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?

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

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.

Does thinking that you are fat make you fat?

What we have suspected for some time – that constantly being bombarded with pictures of skinny people – may have a negative impact on our own thoughts, feelings and behaviour after all. Indeed, despite the images of super-thin bodies become omnipresent and infecting more and more of our waking moments, at a population level we are becoming more overweight and obese.

It looks like the kind of comparison that this ubiquitous imagery could encourage has a significant impact. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have found that normal weight teenagers who perceive themselves as fat are more likely to grow up to be fat. This is the first study to look at the relationship between perceived weight and actual weight in a longitudinal study of teenagers and young adults. 1196 normal range weight adolescents were followed up as young adults 11 years later. After controlling for covariates such as age, sex etc, adolescents who perceived themselves as overweight had a significantly larger weight gain into young adulthood that adolescents who perceived themselves as having a normal weight (0.66 BMI units; 3.46cm waist circumference). This was unrelated to levels of physical activity.

Thinking that you are fat as an adolescent – even when you are not – can lead to become significant fatter as an adult. 22% of girls rated themselves as overweight as teens, compared to 9% of boys – this might be due to media focus on body image focusing on girls – especially at the time that these young adults were teens. Worryingly, 59% of girls who felt fat as teens became overweight as adults. If we consider waist circumference, 78% of teens who initially perceived themselves as fat later became overweight as adults.

It’s difficult to know what causes the increase in weight, and it is likely to be complex. We know that stress can cause an increase in weight – the authors suggest that the psychosocial stress of not being your ideal body type (wherever that idea may come from), as well as thinking of yourself as overweight can lead to weight gain. Perhaps another explanation is that seeing yourself as fat can lead to skipping of meals – and we know that dropping breakfast has been linked to obesity through various mechanisms.

The lesson I take away from this is the importance of anchoring our self-perceptions of weight in fact, rather than glossy imagery that we come across every day. This is even more important in the crucial developmental years of adolescence, where we try to understand and balance the plethora of information telling us how we should be adults and how to be acceptable to ourselves and others. Challenging this information, and developing alternate pathways through healthy diet, exercise and mental wellbeing is so important, and is a set of skills that needs to be taught.

Midlife is not too late to start exercising and reaping the benefits

An encouraging study led by Dr Mark Hamer at my old College – University College London – suggests that it is never too late to start exercising and accrue the protective benefits against heart problems. In a study of over 4000 men and women with an average age of 49 years from the Whitehall II cohort study, their research showed that those who had been exercising regularly seemed to show lower markers of inflammation in their blood assays over 10 years of follow-up. This is important, because inflammation in the body tends to increase as we get older, and this inflammation has been identified as a risk in developing heart disease. As well as confirming the well-known link between exercise and improved heart health, this study seems to be the first to identify the anti-inflammatory effects of exercise as the possible mediating mechanism for these benefits.

The good news in this study is that the level of exercise needed to receive these protective benefits didn’t seem to be all that taxing. A mere 2.5 hours of moderate activity was all that was required to show the associated reduction in inflammatory markers. That means, you don’t have to be chained to a treadmill at the gym – brisk walks that raise a sweat count, as do activities such as gardening and mowing the lawn etc. Aim for around 120 beats per minute or slightly higher. However, its worth noting that people who stuck to their exercise plan for the full 10 years seemed to get the most benefit. Commitment to exercise as a lifestyle still seems to be the best route to wellbeing.

Some caution is still needed in interpreting the results of the study. The research relies upon people reporting their own levels of physical activity, and we tend to over-report this when asked. And the study also looked more at heart problems rather than heart disease itself. I’d be tempted to say that more research is needed, but there are other views on that. Anyway, my view is these findings are a great launchpad to take action.

So, whatever your age, if you’ve been inspired by the Olympics to become more physically active and to step up your exercise, here’s another good reason to do so. Remember though, if you haven’t been so physically active in a while, take things slow and steady. That way, your muscles, heart and lungs can get used to working a bit harder, you won’t feel so bad in the day or two following exercise, and you’ll be much more likely to feel like giving it another go in the following days, weeks and months.

Have fun!

The key to managing your weight is eating less, not exercising more

New research in a hunter-gatherer community seems to indicate that managing what that you eat is more important than exercise in determining how much weight you gain (or lose).

A study into energetics and obesity in the Hazda people of Tanzania revealed that although physical activity levels were much higher for Hazda men and women than their western counterparts, once size and weight were taken into account their metabolic rates were pretty similar. This was something of a surprise, as most people would expect that Hazda people, and others living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle would burn many more calories than their more sedentary equivalents in more ‘developed’ societies. Energy expenditure looks more complex than a simple linear relationship. But what did become apparent was that although physical activity does seem important in keeping you healthy, it won’t keep the weight off. It looks like we need to stick to eating less to do that.

