Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
Most people will agree that exercise should be included in any weight loss plan. Unfortunately, most people think that exercise should be the ONLY component of their weight loss plan. Eat less …
Continue Reading about 178. Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs to Know Part 2: Exercise →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 178 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs To Know, Part Two: Exercise.
So most people will agree that exercise should be included in any weight loss plan. Unfortunately, most people think that exercise should be the only component of their weight loss plan, eat less and move more. Right?
Isn’t that the mantra that’s been forced upon us for several decades now? How’s that actually working for you? Not so great? Well, the good news is you’re not alone, it didn’t work for me either. There’s more to losing weight than just exercising more and eating less.
I know that if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a runner, and you think that you’ve probably got the exercise thing down pat. But running alone, or just running more isn’t the answer when it comes to getting lean and strong and keeping the weight off for good.
So today, I’m gonna lay out several exercise principles that every runner needs to know, especially if you want to lose weight and keep it off. This is part two of a three part series called Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs To Know.
Part one, focused on nutrition principles. And next week, I’m going to do part three, which is all about the most important mindset principles you need to adopt in order to become your healthiest and most badass self.
But first, let me ask you this, does any of this sound familiar? You work out every day, and you don’t lose weight, you train for something like a marathon, you actually gain weight, you track all your food, you count all your calories and still the scale never budges.
Your eating feels out of control, you just can’t seem to put the consistency that you need together. And you can’t ever make any significant progress. It’s always like one step forward, two steps back. Or maybe you’re just finally ready to be done with all of that, all the struggling.
I know exactly what this feels like. Because I’ve been there. I struggled for years. I tried every diet you can imagine. Nothing ever worked for me, not long term. And all these diets had one thing in common, they all said, eat less, run more.
And the more I ran, and the less I ate, the more miserable I actually was, I was just like hungry all the time. And being that hungry all the time makes it very hard to lose weight, right. So that approach just doesn’t work.
So if you can relate to any of this or all of this, just know that there’s nothing wrong with you, you don’t lack willpower. You don’t lack self control, you’re not a failure. You’ve just been given bad advice. Whatever you’re doing doesn’t work, right?
Nothing changes if nothing changes, so maybe it’s time for a change. If you’re ready to try something different, something you’ve probably never tried before, just consider coaching. Coaching works where most cookie cutter plans fail.
Why? Because coaching gives you the expert guidance, support and advice that you need for you and your particular goals that the cookie cutter approaches just can’t do for you. Okay.
Coaching also provides encouragement and motivation to keep you going, especially when things get hard. Coaching even offers up a little bit of tough love every now and then because sometimes we all just need a little kick in the butt to get us back on track.
Coaching has been the one thing that changed everything for me, and I’m confident it can be the game changer for you too. Whether you’re just getting started on your weight loss journey, or you want to drop those last 10 pounds, check out The Coaching Project.
This is my lifetime access weight loss coaching program designed specifically for runners just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn all about it. I would love to see you in The Coaching Project. Alright, let’s get into these principles.
These are weight loss principles that every runner needs to know. And today we’re focused on exercise. So if you want to lose weight and you want to keep it off for good, there’s a certain way of doing things that may go against some of the standard practices out there.
Like I mentioned before, like running more and eating less. That just doesn’t work for most people, it didn’t work for me. And a lot of people I work with say it doesn’t work for them either. That’s why they come to me for advice and help and so what I’m going to lay out for you today is the exercise principles that we need to start to kind of wrap our head around, okay.
So I’m just going to jump into these and the first one is this: that it is okay to keep exercising. I know this may sound a little crazy. But there are a lot of coaches out there who tell people when they start out losing weight that they should stop exercising. And I know that sounds a little crazy.
Here’s why. Here’s why they do it because I had to look into this little bit. If you want to lose weight, and you’re not someone who exercises regularly, it might be a lot to completely change how you’re eating, and start exercising at the same time.
Think about that, if you’re somebody who has weight to lose, and you have not been exercising, to try to start a whole new diet and exercise at the same time can be a little overwhelming, right, it’s hard enough to stick to a meal plan. Now you want to stick to a whole new exercise plan too?
That can be a little bit much for people, especially if they’re just getting started. They’re not somebody who exercises regularly. But I have to say, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a runner, and you probably run pretty consistently already, right? If so, great.
Just keep doing that you don’t really need to change anything. Right? Keep running, let’s focus on making changes around your nutrition at the beginning. Anyway, if you’re not somebody who runs consistently, and you want to lose weight, I’ll suggest just focus on the food for a while.
Go back and listen to the episode I did last week on nutrition, start with that, but get used to eating differently, wrap your head around that. Start developing some good habits around nutrition first, then we can start working on an exercise plan.
Okay, so it’s okay to keep exercising, if that’s something that you’re doing now just keep running. If you’re going to the gym, if you’re doing yoga, whatever it is you’re doing, just keep doing it. Don’t really change anything at the beginning, just focus on the food at the beginning. Okay.
Second principle, it’s not all about running. So this is another one that runners will push back on me with beyond a little bit. But listen, you have to wrap your head around this. Losing weight is not about running a million miles. I say this all the time. Okay, this isn’t about just like increasing your running till you’re running 85-90 miles a week or something like that. Okay.
I talked about this last week, you can go back and listen to that episode, again, if you want to understand what the biggest driver is when it comes to weight loss. So that’s going to be nutrition. There’s lots of reasons why. But it isn’t more cardio, you know, it’s not all about the cardio.
If you’re running, keep on running, just understand that you can’t outrun that bad diet, right. So you’ve got to get your nutrition dialed in first. That’s the most important factor when it comes to losing weight.
Cardio, or just running more is not going to solve your weight loss problems for you. You cannot run so much that you will just you know lose all this weight and be able to keep it off. And it’s something that isn’t really sustainable.
So this leads me into like the next principle, which is just say no to chronic cardio. No, that kind of rhymes, just say no to chronic cardio. Okay, what is chronic cardio? Chronic cardio is when you get out there and every single workout you do is medium hard, right?
You never work out hard enough to get the adaptive effects of those hard workouts. And you never work out easy enough to get the adapted cardiovascular effects of those workouts. So everything you do is a medium-hard intensity. All your runs, all your, you know, sessions at the gym, yoga, whatever. Everything is at this like medium-hard intensity. And this is the way that I used to do it. And every run, I would go out there and just push myself not too hard, but not too easy.
Here’s what happens when you do that, right. And the reason it’s called chronic cardio is because it’s constantly happening. It’s constantly recurring. It’s what you do every single day day in and day out.
Some of the problems. Number one is that this puts your body into a state of chronic stress. So stress is okay. And there’s two types of stress. There’s the chronic stress, which I’m going to get into in a minute here.
But then there’s acute stress, acute stress is where you go and do like speed intervals. And you do a HIIT workout where it’s very short and very intense. And it’s a very intense amount of stress on your body but you’re you have an adaptive response. Your body gets stronger, your cardiovascular system improves.
You go to the gym and do a less hard weightlifting session. Very hard, very intense but short, you know, and your muscles grow because of that, right? That’s the adaptive response to acute stress, then we have what we call chronic stress.
Chronic stress is the kind of stress we don’t want. Chronic stress is where your body is in a state of that fight or flight. Stress, fight or flight or freeze, you know, kind of all the time, you know, think about how we’ve developed as human beings where, you know, we saw the saber toothed tiger, and we became stressed out about that.
That’s acute stress, we run away, you know, cortisol goes up, glucose gets produced, our bodies are, the adrenaline gets produced, whatever. And we can run away, so we have the energy for running away.
But now, a lot of times we put our bodies into this state of chronic stress where our cortisol levels are always high, our glucose levels are high, which means our insulin levels are always high, which means we’re always storing fat, which means it’s really hard to burn fat and lose weight.
Chronic stress leads to chronic weight gain, or the inability to lose weight. So if all your workouts are medium-hard, you’re going to put your body into that state of chronically being stressed. And we do not want that, okay. Exercising this way will not help you to lose weight.
In fact, the opposite might happen, you might just gain weight. And this is why a lot of people come to me and they’re like, Patrick, I don’t understand I workout all the time. And then they start describing their workouts. And I go hmm, I think I know what the problem is here.
So we have to switch how you exercise and how you structure your runs. So what do you do instead?
This leads me to the next principle, which is the 80/20 principle. So what is the 80/20 principle? This is where 80% of your runs, 80% of your workouts should be easy, comfortable, low intensity, conversational pace, zones, one and two. And 20% of your workouts should be hard, high intensity, you cannot carry a conversation in zones three to five.
This is what the best runners in the world do. They focus 80% of their effort on low intensity and they build that cardiovascular base, they build that aerobic engine. And then 20% of the time, they are focused on running super hard, super fast tempo runs. Fartlek speed work, HIIT training, that kind of stuff.
And if you want to take a deep dive into this, read the book 80/20 Running by Matt Fitzgerald, it has a lot of great science in there. But he does explain how this principle works, why it works in great detail, I’m not going to get into all the details of it here.
But if you just take this 80/20 principle, and you start applying that to how you’re running now, this principle is going to help you immensely right, you’re going to start to improve your running, you will actually improve your cardiovascular system, you’ll improve your running engine, so you’ll be able to run longer distances, you’ll improve your speed.
And you don’t risk all the negative effects of having this elevated cortisol all the time and putting your body into that state of chronic stress. Okay, so just understand that if you want a better approach, stay away from the chronic cardio, focus on 80/20. And this is gonna go a long way for you here.
Alright, next principle, resistance training beats cardio every time. So lean runners are strong runners. I told you the first and most important principle when it comes to losing weight is going to be to focus on nutrition. The second best thing you can do for yourself if you want to lose weight is resistance training. This is going to have the most impact over cardio.
Okay, most people don’t understand this. So number one is going to be nutrition. The second biggest driver of your weight loss of your body composition is going to be resistance training. And what is resistance training?
So resistance training is weightlifting. It’s called strength training a lot of times, but resistance training is using some sort of resistance and this could be your own bodyweight. It could be weights at the gym. It could be anything heavy that you carry or resistance bands to cause an overload in your muscles, so they have an adaptive response.
That adaptive response can be more than just building strength. So when we say strength training, yes, we want to build strength, we want to become stronger, but you can also build endurance power speed hypertrophy, which is larger muscles.
So, depending on what your goals are, you might want to build power and speed because you want to increase your running time, you want to be more explosive, maybe you want to run a faster 5k.
So you might want to focus on power and speed versus hypertrophy, like you don’t want to get big and bulky. Okay. So here’s what happens though, when you do not focus on resistance training. So most runners kind of neglect doing resistance training the right way, they just don’t do it the right way. Or they don’t do it at all.
And when you neglect regular resistance training, weight loss will take longer because your metabolism will actually slow down a little bit, you’ll be actively storing more body fat, you’re at a higher risk of injury.
Runners who don’t build strong muscles and connective tissues are more likely to get injured. So being strong means you can run hopefully, injury free, you won’t be able to run as far as having weak muscles means your body won’t be able to carry you as far before if fatigue sets in.
So being a strong runner means you can run longer, and you won’t be able to run as fast. Being a strong runner means you can run at higher intensities for longer. So strong runners are faster and more powerful.
On the flip side, here’s what you can expect when you stick to a regular strength training routine, you will lose weight faster so the more muscle mass that you have means the more fat you’re burning. Carrying muscle around requires more energy than carrying fat so your metabolism actually increases just by getting a little bit bigger and a little stronger.
This doesn’t mean you’re going to be big and jacked. That’s really hard to do, you don’t need to worry about that. Building muscle also speeds up the fat adaptation process which helps you burn even more fat. Building strong muscles means you’re at a much lower risk of injury especially from those connective tissue problems.
Most runners’ muscles adapt pretty quickly but your connective tissues, ligaments and tendons, they take a little bit longer to get strong. That’s why most running related injuries are ligament intended injuries, not muscle injuries. Also your endurance will improve your ability to run longer distances before fatigue sets in vastly improves.
So become a better long distance runner and you’ll get faster. Carrying more muscle means your power to weight ratio improves substantially. So you’ll be able to run faster at higher intensities for longer periods.
Lastly, you’ll live longer. A new meta study in the British Journal of Medicine says that people who do regular strength training are less likely to die prematurely than those who don’t, even when they don’t do any cardio at all.
So, in my opinion, I think that the number two thing you can do besides changing your nutrition is focus on resistance training, and then decide do you want to build stronger muscles? Do you want to build more power, more speed, more endurance? Or do you want to put on more muscle you know, focus on hypertrophy. So you got to figure that out. But resistance training beats cardio every time.
Next principle, you have to understand this: running is catabolic. So long distance running is catabolic, which means that it does break down muscle to some extent. So running is not a muscle building activity on its own. It’s a muscle depleting activity.
This is another reason why doing regular resistance training is so important, you got to keep up with this so you don’t lose muscle. This is also why you need to prioritize protein as a runner, you can lose weight while training for a marathon or any other race, you just have to make sure that you’re not losing muscle weight, right.
So regular resistance training, and getting enough protein will offset the catabolic effects of running, it doesn’t have to be catabolic, it doesn’t have to be a problem for you, you just have to make sure you’re doing regular resistance training and getting enough protein too.
Okay, next principle, I want to just kind of break these two things down here activity versus exercise. So, physical activity, this is any bodily movement produced by your muscles that require energy expenditure.
