russ Harris, The Happiness Trap, 2008)

How to get your mojo back after reaching your goal

The feeling that comes after successfully accomplishing your mission is usually one of satisfaction with a job well done. However, we can sometimes be left wondering, “what now?”

Getting yourself motivated after reaching your goals can be hard. In this post over at Kinetic Revolution, I write about some of the traps we can fall into after success, and how the concept of flow can help you to re-calibrate your goals and efforts to regain your lost mojo.

What I’ve learned about running by running

During a 27km, 2 hour 45 minute run today as part of my build up to the Great Barrier Island Marathon on October 13, I had plenty of time to think about the most important things I’ve learned about running during my learning-to-run journey. Here’s a few of my thoughts:

The couch-to-5Km programme works. I hated running as a kid. Never saw the point of it as an adult, until I moved to NZ – where my stunning surroundings invited me to engage with them. When I first started running about 4 years ago, I couldn’t run for more than about 60 seconds without getting pretty out of breath. If I pressed past that to 3 minutes, I would have horrible shin splints the following day. I tackled this by adopting a couch-to-5km run/walk programme, over 8 weeks. This is where you start running for very little time, and walking for a lot of the time, gradually building up the total time, while increasing running time, and reducing the walking time. It works. And quickly enough to see progress. Which brings me to my second point…

Join a running group. Whether that is a formal club, or a group of people who get together at a lunch time at work, getting out there as a group is fun, and can be the motivation you need when you’d struggle to get out there by yourself. I like a combination – social runs, and solo runs – both work for me.

Resist the temptation to overdo it. Once I’d done this for a while, I started to be able to run 5-7km without feeling like I was going to expire. Like many other beginners, my problem was that I ran too much, too frequently. In the end, I hurt my knee. Physiotherapy revealed my weak core strength, and instability in my hips when I ran. Physiotherapy exercises help to solve my issue, and pilates helped to keep the problem at bay. I’ve not had a serious injury since.

Core work, strength and cross training is critical but easy to neglect. As well as core strength work ,your whole kinetic chain needs looking after – from top to toe. Changing your routine to do different activities may also help keep you fresh and interested, as well as strengthening major and stabiliser muscle group.

Get off-road. Speaking of stabiliser muscles, don’t run too many miles on the road. As well as being pretty hard and tough on your legs and feet, it doesn’t give you much of a neuromuscular workout, as it can be a monotonous surface. Running on grass, trail, rocks etc sharpens your senses and works you stabiliser muscles. Don’t expect to go as fast, switch off your iPod, and engage with your surroundings. And hills are good for you too.

Once you get past 40 minutes continuous running, it gets easier. Much easier. For me anyway.

Watch for overtraining and junk miles. I have learned that I can now train for a marathon by running 3 times a week: 1 x interval run, 1 x tempo run, 1 x slow long run. I won’t do the marathon in a particularly quick time, but I’ll enjoy it, and I’ll be able to fit the training into quite a busy life. Running more than this increases my risk of injury. I try to spend any other time I have for exercise doing strength and flexibility routines, and other aerobic / anaerobic threshold training work, like spinning, pilates, stretching, circuits etc. By the way, I found pilates ridiculously difficult to start with, but I had a great instructor and it gets easier. A bit.

A training structure helps. See above. Of course, it’s fun to run for fun. But a focus to your training will help you to produce results much faster, and can also stop you putting yourself at risk of injury or worse.

Run tempo, and run speed. Train for what you want to reproduce. If you want to run fast, you have to run fast in your training.

Every now and again, back your mileage down. You can’t keep running massive mileage, week in, week out, no matter how great it makes you feel. Your body needs recovery time. If you don’t respect that, your body will show you that it needs recovery time, and your enforced injury break will be a lot harder to deal with that voluntarily stepping it down every now and again. Even the pros cycle their training. Take the hint.

Run s-l-o-w when training for longer events. Far slower than you think you need to. The long run is the cornerstone of any marathon training plan and is run slowly to ensure that you are developing the fat-burning metabolic pathway, and to minimise the effect of fatigue and risk of injury. The biggest mistake I made in my early long runs was running too fast – way too fast. You need to run about 1 minute per mile pace slower than your tempo run, if not slower. Another way to gauge it is at about 20% slower than the pace you want to do your marathon in, or about 25% slower than your last half-marathon. Otherwise try around 70-85% of your maximal heart rate.

Get your running gait looked at and work on it if you need to. I had my whole kinetic chain looked at as I was heel-striking too much. We can fall into the trap that we should just know how to run. That might be true when we are kids, but we spend our lives neglecting our muscular development and confining ourselves tyo desk jobs and sedentary lifestyles. Don’t assume that your running style will help rather than hinder you. Through learning to engage my glutes more, I have a far more efficient running style, and my shoes now show no wear at the heels, and some nice wearing down in the midfoot landing area. This helps with fatigue and injury risk,and is one of the best things I have done in my running adjustments.

