Overtraining Archives - Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray

158. Building Your Aerobic Engine

January 6, 2023 By Patrick McGilvray

I get a lot of questions about how to improve running performance and one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer or faster you have to improve your …

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Podcast Transcript

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 158, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, building your aerobic engine. So I get a lot of questions from people in general and clients about how to improve running performance.

And one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer, or run faster, you have to improve your aerobic fitness. So building and maintaining a solid aerobic base should be the goal of every runner, regardless of your running experience. But many runners skip this step, because they just want to get to the faster running the higher intensity running.

So in this episode, I’m going to explain how building your aerobic engine is essential to helping you improve both your running speed and your endurance. And Happy New Year everyone. This is the first episode of 2023. And is this going to be a new year and a new you or a new year and the same old, same old you?

So I want you to think about this, where do you want to be this time next year? When you look back? Over 2023? What do you want to have accomplished? Where do you want to be with your health and your fitness? Do you want to make this year the year that you finally lose the weight and learn how to keep it off for good?

So I really want you to think about this, what do you really want for yourself this year, because here’s the truth. Whatever you want for yourself, it’s available to you, it’s achievable for you. So let’s get you there together. When you sign up for coaching with me, you get all the knowledge, support and accountability you need to achieve everything that you want for yourself in 2023.

So let’s make this year 2023 your best year yet, to learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a quick application. You and I will get on a call, we’ll see if coaching is a good fit for you. If it is, boom, we’ll get you started. And we’ll start making this the best year yet for you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply.

Okay, so lots of people who are new to running, especially the newer runners, want to kind of skip the part where they have to focus on building their aerobic base, or what I like to call the aerobic engine. And this is a good time of the year to be talking about this, because I think a lot of us are just about to start marathon training, or maybe half marathon training, a lot of spring races happen in the United States.

And so the beginning of January is when a lot of training begins. The problem is that most runners don’t do a really good job of building their aerobic engine properly. At the beginning of a training cycle, lots of runners, even very experienced runners who are maybe following some sort of training plan.

So they may have some sort of marathon training plan that they’re doing. They just begin by, you know, doing all their miles at a kind of medium hard intensity, and they end up kind of maybe getting burned out or getting injured. A lot of overuse injuries happen, especially with new runners, but even with experienced runners.

And a lot of these overuse injuries happen kind of at the first half of the training cycle, which leads me to believe that when we start our marathon training or start our half marathon training program, you need to be you need to have developed a good solid aerobic base, you need a good solid base on which you can build, right?

So you want to start with a good base, start with a good aerobic engine, and then you can get faster and build your intensity levels on top of that. So what does it mean when I’m talking about your aerobic engine? So really what I’m talking about here, as I’m talking about increasing the efficiency of your cardiovascular system, right?

The cardiovascular system is the different functions of your body that can combine to enable you to run for longer distances, right? Your cardiovascular system is, you know, your heart, your blood, carrying oxygen to working muscles and organs to every working part of your body. So it’s mostly, you know, how, how efficient is your heart? How much blood can your heart pump out at a time, like how much blood volume can you pump out?

Because the more blood volume in your heart can pump out, the more oxygen you will be delivering to working muscles, the better you are at delivering oxygen rich blood to working muscles, especially those muscles used for running, that easier running becomes. So we want to improve this system. And it’s something that you can absolutely improve.

Now, if you’re a new runner, and you’re just starting out, and you get out there, and maybe you’re training for your first 5k, and you get out there and to run a mile is takes everything you’ve got and you feel completely winded at the end of that mile, that is fine, that is normal. If you’re just getting started with this, then that is something where if you continue running, and you continue doing the right kind of running, you will find that running a mile becomes very easy.

And then running two and three miles becomes a no big deal. And then all of a sudden, you’re like, I’m just gonna go ahead and, and run a half marathon or trust our training for a marathon, right? But don’t get ahead of yourself. Work your way up to that slowly. And I’m going to be talking about that in a minute here.

So really, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about your aerobic engine, is your cardiovascular system, you know, your body’s ability to deliver oxygen rich blood to all the working muscles and organs and all the functions in your body that help you to improve your running efficiency and your running performance.

Okay, so why do we want to build an aerobic engine? Like why is it important to build this? Well, you know, you just can’t expect to go out there and run a fast half marathon or a fast marathon. Without doing the work to build your cardiovascular system, you can’t improve your running performance, if you don’t start with a good base, right?

So you need to first build a solid aerobic base, then you can work on getting faster, and increasing the intensity of your running over those longer distances. But I want to make sure this is very clear, do not skip this step, do not skip the part where you build that aerobic base. And something that is actually kind of counterintuitive. But I’ll explain why this works in just a minute here, you will actually get faster, just by improving your aerobic engine.

So by doing more slow, easy running and improving your cardiovascular system, you will become more efficient at running and you can actually run faster at the same intensity levels. This is one of the huge benefits of building a strong aerobic base is that you can improve your running efficiency, you can improve your running speed.

In fact, there are many benefits to improving your aerobic engine here. So when your cardiovascular system gets more efficient, when you improve your aerobic fitness, running becomes easier. This is like one of the number one reasons why we want to do this, it just gets easier, right? You can run longer distances and you can run faster at the same perceived effort level.

So let’s say you go out there and you run out a perceived effort level of a three or a four and you’re like this feels great, it feels pretty easy for me. And you might notice your pace is a 10 minute pace. For example, over time, if you build your cardiovascular system the right way, if you build your aerobic engine properly, over time, you can run at that same three four effort level.

