4 training essentials you can’t afford to screw up
If you look at any analysis of training plans and coaching methods, you mostly see just one thing: workouts. Do your long runs this way, and your tempo runs this way, and your intervals this way, and don’t forget hill repeats and the occasional post-run strides.
Do each of these X times per week at Y pace for Z distance. There you have it. A complete training plan.
Except. Maybe not. According to a new report, the first to ask coaches what they consider the essentials of a training program, workouts fell to the bottom of the list. The report’s conclusions found that “notably and perhaps surprisingly less than a third [of coaches] explicitly rated physical training as the most important factor in determining sports performance.”
These results came from a survey of 106 coaches with an average of 15+ years of coaching mostly individual sports.
What did the coaches rate as more important than key workouts? Here’s the list of 4 big factors: the coach-athlete relationship (56%), life stress (41%), athletes’ “belief in the plan” (37%), and psychological and emotional stress (35%).
The authors’ main point: If physical training is less important than other factors, why does so much exercise science try to derive physical measures like vo2 max, lactate threshold, and muscle fiber percentages? Training science begins with the pervasive presumption “that the mechanisms underpinning physical training adaptation are sufficiently well understood to facilitate accurate training prescription.”
However, the new coach-centered survey produced a different viewpoint. “Currently, the science seems mired in a strict biomedical conceptualisation of training theory. Many coaches, in contrast, believe non-physical influences affect training adaptations.”
As a result, there seems to be a mismatch between much scientific research and the actual application of key training principles. Future research should aim to turn things inside-out a bit more, and produce plans more attuned to the athletes' full-life.
And when it comes to individual athletes themselves? It seems clear that they should spend less time looking for magical workouts, and more time on big-picture items like an honest discussion and appraisal of their current training, along with greater emphasis on life stresses. More at Sports Medicine with free full text.
6 ways to keep improving in the marathon (year after year)
Here’s a great article, written in two voices (coach and athlete), about one individual’s 8-year path to improving the marathon segment of his Ironman Triathlon races. During this time, Jan van Berkel lowered his Ironman marathon time from about 3:20 to 2:37, guided by coach Dan Plews.
The piece is instructive in part because several of the approaches they followed were atypical. They would not have been advised by a council of coaches, but they worked for this particular coach-athlete partnership. Here are a few that caught my attention.
Van Berkel disregarded practices like massage, physical therapy, and stretching, all of which “did bring some skepticism from those around me.” Instead, he emphasized sleep and good nutrition, as well as “running in barefoot shoes or on grass periodically.”
He also did a lot of hill running, which he believes is “significantly underrated” by others. “Strength eventually translates into speed,” he says. “I sought out routes that completely challenged my legs.” He did many of these runs after a long bike ride.
While Van Berkel consumed ample carbohydrates during his Ironman races, he often trained in a low-carb state, and even ate fewer carbs than most in his normal day-to-day meals. Plews explains: “His diet also featured a periodized distribution of carbohydrates centered around training, but also generally lower in carbohydrates habitually.”
Lastly, Van Berkel mostly trained at a low intensity, with occasional tempo runs and strides at the end of easy runs. This changed dramatically in the final buildup to his biggest races when he began running repeat 800s or 1000s at close to his vo2 max pace. Plews: “By saving these sessions for the final build-up, we not only mitigated injury risks but also ensured a last-minute boost to his running performance just before race day.”
This article emphasizes how a close coach-athlete relationship, and a belief in the plan, can produce strong results even when the plan is a bit unusual. That’s a good message overall. Do what you enjoy and what works for you. More at EndureIQ.
Don’t buy your next pair of running shoes without reading this first
Here’s an article written by someone who worked 2 years in a top running shoe retail outlet, and an additional 7 years with a shoe company. He says: “In that time, I learned there’s a sizable knowledge gulf between folks in the industry and most consumers.”