Exercise, on the other hand, is a subcategory of physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and purposely focused on improvement or maintenance of one or more components of physical fitness.
So for example, activities would be things like walking the dog, playing with kids, yard work, house cleaning, these are not forms of exercise. They are activities.
Exercises are things like running, weightlifting, cycling, swimming, yoga, and on and on, right.
I think we kind of understand this, but I just want to make this very clear to you. And here’s why I’m bringing this up. Because the key words I want you to focus on here are planned, structured, repetitive, and purposefully focused on improvement.
So, think about your current exercise regimen. How often do you plan your workouts? Do you have a plan? You should have a plan. All your workouts should be planned for the week, whether you’re running weightlifting, doing cross training, swimming, yoga, whatever, these should all be on your calendar, they should be planned ahead of time.
How repetitive are they? How consistent are you with that plan? You should be consistent with your exercise routine, because that’s the only way you’re going to see improvements. Right? How purposefully focused on improvement? Do you have clear goals? Are you tracking your progress? And are you making steady progress? If so great. If not, why not?
Like for running, you need clear running goals, you need a solid running plan. You need to be consistent with your training like don’t ever miss two workouts in a row. And then every run, every workout has to have a purpose. Like you need to be continually making progress towards those goals.
And if you’re not, you need to kind of look at why am I not making progress? Am I overtraining? Am I not getting enough rest? What is the problem here? How can I change things so that I’m getting good results so that I’m moving closer to those goals that I have for myself?
So I just want you to understand that when it comes to exercise that has to be planned, structured, repetitive, and you have to be focused on improving. Most people don’t do it this way. They treat running like it’s, you know, yard work, right?
Running just becomes another activity, which is great. If that’s all you want to do, you just want to treat it as like something that you do, like walking the dog, that’s fine. But if you want to improve if you want to get faster if you want to run farther, you know, if you’re focused on weight training, and you want to get bigger muscles or improve your body composition, or get more toned, especially for the beach, whatever, then you need structure, you need goals, you need to be planning this you need repetition and purpose. Okay?
If you want to PR your next half marathon, you can’t just wing it with your training, you have to have it planned and structured. And you have to have this focus on improvement. Okay, so that is the big difference between activity and exercise.
Which leads me to my next principle, which is you have to prioritize rest and recovery. I know a lot of people do not want to talk about this. And I know a lot of runners who run or workout every single day. And they do not give themselves a chance to rest and recover properly.
And I just have to say when it comes to changing your body composition, losing weight, too much stress, a lack of sleep, lack of proper rest and recovery will result in chronic stress and the inability to lose weight. So just understand that you have to prioritize rest and recovery.
You cannot train every single day hard, like I mentioned earlier, unless you make sure that you’re prioritizing rest and recovery, you have to have those days built into your training plan, right? So think about how we build muscle, right? So you overload your muscle, you have an adaptive response, which means your muscle grows in response.
Or let’s say you want to improve your running, you do a hard intense speed workout and then the next day you rest and your body improves in that off time in that downtime in that rest period. That adaptive response does not happen on days when you’re doing intense training. It just does and it requires rest and recovery for this to happen.
So if you’re not seeing progress in your weight loss, if you’re not seeing progress in your running or your strength training, then you need to look at how is my rest and recovery? Right, remember we don’t want to be in that state of chronic stress, chronically high cortisol levels because that’s just going to keep us holding on to excess body fat okay.
And it leads to chronic fatigue and if you feel like tired all the time, maybe you can’t get a good night’s sleep which is a key component of rest. Maybe your workouts have diminished like your your ability to work out. Well has your performance gone down? Do your workouts feel harder? Your endurance has tanked.
If any of this stuff is happening, then look at rest and recovery, right, this also has a mental impact, right? You don’t have as clear of a head, you might be in a grumpy mood, you might start to lose your motivation, you just don’t feel like running anymore, right?
So you need to focus on rest and recovery. Because when you do, you give your body a chance to rebuild to repair and recover from those hard workouts so that you have that positive adaptive response, you’re able to go harder on your hard days, which means you’ll improve your fitness even faster.
And that’s the thing that people don’t understand. They think, oh, I don’t want to miss a day, I’m just going to do these hard workouts everyday so that I improve faster. Well, the opposite is actually true. If you want to improve faster, focus on rest and recovery days, okay, you give your body a chance to adapt to your training load.
Adapting means that you’ll get stronger, and you’ll improve your cardiovascular system, you can increase the intensity and the duration of your workouts. As long as you’re getting enough rest and recovery time, you won’t be as fatigued, you’ll feel better, your workouts will actually get easier. And you’ll get those positive mental benefits.
So you’ll feel more clear headed, you’ll be happier and less moody and stuff like that. Okay. So just understand that rest and recovery have to be a priority. And if they’re not, put them in your schedule, just put those days in your schedule.
All right, the next principle is this, you need to be working on flexibility and mobility every single day. One of the most debilitating aspects of this world we live in today is sitting in chairs all day, right? You run, you lift weights, and that’s all great.
You know, you get your exercise in every day. But what about the eight hours or whatever it is a day that you’re sitting in a chair at work, or the two or three hours at night, when you’re sitting down watching TV before you go to bed.
I did a little research on this, the average American adult sits down in a chair for about seven hours every day, that’s average, some people it’s a lot more, some people a little bit less. For teenagers, it’s around eight hours a day.
And research has linked sitting for long periods of time with a number of health concerns like obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat, unhealthy cholesterol levels, and these all make up what’s called metabolic syndrome.
And by the way, about 88% of the US population is considered metabolically unhealthy. This is not where you want to be, this is not a good trend. So sitting all day contributes to this, it’s not good for you.
But I get it, you have to work. Your kids have to go to school, they got to sit at desks, whatever. So what do you do? Work on improving your flexibility and your mobility every day. And this is one of those areas where I talk to people about this.
I talk to clients about this, and I can see their eyes kind of rolling back in their head and they’re like, oh my gosh, just one more thing I got to do. I don’t have time for this. I’m already working out all the time. I don’t have time to work on this. But listen, you got to make time for this. You do not want to be one of those 88%.
Okay, so there’s a few things you can do. I’m gonna just talk about a couple of things you can do. They’re super simple, but they’re gonna make such a huge difference for you. Number one, get a standup desk. If you don’t have one already, just get one. I have one. I love it. I’m up and down all day. I’m sitting right now. But a lot of times I’ll record this podcast while I’m standing.
And so I move the desk around, it’s actually one that can go up and down. And I’ll move it up and down and switch every meeting that I have all stand up for one and then I’ll sit so that I’m cutting the amount of time that I’m sitting in a chair and half by doing that right there. That’s a huge game changer right there.
Another thing you can do, which is so simple, and this is going to sound ridiculous. But this is just get on the ground. Spend time on the ground sitting on the ground, squatting, getting up and down from the ground laying on the ground. You could do this any time during the day, grab your laptop, put it on the ground, just sit on the ground.
You can do it while you’re watching TV. You can, you know, do it while you’re eating dinner, put your dinner on the coffee table and just sit there on the ground. You know, there’s cultures that do this already, right.
And little kids do this all the time. I recently spent some time with my grandson. My son and his wife had to go to a wedding and they were like can you come and watch, you know, Vigi’s his name. Can you come and watch him for a few hours while we go to this wedding? So we spent a lot of time together. And which was really interesting.
I was just watching him for a long time. He’s probably thinking like, geez, what are you doing weirdo, but I’m just watching him and he’s on the ground the whole time. He’s squatting. He’s sitting, he’s crawling around.
He wants to play this game with me called crawlies which is just like I’m crawling around, and I gotta chase him around while we’re both crawling and it was super fun. But the point is that little kids do this.
Naturally, this is our natural state as humans getting and moving around on the ground, is how, how we evolve and how we learn, good posture and sitting. And this is very natural for us too. But we’ve gotten far away from this, this world that we live in now with chairs and couches, and we sit everywhere, it’s not good for us, right?
There is this field of study, this field of what’s the right word like rehabilitation, that’s called DNS, or dynamic neuromuscular stabilization. Fancy word I’m going to explain. I’m going to describe what it is, I’m going to give you like their definition of what it is. And then I’m going to tell you in a nutshell what it is.
So DNS, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, is about the nervous system, and how it establishes programs that control human posture, human movement, and our gait. So this motor control is largely established during the first critical years of life.
DNS emphasizes neuro developmental aspects of motor control in order to assess and restore dysfunction of the local motor system and associated syndromes. Okay, that was a lot, right? Here’s what DNS is. In a nutshell, it’s about restoring our natural movement.
It uses postures, positions, and movements, based on what babies and toddlers do naturally. So if you look up DNS positions, DNS exercises, you will see pictures of babies, and then the adult version of that thing. So a baby may be in a squatting position, and then the adult is in the squatting position.
And they explain, you know why these movements are so natural and so important. But I noticed that my grandson has all this flexibility. Like, it’s crazy how flexible he is. And I’m trying to do the same things he’s doing. And I’m like, dang, I can’t do that anymore. Like I used to be able to do that, you know, so we lose that as we get older.
Okay, so I know this sounds crazy, but I’m just telling you right now that the main benefits of DNS are going to be improved mobility, improved flexibility, and improved stability. Every mobility issue, tight muscle or stuck joint is really an underlying stability issue. So if you can improve your stability, all this stuff goes away.
So get on the ground, this doesn’t take any extra time, just get on the ground, and do what little babies do. It’s so fun to just roll around on the ground and sit up and get up and down. If you find that if you’re older, like I am, and you find that getting up off the ground is like oh, my knees are cracking and it like takes a little bit more effort than it used to, then this is something you need to focus on. Okay.
Here’s the thing, if you did this regularly, if you focus on this type of DNS training this like getting on the ground, spending time on the ground, and consistent resistance training, you would feel amazing, you would improve your health, your body composition, your vitality, your longevity, and just become an overall badass, really.
If you just did these two things running fine, run, keep running. But I’m just going to tell you that this and resistance training are going to go so far for you and feeling better, but also in improving your body composition, losing weight.
So this brings me to my last principle I want to talk about today, which is run because you love it. Don’t run to lose weight. It doesn’t work. I think you understand why by now. Run because you love running. And people say this to me all the time. They say, Gosh, Patrick, I just love running. Running is like my therapy.
And I love this because just like therapy, running helps you to feel good about yourself. It helps you to build self confidence and self esteem. It helps you to improve your self awareness. It helps you to connect with yourself and with other people better. And just like therapy, running can help mitigate depression and anxiety. Lots of studies have shown this.
So running makes us feel better about ourselves. People who run regularly are typically happier. So run because you love it. Running helps you improve your focus and your concentration throughout the day. So you can actually be more productive. It’s an amazing stress reliever. So run not to lose weight not because you have to run because you love running, right.
If you’re running just to try to lose weight, you’re going to be very stressed out, it’s just going to cause a lot of unnecessary stress in you, okay? And don’t run because you have to, it’s not a chore, right? You’re not trying to prove something to others either, just run because you want to prove something to yourself.
Run because it feels good to run, run because you, you want to become healthier and happier and you want more for yourself, you want to improve, run because you love running. So maybe it’s time to change how you run a little bit, maybe leave your watch at home, leave your phone at home, just go run naked, they say that doesn’t mean without clothes. It just means running without your watch and your phone, no headphones, just go out and run.
Focus on your breathing, focus on the surroundings. Focus on nature. Maybe use this time while you’re running to give thanks for everything that you have in your life. Think about the trees and the birds on the sidewalk and the dirt path beneath your feet.
Think about how grateful you are for everything in your life. Maybe you can use this time to meditate or to pray. However you do this, it’s up to you. But I just want to encourage you to to run because you love running not because you have to.
So those are the principles I wanted to share with you today all about exercise. Remember, this is part two of a three part series called Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs To Know. Check out last week’s if you haven’t already, it’s all about nutrition.
And next week, I’m going to come up with part three, which is going to focus on the mindset principles every runner needs to know. And to make sure you never miss an episode, just subscribe to the podcast on whatever podcast app that you use.
And listen, if you’re ready to begin your weight loss journey, I have just the thing to help you get started on the right track. I put together a brand new hour long training just for you. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner.
In this training, I’m gonna teach you how to lose weight the right way and how to keep it off without running a million miles a week. A few things you’ll learn in this training, why running more and eating less is not an effective way to lose weight and what to do instead.
The one thing runners don’t do or do wrong when they try to lose weight, the best fuel to use to improve your running endurance and help you lose weight. How to create the mindset shifts necessary to develop new habits that last for life.
And then the one thing that I did that was really the key for me being able to lose the weight and keep it off for good and something you should probably do too. And tons more. It’s super fun. It’s free. If you’re ready to get leaner and get stronger, if you’re ready to run faster and run longer and become the healthiest version of yourself. Check out this free training and did I mention that it’s free? Well, it is free.
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There’s a bit of a debate going on out there in the running community around whether or not runners should be lifting heavy weights. Some people think no, runners should never lift heavy weights …
Continue Reading about 160. Should Runners Lift Heavy Weights? →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 160 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today should runners lift heavy weights? So, there’s a bit of a debate out there in the running community around whether or not runners should be lifting heavy weights.