Oh, this feels pretty easy. But now your pace is a 9:30 or a 9:00 minute pace because you’ve improved how your body is fueling itself and how your body is using oxygen and and how much blood volume you’re pumping out there. Okay, so you actually get faster at the same effort level, which is amazing.

Another reason why we want to improve our cardiovascular system, or our aerobic engine is that it actually increases the number of mitochondria in your body. So this is the powerhouse of your cells. And you can actually increase the size and strength of your mitochondria as well. So this right here is going to give you an edge and this is one of the reasons why you run easier and you can run faster at the same effort level.

You also get denser capillaries and you can deliver more oxygenated blood with more capillaries working in your bloodstream. So your working muscles will actually get more oxygen, which makes running easier. Another kind of benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to build mental toughness. So as you improve your cardiovascular system, you start to feel more confident. So you can go out there and run three miles and it feels tough.

But as you, you know, increase your running volume as you increase your distance as you increase your aerobic capacity and your aerobic performance, then running becomes easier and becomes more confident you can run 8, 10, 12 miles and and feel like well, yeah, I can do this. And it makes you more mentally tough because it pushes you, enables you to push yourself a little bit harder, enables you to shoot for higher and higher goals. And next thing you know you’re running a half marathon or you’re running a marathon, you’re starting to train for an ultra marathon.

Another benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to improve muscular strength, you know, you’re delivering more oxygen to muscles, you’re able to run longer, you build more muscular strength, you improve your running economy, you improve your running efficiency, you become more energy efficient, you know, you’re using the same kind of you have the same inputs, but your output is much more efficient. And then you get faster, you know, you’ll be able to perform better at races.

So all these reasons are why we work hard to improve our aerobic engine, okay. So do not skip this, we absolutely want to make sure that before you begin your training, or the first phases of your training for any kind of endurance events should be to really build a strong aerobic base. Now some people like to do this in the offseason, they like to spend, you know, four to six weeks building that aerobic engine, even up to 12 weeks, you know, really building a strong aerobic engine before they get into their training cycle.

But you can absolutely do this at the beginning of a half or full marathon training cycle. So how do we do this? How do you start building your aerobic engine? What are the keys to improving your aerobic fitness and improving your cardiovascular efficiency?

So the first tip I’m going to give you here to improve your aerobic engine would be to increase your running volume. Right? The simple fact of running more will help you to increase your aerobic capacity, increase your running efficiency, just running more and increasing your volume helps to improve your running form and helps to increase your cardiovascular system.

You build stronger muscles. Running becomes easier, just by running more. But the caveat with this is you don’t do too much too soon. This is one of the biggest rookie mistakes that new runners make is increasing their volume too much too soon. So the standard sort of rule of thumb has always been to increase by no more than around 10% a week in your weekly volume.

So that means if you’re starting out and you’re running about 10 miles a week, you know, for the first few weeks, I would only increase that by like a mile each week. So maybe week one you’re at 10 miles and then you build up to 11, 12, 13. Maybe you can jump up to 14.5 or 15, 16, 18, 20. But you don’t really want to increase volume too quickly.

So people get excited when they start running and they’re like oh running is amazing. I feel so great doing this and your muscles might be ready to take on the miles but your connective tissues, your tendons and ligaments are not quite ready for that yet. And a lot of the running injuries that people experience are tendinitis issues or strained, you know ligaments or tendons. They tend to be more connective tissue issues than they do with muscular issues.

It’s pretty rare to strain the muscle from running in the beginning especially. It’s more common to have these connective tissue issues so definitely be careful and don’t do too. Too much too soon try to keep it around that 10% increase in weekly volume, then, you know, if you’re a more experienced runner, you can increase that from 10 to maybe 15 or 20% per week. The idea is that you have to do what feels right for you. And don’t overdo it. That is the key here. Less is more in this case, right. So just slowly build your volume, but definitely increasing your volume is going to be one of the best ways to improve your aerobic engine.

Another way of doing this is to run slower. So when I talk about running slower, there’s different ways we can look at this. So running slower means you’re running in, maybe you’re running in a zone one or two. From a heart rate standpoint, maybe you’re someone who likes to just use RPE, rate of perceived exertion, the scale of 1 to 10. And you might like to stay in the one to four range.

That would be nice, easy running, maybe you’d like to just run at a conversational pace, you’d like to just, you know, go by if you can carry on a conversation or not. The idea here is that you need to slow down, and you need to do a lot of running slower. When you do a lot of running slower, you increase your distance, but if you keep the intensity levels very low, you are at lower risk of injury. And you put less stress on your systems, you put less stress on your bones and muscles and those connective tissues like I talked about.

So slow running is one of the best ways to build your aerobic engine, it’s one of the most effective ways to build your aerobic engine, you’re not going to be able to get more aerobically fit by just cranking out every workout, you can’t go out there and do every workout hard or medium hard, you know that you have to spend a lot of time running easy and rolling slow.

So something I noticed here, so I took about three months off of running. And since August, so August, September, October, getting into November, I’ve been running very consistently since the middle of November in my room or maybe like Thanksgiving, let’s just say. And I’m noticing that I’m paying very close attention to my effort level and my heart rate.