This happens because brands produce so many similar shoes, or SKUs (Stock Keeping Units). They don’t do this to confuse consumers, but to offer a wide selection that allows everyone to find a shoe that should be the best for them. Of course, since you don’t get to run 100 miles in each pair, this does ultimately become confusing.
So what can a typical mystified shoe buyer do? The article offers 9 things you ought to know before handing over your credit card. Among them, three seem really important to me.
1--The most comfortable shoe is probably the one you should buy. Not the most expensive, or the one with the most heavily advertised features. Comfort is rule one in shoe buying.
2--Running shoes don’t cause injuries. Don’t look down at your feet if you’re troubled by frequent injuries. Look at yourself in the mirror, and admit that you probably made several training mistakes that led to your injuries. Start over again. Train smarter this time.
3--Don’t worry about “support.” No one really knows what support is or means in a running shoe. Or perhaps it means something different to each user. Revert back to rule 1--the comfort rule. That’s where you should focus your attention. More at Outside Online.
8 steps to improve your mental game
Running presents so many fascinating contrasts, or paradoxes. For example, running is easy, right? You learned as a child, and didn’t need parents with a PhD in biomechanics to instruct you.
On the other hand, running is hard work. While slow walking constitutes a low-intensity exercise, everything changes as soon as you break into a jog. Now you’re in the moderate-to-vigorous zone. You breathe harder, you start sweating more, you burn twice as many calories per minute.
Yes, running is hard work. That explains why all the neighborhood walkers never enter a local 5K, and also why running produces so many important mental and physical benefits in a relatively short period of time.
The hard work aspect of running is why I frequently return to the mind and motivation. It’s not the size of your heart chambers that makes you a good runner, or the length of your legs, or the diameter of your calf muscles.
It’s your brain. The brain is what motivates you to continue running even though it’s hard work.
You can never put too much emphasis on brain-training, because it’s what gets you out the door (or onto the treadmill). We all need to master every get-going trick in the books to make sure we keep on keeping on.
Here’s a concise article that nicely summarizes 8 great tips to focus and improve your motivation.
I particularly like the last of them: “Set Mindful Intentions: Connect with Your Purpose.” I try to do this before every run, but I also use the other 7 tips as well. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. More at Sport Coaching.
Why your kids (or grand-kids) should start running
We often focus too much on the relatively short term. I mean, I get it. Everyone wants to run a strong marathon--or other personal favorite distance--this fall or next spring. (And I definitely fall into this group.)
But the long-term is more important and carries greater potential payoffs. Lately, at various social gatherings, I’ve been showing off by saying “intergenerational epigenetic metabolomics” a lot. This is way outside my wheelhouse, but I know it can refer to exercise benefits that are passed from one generation to the next--that is, from mother/father to child.
Similarly, on a slightly shorter term, your midlife fitness affects your late life health. This is one of the most important reasons to resist weight gain and exercise regularly as you age from 40 to 60.
A new study also provides concrete data to support the importance of youth fitness to lower adult cancer. Using a Swedish military-conscription registry (all male), researchers divided more than 1 million subjects by their “cardiorespiratory fitness in youth.” During the next 33 years, more than 84,000 of these individuals developed cancer.
Those who had shown high fitness at the study’s beginning had a 5 to 40 percent lower risk of 9 site-specific cancers (like lung cancer, stomach cancer, colon cancer, etc) than low-fit youth. Conclusion: “These results strengthen the public policy-making incentive to promote health through improving cardiorespiratory fitness in youth.”
Important notes: High fit youth were 7% more likely to develop prostate cancer, though possibly not the most aggressive prostate cancers. Also, they had a 31% higher risk for malignant skin cancer, a well known issue for outdoor exercisers. More at British J of Sports Medicine with free full text.
Can we solve the riddle of performance breakthroughs?
The future of training breakthroughs is … cloudy with occasional periods of drizzle and fog. Even when performance breakthroughs do occur, we’re often not sure why they happened. Here Alex Hutchinson refers to a paper I mentioned several weeks ago. It’s a survey of top sports scientists who were asked the question: Where are future breakthroughs going to come from?