Some people think no, runners should never lift heavy weights. And they give a bunch of valid sounding reasons why others think that runners should always lift heavy, and they have their own logical point of view on the topic. And the two sides both have some good points. Today, I’m hoping to clarify this for you and give you my stance on the subject.
So in this episode, I’m going to definitively answer the question should runners lift heavy weights. And before we get into this topic, I want to give you a quick recap of my personal weight loss journey. I’m sharing this with you today because I want you to understand something I want you to know that I get it that I’ve been there and that I’ve come out the other side.
So a few years ago, I found myself around 40 pounds overweight. Very recently, I was running like a madman and I was trying to burn off all these calories. And it just wasn’t working. I was logging all my food. I was doing these like whatever the latest fad diets. I was running every day, and still nothing was working for me.
My cravings for sugar and junk food were like crazy off the charts. And I was seriously riding the struggle bus. And then I did something that changed all this for me. So I went against everything I’d been taught as runner like you need sugar to run, you need carbs to run. And I finally got off the struggle bus.
I started fueling differently for running, I began lifting weights consistently. And I fixed my mindset so that I could make all of this a sustainable way of life. I ended up losing the 40 pounds, running became way easier. I’m stronger now than I’ve ever been. I have more energy than I know what to do with and my cravings for junk food are basically gone.
So, this is what I do. Now I teach runners like you how to stop struggling with your weight and start living like the healthy, strong, lean, badass runner that you know you can be. Of course, it’s up to you, you can continue to struggle like I did for a long time there. But listen, when you’re ready to be done with all that, I’m here for you.
If you want to learn more about coaching, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a quick application, we’ll have a quick chat, see if coaching is a good fit for you. Cool! runningleancoaching.com/apply I hope to see you in the Running Lean Coaching Project.
Okay, so let’s talk about this: should runners lift heavy weights? So, the reason I’m bringing this up today is because I think there’s a little bit of a debate out there. And if you look up, you know, hey, should runners be lifting heavy weights, I think you’re gonna get some mixed opinions about this subject. And especially if you talk to other runners, or you talk to people at the gym, don’t talk to people at the gym about this kind of stuff.
I get it, butI always hear people say oh, I was talking to this guy at the gym and I’m always like, oh boy, here we go. Right. Some expert quote unquote expert at the gym. So why am I talking about this? Well, a lot of runners think that they should never lift heavy weights like they should always do very lightweights lots of reps and others you know have a different opinion they think you should always lift super heavy and so like what are you supposed to do?
Like how do you decide as a runner, what you should do? And it doesn’t matter which you know, side you kind of fall into. I want to help you kind of make this decision clear today. Okay, so the first thing I want you to think about is this. What are your goals? What are your goals?
First of all as a runner: so, are you planning on running your fastest half or full marathon? Are you running your first ultra or your fastest 5k? Maybe you are you’re a miler, maybe you’re running your fastest mile. Maybe you just want to run every day, maybe you just want to run and continue running forever and that just wants you just want running to be part of your life forever. And you want to stay strong for that. Because your goals as a runner will a little bit determine like which way you want to go with this. Okay.
The other thing I want you to consider is what are your overall health and fitness goals? Like, are you trying to lose weight? How much weight; 10 pounds, 50 pounds? Are you trying to get stronger? You should be. Are you trying to build some lean muscle to improve your body composition? Like lose some fat and gain some muscle weight? Or you just want to live longer, like be very, very clear on your personal health and fitness goals.
Okay, because at the end of the day, you get to do this however you want. And I’m going to give you kind of my opinion here today. And I feel very strongly about certain what I think about this in my certain approach. But I just want you to think about what are your goals, okay.
So how you lift, how often you lift, how much weight you lift will largely be affected by your goals. So, think about like what your personal goals are, as we’re talking about weightlifting and talking about how much weight and how many reps you should be doing and stuff like that. Because if you want to build some muscle or maintain the muscle that you have, there’s a little bit of a different approach you want to take to this, okay.
But whatever your goals, whatever your goals, there’s a place for strength training in your workout regimen, or at least there should be. Lifting weights should be something that you do all the time no matter what. So, there’s nothing really inherently bad about weightlifting. But the interesting thing is that most runners are notoriously bad at weightlifting, they just don’t do it or they don’t do it right. They think that they don’t really need to lift weights because they run. This is very, very wrong. And I’m going to tell you why in just a second.
If you want to be a healthy fit runner, if you want to be a healthy fit human being, you need to be doing some sort of resistance activity, you need to be lifting weights, right? Running is just not enough. In fact, running is catabolic. It’s a catabolic activity, it breaks down muscle, long distance running is amazing. I love it so much. It’s like my life, you know, I love running.
And there’s a lot of people who think that running is enough to build muscle like, Oh, I’m just you know, I run a lot. So, I’m good to go there. And I’ve got some bad news for you. Running is what’s considered a catabolic exercise. So, anything that is cardio considered like cardio or aerobic exercises, especially over long, longer durations. These are great activities, cardio, aerobic exercises, these are great for helping you to improve your cardiovascular system, helping to build a healthy heart helping to improve your lung capacity. But they also cause you to lose some body mass both fat, which is good, and muscle, which is bad.
Running effectively breaks down muscle over time, this is very important for you to understand: is that running is a catabolic activity. Over time long distance running will break down muscle tissue. In order to offset this, you need to be doing anabolic exercises regularly. Anabolic is in the state of muscle building that’s building muscle growing muscle getting stronger.
So, what you really want is a good balance of the two to maintain a healthy, strong, fit body to maintain that lean body mass and we’re talking about not just you know, bigger muscles, we want stronger muscles. So too much catabolic exercise without enough anabolic exercise and you lose muscle you lose strength. And this is going to affect running negatively, too.
Okay. So it’s very important that you understand this concept that running is a catabolic activity. It will break you down over time. So you need to be doing something to offset that. So here are some of the here’s the flip side of this right here. Here’s some of the positive benefits of weightlifting of doing regular strength training for runners. Right, so the first thing you have to understand is that when you do regular strength training, regular resistance training, you’ll lose more weight and faster so the more muscle mass you have, the more fat you burn.
Carrying around muscle requires more energy than carrying around fat. So, your metabolism actually increases just by getting slightly larger, stronger muscles. Building muscle also speeds up the whole fat adaptation process, which will help you burn even more fat. And you know, like everything we talked about here, we’re all about fat burning, right?
So, lift weights, get a little bit stronger, build some muscle, and you increase your metabolism, you burn more fat, boom, this is awesome. Building strong muscles also means that you’re at a much lower risk of injury, especially from what we call connective tissue issues. So like, most runners’ muscles adapt pretty quickly.
But your connective tissues like ligaments and tendons take much longer to get strong. That’s why you see most running related injuries are ligament and tendon injuries, not necessarily muscle injuries. So, building strong muscles will also improve and strengthen those connective tissues and prevent running related injuries. So if you want to run injury free, one of the biggest things you can do, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to get stronger.
Also, when you get stronger, your endurance improves. So your ability to run longer distances before fatigue sets in is vastly improved when you’re stronger. So you can become a long distance running machine. But you need, you know, good strong working muscles in order to do that. Also, you get faster, carrying around a little more muscle means that you are stronger and your power to weight ratio improves the stance substantially.
So you get a little bit leaner, you lose some of that fat weight, you gain some muscle weight, and now your power to weight ratio has gone up, and you’re more powerful and lighter, and you’re able to run faster at higher intensities for longer distances, right. So as far as improving your running performance, getting strong is one of the best things you can do for yourself, you’ll get faster, your endurance improves, you get lighter, your power to weight ratio goes up, all those things are amazing.
And then lastly, when you lift weights regularly and you get stronger, you will live longer. Evidence continues to point to the benefits of strength training. And a new meta analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has concluded that people who do strength training regularly are less likely to die prematurely than those who don’t, even when they don’t do any aerobic workouts. So they’ve kind of factored that even if you don’t do any aerobic activity whatsoever, strength training will lead to a longer life.
And of course, doing some aerobic activity, improving your cardiovascular system, helps you to live longer as well. So you want to live longer: strength training. Okay. And so there’s all these amazing benefits to weightlifting for runners, right?
So here’s what I hope for you. I hope that your biggest takeaway from this episode right now is that you have to get into some sort of regular strength training routine, like you just have to get stronger. This is what I want you to take away from this, it doesn’t matter what your goals are, it doesn’t matter, you know, where you fall on the line of whether or not you should be lifting heavy weights or not.
I think the most important thing is that you are doing some sort of regular strength training, it has to be part of your weekly workout plan. Doesn’t matter what you’re training for. Make time for it. It’s that important, okay? Okay, so what happens when you lift weights, so let’s get into kind of the, what’s happening in your body when you lift weights, okay.
So before we talk about how heavy you should lift or how light you should lift, I want to explain what happens when you lift weights like, or at least what you’re trying to make happen in your body, okay? So your muscles will grow as a response to stress. So, you stress out a muscle or a group of muscles, essentially, you overload them. And then because of that overloading, they have an adaptive response.
So they grow more muscle fibers are produced those muscle fibers band together, they get stronger, the muscle grows a little bit and, and they grow. So you have this adaptive response. This is called the overload principle. Overload a muscle and in response, it gets stronger. Do this over and over again and you get bigger, stronger muscles, right? But in order to overload the muscle, you need enough resistance.
So resistance can come in many forms. Resistance could be your own bodyweight: hold a plank for a minute or two. See how long you can hold a plank just with your own bodyweight, or do push ups. Do some pull ups, these are all bodyweight exercises that are pretty hard, you know, you’ll find yourself getting pretty fatigued pretty quickly. With some of these bodyweight exercises, right.
Then we have free weights, we’ve got dumbbells and kettlebells, and barbells. And all kinds of machines at the gym, they’re designed to work certain muscle groups. And then we have resistance bands, things you can attach to a door or two, or you don’t even have to attach to anything, you can just pull on them, step on it, lift it up and create the resistance. That way, you can even use logs or rocks or heavy books or milk jugs filled with sand, it doesn’t really matter, you can literally use just about anything to create resistance, right?
The important thing is that you have to have enough resistance in order to over load the muscle if you want it to have that adaptive response, if you want it to get stronger. So the way you overload the muscle, as you get to muscle failure, you have to get to muscle failure in order to create that adaptive response.
So you can get to failure a couple of different ways you can overload that muscle in a few different ways. But you’ll you know that you’re there, when you can no longer lift that weight, like you cannot do another rep with good form, like you just your form breaks down, you start cheating, so to speak, you know. So for example, you can get to overload by lifting a one pound weight lifted like 100 times I promise you, you know, at some point, you’re going to probably get to overload with 100 with a one pound weight if you if you lift it 100 times or you can lift a 100 pound weight once or whatever amount of weight you can lift one time that will get you to that failure place, right?
So then we say like, okay, which is better? Should you lift 100 times should you do 100 reps? Or should you do one rep, like, what’s the right number? Like should you be lifting heavy? Should you be lifting super light? So, let’s look at what each of these kinds of looks like. Kind of looks like here.
The first one let’s talk about light weights; light weights, lots of reps. So, think about what it looks like and feels like to do a lot of reps with very light weights. So, lots of group workout classes are based on this approach, right? Everybody grabs some light little dumbbells and you’re lifting them and you’re like, you know, doing a ton of reps. And at the end of the workout, you’re like, oh, that was fun, you know, and you’re tired and you know, you’re probably, you know, pretty sweaty and things like that.
So you’re doing a ton of reps, you’re using very light weights. But what is this? This is mostly a cardio workout, right? Here, you’re really working out the cardiovascular system, you’re adding a little bit of resistance. But really, you know, it’s a cardio workout, right? And there’s nothing wrong with this, right? But as a runner who does pretty much nothing but cardio everyday when you go out and run, do you really need to be doing another cardio workout? Do you need to be lifting super lightweight a million times and making it some new some other cardio type workout? I don’t believe so.
I don’t believe you want to be doing that. You don’t need to do a bunch more cardio. Remember that you’re already engaged in a catabolic activity. And you need to be doing something to offset that. So more cardio is not going to be the answer. Even though you might be using some weights, it’s probably not enough resistance to make a difference and offset the amount of catabolic activity you’re doing from already. Right.
So the other thing to think about is you’re probably never going to see someone in a workout class like that get to muscle failure, you’re just never going to see somebody get to failure. So that’s, that’s a sign that that’s probably not the most ideal approach. Okay? So if you’re doing some kind of workout and you’re lifting, let’s say 10 pounds for the duration of the workout, and you really never get to failure, there’s no overload happening. There’s no adaptive response happening.
You’re not growing muscle fibers. You’re not getting stronger. What’s the point of all that? Yeah, it’s a good cardio workout. But you don’t probably need to be doing more cardio, okay. It’s good to improve your cardiovascular system, right? It’s good to do that, right, but that should not be your goal from weightlifting. Your goal with weightlifting should be to overload your muscles so you get stronger period.
Okay, so let’s look at now the other side of this, which is lifting heavy weights, right? And you’re probably thinking, I’ve kind of figured out, Patrick, this is probably your preferred approach. And yes, it is. Yes, it is. And I’m going to explain why. So when you lift heavy weights, you will absolutely get to muscle failure. So I want to make this very clear: to failure doesn’t mean it’s hard. Failure isn’t like, oh, man, this is really hard. I can’t believe I, I’m doing these reps, oh, gosh, this is really hard. This must be failure. No failure means you cannot do another rep with proper form. Failure means you’re trying with all your might as hard as you can to lift that weight, and you just cannot move it any longer. It should hurt. It should look ugly, feels terrible. And it’s pretty amazing, all at the same time. Okay.