And I’m noticing that I’m staying very consistent from an energy standpoint, very easy running most of my runs, I would say 90% of my runs right now or at a very easy conversational pace, probably that one to two zones, and the heart rate zones, and maybe three to four on the RPE scale, or two to four somewhere in there and that our RPE scale.

But one thing that’s interesting here is I noticed that my effort level is staying the same, my heart rate is staying the same, but my pace is increasing. So I’m getting faster, at the same effort level. So this is a sign that I’m building a strong aerobic engine. And this is what I want for you too. You should notice that over time, doing a lot of running 90% 80% of your runs at this slower pace, just slowing things down, will help you to increase your aerobic engine and help you to get faster.

So now as I get to the place where I’m you know, going to get into marathon training here, and I’m training for an ultra marathon event here in May, I will continue doing a lot of this slow, easy running and see my pace continually increase, you know, to a certain degree here, okay? The other way that you can really increase your aerobic engine is by running faster.

And I know that sounds a little bit counterintuitive here. But doing higher intensity, like short, higher intensity workouts is another amazing way of building that aerobic engine, right? So why these work is that these workouts put a very high amount of stress on the cardiovascular system, very high amount of stress for very short intervals. This elicits an adaptive response where your system improves.

Think about it, like you know building muscle, like if you lift heavy weights, and you do you know six to eight reps of a very heavy weight. And you get to the point where you just cannot lift one more rep of that weight.

And then you stop and so that’s a short interval but very intense. Your muscle is going to have been put under a high amount of stress for a very short amount of time. That muscle is going to have an adaptive response. It’s going to get stronger. It’s going to grow. You’re gonna see some growth rather than that muscle, and the next time, you’ll be able to lift a heavier weight.

The exact same response happens in our cardiovascular system. So we put high stress for a very short amount of time on that cardiovascular system that improves, this isn’t there’s an adaptive response, your body’s like, hey, we need to, you know, change the way we’re doing things here, we need to increase the amount of blood we’re pumping out per heartbeat. So increase our blood volume, you know, we need to deliver more oxygen working muscles.

And this is another very effective way of improving that aerobic engine. And especially when you combine it with your longer slower runs, right, your very easy lower stress run. So very low stress, long runs, and then very high stress, short runs. So running fast and hard for short intervals, like this could be like, one to three minutes, a very hard running 4-10 minutes of moderate intensity running maybe 12-30 minutes.

For tempo type workouts, these are just examples of different intensity levels that you can add in there. But you know, anything short is one to 30 minutes, maybe. And it just kind of depends on the event that you’re training for. But high stress for short intervals, and low stress for the long runs equals a badass aerobic engine, right there. Okay?

So those two combined are a really, really good way of improving your cardiovascular fitness. So the slower runs focus on 80-90% of your runs at that slow pace, and then higher intensity, shorter workouts, you know, 10-20%, depending on where you are in your training cycle, when we’re talking about building your aerobic base here, I would I would focus on more of a 90/10 breakdown there, okay.

And then probably the most common method people think of when they want to improve their aerobic fitness would be the long run, like improve the length of your long run. And when I say long run, it depends on what you’re training for, again, so this could be 30 minutes, if you’re training for your first 5k, that could be a long run for you, or six hours, if you’re trading for for a 50 miler, you know, so, long run is very subjective. So it just kind of depends on what you’re training for.

Most of us, if we’re training for a marathon, let’s say, most people are going to be doing a long run anywhere from an hour to three and a half hours, something like that, okay. So when we’re talking about in increasing the distance of your long run, the effort level has to be low. So we’re talking about, you know, heart rate zones wanting to wonder for on the RPE scale, this is a conversational pace, this is a easy, I could run all day at this pace.

Okay, this is gonna be one of the most powerful ways of improving your cardiovascular system. So we’re, we’re not just doing one of these things. By the way, we’re not just picking one of these things and saying, like, Oh, I’m just going to improve my long run, I’m just gonna increase the distance on my lawn, or I’m just going to do some HIIT workouts or I’m just going to run slower.

No, you got to do a mile, you got to increase your running volume, you got to run slower, you got to run faster for shorter distances, and you got to increase the distance of that long run, you got to do all these things. But when you do and you combine them all, you’re going to find that your aerobic engine is pretty badass. Okay.

And then the last thing I’ll add to this list is really just getting better at burning fat. You need fuel for running. And when you’re especially running slower and running at these lower intensities, the preferred source of fuel your body’s going to want to use as fat, the better you can get at burning fat, the easier running is going to feel for you.

Listen, we as human beings, we’re naturally good fat burning machines, we’ve just gotten very far away from that state. You know, we’ve been eating a diet that forces us to use glucose as our main fuel source. And granted, it is a very easily available and very quick burning source of fuel especially for running but you run out of that fast and your body isn’t using a whole lot of glucose. When you’re running at these lower intensities fat is going to be the main fuel source, so you got to get good at burning fat.

I suggest you get fat adapted stop using sugar and carbs as fuel. stop relying on glucose as a fuel source. Start training your body to tap into your own stored body fat as a source of fuel for running run in the fasted state. That means you don’t need to fuel up before you run. Maybe for a long long run or a high intensity run, yes. But for the most part, you know, you don’t really need to feel up before the runs, train your body to get good at burning fat.

And this isn’t about like zero carbs or anything like that, this is just about using the right kinds of carbs and using carbs properly. Keeping the carbs pretty low, though, okay, so get better at burning fat. Listen, we’re great at storing fat, right? We’re really good at storing fat, we’re just not good at tapping into our own body fat for fuel. And if you’re somebody who has, you know, 10-20 pounds to lose, you’ve got way more than enough body fat to get you out there and run for many, many, many miles for days, days.