Be careful if you decide to go barefoot running. It’s fun, but watch out if you go straight into long distance. I use this for drills and focusing on form., over shorter distances – 2-3km. You might choose to try this differently – there is plenty of guidance out there on the web, and I might write about it another time.

There’s more, and a lot about nutrition, but I’ll save that for another time. Any questions, leave a comment or fire me a message.

What have you learned in your running adventures?

Runrunlive podcast research update: Chronic stress can delay your workout recovery

In this week’s update on the runrunlive podcast , I give a heads-up on how chronic stress can delay your recovery from an intense workout.

Or you can listen to it here: I’m at the start, after the intro music:

Guest blogpost at Profellow – Tips for applying for a Fellowship

 

Back in 2009 I was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Society Fellow based at the National Institute of Mental Health in Tokyo. The application process for Fellowships like this can be a bit tricky, but the payoff in the experience and contacts you gain is enormous, both professional and culturally. In this guest blogpost at Profellow.com, I outline some tips for getting through a Fellowship application process. I hope you find them useful.

Chronic stress slows your post-workout recovery

If you want to optimise your recovery from a hard workout, you need to watch the levels of stress in your daily life. So says the latest research out of the Yale Stress Centre this month. You might use your workout as an outlet for the stresses and strains that you experience in your daily life, or when your job feels like it is getting on top of you. And exercise is a powerful tool in the quest to reduce stress. However, if you get into that workout with high levels of stress, it will take you longer to recover.

This small but interesting study seems to show that during the hour following a lower body heavy resistance exercise task to failure, students with higher chronic stress scores took longer to recover their maximum strength than their lower stressed colleagues. The lower stressed students had regained 60% of their leg strength after 60 minutes – the more stressed students had regained an average of only 38% of their leg strength at the same measurement point. This effect seemed to hold, even when other possible influences such as fitness, workload and training experience were controlled.

The authors hypothesise that the underlying level of chronic stress pre-workout influences the inflammatory response in the body such that it becomes inadequate to facilitate the repair caused by the acute physiological stress of a tough workout. But the differences are probably due to more than just hormonal control of the inflammatory response. Stress means that we are more likely to sleep worse, eat less optimally and generally not take as good care of ourselves – all these factors can influence how the body heals itself. These are likely to be bi-directional relationships too.

So if you’re stressed and need to workout, you can still go ahead because exercise is an excellent stress-reduction too. But remember, that you’re likely to recover better if you can manage your stress in other ways too before you start to work out. Mindfulness techniques, and focusing on your breathing to influence your parasympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system responsible for promoting a calm response) are fantastic ways to bring down the physiological stress indicators in your body. You can see here and here for more tips on that, but here is a simple breathing exercise to try to help bring down your stress levels before you workout:

• Pause for two minutes to just observe your body breathing
• Do this by following your inhalations and exhalations, without trying to control or change anything – just observe
• Focus on feeling the sensations of breathing in the nostrils, the chest and the belly
• If your mind wanders, that’s okay – just return your focus to your breathing
• Practice daily – you’ll get better at it

Sleep can promote insight and problem-solving, so get more of it

Getting enough sleep is good for you in so many ways. For example, getting enough sleep is necessary to help you recover and repair muscles after your workouts. Another function of sleep may be demonstrated by the many accounts of how it has helped people to come up with some innovative and creative solutions to problems they were wrestling with, whether consciously or not.

• John Steinbeck once wrote, It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee hass worked on it
• Paul McCartney reported that as a 22-year-old in 1965, he dreamed the melody of the song Yesterday, and played it on the piano immediately on waking
• Katherine Mansfield had an unusual dream experience through the eyes of a 5 year-old boy – this became her successful short story, Sun and Moon
• Frederick Banting reportedly dreamed of a way to isolate insulin, and therefore make diabetes treatable
• When we have a problem that we need time to sort out, we say that we will sleep on it.

A conversation with Rachel on Twitter made me reflect on research that I knew about on how sleep can help to promote insight and problem solving. Insight signifies a restructuring that leads to a sudden gain of knowledge that is explicit and able to be articulated, and that leads to a change in behaviour. Sleep seems to have the effect of consolidating recent memories and could therefore allow insight by changing or shuffling their representational structures. This reconfiguration could underlie the Aha! moment that we sometimes have when we wake – the problem that we went to bed thinking about now seems to have a possible solution.