So failure means you cannot move the weight. Again, you cannot finish that rep. That’s what failure is not oh, it’s hard. It’s like you cannot do it. Okay. And then heavy, lifting a heavy weight heavy is relative for you. It’s just, it’s heavy for you. It’s how strong you are, it’s relative to how strong you are. Heavy means that you can only do around six to twelve eps before you hit failure. Six to twelve reps is a good amount of reps to fatigue the muscle enough to stress the muscle enough to produce that adaptive effect.
You don’t have to aim for a one rep max like bodybuilders do and power lifters do. Although I do like doing this sometimes just to see how strong I’m getting. I’ll do a one rep max on bench press. And what have I been doing like bench press and deadlift? I’d stopped kind of doing the squat one rep max because my knees are a little bit jacked up right now. But I want to get back to that as well. And I’m seeing some progression happening.
So I can see that I’m getting stronger with the one rep but you don’t have to just do a one rep max. That’s not what we’re getting into here. Six to twelve reps is where you want to be. So aim for six to twelve and do a full body workout. And you only need to be doing this twice a week, you don’t have to become a gym rat, you don’t have to spend two to three hours every day in the gym.
And I have this very specific strength program that I teach my runners, my clients, and it’s a full body workout, it’s twice a week should only take you about 20 minutes each time. And it’s enough, it’s plenty. Like it doesn’t have to be super time consuming, okay. But the important thing you have to understand here is that you really want to get to muscle failure. And in my opinion, it’s just much more efficient and better for you to get to failure with fewer reps. So aim for that six to twelve rep range, lift heavy weights, there’s you don’t have to worry about getting too big.
This is one of the biggest fears around lifting heavy weights that I hear from runners is that and you’ll hear people say this all the time. I don’t want to get all big and jacked and like I don’t want to be carrying around tons of extra muscle weight. You know, I don’t want to look like one of these big bodybuilders. Listen, remember I said running is catabolic. Lifting heavy weights is a great way to offset this.
In fact, it is very, very hard to look like a bodybuilder it takes years of very hard work to look like a bodybuilder they lift five, six days a week, they’re in the gym for hours, they eat a ton of extra food, you know and they really limit the amount of cardio that they do in order to gain all these muscles and stuff. Okay, so please do not worry about getting too big. Do not worry about gaining too much muscle or looking like a bodybuilder, it is extremely hard to gain that much muscle.
We want to offset the amount of running that we’re doing with some good strength training, we want to build some muscle we want to get stronger. So lift heavy weights, aim for that six to twelve rep max, get to failure with each exercise. If you really want the best bang for your buck, from resistance training, lift heavy weights, save the cardio workout for all the running that you’re doing.
If you want to become a stronger, faster, more powerful runner, if you want to burn more fat, lose more weight. And if you’re interested in living longer, lift heavy weights. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
If you’re a runner and you are not engaging in some form of consistent, intentional strength training, you are leaving a LOT on the table. This is another episode I’m doing in my “Back to Basics” …
Continue Reading about 129. Back to Basics: The Importance of Strength Training for Runners →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 129 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, another in My Back to Basics series: the importance of strength training for runners. So if you’re a runner, and you’re not engaging in some sort of consistent intentional strength training, I’m just going to tell you right now you’re leaving a lot on the table.
So this is another episode I’m doing in my Back to Basics series, where I’m talking about the basics of good health: improved fitness, improved running, and really becoming your healthiest and most badass self. Okay, so today is all about the importance of strength training for runners.
To be honest, most runners that I talked to are not doing any form of strength training, like at all, or they’re not doing it properly. So in this episode, I’m gonna go over why strength training is so important. If you’re a runner, how it can help you to improve your running, how we can help you to lose weight. And all the reasons I believe that strength training is actually one of the most powerful things you can do to improve your overall health and fitness. So that’s all coming up here.
And I just wanted to let you guys know that this whole month, this month of June, is mastering your mindset month over in the Running Lean coaching project. The Running Lean coaching project is my coaching program. And this is our it’s it combines the best of my group program and one on one coaching with me, we put together a personalized plan that works for you, you get training, you get all the information you need, you’ll learn exactly what to do, how to improve your nutrition, how to take control of your food choices, how to lose weight and keep it off permanently, how to build new habits, how to get stronger, how to improve your strength, your endurance, how to fix your mindset.
This whole month, mindset is one of the most important things you can do. This shifting your mindset is one of the most important things you can do to take control of your health and fitness, you cannot succeed and cannot make these changes last, if you don’t have the right mindset. So we’re spending the whole month of June talking about how to improve your mindset. And don’t worry, I know it’s the middle of the month. But if you want to join us, you can.
And all the calls that we do and all the training I’ve been doing around mindset this month, they’re all recorded, and they’re all archived on to a private podcast feed that you can listen to, or you can watch the replays of the Zoom calls, you can watch the videos as well. So you won’t really miss out on anything.
So I just want you to know that anytime you hear me talking about what we’re doing in the current month, and every month, we pick a different theme and sort of just do a deep dive into that theme, you’re not really going to miss out on anything if you join in the first or second week or the middle of the month, okay. And then you can actually have access to all the back back months of trainings that we’ve done.
So if you’re ever interested in really taking control of your health and fitness for good, and understanding how to make these changes last permanently, then join us over in the Running Lean coaching project. There is an application process. This isn’t for everyone. And I want to make sure that we get on the same page before you jump into the program because I’m interested in working with people who are committed and who have what it takes, I think to succeed you so you have to have this commitment level, you have to sort of go all in on yourself in order to be successful with changing your health and fitness like this. So I want you to consider that. So we jump on a call and we talk about your goals and see if this program is right for you or not.
So if you’re interested in applying, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply We’ll jump on a quick zoom call you and I will have a conversation and see if this is good fit cool. But we’d love to have you in the Running Lean coaching project. And especially for this month where we’re talking all about mindset that’s runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out your application and we’ll jump on and a zoom call and see if this is right for you.
Okay, another episode today’s another episode in our Back to Basics series. This is where I’m just kind of going over some things I may have talked about in the past. You know, maybe I’ve updated some of the information that today’s a good example of that I’ve got some updated information about strength training for you guys and about why it’s so important, especially for runners, especially if you’re somebody who’s trying to lose weight, especially if you’re somebody who wants to improve your health and fitness, I know you do. If you’re listening to this podcast, you want to become more, you want to become the most badass version of yourself. I know you.
So, you know, this is one of the best things you can do for yourself. Absolutely. People talk about, you know, how great running is for you. And I know I’m a runner, this shows for runners, I coach runners running is my life. It’s what I do. But I’m going to say something that may surprise you. I think strength training is more powerful and more important for you than running. Running is also important. Running is also important, okay.
But I think building strength is going to have ramifications that last longer, and will help improve your fitness in ways that I’m gonna explain today. So I hope you kind of agree with me by the end of this episode, how important strength training is for you.
But it can be more powerful and more effective on your overall health and fitness than running can be. Okay, I know it sounds crazy, right? But I believe it’s true.
So just to give you an idea of like, what I teach in my coaching program, there’s like four main pillars that I talk about in my program. And they are nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset. And all four are required. All four are important for different reasons. Nutrition, obviously, if you’re eating the wrong diet, and no amount of running is going to fix that no amount of strength training can really undo that. Okay, so nutrition I’m going to say is number one, and then I would put strength as number two.
And then endurance would be number three, you know, we need to build a strong cardiovascular system. So you know, running, run, walk, or whatever you like to do. For endurance, some people are cyclists, awesome rowers, swimmers, whatever you’re into from an endurance mindset. And endurance standpoint is awesome, do that. Do that.
And then underlying everything is mindset. Mindset is like, sort of the foundation that makes everything else possible without the right mindset. All this stuff is really hard to do. Okay, but armed with the right mindset, shifting your mindset, changing your mindset for the better, will make huge improvements, all these things you think are impossible for you become possible with the right mindset. Okay, so all four of these elements are required to be a fit, healthy, happy human being, you have to have all four, nutrition, strength, endurance, and mindset.
And today, we’re gonna be talking about strength. We’re going to talk all about why it’s important. And I don’t want you to skip this. It’s probably the most important. Okay, next to nutrition. All right.
So the problem I see with a lot of runners is that they just don’t do any kind of intentional strength training, or the strength training they do is, is not they’re not doing it, right. I hate to say that. But I’m just going to tell you right now that there’s kind of like two different ways to do strength training.
There’s one where you’re intentionally building muscle. And there’s another way where you’re basically it’s more like a cardio workout. Right? You’ve seen this like Orangetheory, and, you know, certain, you know, HIIT classes maybe, or yoga, like power yoga and things like that. These are, these are great, I love all that stuff. They’re all good for you. But a lot of times these workouts tend to be more cardio based.
And that’s fine. But as runners do, we really need to be engaging in more cardio. It’s not a bad thing. Cross training is great. I love it. You know, if you’re a runner and all you’re doing is running, I think that can be detrimental after some time. You know, you start to get overuse injuries and things like that. So engaging in some other types of cardio activities like cycling or swimming. Great, awesome stuff to do.
But don’t pretend like what you’re doing is strength training because a lot of times it’s not, you know. So, bodyweight isn’t really enough sometimes, and I’m gonna get into that in just a minute. But we want to be intentional about building strength and building muscle.
And if you’re a runner and you’re not doing this, you are leaving a lot on the table, you’re not going to be as efficient as a runner, you’re not going to be as efficient as a fat burner, you’re not going to lose weight, if that’s something you’re interested in as effectively as you could be if you’re doing some intentional strength training. So running is just not enough on its own.
There’s three main systems that runners need, and they need to improve and need to work on. And that is endurance, strength and explosive power.
So most long distance runners especially we get into marathon runners, or ultra marathoners, they just focus on endurance. And that’s it. So again, you’re just leaving a lot on the table, you’re leaving out two very important systems that you should be improving in order to make writing that much better for you. Okay. So endurance is great, we want to build our endurance, but you’re leaving a lot on the table, if that’s all you’re working on.
Now, I get some times, you’re training for 100 miler, and, you know, that might be where you’re gonna focus on the long, slow distance, and totally make sense. But incorporating strength and explosive power into your training cycle, and into your regular workouts is going to make that endurance even better, you’re going to improve your endurance, because you’re improving these other systems.
Think about it like this, we need all three systems to function properly, to be at our best, to be at our strongest. And if you’re only working on one of them, endurance, for example, you’re just gonna leave out a lot of potential for improvement, you know, running improvement, performance improvement, power output, even endurance, like, just if you just work on endurance, and that’s all you’re working on, but you’re not getting stronger, you actually are not going to improve your endurance the way you could be, if you were if you were doing some intentional strength training, okay.
So, you know, like to build endurance, you just want to run more, you keep increasing your distance, you keep increasing the time you’re out there running, you know, to build explosive power, you can do things like HIIT training, plyometric exercises, stuff like that. And then to build strength, we have to lift weights, we have to have some sort of resistance.
Okay, so bodyweight usually isn’t enough. So we need to have some more resistance, some body weight can be fine, especially at the beginning. And there’s some exercises where bodyweight is plenty. But really, to work your entire body, you have to be overloading muscles. And so I’ll explain more about that in a second here.
But just understand that we need all three of these systems functioning properly, endurance, strength, and explosive power. And if you do have all those things, firing on all cylinders, so to speak, you’re going to be at your best, right, you’re going to be much more, you’re going to be much stronger and much more powerful as a runner, and a healthier human being overall.
So some of the things I see as a result of people not doing regular resistance training, regular strength training, is they have reduced power output. So they cannot run as hard, or as intense, or as fast as they want to, their running performance is impaired. Regular strength training will fix this. People that don’t engage in regular strength training, especially runners are more prone to injury.
You have a reduced ability to burn fat, if you’re not engaging in regular strength training, your metabolism is actually slower than if you were doing some regular strength training. And there’s just this overall kind of lack of energy that happens, that I see in a lot of people who aren’t engaging in regular strength training. Okay. So just understand that some of the negative things, and I’m gonna talk about how we fix these things right now, right.
But the important thing I want you to understand here is that we have to be engaging in regular consistent resistance training of some sort. And when I say resistance training, there has to be some sort of resistance in order for you to overload your muscles. So that can be free weights, it can be machines at the gym, sometimes it’s bodyweight, it could be those bands that you hook into a doorway or something like that.
I’ve got a set of those bands that I take with me on vacation. If I can’t get to a gym with actual weights, and they work really well. They work really well to do all kinds of resistance exercise, we just have to be, we have to push ourselves to the point of failure. muscle failure is what we’re looking for here. Okay.
So let’s talk about why strength training is so important for runners and what it does for you like, what are the benefits? Why would we want to be engaging in regular strength training? So one of the most important ones that I like to talk to, especially with the people that I work with who a lot of times they’re trying to lose weight, is that your strength training will play a big role in helping you to lose weight.