I’m pretty low in the body fat percentage, and I’ve got hundreds of 1000s of calories of body fat on my body right now that I could use, I could literally run for, you know, weeks at a time or something like that. So get better at burning that fat. And you’ll find that your aerobic capacity, it gets better too. And just running just becomes so much easier. Okay.

So remember, we want to build our aerobic engine, we want to, you know, we only want to be delivering more oxygen to working muscles. The way we do this, as we increase our running volume, we run more just more often, we want to run slower, keep it in those zones wanting to keep it in the fat burning zone, right? You know, RPE should be, you know, one to four, run faster, do some HIIT workouts, do some high intensity, but short workouts run longer, like increase the distance of your long run, and then get better at burning fat.

And when you do these things, and you combine all these things, you’re going to be well on your way to being a fit faster, more efficient runner, running is going to become easier for you, you’re going to be able to get faster, and your spring marathon or spring race, whatever it is that you’re training for, will be a huge success for you. Cool. Awesome. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will 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.

107. Prioritizing Rest & Recovery

January 14, 2022 By Patrick McGilvray

If you’re anything like most runners, you have a very hard time taking time off. Rest days can feel like torture, you feel like you’re losing fitness, and you are convinced that your running is …

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Podcast Transcript

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 107 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m talking about prioritizing rest and recovery. If you are anything like most runners, then you probably have a pretty hard time taking time off right?

Rest days can feel like torture, you feel like you’re gonna lose your fitness and you’re convinced that your running is going to suffer, right? But the reality is most runners do not prioritize rest and recovery properly. So most runners are not getting the most out there training. You cannot become that lean badass runner you want to be if you never take the time to rest and recover properly. That’s just incredibly important. I cannot stress this enough.

That’s why I’ve dedicated this whole podcast episode to this topic, rest and recovery has to be part of your training plan. Okay, so today I’m going to just share the importance of prioritizing rest and recovery. I’m going to talk about how to do it because I want you to be able to show up at the start of your race in peak fitness and you cannot do it if you’re not taking rest days properly.

Okay. But first, if you like this podcast, please come check us out on Facebook, you can join the Running Lean Community. It’s a group of like-minded runners that support encourage and motivate one another. You can ask questions you can get answers. Get the kind of like, the camaraderie that you get from your running pals, you know, and I do some weekly coaching and training in the group. And we just have a lot of fun. It’s one of the most positive communities that I’ve experienced on Facebook. And a lot of people tell me that too. That’s not just my opinion. This is what I hear from other people.

And the Facebook group is full of people that are just like you people that are tired of struggling and ready to become more I talk about this all the time, we are people that are becoming more. If you’re tired of struggling or if you’re tired of feeling sluggish all the time. If you’re tired of gaining and losing the same 10-20 pounds over and over again. If you’ve ever been there, it’s not a fun place to be. I’ve been there.

If you’re done with all the like fad diets and meal replacement shakes. If you’re ready to end all this struggle with you know not feeling how you know you should feel, then I want to encourage you to take action for yourself. Nothing changes if nothing changes, right. So I want to encourage you to get into action starting now. I want you to start this new year, by learning how to create the good habits you need to make eating healthy a permanent part of your life.

Listen, we’re not interested in short-term results here. We’re focused on the long game. I want to help you make being healthy, just a part of who you are from now on out. And the easiest way to get there is to have someone there guiding you every step of the way, helping you overcome the things that you always struggle with. Like giving into cravings on the weekends like you do find all week long, and then the weekend comes along, you just blow it right, you keep reverting back to these old patterns of behavior. Having a coach means that you have someone in your corner, someone supporting you, someone who’s got your back, someone who’s holding you accountable to do the things you need to do to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself.

I want you to make this year count. I want this year to be the year that you finally take control of your health and fitness for good. I want you to make this the year that you finally become the lean, strong, badass runner that you’ve always wanted to be. Everything I do here on the podcast and in the Facebook group I do with my group program with my one on one coaching clients is to help you to become the most amazing, most better version of yourself yet. And I put my heart and soul into doing this.

I put my heart and soul into helping you become your best self. Why? Because I want to be an example of what’s possible and I will inspire you to do the same thing and so on and so on. I’m on a mission to create a ripple effect of health and positivity in this world. But it requires action change requires action. So I want to encourage you to take action now. And make this the year that you make some permanent changes for yourself and become that badass runner that badass version of yourself that you know, you can be.

You can apply for coaching over at runningleanpodcast.com/apply. Let’s do this. Let’s make this your year. Cool.

Okay, let’s get into this topic of prioritizing rest and recovery. And let me tell you a little bit about why I’m thinking about this so much right now, you’ve probably heard me talk about this already, I’ve been kind of talking about this on the last couple of episodes, that I’ve been sort of forced to rest, right. I’ve been forced to take some time off from running from lifting weights from really doing any kind of strenuous activity at all.

So six weeks ago, I had rotator cuff surgery to repair three torn muscles in my rotator cuff. This is a pretty brutal recovery from this surgery. It is a long process is like three or four months of really not being able to do a whole lot. You know, I mean, I’m in physical therapy, I’m starting to get more active and starting to move things around a bit. But it’s still, you know, I’m still in a pretty good amount of pain. And there’s still a very limited range of motion. I’m only about halfway through this recovery process, right. And then, and this is something I really haven’t talked about before.

