Rethink Your Week: Benefits Of A Non-7-Day Training Cycle
It’s hard not to live your life by the calendar. After all, we mostly work on certain days of the week, skip the job on certain days, follow our religious beliefs on specified days, and so forth.
On the other hand, it’s not written anywhere that the perfect training week is exactly 7 days long. In fact, a short training cycle might tempt you to cram in too much.
Let’s see: Gotta go long. Gotta do a tempo day. Gotta set aside a day for speedwork.
That doesn’t leave much time, in a 7-day cycle, for recovery, adaptation, cross-training, strength-training . . . and, oh, yeah, having a life.
At the Reddit “Advanced Running” forum, several members discussed their personal explorations of non-7-day cycles. “It’s beneficial if you feel like you're not bouncing back fast enough between workouts and long runs,” noted one.
Another wrote: “Fourteen days has been a life changer for me at 41 years old. Every 2 weeks, I do a long run, a tempo run, a short interval run, and a longer interval run.” That’s a powerful training diet that works out to 2 hard days per week on a 14-day rotation.
A third commenter pointed out the harmonious rhythm of a 9-day cycle. “Easy, Easy, Workout, Easy, Easy, Workout, Easy, Easy, Long Run. Repeat.”
I’m not aware of any scientific research on this important “cycle” question. But I’m sure it’s worth trying different plans, especially if you often feel overly fatigued on your current training cycle. More at Reddit Advanced Running.
Find Your Best Racing Shoes This Fall
If you’ve still got time to buy a new pair of racing shoes for your fall marathon or other events, here’s a deep, go-to review. It includes a number of key categories like: best overall, best no-plate shoe, best zero-drop shoe, best minimalist shoe, best trail shoe, and more.
In a surprise move, it even warns you against buying two don’t-go-there shoes.
I was most impressed by the apparent “stark contrast” and progress of On’s super shoe vs its previous efforts. Not only that: The company has a trick up its sleeve, too.
Since World Athletics limits the midsole foam height of all shoes to 40 mm or less, On followed that regulation. But then it created a PEBA super-foam midsole to add even more bounce to its shoe.
No rules against that. At least, not yet. Someone at On should get a bonus for this unexpected wrinkle.
(Of course, we don’t know if a super-foam midsole actually improves a shoe’s overall performance. But it’s still a stealthy move.) More at Run Outside.
Is Ashwagandha The Best New Performance Supplement?
Ashwagandha is rising fast on the list of favorite herbal supplements of strength trainers and endurance athletes. It comes from an evergreen shrub found in parts of India, Africa, and the Middle East. It’s low-cost, appears to have no worrisome side effects, and has proven successful in a number of recent exercise performance trials.
In a 2012 paper in the Journal of Ayurveda & Integrative Medicine, researchers gave elite Indian cyclists an ashwagandha supplement for 8 weeks, while other cyclists didn’t receive it. Subjects on the supplement enjoyed significant improvements in vo2 max and time to exhaustion.
A new Ashwagandha study followed a prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled design. It fed the supplement (600 mg/day) to 40 healthy and physically active male and female subjects over an 8 week period. Another 40 subjects received a placebo supplement.
All subjects followed the same 8 week program of strength training. Subsequently, those who received the ashwagandha had greater increases in bench press, leg press, and endurance, which was measured by a vo2 max test.
Conclusion: “Eight weeks of Ashwagandha root extract supplementation along with resistance training is effective in improving muscle strength, growth and endurance in both male and female participants. Ashwagandha root extract could be a safer, effective and low-cost alternative for athletes to improve muscle endurance.” More at F1000 Research with free full text.
Four years ago, a systematic review and meta analysis of studies with 142 participants showed “a significant enhancement in vo2 max in healthy adults and athletes.”
Here’s an Ashwagandha review from Examine.com, the independent encyclopedia of supplements. It states that “Ashwagandha appears to be safe.” Also, “It’s best known for reducing stress and anxiety. It may also modestly enhance various aspects of physical performance, increase testosterone levels, and improve reproductive health, but more research is needed to confirm these effects.”
The Truth About Exercise & Weight Loss
It’s one of the oldest questions out there, and an important one as well: Is exercise an effective way to lose weight? Or do you have to diet-diet-diet to cut the pounds?
This remains a key question because overweight and obesity are still persistent health issues in the U.S. and around the globe. Sure, you read new stories every day about people losing significant weight with the help of those amazing new GLP-1 drugs (that often cost $1000/month or more.) Still, in the U.S. about 70 percent of the adult population is overweight or obese.
We all know too many people, including family and friends, in this category. They’d be better off carrying fewer pounds. Many are already trying.
But losing weight and keeping it off is incredibly difficult. We live in an “obesogenic environment” surrounded by food, and there are all sorts of “compensation” mechanisms that need to be overcome.
Here Dr. Scott Lear reviews the evidence and argues for “a combination of both diet and exercise” to lose weight. A key point: Even if you don’t lose as much weight as you’d like, “Exercising and being active has so many other benefits to reduce your risk for diabetes, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, stress and improve your mental well-being.”
We should view exercise as its own reward. The bathroom scale isn’t the only important gauge. Exercise will make you feel better, look better, and improve your health. If it also helps you lose a few pounds, that’s a nice bonus. More at Dr. Scott Lear.
A recent “Brief Communication” in Nature makes many similar points. It argues that “recognizing the broad value of physical activity/exercise in improving health and quality of life of people with obesity is a crucial perspective shift.” More at Nature.
Leaning Forward: Helpful At Times, But Bad At Others
I first noticed this paper when it won the “Young Investigator Award” at a recent meeting of the German Society for Biomechanics. Someone thinks highly of it, because the full pre-press report appeared very quickly at a journal website.