So when you are carrying around more muscle mass, when you actually have more muscles, your metabolism speeds up, you can actually burn more calories, and therefore burn more fat when you’re carrying around more muscle. So one of the best things you can do to lose weight and improve your body composition, is to do regular strength training. So your muscles require more energy than fat does.
So muscle requires more energy to be on your body than fat does, that doesn’t require a whole lot of energy for your body to carry it around. But muscle does. And so your metabolism will actually be faster if you’re doing regular strength training, and you’re building some muscle. So just understand that if you’re trying to lose weight, like if that’s a goal of yours, and you’re not doing regular strength training, it’s just going to take longer.
Okay, so don’t you want it to go faster? Yeah, I know you do. Another benefit of strength training is that it helps you to get fat adapted and helps you to stay fat adapted. So this whole idea of speeding up your metabolism helps to improve fat burning, it speeds up the fat adaptation process as well.
So if you want to get fat adapted, which is where we’re transitioning our body from being primarily sugar burners to being primarily fat burners, then regular strength training is going to help speed that process up, and it’s going to help you to stay there again, your metabolism is faster, you’re burning more fat in general, then you can stay fat adapted, if you’re doing regular strength training, it’s a much, it’s a much better way to stay fat adapted, and it’s really powerful. And if you can keep your metabolism operating faster, then you keep the engine burning hotter, basically, when you have more muscle on your body, okay, so it’ll help you to get fat adapted and help you to stay fat adapted.
Another benefit of strength training, especially for runners is that, you know, when you, when you build strength, you’re increasing the strength of your muscles, but you’re also increasing the strength of your connective tissues. So ligaments and tendons, this will help protect joints around things like your knees, and your ankles and your hips.
And if you’re a runner who’s prone to injury, and you want to know, like one of the best things you can do to help prevent injury in the future, regular strength training is going to do that for you. So having stronger muscles, having stronger connective tissues, having stronger joints will mean that you are you have a less reduced risk of injury. Right? So this is something that I think is very important, especially as we get older, okay.
Which brings me to another important benefit of strength training, which is it helps to increase bone density. So, bone density is one of those things that people think, oh, you know, you just need to, like, take calcium supplements or something and, and there’s actually some sort of controversy around that and how taking too much calcium can actually diminish bone density.
So it’s better to do something like strength training to improve bone density. So as we get older, one of the most common issues with people is that they lose muscle mass, and they lose bone density. And then they you know, as they get older, they do things like fall down. And when you fall down and you break a hip or something like that, you become sedentary and then your overall health and fitness declines very rapidly at that point.
This is one of the most common causes of death in the elderly is complications from falls, that can be prevented with regular strength training, just stay strong. I want to be like 101 years old and still be able to like, go for a run, lift weights, I want to be in good shape. So that’s my goal. I don’t want to fall down and break a hip or break a leg or something like that. Okay. So, if you’re an endurance athlete, and you’re getting a little bit older, you’re over 40 or whatever. You especially will benefit from strength training, because your strength declines faster than your endurance as you get older.
So you may still be able to run longer, but you could be breaking yourself down. Remember that running is catabolic. Running kind of breaks you down. And one of the best ways to reverse this or prevent this from happening is to maintain muscle strength.
I am currently 55 years old, and I have never been stronger in my life. And I just started this a few years ago, this very intentional way of strength training that I teach to my clients that is very effective. And if you engage in regular strength training, it doesn’t matter how old you are, you can improve, you can make improvements, you can become stronger. And you should be doing some sort of regular strength training, it doesn’t matter how old you are, okay, but strength training will help increase bone density and help you to kind of prevent aging, it’s like magic. Another benefit of strength training is that it helps to improve your overall energy. So consistent anaerobic exercise, like sprinting or intense weightlifting, you know, lifting heavier weights, this is going to give you more energy and give you more energy for your next bout of intense physical activity.
So this is actually going to improve your overall athletic ability, this isn’t going to improve your overall athletic performance. And this is going to improve your overall energy levels. So doing some sort of consistent, anaerobic type of exercise, like strength training, will help you to have more energy just throughout the day.
Another important aspect of strength training for runners is that if you want to improve your speed, if you want to become a faster runner, you need to be doing some regular strength training, there’s no better way to get faster. And then to build stronger muscles. When you start to build stronger muscles and you lose the fat weight and gain some muscle weight, you improve your power to weight ratio, so you have more power on a smaller frame. That means that you can run faster, you have more power output at that point.
So this is about body composition. This is about losing fat weight, gaining muscle weight, and it will help to improve your running performance, you can run faster for longer, okay. And that brings me to my next point, which is improving endurance. So being being stronger means you have more long lasting energy, you can run further, you can run longer distances and longer amounts of time, you can be out there running, because you have stronger muscles, right, you’re not going to break down and hit the wall, like you would if you were super weak, you know. So stronger muscles means you can sustain running for longer periods of time.
And it also has to do with increasing your lactate threshold. So regular strength training will help to improve your lactate threshold, increase your lactate threshold. So that means you’re just shuttling more lactate out of the bloodstream. So you’ll be able to work out harder and more intensely for longer periods. Right. So again, this is about helping to improve performance in general helping to improve speed, power, output and endurance. So all of that gets improved when you’re engaging in regular strength training.
Then there’s a couple of benefits of strength training that I thought were interesting. For example, regular strength training can help you fight depression, improve your mood. So regular strength training releases these feel good hormones and neurotransmitters. And we call this your daily dose. So its dose stands for dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins, D O S E. And the effect of these feel good hormones can last for, depending on the person, up to 12 to 24 hours.
So if you’re doing regular strength training, you’re doing regular workouts every day, every other day, whatever. You are just going to be a happier human being all around, you’re going to be nicer to be around, you’re going to be in an elevated mood. And so if you’re somebody that has struggled with some, you know, mental health issues, or maybe a little bit of depression, anxiety, that kind of thing. I know this was me.
Years ago, I really struggled with some anxiety issues and depression. And running regularly and doing regular strength training was one of the things that really pulled me out of that, and really helped me to stay above that. And, you know, I still had some of those issues. It’s not like it’s going to fix everything, I had to do some, you know, some counseling and therapy and things like that, which I think is so, so important.
But this regular release of these feel good hormones, just puts you in a little bit of a better mood, and it lasts for a while. And so this is one of the reasons why I continue to do regular exercise and regular, intense exercise. So when I go to the gym, and I lift weights, it’s a hard workout. When I go run, I usually do one of two things, I do super hard, fast runs, I did some sprints the other day, super hard, super hard. And then today, I did a very slow, easy run.
And I kind of balanced the two out, you know, so I’m not always just doing some medium hard runs, I’ve kind of balanced them out with some pretty intense runs, that release more of these feel good hormones, regular strength training, that can be pretty intense to release, these feel good hormones, and I’m just in a better mood all the time, I’m a lot nicer to be around when I’m exercising regularly. I like myself better and other people like me better.
And another thing I thought was interesting was that regular strength training can help reduce risk for some diseases. They’ve done some studies that show that increasing muscle in your body, increasing bone density can actually help reduce the risk for diabetes and heart disease. So if you’re somebody that maybe has a family history of these kinds of things, then regular strength training can be a factor to help to reduce the risk of some of these things. Obviously, your diet is gonna play a factor into this.
Genetics to some point. Don’t smoke cigarettes, that kind of thing, right? You don’t smoke cigarettes, right? I used to smoke cigarettes, I can’t believe I did that today, I look back on that and go like, that was dumb, right? I smoked for like 15 years. Terrible. Kids don’t smoke cigarettes. Okay, stay away from cigarettes.
Alright, now I want to talk a little bit about what it means to do strength training and like kind of how we do it and how we shouldn’t do it. So I was kind of mentioning this earlier, but we want to make sure that we are intentional about building strength.
So when I say that what I mean is like, we don’t want these workouts to just be another cardio workout. And I see too many people, especially runners who they’re like, well, you know, I just need to lift really light weights and do a million reps, you know, because that’s how you get toned. And really, it doesn’t really work that way.
In order to build strength, you have to create an overload in the muscles that you want to build strength in. And we should be working out the whole body here. Okay, so a whole body workout is what we’re talking about here. Tip to toe.
So when you do intentional strength training, you should be overloading the muscle group you’re working out. And this is a principle in strength training called progressive overload. So as you lift the weight, and you get to rep number 12, or 15, whatever it is, and you can no longer lift that weight, even though you’re trying with all your might. And it’s hard and it hurts and you’re like I can’t do it.
That’s overload, you have overloaded that muscle, you can no longer lift that weight. If you could still do another 20 or 30 reps, you’re not there, you’re not going to have an adaptive response. When you overload the muscle, the muscle responds by then, growing stronger, there’s an adaptive response to that overload.
Right? So what we don’t want to do as runners is more cardio, you don’t really need to be doing more cardio, most runners do plenty of cardio. So make your strength workouts very intentional about building strength and don’t make them about more cardio.
So we got to overload the muscle. And we want to do that in a very intentional way with some sort of resistance. So how much resistance Well, studies have shown that light weights will not create the overload required for your muscles to have that adaptive response and grow and get stronger.
So what you want to be doing is lifting heavy and I know what people are thinking you’re like, Oh, but I don’t want to become some big giant bodybuilder. And I’m just gonna tell you right now, do not worry about that. So many people tell me this, they’re like, oh, I’m not gonna I don’t want to lift weights because I don’t want to be all big and jacked. You know? I will tell you right now that to become big and jacked takes so long and it is so hard to do.
Go tell a bodybuilder that you know you’re not going to lift weights because you don’t want to get jacked like them. And they will just laugh in your face, they’ll just be like, yeah, whatever, don’t worry about it, you got to eat a ton more food, you got to be intentional about taking certain supplements, you got to, like work out really intentionally, really hard, like, five, six days a week at the gym.
If you want to get jacked, you can, but it’s going to require a lot of work, a lot of, lot of work. And I’m just going to tell you as a runner, if you’re a long distance runner, right there is going to be, that’s going to kind of be working against you a little bit. Because running, like I said, is catabolic, it breaks you down, running can break down muscle.
So in order to build muscle, you got to be pretty intentional about strength training, do not worry about getting huge. Do not worry about getting muscle bound, it’s just not going to happen. Okay, so lift heavy weights, lift weights heavy enough to create that overload, that’s what’s going to get you there, that’s what’s going to create the adaptive response and get you stronger, we’re not in you know, if you want to see some muscle on you, that’s fine, you can do that you can do that.
You don’t worry about getting huge. More importantly, is getting stronger, becoming a stronger human being. That’s what we’re really after here. So sometimes you’ll see some of those muscles, sometimes you won’t, it’s okay. But if you’re working, if you’re working out properly, you will get stronger. Now this is what’s going to create all these benefits that I talked about here.
When I say you’re going to gain muscle, I mean, you might gain a few pounds of muscle, you probably won’t even see it on the outside of your skin, you might even see bulging muscles coming out, especially women, if you don’t want that look, don’t worry, you won’t get that look. Okay.
It’s very hard to do that, it’s very hard to get these big jacked muscles, I’m trying to do that right now. And as a 55 year old runner, it’s challenging, it’s taking me a lot of effort to like actually build some bigger arms and bigger chest and things like that. So just know that is very hard to do. Don’t worry about it.
So lift heavy, make sure you’re doing some sort of intentional strength training twice a week, and you should be doing a full body workout twice a week, this is what’s going to improve your strength and you know, help to build muscle, once a week is enough, if you just want to maintain where you are. But twice a week, if you want to build, you know, if you’re doing it three or four times a week, that’s fine, too. But twice a week is all that’s really required if you want to build muscle, okay, and then you want to work all your muscle groups.
This isn’t about like just working your arms or just your legs, you know, we want to work the entire muscle groups, all the muscle groups in your body and your entire body from top to bottom. And we work these in order from largest muscle groups to smallest and yes, you’re going to do legs too. Just because you’re a runner, doesn’t mean you get to skip leg day.
It’s important that we work all the muscles and that you’re, you’re improving strength in all areas of your body, especially your legs. So runners will tell me this all the time. They’re like, well, I just don’t do legs because I run so much. So I don’t really need to do legs. You absolutely need to do legs.
Yeah, you might have pretty strong legs right now. But what if you could improve that what I know it would be amazing, wouldn’t it? And think about this. We store glycogen in our muscles. Even if you’re a low carb runner or a fat adapted runner and you’re really efficient at burning fat, you still need glycogen in your muscles for your muscles to operate.
And you get all that you need from you know, your liver like producing glycogen for you don’t need to eat a bunch of gels and stuff like that. But just know that glycogen is stored in your muscles. The biggest muscles in your body that store the most glycogen are like your legs, your quads, really. So if you have larger quads, you can store more glycogen, just something to think about as you’re considering whether or not you want to build muscle. Okay.
So all these reasons I just mentioned, are why I think it’s so important that if you’re a runner, and especially if you’re somebody who wants to improve their overall strength and overall health and fitness and you want to become your most badass self, you cannot skip strength training, you got to do it intentionally. You gotta do it consistently. And you gotta do it in a way that will help to make you stronger, and build muscle. Okay.
And if you’re interested in getting some help with all of this and you want to become a stronger leaner runner, you want to lose weight. You want to do it in a way that supports your running and you want to do it in a way where you get stronger as well as leaner then join us in the Running Lean coaching project.