Back in September, of this past year, I developed a hernia and probably developed that from, you know, some really heavy weight lifting. Maybe I did something wrong. I’m not really sure exactly how I did it. It’s sort of just kind of appeared one day. And I was like, well, that’s weird what’s going on there when saw the doctor.

And yeah, so I had an inguinal hernia that needed to get repaired. And because of COVID, and because of the way the hospitals have been jammed up and stuff like that, I had to wait. I had to wait. And I had to push that surgery off until just a week ago. So I had to finish up my marathon training and run a marathon with a hernia, this is not a good situation to be in. I’m just going to tell you right now.

I ended up having this like neoprene belt that I wore under my clothes to kind of hold things so that I could actually run. But I’m telling you right now having like this shoulder pain, and then having a hernia at the same time made this whole marathon experience that much tougher and more challenging for me, but I got through it, okay. And I finally had the hernia surgery a week ago. And so within five weeks, I’ve had two pretty major surgeries.

Alright. So I started to make some progress, I started to get back to the gym, up until you know, had hernia surgery. So now I’ve got to like scale everything back. Again, I can’t lift anything more than 20 pounds, I can’t do any strenuous activity for six weeks, which is kind of fine. It’s kind of just goes along with what I’m doing with my rotator cuff recovery period here.

So long story short here, I’ve experienced a lot of downtime, right? I’ve just been like having to take time off. And it’s gonna be a while for me until I get back to where I want to be and the level of activity and doing all the things that I want to do again. But this really got me thinking about how hard it is for runners, especially to take time off.

It’s really hard to just give yourself a rest especially when you’re in training mode, especially when you’re in the thick of your marathon training, let’s say prioritize prioritizing rest and recovery days is something that runners just they don’t do well, right runners don’t like to rest they’d rather just go go go go go, go, go. And when you can’t just go go go all the time it can be very frustrating. Right?

You feel bad when you can’t run or you can’t do a workout. And so most runners just don’t do it. They don’t make rest and recovery days a priority. It’s like the last thing they want to do, right? So most runners just would rather do anything than take a rest day. Right? It’s so hard like mentally, physically. Emotionally.

It’s hard to tell yourself that this is an important part of your training plan. So most people just don’t include this kind of rest and recovery time as part of their training program. Okay. So why wouldn’t we do this though? Like, why? Why aren’t we making rest and sleep and recovery time a priority?

And I think it goes back to like this mindset of like, if you’re not doing something active, if you’re not like moving and pushing, and just grind in and out all the time, that you’re going to lose fitness, that you’re not going to perform as well, on race day, that you’re going to be taking steps backward.

And I have to say that this is absolutely not true. In fact, if anything, the opposite is true. If you want to perform well on race day, if you want to maximize your training program, whatever it is, you’re training for, whether it’s a 5k, half marathon, marathon, whatever, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not prioritizing rest and recovery days. All right, you are doing yourself a disservice. And you’re actually going to perform worse than if you are making rest and recovery part of your training program and a priority. Okay.

So here, I just want to kind of list out some of the problems that happen when you don’t prioritize rest and recovery when you don’t take the time off that you need. In order to give your body a chance to kind of heal and repair and recover from your hard workouts right? Not prioritizing rest and recovery days will have a bunch of negative impacts on your running performance, and basically your overall health and fitness.

Okay, so here are some of the things that we need to be careful of, right. First of all, running is catabolic, it breaks you down, if you’re just running all the time, you are just constantly breaking yourself down. So when you run, especially when you do like a hard workout, there are micro microscopic muscle tears that happen in your, in your muscles, in your legs, in your arms, in your glutes, and it’s very much like weight training.

You know when you lift heavy weights, you get these microscopic tears in your muscles. And then you give yourself a chance to rest and recover and your body repairs and get stronger. Right, you don’t gain muscle at the gym, you gain muscle on your rest days you gain muscle while you’re sleeping and recovering. And it’s the same thing with running Okay.

Without the rest and recovery days, your body will not heal properly, okay, you’re not going to adapt your body to the training load that you’re putting yourself under. Right, so this goes to the overload principle which I’ve just kind of talking about here, which is you overload a muscle. So you put a strain on a muscle to the point where you get to failure on a muscle and you overload that muscle.

You cannot lift the weight you’re trying to lift that creates an adaptive response in your body and your muscle grows stronger and bigger in response to that overload. The same thing happens with your other systems in your body like your cardiovascular system okay. You overload the cardiovascular system by doing something like a sprint workout, right you go out there and crush a hard you know hit training or interval workout you know, hill repeats or you know, sprints or whatever, and your cardiovascular system in response will will improve it will get stronger, right? It’ll become more efficient.

But this does not happen while you’re doing it. It only happens on the rest and recovery days. It happens when you are taking the time off when you are inactive. So, rest and recovery are required for this overload principle for this adaptive training principle to actually take place okay?

So if you’re not giving yourself the time off that you need, you’re just going to be constantly in that breaking down mode, right, you’re just breaking yourself down. And you’re never really giving yourself a chance to repair and adapt and get stronger. Okay. So that’s one of the biggest reasons why you have to prioritize rest and recovery.