In one experiment, researchers asked participants to transform a sequence of 8 digits to a new sequence by applying two simple rules. As the participants got practice at the task, they got faster at it. However, unbeknownst to the participants, there was an additional ‘hidden’ rule which wasn’t mentioned, and was therefore processed at an implicit level of awareness. The participants seem to get this hidden rule suddenly, or develop insight into it, and this was shown by a sudden shift in moving from a sequential, iterative response to jumping to the final solution in advance. Once the participants had training on the task, the training period was followed by 8 hour intervals of either 8 hours of nocturnal sleep, 8 hours of nocturnal wakefulness or 8 hours of daytime wakefulness.

When tested again on blocks of the learning tasks those participants who had slept seemed show insight into the hidden rule at almost double the probability of the wakefulness groups. Sleep seems to facilitate insight into rules that explicitly hidden from us – we seem to be able to make the leap to solve the problem much better once we have slept. Dreams seem like they might be important in this process in that they might help to reformulate problems in ways we can’t fathom when we are awake. They may help us to reconceptualise the problems before us, the issues we are wrestling with in different ways, enabling insight.

So, the next time you are up working late on a problem, and the solution isn’t coming to you, go to bed and get some sleep. Chances are that you’re more likely to have found a way forward after having slept than staying up all night continuing to work on the problem. And your body will love you for it too.

Your physical experiences influence how you think, feel and make decisions

It’s true that the way people feel think and decide can be altered by their circumstances. This field of ’embodied cognition’ explores the theory that a person’s physical experiences subtly and unconsciously influence their psychological states. Underpinning this is the notion that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind. In practice, what this means is that our cognition, our representation and understanding of our world is not entirely defined by what is going on in our brains in terms of actual physical activity. Rather, our experiences in the physical world are an important influence. It is also related to the idea that the brain circuits responsible for abstract thinking are closely tied to those circuits that analyze and process sensory experiences received from the body — and its role in how we think and feel about our world.

This approach has important implications. By expanding the resources available to solve a task from simply the brain to include the body and the brain circuits that processes sensory information received perceptual and motor systems, we’ve opened up the possibility that we can solve a task in a very different way than a brain by itself might solve the task. A classic example that is often cited is the baseball outfielder problem where the informational problem of catching the ball is solved by moving in a particular way – a solution that requires both the body and the brain.

Recently, researchers used an adapted embodied cognition approach to examine whether seemingly unrelated experiences affect individuals’ preferences for stability. Although this study is still in press, a write-up about it can be found here and in a recent edition of The Economist. The researchers split a group in two, assigning one half to a slightly wobbly table and chair, while others had stable furniture. When asked to rate the stability of four celebrity couples, those in the ‘wobbly’ group rated the couple as significantly less stable that the ‘non-wobbly furniture’ group. Moreover, when asked to rate their preferences for traits in potential romantic partners (all participants were romantically unattached), those in the ‘wobbly’ group said that they valued stability in their own relationships more highly to a statistically significant level.

It seems that even a small amount of wobbliness in your physical environment seems to be able to influence the desire for more stable surroundings, including potential partner choice. So the next time you find yourself making seemingly strange decisions that you are having trouble understanding, ask yourself how much you are being affected by the context you find yourself in. And perhaps change your context if you want to experience a different outcome.

 

Thirty minutes exercise is enough to start losing weight

If weight loss is your goal, you may have been discouraged by the amount of exercise you might need to commit to in order to make a meaningful difference. It’s the sort if thing that can put you off your workout altogether if you’re not careful. Not any more. This research seems to indicate that 30 minutes of exercise is just as effective as 60 minutes in promoting weight loss.

In a sample of 60 heavy – but healthy – men over 13 weeks, half the group were set to exercise for 60 minutes a day wearing a heart rate monitor and a calorie counter, whereas the half of the group only exercised for 30 minutes per day. Both halves of the group had to exercise enough to raise a sweat.

On average, those who exercised for 30 minutes per day lost 3.6kg over the 13 weeks – the average weight loss in the 60 minutes per day exercise group was 2.7kg. Actual fat mass was reduced by similar amounts for both groups – approximately 4kg. A bonus for the 30 minute a day group was that they seemed to burn more calories than expected for the training programme that was set for them. Another key factor was that there did not seem to be any statistically significant changes found in energy intake or non-exercise physical activity that could explain the different responses between the 30 mins v 60 mins exercise per day groups.

A few explanations were put forward by the Danish researchers, though we can’t be certain about any of them. Amongst them, they suggest that perhaps 30 minutes of exercise felt so ‘doable’ that the participants had energy left over to start exercising more intensely within their 30 minute allocation per day.

A feature of this research is that it focuses on a group of moderately but not severely overweight men – a group that now makes up 40% of the Danish male population. It certainly adds data to the general evidence that 30 minutes of aerobic exercise on most days – even if you break that up into smaller chunks – is a worthwhile and beneficial goal to set yourself.