I’d love to have you in the program, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply And as always, I love you all keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
Some of the most asked questions in the Running Lean Community on Facebook are about running-related injuries. Runners just seem to get injured pretty often. In fact, more than half of all …
Continue Reading about 92. Preventing and Treating Running Injuries with Brodie Sharpe →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there and welcome to episode 92 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today we’re talking about preventing and treating running injuries with Brodie Sharpe.
So some of the most asked questions that we get over in the Running Lean community on Facebook are about running-related injuries. People are constantly asking about hey, this hurts. What should I do? Or I did this when I was running? What does this mean?
Runners just seem to get injured pretty often. In fact, more than half of all recreational runners will experience an injury at some point. Why is this? Why do runners get injured so often? What are the most common injuries that runners are experiencing? How do we treat these injuries? And how can we prevent getting injured in the first place?
So in this episode of the podcast, I brought a very special guest to help answer these questions. Brodie Sharpe is an experienced physiotherapist and host of the popular Run Smarter podcast. And today he’s talking all about preventing and treating running injuries. This is going to be great. You guys are going to really enjoy this interview and this particular podcast, especially if you are worried about an injury or experiencing an injury right now.
But first, if you like this podcast, come check out that Running Lean podcast community over on Facebook, you can ask questions how what’s hurting, or anything else that has to do with running with sports nutrition with diet and exercise, weight loss, the group it goes hand in hand with this podcast, it extends the conversation.
It gives you a place where you have a voice where you can ask questions and get answers. So just search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us. It’s fun. We have fun over there.
Here’s another five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This one’s from Wendy and she says, “Thank you for the great podcasts. I know it’s consistency that will take us where we want to be. But it’s the motivation that gets us to start. Thank you for the motivation. You are awesome.”
Thank you very much money that was very sweet of you. And I love getting these kinds of reviews on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you guys listen because it just means that the message is resonating with you. So thank you for sharing that.
And then people ask how they can work with me there are two ways number one, the Running Lean coaching group and starting in October. Oh man, October is already upon us. This episode will actually be coming out on October the first so starting the first Tuesday in October we’re going to be talking all about injury prevention and strength and flexibility.
And so the focus of our coaching and the focus of the training for this whole month is going to be on building strength becoming more flexible to prevent injuries. You know injuries are preventable, you don’t have to be injured as a runner, you don’t have to be one of the half of runners that get injured.
Okay, so I’ve got some special guests that I’m bringing in to teach us how to get stronger how to become more flexible how to stay injury-free so if you’re interested come and join us just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join.
And then the other way that you can work with me is one on one as I can be your coach this is what I do, I’m a coach. And working with me one on one is probably the best way for you to reach your goals. I mean imagine how much you can accomplish working one on one with a coach for like three months I mean, what is not possible for you now can definitely be possible for you in 90 days’ time.
Okay, so definitely think about this and you can learn all about coaching and apply and then we can have a conversation about it. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply and see if coaching is good for is a good fit for you. And in addition to the one-on-one coaching, you also get access to the monthly coaching group as well when you’re a one-on-one client. Cool.
All right, let’s get into this episode because I’m excited about sharing this interview with you guys. Brodie’s a cool guy and I really enjoyed this conversation. Brodie Sharpe is a physiotherapist from Melbourne, Australia, and he’s the founder and CEO of the Run Smarter series and host of the Run Smarter podcast.
Brodie helps runners identify the common misconceptions about running and running injuries so that you can become a faster, healthier, and smarter runner. He teaches powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist.
He also interviews the best running gurus in the world on his podcast. And I was recently a guest on his podcast does that make me one of the best running gurus in the world? I don’t know. I guess I’ll throw my name that will lump it in there.
But it’s a great podcast, you definitely need to check it out. His podcast is designed for injured runners or for runners who are looking to prevent becoming injured runners or runners who just want to improve their running performance. So it covers a wide range of stuff. He interviews a lot of great people on that podcast. He has so much knowledge.
Brodie is an experienced runner himself. He’s dealt with his share of running injuries so he knows exactly how frustrating being injured can be as a runner. This is one of the reasons why he became a physiotherapist so that he could help other runners get back to doing what they love doing the most, which is running, right.
So in this episode, we talk about what are the most common running injuries, we talked about how we can prevent these injuries from happening in the first place. Brodie shares his thoughts on stretching, foam rolling, and what the science actually says about these things, and how beneficial they actually are, or are not for us as runners.
We talk about whether or not running is just bad for your knees. And if we should all just expect to have bad knees as we get older because we run a lot. And then we get into some of the common misconceptions about running injuries, and how to properly treat running injuries.
Like there are some ways of treating injuries that we’ve been kind of conditioned to do over the last few decades. And are these things still the right way to do it or not. So this is great. Like I learned so much from this interview, and I know you will, too.
So without further ado, let’s get into this awesome conversation with Brodie Sharpe. Today, I’ve got Brodie Sharpe from the Run Smarter podcast.
And Brodie, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself? Tell us about what you do. Let’s talk about what your jam is because I’m very interested in this topic today.
Brodie Sharpe
Thanks, Patrick. Thanks for having me on. My name is Brodie Sharpe. I am a physiotherapist from Melbourne, Australia. And a couple of years into my physio career I became a recreational runner, I transitioned out of team sports playing basketball, to training for a half marathon with my sister.
And a couple of things happened at that time – one I caught the running bug very quickly, two I became injured very quickly. And three, during when I was seeing patients in my clinic, I was just an employee, just a random private practice clinic see anyone under the sun.
But as soon as I’d see a runner, I’d just have this heightened passion around wanting to pull out my best self and really like help educate them as best I can, get them back to pain-free running as best I can. And it was just years and years of seeing those and self-reflecting on what my passions were, where my passion lied, and what brought out my best self what gave me energy rather than depleted my energy.
I was seeing these runners and so slowly would transition my career into still being a physiotherapist, but tailoring to only treating runners and educating runners as best I can. Because I found a big passion with educating runners recognized there were a lot of misconceptions out there, recognized that a lot of runners need to be educated on certain topics if they wanted to reduce the risk of injuries or increase their running performance safely.
And a lot of times, there’s a lot of confusion out there. If you Google something, if you type a message onto running Facebook groups and you ask you know, I have plantar fasciitis, what’s helped you, or I just want to reduce my risk of injuries. What should I do? And you just see the wide array of not only different types of answers but also contradictory answers.
Some would say you know you need to rest an injury. Some will say you know, you need to run through an injury, need to foam roll, you need to stretch you need to continue loading, you need to do all these sorts of things that perhaps sometimes contradict one another.
And so recognizing that and talking with a lot of runners and a lot of their confusions, decided to launch the Run Smarter podcast, where I help bring clarity, bring control to recreational runners try and deliver information in a way that’s easy for them to understand, kind of break down the science and bust a lot of these misconceptions.
And so that brought me to a couple of things. So venturing into online physiotherapy where I only train runners in my own business now, the Run Smarter Physiotherapy Clinic continues to build the podcast. It’s a big kind of lead generator, but also just helps people if they just want free resources, free information just to go there and help build on their own running IQs.
So it’s kind of like the long answer of where I find myself today. And there’s probably a lot of your listeners are runners and maybe have gone through that same path of being quite confused when they are injured. What caused that injury? How do I overcome it? How do I reduce the risk of it coming back? A lot of those kinds of answers. So hopefully, we delve into a lot of that today.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. And you’re so right, when it comes to like people posting, you know, questions in forums and on Facebook groups and stuff. And the Running Lean community is an awesome Facebook group. Tons of just great positive people in there.
And I always crack up when somebody says, hey, my leg hurts here. What should I do? And then you get all the answers that all contradict each other. And it’s like, what is the right answer? And I always want to just tell people, like you need to go talk to somebody that knows what they’re talking about here, you know.
So let’s, let’s get into this a little bit. What are some of the major injuries are the most common injuries that runners face? And I can think of a few off the top of my head, but what do you see as the most common injuries that runners are presented with?
Brodie Sharpe
I think if we were to fall back on like the research and say, what is the most common running-related injuries in the recreational population, it would be knee pain. So the most common form of that would be runner’s knee, or patellofemoral pain, which is essentially just pain around the kneecap quite hard to localize.
People point to different margins of the kneecap itself inside, it’s kind of around here. And that’s what the research would show. A lot of the runners that come to me would be plantar fasciitis, and it would be a high hamstring tendinopathy or proximal hamstring tendinopathy.
Because those two conditions really don’t get better on their own unless you have really good management and they can get quite nasty, and severe and carry over outside of running into everyday life. Like sitting for the hamstring becomes an issue or just like standing for your job becomes an issue when it comes to plantar fasciitis. They’re definitely the two most that I see.
Other ones would be shin splints, others would be like ITB friction syndrome, they’re quite common amongst the running population, then you have some stuff a bit higher up, you have like a lateral hip pain or like hip flexor type of issues.
Rarely do we see low back pain. But it can happen. Sometimes a lot of these things, someone might get low back pain outside of running, say if they’ve moved house, or they’ve done something they shouldn’t have done too much lifting beyond their capacity.
And then they try and run and it’s the running that stirs it up. But isn’t the thing that actually triggered that pain. But yeah, definitely those issues at the knee and below the knee are definitely most common.
Patrick McGilvray
So when people say you hear people that are not runners say this all the time, like oh, running is just gonna, it’s just bad for your knees. You know, you just it’s just bad for the knees. And do you find that to be the case? Or is that one of those misconceptions that people have about, about running injuries?
Brodie Sharpe
Definitely one of those misconceptions. Yes, we know that the knee is the most common area where someone might develop an injury. But it’s only the knee has developed the injury because you have had some sort of training error, or there’s been some sort of under recovering kind of aspect.
Before we delve into maybe I’d best describe like what causes running injuries because that would like layout the foundation for the for my actual answer. If you were to look at all running-related injuries, they’re called overuse injuries because it’s not due to direct trauma. It’s not due to a twist or rolled ankle or you haven’t got tackled or fallen to the ground.
It’s been in most cases you’re running load, what we call repetitive type of injuries. So hitting the ground with a certain striking the ground with a certain pattern and just doing that over and over and over again hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of times if you do something that goes beyond your capacity, so every tendon, every muscle, every ligament, every joint has a certain load capacity that we need to train just below that capacity which is within in what we call your adaptation zone.
So if you train enough and foster enough loading within that adaptation zone frequently enough, it will get stronger, your adaptation zone grows, and you need to progress your training and continue following that new adaptation zone and you just get stronger and stronger.
But where these running-related injuries, these overuse injuries, these training errors happen is you have caused an abrupt shift in your training, either running too far running too fast, having an abrupt shift to your terrain.
So you might be running on flats, and then all of a sudden, you’re doing hills, and your tendons, ligaments, whatever structure fails first has said wait, that’s way too much for me, I’m not used to this type of load, it’s gone way past my adaptation zone, and it starts breaking down getting sore getting stiff, rather than building up.
And so when we talk about running injuries and around the knee, in most cases, it’s been due to some sort of training error or some sort of abrupt change, either loading it too much, or you’ve under recovered too much. So that’d be like lack of sleep, increased stress, and your body doesn’t hit this recovery mode like it once used to. And that can develop an overuse injury as well.
And so, yes, running too far, running too fast beyond your capacity, doing too many hills, if you’re used to running on the flats, that would increase the amount of load that goes through the knee, and it can start getting sore because of that.
When people say that running is bad for your knees, they kind of think if you were to run throughout your career, that your knee joint is going to slowly degrade because of too much.
Too much wear and tear too much repetition too much load constantly, throughout your running career, that it’s only going to be a finite kind of expiry date before the cartilage in your knees will start to slowly wear away, then you’ll start to get early-onset osteoarthritis, and then it’s going to be needed a replacement down the track. That’s where people tend to head towards.
However, we know that there’s research out there to show the complete opposite. If you have loading of the knee – if you strike the ground, and you hit the ground with some ground reaction force that actually stimulates cartilage growth, we actually want that stimulation, we want to keep the joint healthy, we want to keep the joint strong.
And we want to engage the lower leg, the whole entire body with some sort of ground reaction force to trigger and stimulate cartilage growth, muscle strength, tendon adaptation, all those healthy things. And we can point to really nice robust evidence.
There was one study in particular that looked at a systematic review of 123,000 people, mainly in the US, but they looked at the prevalence of osteoarthritis, and this cartilage wear and tear amongst sedentary people, amongst recreational runners and amongst elite runners. And they showed that you’re three times more likely to get osteoarthritis if you are in the sedentary population compared to a recreational runner.
And if we know anything about what I’ve just explained around – you need stimulation, you need strength, you need to trigger your body to adapt to these sort of loads – that’s why we say that that general population was around 3.5% of recreational runners have knee or hip osteoarthritis and that the sedentary population was around about 12%.
So we’re looking at those sorts of numbers. And it kind of makes sense why we do these massive studies and see the prevalence numbers if we know anything about adaptation, and so someone says running is bad for your knees, yes, it is bad for your knees. If you go out and you run a marathon when you’re not when you’re only used to running 10 K’s – yes, your knee will get sore.
But if you train sensibly if you run smarter, which is why I’ve developed the Run Smarter podcast, you will start to find out that it’s actually better for your knees if you train smart and have running longevity compared to someone who does who while definitely compared to this entry population. But we do need that constant adaptation we do need that constant trigger. So that would be my answer.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s awesome. And the way that I understand this and so this is why a lot of new runners I think face these kinds of issues is because they do too much too soon. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand that your muscles will develop pretty quickly.