The third thing to think about is this: when you are going hard all the time, you are putting your body under a lot of stress. And chronic stress will keep your cortisol levels very high, all the time. Cortisol is a stress hormone. And when cortisol is high, you actually get this like increase of blood sugar, you get this insulin response because of the cortisol. And you kind of keep your body in this fight or flight mode, you keep your body in this fat storage mode, you keep your body in this place where it makes it very hard to burn fat. It makes it very hard to become fat-adapted, which makes it very hard to get the most out of your training. Because you’re just overstressing your body, you’re chronically stressed out.

Chronic stress is not a good thing, right? I think we can all agree on this, right? And this idea of running hard or medium hard all the time is going to keep your body in that chronically stressed state. Okay, so too much stress on your body, constant stress on your body is going to have a definite negative impact on all the good things you’re trying to do for yourself here. Okay?

What we’re really talking about here is overtraining. Overtraining means you’re just not giving yourself the rest and recovery time that you need. Okay. Overtraining can lead to not just chronic stress, not just like breaking yourself down. But also you can be chronically fatigued. So you can just feel tired all the time. And if you’ve ever experienced this, believe me, I have.

I have done some training cycles where I was running like six days a week. And on those off, off days, quote, unquote, off days, I was like doing something else really active. And I was never getting a good night’s sleep, I was never giving my body a chance to recover. And I was like, I would get sick, I would be tired all the time. couldn’t keep my eyes open, like I was crashing and burning every afternoon like just, this is not a good place to be in right, this is not good for your, for your overall health and fitness much, much less for your training program.

If you’re training for an ultra marathon or you’re training for a marathon or half marathon or whatever it is, you cannot perform your best if you’re chronically fatigued if you’re just tired all the time. And sleep is another component of this, which I’m not going to get into today.

But I just want you to know that getting a good night’s sleep is a key component of rest and recovery. I want to do a whole other episode just on the importance of sleep because there are so many studies that have been done. And so much evidence out there that says that first of all, we are chronically under, we’re not getting enough sleep like we are a nation of people who are chronic under sleepers like we’re not getting enough sleep.

We need something like 7-9 hours of sleep a night and if you’re training hard, especially at the peak of your training cycle, you need more you might need 9 or 10 hours of sleep. But most people a lot of runners I talk to most will say they don’t get enough sleep and most will say they’re getting somewhere between like 5, 6, 7 hours of sleep which I don’t think is enough.

But if you’re experiencing this chronic fatigue, if you’re experiencing being chronically stressed out sleep could be a big part of this, okay? Another thing is that when you are chronically overtraining when you’re not getting enough rest and recovery, your running, performance will suffer. You will see your workouts really start to suffer, okay. Your workouts are going to start to feel harder than they are. So that rate of perceived exertion the RPE you know, when you go out there and run and you’re like this feels pretty easy. Or whoa, this workout feels really hard for the same effort.

Those workouts are gonna feel much harder if you’re not prioritizing rest and recovery properly. So just know that if your workouts if you’re out there running, you’re like, ‘I don’t know why running feels so hard right now’, it could be that you’re just not getting enough rest. It could be that you’re just in that chronic cardio chronically stressed out, chronically overtrained state. All right, like prioritize rest and recovery days here.

Another thing is that not only will your workouts feel harder, but your endurance starts to tank like you won’t be able to run as long, you won’t be able to go as far. And it’s gonna be, it’s gonna really create this negative impact on your endurance.

So if you’re somebody who’s out there trying to run, you know, you’re training for a marathon and you’re trying to get, you know, you got your 18-20 mile runs coming up, and you just feel like you just can’t do it, you’ve got no gas in the tank. It could be that you’re just not taking the time off that you need, you know, your endurance will suffer the more overtrained that you are.

And it sounds so counterintuitive, doesn’t it? It’s like, ‘Well, shouldn’t you just keep going longer and longer and harder and harder?’ And the answer is no, you have to like, push hard, and then you have to back off. You have to go longer, and then you have to go, you know, shorter. You have to run longer distances, and then you have to back it off, you have to have hard days, you have to have super easy days, and you have to have rest days. Right.

Another key aspect of this that most people don’t really realize is that chronically overtraining and not getting enough rest and recovery can have a negative impact on your mental state. Your mindset is so important. And I talk about this all the time mindset is like 80% of the equation.

If you’re trying to lose weight, if you’re trying to change habits, if you’re trying to like create a better relationship with food, if you’re trying to improve your running, if you want to run your first marathon or PR – 80% of your results are going to be because you have the right mindset. 20% is going to be based on what you’re doing what you know, what you don’t know, things like that.

But 80% of this is mindset. And if your mindset is negatively impacted, because you’re overtraining, you’re not going to be as clear headed, you’re not going to be able to focus as much, your head’s not going to be in the game.

You know, you’re gonna be moody, you know, you’re not in a good mood, you’re like a grumpy person. Are you a grumpy person? Maybe you’re overtraining. And all this can lead to this dip in motivation to you can really start to feel like, ‘Oh, I just don’t want to run, I don’t feel like it. I’m in a bad mood. I can’t think clearly.’ And then doubt starts to creep in. And just don’t feel like running and you just like, want to give it up, you just want to like just lay on the couch watching Netflix, right.

And all of this can just be a result of not giving yourself the rest that you need. Okay. And then obviously, all of this can affect your race day performance. If you’re somebody that’s out there training for a race, and you know, you’ve got a marathon coming up. And you’ve been training for, you know, six months, or even if it’s just like three or four months of a training program, you’re putting a lot of effort, you’re putting a lot of energy, you’re putting your heart and soul into training for this race, and everything needs to be perfect on race day, right?