The paper reports that leaning forward from the waist while running is good and bad. It’s good because it can reduce “knee joint loading,” but bad because it lowers your running economy.
The pros and cons of running with a forward lean are much debated among coaches and athletes. Mostly, you hear suggestions that you should lean slightly forward from the ankles. But definitely not from the waist (ie, with your chest and head).
Of course, that’s not a universal truth. You can’t watch a video of Norwegian superstar Jakob Ingebrigtsen without noticing that he has more upper-body lean than most of his elite competitors.
Nonetheless, the new paper claims that trunk leaning could reduce your running economy by as much as 11 percent. That’s a big number.
But it’s not the full story. There are times--when injured, when recovering from injury, when building a big endurance base, etc--that a runner is not principally focused on speed. At these times, you simply want to run healthy.
And a forward trunk lean could help. The German researchers found that each degree of forward trunk lean lowered “cumulative knee joint loading.” In other words, forward trunk leaning reduces stress to the knees.
Conclusion: “Designing load management interventions” based on trunk leaning “seems promising” in certain injury situations. However, you should be aware of a potential “trade off” with running economy. More at J of Sport & Health Science with free full text.
Keto Diet Has “No Disadvantages” For Runners; Could Help
The effect of low-carb (and therefore high-fat) diets on endurance performance has been studied extensively for more than a decade now. The same applies to the use of ketone supplements. There are several visible “camps” on each side of the argument, and the camps tend to produce studies supporting their viewpoint.
So of course we want to know: What does a wider, more independent view of the evidence show? A new systematic review digs into the pros and cons of “Ketogenic Diets and Ketone Supplements on the Aerobic Performance of Endurance Runners.”
Its conclusion: The evidence shows no “significant advantages or disadvantages of ketogenic diets or ketone supplements.”
The review was based on results from 12 keto studies that involved 132 endurance runners. Each of the studies included specific runner-performance measurements like vo2 max, time trials, 3-hour runs, or runs to exhaustion.
None of the studies reported “benefits of ketogenic diets or ketone supplements on selected markers of aerobic performance.” Several of the keto studies did find a reduction in body weight while preserving muscle mass. This could be beneficial to a runner. Others noted improvement in “glycemic control,” which would enhance health.
However, no study reported improved running performance. That’s why most runners continue to follow a modestly high-carb diet, while focusing on other training or lifestyle modifications that could help them run faster. More at Sports Health.
Recent Leadville 100 Mile course-record setter and prolific podcaster David Roche has “no secrets” about his ketone program. He uses them post-exercise 3 to 4 times a week with a big meal. And again “the day before ultras.” More at Twitter/Mountain Roche including many journal references.
New Squat Technique = More Quad Strength
A research team wondered how a change in foot placement (close together vs wider apart) might change the effectiveness of the common squat. They tested two different stance widths: 0.7 acromion width vs 1.7 acromion width.
Yeah, I scratched my head over “acromion,” too. Turns out it means “shoulder width.” Today, you get a vocabulary builder in addition to exercise tips.
In this experiment, the investigators pitted a narrow foot placement against a significantly wider one. And the narrow stance won the contest.
Result: “The wide stance resulted in statistically smaller vastii forces compared with the narrow stance.” Vastii forces refers to the quadriceps muscle group just above the knee.
Conclusion: “We suggest that recreationally trained men aiming to optimize muscle forces in the vastii muscles during maximum back squat training should consider adopting a narrow stance.”
More force should produce more muscle stimulation and growth. You can also use the results of this study to modulate your squat exercises. Perhaps you set your feet farther apart when you are injured or fatigued, and bring them closer together when you want a harder quad workout. More at J of Strength & Conditioning Research.
Another new knee study found that strength training reduces the risk of knee arthritis. It followed more than 2,600 strength training adults (56% female; average age, 64) for 8 years.
Conclusion: “Strength training is beneficial for future knee health, counteracting long-held assumptions that strength training has adverse effects.” Indeed, individuals who engaged in strength training averaged about a 20% lower risk of developing knee osteoarthritis. More at Arthritis & Rheumatology.
Masters Runners: Beware Of “Hidden Hypertension”
Regular aerobic exercise like running lowers your risk of heart disease, but provides no bullet-proof guarantees. The same is true about hypertension (high blood pressure)--a health concern many runners overlook.
This paper observes that “Arterial hypertension defined as a blood pressure values ≥ 140/90 mmHg is one of the most common chronic diseases in the general population and also in master athletes.”
The article also argues that masters athletes need to become more aware of “hidden hypertension” and how to “prevent its consequences.” Early detection is critical. Hidden hypertension is high blood pressure that doesn’t turn up in the doctor’s office, but perhaps at home, at work, or during your workouts when stress levels increase.
The first step: “Lifestyle changes such as healthy diet and body mass reduction.” Increasing the antioxidant foods (fruits, veggies) in your diet can lower blood pressure. But avoid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), as they may increase blood pressure.
If your blood pressure registers higher than 160/100 on several occasions, it’s time for prescription medical treatment. Fortunately, several common meds reduce blood pressure without affecting athletic performance.
Conclusion: “Raising awareness of the [hypertension] risk factors is essential in preventing an increasing number of hypertensive patients.” More at Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine with free full text.
SHORT STUFF You Don’t Want To Miss
>>> One step at a time: Henry Rueden is 74, he’s run 2000 marathons, he doesn’t seem to be tired yet.
GREAT QUOTES Make Great Training Partners
“I always say: A run in the morning is like eating a fruit a day. It chases the doctor away.”
--Eliud Kipchoge, two-time Olympic Marathon champ
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. RLRH will not be published next week. The next edition will appear the second week of October. Amby