So, if you’re relying on your workout to give you permission to eat more, think again. If your goal is to lose weight, you’re probably not doing as well as you could be.

Working? Keep on moving

Sitting down all day is not good for us. Not good at all. But, even if you’re sitting at your desk, there are ways for you exercise different muscle groups to keep active. Stretching your upper body muscles keeps your neck and back from becoming stiff; wrist rolls will help you to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome; and, sitting on an exercise ball (if your workplace will allow it) will help you to engage and work out your core muscles and stabilisers. You’re only concern is getting passed the first day when people may look slightly askance at you. But hey, this is your opportunity to lead, right? 😉

Number 3 in the info graphic below if really good if you tend to suffer from lower back pain after remaining seated for a while. You can also tilt your tailbone so that you tuck in and draw it towards your tummy, and the push out behind you. Do that 5 times, and then again every 30 minutes or so that you remain seated. It’s not a full-work out by any means, but combine this with your walking breaks and it certainly makes a contribution to your wellness.

Oh, and make sure you have a bit of room before attempting move number 4!

Tips for getting through that difficult run

If you are trying to extend out the time or distance that you are running, it can be tricky to break through some limits. You might be running a bit too quickly for the distance you are trying to accomplish. The speed makes a difference – it changes the proportion of fuel you draw from in your body from either carbohydrate or fat sources. A greater proportion of fat sources tend to be drawn from if you run relatively slowly and for periods of 25-30 minutes or more. Quicker, shorter runs tend to draw from your carb stores – which tends to be glycogen.

If you are having trouble breaking through a barrier, try out these three tips:

1. Try some self-talk. If you’re running alone and struggling, give yourself a bit of self-coaching. Tell yourself that you’re mentally fatigues — not physically tired, and that you can push through it. Trying telling yourself things like, “I’ll have some water in five minutes — that will make me feel better.” If you’re extending distance and doing your longest run ever, remind yourself how great you’ll feel when you’re finished.
2. Break up your run into smaller goals. Dividing up your run into smaller chunks will make the distance feel much more manageable. For example, if you’re running 20 km, think, “OK, it’s four 5-km runs.” At the start of each new chunk, visualize yourself just starting out on a new run with fresh legs and attitude and just focus on getting to the end of that section. This works for shorter distances too, and can work on the fly. You can focus on maintaining good form to get to the end of that street, and then focus on speed between those two lampposts.
3. Remember: It’s not always easy. As you’re doing a long run – maybe your weekly long, slow distance run, remind yourself that it’s not so easy to train for a long-distance event. If it were, everyone would be doing it, right? Remind yourself that you’re taking on a challenge and the difficulties you face will make your achievements all the more worthwhile in the end.

Keep getting out there!

Health and running on the Runner’s Round Table show

I really like running. I was a late starter, impelled by the very apparent onset of middle-aged spread. But I have come to love the feeling of running, the mindful opportunities, the extreme geekfest and statistics heaven of Garmin gadgets, compression garments and nutritional analysis. I embrace both the journey and the finish, though learning to love the journey was a journey in itself.

Tomorrow night at 6pm EST, I get to talk about running with some esteemed company on the net. I have been invited to join the Runner’s Round Table live broadcast, where runners from around the world share tips, tell stories, and keep each other motivated. So, pull up a chair and join us at the table.

Some of the topics we are planning to talk about include:

• Do statins degrade muscle performance?
• Sudden deaths during running – should I be worried? (Unfortunately topical after the death of Claire Squires during the London Marathon just this last weekend)
• Do you need to take a multivitamin if you eat a healthy diet?
• Five tests that can save your life.

You can find the link to the articles we will discuss here, as well as links to the recording of the broadcast once it is done, and previous shows. If you want to join in online and ask questions, then join us on Talkshoe – follow the link above for instructions.

Yes, your music does help your exercise performance

Gets those earbuds in. 

A recent study seems to show that whatever you like to listen to, your own choice of music could not only improve your enjoyment of taking part in competitive sports, but it could help to boost your performance too. Listening to your preferred choice of music seems to lower your perceived exertion (for the same level of performance) – you don’t feel like you have to try as hard to hit your goals. It also increases your sense of being ‘in the zone’ compared to listening to no music at all.

So, Grateful Dead or Chilli Peppers, T-Pain or David Guetta – whatever you’re into will get you going. I’m not sure what the effect of being forced to other people’s choice of music can have – I know I can react badly in the middle of a set if a tune I hate blares through the gym loudspeakers. At that point, I tune out and focus on my set instead. It can feel harder though – maybe that’s just me.

 

Science geeks, here’s the reference: British Psychological Society (BPS) (2012, April 17). Listening to your favorite music boosts performance. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 19, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2012/04/120417221709.htm