Everything needs to be in perfect working order. And overtraining can just have you showing up on race day, and ready for like disappointment, feeling like crap, poor performance. You know, you’re gonna feel like you’ve wasted all this time training when really all you did was you just overtrained, right? You just overtrain, you didn’t give yourself the rest and recovery that you needed so that you could show up on race day properly.

I was just talking to somebody last night about tapering, right. So you know, somebody who’s one of my clients, you know, they’ve got a marathon coming up this weekend, and they’re in this taper mode, and they’re just like, Ah, it’s driving me crazy. I hate tapering. I just want to be active, I want to be moving.

But the important thing to understand, here’s that tapering is there for a reason, right? You have to show up on race day fully rested and recovered and ready to go. If you’re just like going hard, hard, hard, all the way up to race day. You are not optimizing your body in your mind for that race. You’re going to be you’re going to show up overtrained and you’re going to show up tired and you’re going to show up stressed out and you’re not going to have a good day out there. Okay.

When you start making rest and recovery days a priority. You give your body a chance to rebuild, to repair. And to recover from all those hard workouts, we want to do the hard workouts, you want to be able to go hard on your hard days and make your easy days super easy, right?

When you are properly rested, and you can recover, and you’re repairing from these hard workouts, I’m going to tell you something, those hard days, you’re actually going to be able to go harder, you’re going to be able to run faster, you’re going to be able to run harder, you’re going to be able to run longer, which means that if you do it the right way, you should improve your fitness exponentially.

Because you’re giving your body a chance to adapt to your training load. Right, you’re improving the systems, you’re improving your cardiovascular system, you’re improving your your body’s ability to oxygenate your muscles, you’re improving your ability to get stronger, like you’re building stronger muscles, you have to give your body a chance to adapt. And that’s what happens during the rest recovery phase, okay.

You’ll be able to increase the intensity and the duration of your workout. So you can go longer without feeling fatigued. But it requires rest and your workouts will actually feel easier. So not only will you be able to go harder and things like that, but you know, your rate of perceived exertion actually goes down.

So that same run that you did when you were chronically stressed out, that same workout is gonna feel so much easier because you’re properly rested. And then there’s all these positive mental benefits to like you’re you feel more clear headed, you’re more focused, you can concentrate, you have improved cognition, you’re going to feel happier, you’re not going to be all moody and grumpy and negative, you’re going to be more positive.

And this goes a long, long way to your running performance, you know, you’re going to wake up feeling motivated, ready to go get out there and get at it. And then, you know, obviously showing up on race day, you’re going to be giving your body everything that it needs, you’re going to be setting yourself up for success. You’ve given your body the exact formula that it needs for adaptation, go hard, rest and recover, go hard rest and recover.

So that on race day, you show up at that starting line and you’re just firing on all cylinders, you’ll be operating at peak performance, you’ll be stronger, faster, and ready to go. That’s what we want. That’s what we want out of our training plans. Okay.

So rest recovery means just that just means like, you gotta like, take some time off, okay? The ideal way to do this is to just take a day off, take a day or two off every week. This is ideal. And I know that for a lot of people, they’re like, ‘I just need to do something.’ It’s like, okay, fine. You can have active recovery days, but they have to be a very minimal activity, like taking a walk.

And a lot of people are like, ‘I walk my dogs every day. I’ll go walk the dogs or I’ll go for a bike ride with the kids, you know, we’re just like on the bike’s just like really easy. Or maybe I’m going to do some stretching and foam rolling, or some gentle yoga.’

Those kinds of things are fine as recovery days, you know, those kind of active recovery days, but there’s nothing wrong with just taking a day off, you’re not gonna lose fitness if you do nothing for a day or two every week, right?

The idea is that you’re feeling fresh. The idea is that you’re repairing and you’re adapting and you’re becoming stronger so that you can go harder at your next workout. So I want you to start prioritizing rest and recovery days, put them on your training schedule. Schedule, rest and recovery days into your weekly training regimen. Right.

And rest days are not just for the early stages of your training cycle. In fact, it’s even more important that the harder you’re working out, the more intense and the longer duration of your training, the more important rest days become. Right as you get closer to your race, your intensity and your duration of running are going to increase right?

So those are the times when you need to prioritize rest days even more. And the cycle looks like this. It’s like you go harder, you rest, adapt, you get stronger, you go hard, you rest and adapt, and you get stronger, and then just kind of repeats throughout your training program.

And then there are other times where you might consider taking rest days, or you might be forced to take rest days, and I’m going to encourage you to just like, lean into this a little bit. It’s kind of like what I’m doing right now, like, I had surgery. And it’s gonna be, it’s not just a day or two, for me, this is like weeks and months of time off, and I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that.

For me, I know I am losing some fitness, I’ve lost some weight, I’m losing some muscle during this process, I’ll get it all back, and it’ll come back. Fast, it’ll come back, you know faster than it went off. I’m going to take the time and make this work, I’m going to become the strongest, most badass version of myself. This year, this is my goal, right?

So I’ve got to give myself a chance to recover. This is some pretty brutal stuff I’ve gone through here, I’m going to give myself a chance to recover. If you get sick, a lot of people are sick with COVID and stuff, you know, you need to take some time off, just embrace it and really give your body a chance to recover.