And so, you know, you might develop the muscles in your legs, in your you know, feet and your hips and things like that to be able to run for longer distances. But the connective tissues, the tendons, the ligaments have not developed the load capacity like you said.
And so I think that is one of the reasons why newer runners develop these kinds of injuries because it’s not because their muscles aren’t, you know, capable or they’re doing too much pounding on the ground. What it is, is their connective tissues have not, you know, gain those the strength that they need to handle the wear and tear that they’re putting on them.
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, you can just look at any kind of recreational runner in the type of injuries that develop like Achilles tendinopathy, patella tendinopathy, like a lot of these tibialis posterior, like these tendons that are kind of around the feet and the ankles, they are very prone to developing high levels of forces.
Because the tendons themselves actually have to generate or they cop a lot of load during your running. The muscles yeah, they work with propulsion a little bit, but the tendons themselves, accumulate a lot more than the actual muscles themselves. If we look at the size of them, if we look at the structure of them compared to a big kind of quadriceps muscle or those particular kinds of structures.
And then if someone’s developed an Achilles injury, they have gone, you can just assume that that capacity is a lot lower than what the muscles could have been. Because compared to the load that running is required, and you exceeding whatever capacity of whatever structure might be, if it is a tendon, that means that tendon was the weakest point.
I know from my career of playing in basketball, like constantly running on my toes, constantly jumping, landing, taking off like sprint kind of things, my calf, and Achilles my Achilles, especially a quite strong, and I have, I’ve almost had every injury under the sun.
I’ve never had an Achilles injury when it comes to running, never had an Achilles issue when it comes to any other sort of training, just because I assume that the capacity of both of my Achilles are just really, really high. And I’ve just simply within my training, haven’t managed to exceed that capacity. Whereas something else like my knees, something else like my hamstring is a different story.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I don’t know, many runners who have not experienced some sort of injury during the course of their career running, you know, so. So how do we prevent these kinds of injuries from happening in the first place? Like what are some of the things we can do as runners to prevent this stuff from happening so we’re not sidelined?
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, I think it’s just following that same kind of universal principle. It’s just understanding the adaptation process, understanding your own adaptation capacity. I know in my podcast, episode one is called adaptation education. And that’s number one for a reason.
It’s the number one thing that we need to at least start with, where we need to start that conversation before we continue and start talking about more, more niche kinds of complex kinds of terms.
But if you’re a runner, and you want to try and reduce your risk of injury as much as you can, you need to understand, okay, we know abrupt changes in training will increase and elevate the risk of injury.
So running too far too fast beyond your capacity. Having abrupt changes, like I said, changes in terrain changes in surfaces. Sometimes some scenarios like if you have a change in footwear, so changing footwear is totally fine. But you need to transition gradually enough so that the body adapts to that style of running.
If you have the same type of shoe you’ve ran in for 10 years, you can continue running that shoe. If you buy a new shoe that’s exactly the same design, the exact same properties as the past shoe, then that’s fine as well. But if you want to run from a traditional kind of shoe to a minimalist type of shoe, you need a lot of time to transition into that shoe because it changes the load on your body. It changes the requirements.
And so if you just transition straight away, a lot of injuries happen. There was actually a study where they had 12 runners, no 14 runners go from a traditional shoe into a barefoot shoe. And they gave them this pamphlet. They taught them about how to transition gradually. And they just let them see how they went. They followed them for 8 weeks and 12 out of the 14 runners developed an injury and that is an enormous amount of risk.
And they interviewed them afterward and said okay, did you follow the pamphlet, not one person abided to every single transitioning rule that they provided at the start of the study. And so it goes to show – runners we get a bit of ahead of ourselves, we want to just get in there we want to try and rush our way through things. We can be a bit stubborn can be a bit impatient at times.
But if we make those training errors and we’re a bit hasty in our decisions. And we’re a bit hasty in our training. That’s where the injury risk comes into it. So that’s the adaptation side of things. That’s the external load on the body type of thing.
But we also know that recovery is key, when it comes to reducing the risk of injuries. Someone might be sleeping seven hours a day, their diet might be adequate, their stress levels moderate. And that’s totally fine for their situation that they’ve currently have placed themselves in.
But then they decide to train for a marathon. And it seems that like some way throughout their marathon training plan, where their loads are accumulated, the old recovery strategies just don’t seem to match, it needs to be this balanced equation, your recovery strategies need to match your external load.
And so if people keep to their old recovery strategies, and expect to build up their load and be fine, it just doesn’t happen. So there might get to this sort of tipping point where overuse injury happens.
And they say, Brodie, like I’ve been so gradual with my training, have followed this plan to the tee. And then you ask them, like, how’s your diet has your sleep has your stress, and they don’t score very well on those parameters. So you say, alright, you have been building up your external load, it’s time to match that with recovery because you don’t get stronger and you don’t adapt during the running.
You adapt and get stronger after the bout of running once your body is in this recovery mode. And so we need to have a discussion around maybe extending their sleep, getting better quality sleep, maybe mixing in some naps a couple of times a week, if they have that luxury of time.
Improving on nutrition, which is right in the in line with this podcast, monitoring levels of stress and all those other things.
And so it’s that balance between external load and recovery. If you’re balancing that really well, your likelihood of getting an overuse injury significantly reduces.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and taking some time off, like runners are notorious about sticking to their training plan no matter what. And I think that’s to our detriment, sometimes, you know, it’s great that you have a run streak going, or whatever it is, you know, maybe you’re training for something, you’re running five days a week, and you know, you’re training for a marathon, and you’re gonna stick to that no matter what.
But you could be just burning yourself out, you know, and I think it’s in our best interest, I love the idea of taking naps, by the way. But I think it’s in our best interest to like, slow down sometimes and take the day off when we need it.
Because in the long run, you’re going to stay healthy, you’re not going to be injured, you’re not gonna get sidelined, you’re not going to be losing, you know, training time. But if you do get injured, then you know, the doctor is going to tell you, you know, you need to take eight weeks off of running, of course, nobody is going to do that. But you know, runners are really stubborn, right?
Brodie Sharpe
So it’s also like when an injury starts to surface like if there’s just a bit of stiffness, not pain or just like the initial signs of an injury occurring, the runners are more often going to just run through that and see how things go. We’re stubborn, we love running. And that’s all we want to do, for most for some cases.
But when an injury happens, they kind of convinced themselves, it’s not happening that convinced themselves if they continue training should be fine. And that injury gets worse and worse and worse, especially if it continues to exceed that adaptation zone.
And so it can be really tricky for some runners, if they don’t have any other cross-training alternative, say if like an injury arises in my high hamstring, I know Okay, running speed work probably isn’t the best. Maybe I’ll take a couple of days off running, but swimming is good. Cycling is okay for my hamstring. And I know strength training is fine. And I’ll come up with these alternatives.
But it’s those runners who they run for, like their mental well-being as well as their physical well-being, and they just need to run every day or most days. When they get injured and they can’t run, it’s really tough for them. That’s a real mental battle. It’s real, causing a lot of frustration. It’s causing a lot of angst.
And they’re very likely to just go out for a run. I’m just, I just need it. I need this to be done. I don’t care if I’m sore or not. And that’s where they can get into real trouble because they don’t have any alternatives.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and that kind of brings up my next question, which is about maybe it’s prevention, maybe it’s not is so what role does things like stretching or foam rolling play in injury prevention or in like, kind of treating some of these injuries?
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, we can start with stretching. Most of the research revolves around static stretching, so like that stretch and hold, sort of stretch. If someone loves running, they’re not going to like what the research shows. But there is research to show that static stretching before a run doesn’t do anything for injury prevention, it doesn’t do anything for running performance, it doesn’t increase your running performance.
And when it comes to like a cooldown afterward, physically speaking, the static stretching doesn’t do much for recovery. If there’s going to be delayed onset muscle soreness the next day, it’s not going to reduce that time, it’s not going to reduce that recovery time.
However, we know that stretching feels really good for some people. For some runners, they just love stretching. And this is often what I recommend, I recommend that runners try a whole bunch of different warm-up routines, a whole bunch of different cooldown routines, and see what best feels good for them.
In the last couple of years, I have, say, if you were to have looked at me five years ago, I wouldn’t do a lot of stretching, I would just if I was to do like a warm-up, it would be jogging on the spot, it would be just doing my first couple of minutes of running just really slow. And then just getting into my rhythm and then increasing my speed, that would be my warm-up.
If I was to do a speed session, like intervals really hard, really intense, might do a little bit of stretching, might try and increase the mobility of my hips and my ankles a little bit. And then I would be very diligent with increasing my speeds slowly when I run. That would be my routine.
Fast forward to today, I am focusing a lot more on stretching, a lot more on mobility work only because I’ve tried different routines. And I’m finding now that for some reason or whatever my stretching, and my mobility work is making me feel better before a run. And so that’s what I recommend for runners.
Try a whole bunch of routines, you might want to do a 20-minute yoga session before a run, see how you feel. And if you feel a lot better from that, then maybe implement that into your strategy if you have the time.
But if you have tried a whole bunch of different strategies, and then you go for a run, and compared to not stretching, you’re indifferent, which would be me five years ago, then maybe it’s not high on your priority list. And maybe it’s something that you might not need to implement because we know from the research, it doesn’t reduce your risk of injury doesn’t really increase your running performance. So there’s that side of things.
When it comes to recovery, though, like I said, we want the body, it’s important for the body to switch into recovery mode, after your bout of exercise. And we enhance those recovery kinds of techniques.
If foam rolling, stretching, yoga – if that is a really nice way for you to unwind, instead of you going straight into a work setting and being quite stressed, or not getting a lot of sleep if you find that you just mentally unwind with a stretch session, yoga, foam roll whatever have you – that can be your recovery strategy.
Mentally, it switches your body into recovery mode really effectively. And so that can have real benefits mentally as well as physically because if you mentally unwind, then you physically recover. And so it depends on the person, I don’t have these absolute kind of rules around Yes, you should be foam rolling, yes, you should be stretching just depends on the individual how they feel.
A lot of people say, oh, I’ve tried foam rolling, it’s not really for me, I don’t like it. It just is painful the entire time. I’m kind of a bit tense the entire time when I do it. I’m thinking about other things that I could be doing. I don’t recommend it for them. I think we can count on other strategies and other ways to unwind. So that’s kind of where we fall on to it.
We know that foam rolling doesn’t release muscles, particularly the ITB is a really big misconception out there. A lot of people think they need to release their ITB or stretch their ITB because it feels tight. You’re not doing I’m telling you now you’re not doing anything to release that structure. It is so thick, it is so fibrous, it actually bluntons the scalpel of surgeons who try and cut through it.
It is that thick, and it doesn’t have any muscle properties. So pushing a foam roller or trying to stretch it in a particular stretch might feel good for you. So continue doing it but not releasing it. So we really need to be honest with ourselves and really educate ourselves on what effect it’s actually having.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I’m glad you sort of cleared that up, because I’ve heard the stretching argument for years. And I’ve sort of heard that too, that there really isn’t a lot of data that supports that stretching is actually doing much for you. But if it feels good, do it and I love that, you know. Because I love doing I do some foam rolling I do a little bit of stretching. I love doing a little bit of yoga. And this stuff feels good for me. And so I’m going to continue doing it.
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, and it’s probably worth saying as well that stretching, foam rolling – it’s not detrimental. There are studies done to show that there’s no detrimental, it’s not gonna make you slower, it’s not going to increase your risk of injury, it’s not gonna do anything detrimental to your performance in your recovery. So if you love doing it, then it definitely should be still implemented.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. And so when it comes to certain injuries, I know that there’s this acronym RICE that we’ve all heard, you know? R, which is Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation, right? And is this still legit? Like, do we still want to use this, this methodology when it comes to most running injuries?
Brodie Sharpe
No, because, as I said, at the start running injuries aren’t necessarily trauma-based. They’re not a rolled ankle where people sometimes might roll ankles if they’re on the trails, but running-related injuries refers to overuse injuries, which means there’s not there’s no inflammation, it’s not the primary driver of pain.
We know that if you develop, say tendinopathy, we know we’ve changed our terminology from tendinitis, which was 10 years ago to now which is tendinopathy because that itis refers to inflammation, inflammatory component as the primary driver. So now it’s a tendinopathy, which we know the pain signals aren’t inflammatory driven.
And so overcoming that injury, usually, if you were to roll your ankle, they would say, Okay, you need to rest definitely from any aggravating factors need to ice because there’s inflammation there, and that settles down inflammation, you need to compress because it also helps circulate that swelling, or that inflammation present and elevate because if you keep that body part above the level of your heart, there’s not that the body it has to work against gravity, and that inflammation just doesn’t seep into that area as easily.
I think that whether that method for even inflammatory driven components, like a rolled ankle that is starting to be challenged these days anyway but talking about running-related injuries, that’s not the case.
There is a very long acronym that has come out maybe about five years ago, it was called PEACEANDLOVE. And that’s a long acronym. But the peace side of it was more towards that real direct trauma kind of blunt force if you get tackled. If you twist something and there’s, it’s swollen, those sort of things.