Hutchinson touches on the big themes that were mentioned--high-tech assistance, better use of altitude/heat/nutrition, etc--but becomes more interesting when he reflects on his own thinking. When a new approach is clearly beneficial, he observes, we know it’s working because the results are everywhere obvious. For example: super shoes.
But when something provides a lesser boost, or none at all, we waiver on its value because the results are difficult to perceive on a wide basis. Think: ketones, nose strips, heart rate variability, and many more. As Hutchinson writes, “Every time I start to get too enthusiastic about the performance-boosting power of new technology, I remember that a disproportionate share of the world’s greatest distance runners still come from East African countries where sports science isn’t a high priority.”
In endurance practice, we do well to stick to the simple, proven basics of training, nutrition, hydration, recovery, and sleep. When it’s time to try something new--shoes, for example--you’ll figure it out soon enough by listening to other runners.
Fifteen years ago, barefoot/minimalist shoes were all the rage, especially beloved by media types eager to write/video about something new. But minimalist shoes never reached the point of widespread adoption by serious runners. Whereas with super shoes, we’re looking at a massive, generational breakthrough. Vast numbers of runners can see and feel the difference. The performance-improvement scale has clearly dipped in their direction. More at Outside Online.
No fear: Flat feet aren’t the disaster you’ve been told
Breathe easy, all you flat-footers. It seems that sports/podiatric science is ready to release you from Purgatory.
Not long ago, you were advised to wet the bottoms of your feet and step on a piece of paper to produce a damp footprint. The outline of that footprint supposedly revealed your injury risk and your need for a certain type of running shoes. A high-arched footprint was mostly good. A low-arched outline not so much. It indicated that you had a high risk of injury, and had better buy a rigid pair of motion-control shoes.
Years later, research showed that this “wet test” had no power to predict injuries. Now a new Editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine contends that the continuation of articles from “the grey literature, professional websites, forums and other media still often suggest that flat feet are an important risk for injury or worse.” This situation “often results in unnecessary interventions for asymptomatic flat feet (eg, foot orthoses, motion control shoes), causing patients to become concerned.”
Instead, the authors argue that “flat feet should be considered as healthy anatomical variants.” This means it’s time “to abandon the outdated notion that having flat feet is problematic and makes individuals at high risk of musculoskeletal injuries.” More at British J of Sports Medicine.
A surprising way to maintain late-life strength
A key goal for a long, healthy life is to maintain sufficient vigor and strength in the late years. The opposite of this is called frailty, or sarcopenia.
Many older runners consume whey protein and other protein supplements to boost/maintain strength and fight frailty. It turns out another common but surprising food may also be effective: caffeine from coffee and tea.
Chinese researchers followed more than 12,000 subjects for 20 years after they had enrolled in a health study at an average age of 53. Compared with those who drank no coffee/tea, those who consumed 4 or more cups a day had a 46% lower risk of becoming frail.
There was a clear dose-response relationship, meaning that the more caffeine consumed, the lower the risk of frailty. Conclusion: “Higher consumption of caffeine at midlife, via coffee and tea, was associated with a reduced likelihood of physical frailty in late life.” More at J of the American Medical Directors Association with free full text.
If you’re worried about caffeine causing troubled sleep, theanine seems to neutralize the caffeine buzz that some find troubling. And tea, especially green tea, contains both caffeine and theanine. Therefore, it can reduce “the excitotoxicity” of caffeine to bring “a stimulating effect from caffeine and a calming or relaxing effect from theanine.” More at the preprint website QXMD.
SHORT STUFF you don’t want to miss
>>> Keep a mini nearby: Why you should have one pair of minimalist shoes in your training-shoe rotation
>>> Stay straight: How to correct the “side lean” that might have developed in your running form
GREAT QUOTES make great training partners
"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
--William Churchill
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. See you again next week. Amby