So the peace side of it was protect, elevate, avoid anti-inflammation medication, compress and educate. So the Protect being like anything, it’s really anything that’s really irritating it best to avoid that kind of thing. Elevate Yes, getting it above your heart probably does about 5% effectiveness, but it’s still a little bit of something. Avoid anti-inflammation, especially when it comes to overuse injuries, running injuries, tendon injuries, we know that long-term anti-inflammation medication is actually detrimental to long-term recovery. So best take it for one to two days, if you must.
But you know, generally speaking, if you don’t need to take it, you probably shouldn’t. Compress the area a little bit if there’s swelling, and educate, educate about the injury, educate around the aggravating factors, exactly what you need to do. Those sort of things is really key in those inflammatory, blunt trauma, twisting, popping kind of injuries. But we’re continuing with this acronym.
So you’ve got peace, and then you’ve got love. So peace and love. And love is the one that’s more to do with definitely like day one, running-related injuries, or once you’ve passed that inflammatory phase, that primary inflammatory driver, probably three or four days moving into this kind of like recovery phase.
So LOVE – L being load. You need to find your new adaptation zone to this injury. If it’s a knee injury, you need to find how to load it that doesn’t exacerbate symptoms. So load being maybe squats, maybe wall sits, so static wall sets, maybe doing step-ups, maybe doing low levels of running, you need to find where that new adaptation zone is and train within that adaptation zone and build your way back up.
O is optimism, and that kind of comes along with education as well. It’s knowing that you can recover. It’s having a good management plan forward. It’s feeling good about your recovery. So we’re looking at the mental side of things as well.
The V is vascularisation which is just getting the heart pumping. If you have a knee injury, maybe it’s going swimming, if you have a shoulder injury, maybe it’s going for a jog or a bike ride, just getting some blood flowing. Because we know, when it comes to healing, blood flow is very, very good.
We know that for certain structures that don’t have a lot of blood supply, those recovery times are a lot longer than that of a muscle or something that has a lot of very rich blood supply. So keeping optimistic, keeping exercising can feel really good as well, if you’re injured and find another exercise alternative, then you feel really good, which is going to be the E, it’s that exercise component.
So you’ve got the vascularization mixed in with loading mixed in with just getting moving all of these really positive, proactive steps that you can take to be very active, rather than just completely resting your injury, which can actually be detrimental if you follow that particular path, which we can delve into, in a bit more detail if you want.
But that’s a bit more of a detailed explanation acronym when it comes to entry management, which I hope didn’t confuse a lot of people.
Patrick McGilvray
No, I think that is awesome. Because it’s just, you know, we hear these things we hear for so long, and we just kind of take them at face value. And we take them at face value for sometimes decades. And I know that there’s always, you know, new studies that are coming out or, or new ways of doing things. And so that’s why, you know, we got you here because we want to hear like what should we be doing, you know, what’s the, what’s the new methodology that’s going to help us with this kind of stuff?
Because, you know, I can’t tell you how many people I know that, you know, deal with injuries, and they don’t know what to do. You know, that kind of brings me to my next question, which is like, how do you know if you even have an injury, or if it’s just like, you’re sore, because you’ve been running.
Like we all run and we get sore, you know, you go on your run, and you start building up mileage, and maybe you’re training for a marathon, you run, you know, 8 miles and then you’re up to 10 or 12 miles or up to 14 miles, you’re gonna get some soreness, there’s gonna be some delayed onset muscle soreness, you know, that kind of thing?
How do you know that you’re actually dealing with an injury? At what point do we need to go and like take some more dramatic action?
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, it’s a good question. There are certain pain characteristics, certain styles of pain behaviors that you can pay attention to recognize, okay, is this going to be good pain? Or is it bad pain, and let’s talk about the good pain.
So good pain is that delayed onset muscle soreness like you described, we need to, sometimes if you go to a gym, or if you do a new exercise you hadn’t done before you do a new gym class most people have experienced next day waking up and like just being completely sore.
First of all, the onset of the pain, it’s not during that class or that exercise is not straight after during that warm down, it’s the next day you wake up some maybe sometimes 48 hours later, you just feel super tired, you feel super sore. And it’s that timeframe that we also need to pay attention to.
The location of the pain. In most cases, delayed onset muscle soreness will be located throughout the muscle, it’s kind of this widespread, it’s not focal like this pinpoint kind of pain, it’s a bit more widespread than that.
And also, when it comes to the subsequent days of that we know that delayed onset muscle soreness hangs around for two or three days, if it’s really severe, might be four to five days. But then it just dissipates just goes away because that’s what the body is done. And that’s why it’s necessary.
If you do a new gym class, and you wake up the next day, and you have this delayed onset muscle soreness, that’s the body processing itself, rejuvenating yourself in order to be stronger next time. So that’s why it’s it’s called good pain.
Converse to that when it comes to bad levels of pain. We know okay, from the onset, yes, a bad pain can be the next day. So we need to be quite mindful of that. But definitely, if the pain comes on during the run and gets worse as you run if it comes on quite severely once you’ve cooled down, they are worth paying attention to.
It’s worth trying to modify your training. It’s trying to be proactive with managing that it’s like changing things in that time. Over the next couple of days, try and make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Like I said, sometimes especially with tendon injuries, they can come on the next day. But this comes back to the location side of things. If it’s a tendon injury that’s flared up the next day when you first wake up and move around, that’s usually more localized. You can point to the tendon or you can always pinpoint where that pain resides. And it’s not that widespread kind of ache through the muscles that just feels tight and stiff and sore.
And subsequent to that, like over the next couple of days, we know that delayed onset muscle soreness generally will go away in two or three days. Injuries can persist for a couple of weeks, sometimes a couple of months.
And so if you’re trying to figure out is this little niggle, this little sore spot, is this an injury, is this good pain or bad pain, but you’ve had it for two weeks? It’s definitely not good pain, it’s definitely not going to be this muscle soreness, this is going to sporadically go away unless you change something in your training.
And so it’s those kinds of things that happen. Definitely, if you have like a bad pain, we know that niggles kind of happened, we know, if you’re doing marathon training, then the foot might get sore during the run, we know that like the calf might start getting really tight and sore, at the end of your long runs. We know that it’s not delayed onset muscle soreness, but you’re just challenging your body quite a lot.
So you’re kind of on this cusp. And modifications will be needed. Like if you continue to ignore it, and continue building up your training and your speed work, and just totally ignore those symptoms, then it can tip into something very hard to manage.
But I always say on my podcast, we can’t reduce the risk of an injury down to zero, that just doesn’t happen. It’s unachievable, but we can train smart to reduce that risk of injury as much as we can.
But then if injuries do arise, if we catch it day one, day two, day three, and we be quite proactive and do all the right things, then we overcome that injury very quickly. Within like a couple of days, we haven’t lost any fitness. We continue to learn from our past mistakes, why that came up in the first place. And we can take proactive measures to interact with that.
And so that’s what I call like the real injury prevention strategies. It’s once something arises, overcome a quickly train smart, learn from it, modify and then continue progressing without losing any fitness. It’s sometimes hard to achieve. You need a lot of education, you need the right people on your team.
But that’s, that’s kind of where real life kind of falls into it. We can’t just get the injury risk down to zero. And if you’re injured, you’re like, Oh, God, I tried everything I can, what else could I possibly do? We kind of need to be a bit more realistic in that sense.
Patrick McGilvray
And so I mean, geez, everything you’re talking about is just so awesome. And the not overloading, not doing too much too fast seems to be like a theme that I hear. And that seems to be the cause of most of these injuries. So does the 10% rule still apply, is that’s something we should sort of stick to, or is that just kind of can we kind of debunk that one as well?
Brodie Sharpe
It’s a general rule that has a lot of limitations. One, if you’re just starting out as a new runner, it’s going to be extremely slow, you’re going to be progressing, getting nowhere very quickly if you have to try and increase by 10%. So there are limitations on that side. But if you’re an ultra-athlete, maybe 10% is too much for you. If you’re doing like 200 kilometers a week, that might be too much. Who knows, it depends on the individual.
So it is a very general rule that we can apply if you want. But also, the limitation lies with a lot of like intricacies – like it doesn’t incorporate spade doesn’t incorporate recovery doesn’t incorporate like terrain. So you can increase your mileage by 10% every week, but you just get faster and faster and faster, you’re just gonna break down.
If you go from doing flats to doing hills, you’re gonna break down. So what I like to do with a lot of my runners that I work with, is have these arbitrary exercise units. And so you train for the amount of minutes, and you train. And you rank on average, how intense that was out of 10.
And so 10 is like this max out sprint, you cannot last for very long at that level, a 2 or a 3 is just, you could just go for hours, just jogging at a really low intensity, do that for hours. And then you kind of just rank yourself on okay, my session went for 30 minutes, my intensity was like a 4 out of 10. And then you just combine that to give you, you multiply those two numbers to give you these arbitrary exercise units. And you want to make sure that that doesn’t increase by more than 10 or 15% per week.
And I’ve actually followed this myself quite diligently and seeing really good results with it because you’re incorporating distance or duration, so in minutes, but you’re also incorporating intensities or speeds or those sort of kind of workouts and can be really nice for a structure for someone to follow.
It covers plenty because you could be running at the same speed. But all of a sudden, you’re running at that same speed up the hill, and just feels really intense. So speed itself can have its limitations, because it depends on the terrain or the elevation, but you feel really bad.
But also, we also know if you’re under-recovered, we know that an easy 5K run can feel quite challenging at times. Whereas if you are well-rested, well recovered, training well with the right intensities, a 5K run might be a 5K, slow run might feel really easy.
So it’s in the moment as well how your body’s feeling how you’ve recovered, you might say, look, I went really slow with that 5K. But I feel like that was a bit of a workout, maybe it was more of a 4 or 5 out of 10 rather than a 2 or a 3, and then you’re incorporating that into these arbitrary exercise units as well.
So it’s this internal process, listening to the body, listening to your recovery, a lot of things that just really work well. So people can do that, rather than just following a general kind of mileage 10% rule as well.
Patrick McGilvray
I love that. That is solid advice right there, Brodie. Thank you for that. Anything else you want to add? This has been really, really awesome. We’re gonna have to get you back on here and have a more in-depth conversation about some other specific topics, because there are so many things that are kind of coming to mind now that it’s like we could just talk all day about this stuff.
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, I think just as a general takeaway, as well, if people want to delve deep into these sorts of topics, then they always listen to the podcast. But resting in injury, like the complete rest of an injury can actually be detrimental. You need to continue to stay active, sometimes even run, but just pay attention to symptoms along the way.
If there’s an increase in your symptoms during the run, after the run, or the next day, like a significant kind of flare-up, then we know that’s way too much. But sometimes poking into a little bit of pain in order to stay active and stay strong and keep your capacity quite strong is the way to go.
And I can talk about that topic for another 40 minutes. But it’s still a really key message for a lot of runners to hear. And it resonates a lot with a lot of runners as well. But you do need to be smart, maybe have the right guidance if you’re not too sure.
If you continue to flare up an injury because you’re returning too quickly or doing something you might not then maybe having a running coach or a health professional to guide you through that process. But that’s something I often see people say there, they get a sore knee and they’re like, Oh, damn, I’ve overdone myself, let me just take a week off and let me try running again next weekend and see how things go. And then it comes back that next weekend, that next weekend, I think, damn, maybe I need more time off.
And so they take two weeks off, and all of a sudden, this knee is completely weak. It’s completely painful. It’s completely sensitized and just can’t tolerate any sort of loading. And so that’s something that we need to be really proactive about, have a lot of education about and yeah, in order to overcome these injuries quite quickly and without losing fitness either.
Patrick McGilvray
Love it. So where can people find you and learn more about all this stuff?
Brodie Sharpe
I always recommend going to the podcast first if they are one for like that audio format. My first 10 episodes of the Run Smarter podcast covers 10 universal principles to overcome any injury. I think number seven talks about this pain, rest, weakness downward spiral, which delves a bit more in detail of what I was just describing with this complete rest is an injury.
If you don’t like the audio format, or if you want to just read and watch things, I am quite active on Instagram as well. So @runsmarterseries is my handle quite active on that. Releasing, like reviewing articles, reviewing like papers around running and overcoming injuries, blogs, and exercise examples, all those sorts of things. So if they want to digest a bit more of that, that sort of information, they can go there.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. This has been really interesting. And I just want to say thanks, Brodie, for coming on here and sharing all this stuff with us. And I know that people are going to be really interested in this topic because it’s a hot topic – injury prevention. And just like what do we do when we get injured? It’s like one of the top things people ask about. So we’ll get you back on here again, but thanks so much for being here today, I appreciate it.
Brodie Sharpe
I’d love to come back on. Thank you very much.
Patrick McGilvray
Wasn’t that good? Brodie is such a cool guy and he has so much knowledge to share. Definitely check out the Run Smarter podcast. He shares a ton of great info on there to help you keep running injury-free.
And then remember October is injury prevention strength and flexibility month over in the Running Lean coaching group. The focus all month is going to be on building strength, building flexibility, and staying injury-free. And I’ve got some special guests coming in to share their thoughts and ideas and teach you how to get stronger and be more flexible and keep running without getting injured.
Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. And I really hope that you got something out of this episode today. I know you did. And if you did, please consider sharing it with a friend. That’s all I got. Love you all keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.
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