Because if you’re sick, and you’re like, I’m just gonna keep pushing through this, I’m going to keep pushing through this, you’re probably going to prolong the time it takes you to recover, I’m going to want to do that right. Or maybe you have an injury that you need to take a little bit of time off from, take the time off, it’s gonna be okay. And then like, take time off after a race, obviously, you know, anytime you have like a super intense workout or race, you got to take some time off from that, okay?

If you’re the kind of person who lays it all out there on race day, then you have got to take some time off. After that, prioritize rest and recovery, put it into your training schedule. And I promise you, you’re going to feel better your runnings going to improve, you’re going to be able to go harder and longer and faster. And you’re just going to become the healthiest version of yourself.

Okay, so make sure you’re making rest and recovery days a priority. All right. Cool. Well, I hope you guys got something out of this today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.

92. Preventing and Treating Running Injuries with Brodie Sharpe

October 1, 2021 By Patrick McGilvray

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 →

Podcast Transcript

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.

81. Good Stress, Bad Stress

July 16, 2021 By Patrick McGilvray

We often think of stress as being something annoying, a mental or emotional issue, but stress can also have serious implications on our physical health as well. The NIH (National Institutes of …

Continue Reading about 81. Good Stress, Bad Stress →

Podcast Transcript

Hey there, and welcome to episode 81 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners, and today we’re talking about stress, in particular, good stress and bad stress. So we often think of stress as being just something that is annoying. It’s like a mental or emotional issue. But stress can also have serious implications on our physical health as well.

The NIH, National Institutes of Health, says that continued strain on your body from routine stress could lead to serious health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety disorder, and other serious illnesses. But here’s the thing, stress is not always a bad thing.

There’s another side of stress that’s actually considered not just good for us but actually required in order for us to grow and thrive as humans. In other words, some types of stress are bad and should be avoided, and some are considered good and should be embraced. So today on the podcast, I’m going to talk about good stress and bad stress, which types are detrimental, and which are considered beneficial for our health and well-being.

But first, hey, if you like this podcast, you have to come check us out on Facebook, the Running Lean podcast community is a group of positive, like-minded people, the group goes hand in hand with this podcast, it extends the conversation that we’re having here on this podcast, it gives you a chance to have a voice. So you can ask questions and get answers and feel supported and get encouragement and inspiration.

And this month, in the Facebook group, we’re doing the dry July challenge, which is we’re giving up alcohol for the month of July. And just to see how that affects our mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

And a lot of people are getting some pretty interesting, positive results from just not drinking, you know, they didn’t realize that they had, that they could have so much more energy, or that maybe their weight loss was really stalled because they were drinking or they just feel better, you know, or maybe their running is improved.

So this is an opportunity for you to kind of check us out and take a challenge with us. And the dry July challenge is something we’re just doing for the rest of this month. But I mean, you can do this anytime you want, right? It’s just a chance to like take a break from alcohol to see how it feels for you, right?

So if you’re one of those people that just wants a little bit more than what you’re getting here on the podcast, come and check us out in the Facebook group. I do some weekly coaching and teaching in the group as well. So we sort of have more than what you get here on the podcast. Okay. And it’s fun. Did I mention that we’re fun? So just search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us over there.

And if you ever want a little help with all this stuff, like speaking of stress, I understand how stressful it can be to try to figure out what’s the right diet, you know, what’s the right exercise regimen? How much running should I be doing? What does strength training look like? You know, I want to like stop eating sugar, but I’m not sure exactly how to do that. What does it mean to be fat-adapted? How does that work? Like? How do I do that?

This can be kind of confusing, and I get it, I totally get it. And that’s why I work one on one with you as your coach. I work with runners every single day who are becoming the healthiest and most badass versions of themselves. And a coach is there to help guide you provide experience, expertise, support, encouragement, motivation.

And one of the most important parts of coaching is accountability. People tell me all the time. Yeah, I wasn’t going to stick to my plan, but then I knew I was going to be talking to you later today. So I definitely went for my run. Or I did the workout I said I was going to do or I didn’t eat cake because I knew that I would have to report it to you and tell you that I did that and I didn’t want to feel like I let you down or feel like I let myself down so that accountability is a huge part of coaching.

And just coaching is just one of those things that helps you stay on track and helps you to achieve goals you have. Goals that otherwise seem pretty daunting and pretty hard to do on your own. If you’re interested in coaching, just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply. And that’s it. Well, you and I will jump on a quick zoom call, we’ll have a conversation, and we’ll just see if this is something that you’re interested in. Cool. Awesome.

Okay, let’s get into this topic of stress today. So I was doing a little bit of research on this. And I came across some pretty interesting stuff, which I’ll be sharing with you here in a moment. But I just want you to know that there’s this sort of stigma around stress and like stress just being all bad.

And I just have to say that there is another side of stress that is good and required, and absolutely essential for certain functions here. So I’m going to get into all of that. But just let’s talk about what stress is. So, you know, there’s the one type of stress that we really kind of focus on is this chronic stress, okay, this is where, you know, maybe it’s because of your job, or because of relationship issues or financial issues or whatever.

You are in a state of chronically elevated stress hormones, you are chronically worried about things, you’re chronically angry about things, you’re chronically fearful, or in some sort of conflict. And this is the bad kind of stress. So chronic stress is the kind of stress that we really want to avoid.

Because your body in a state of chronic stress is a sick body. Alright. So chronic stress will manifest in this way where, you know, we constantly have raised cortisol levels, cortisol is the stress hormone. And when we have raised cortisol, we’re always under this like fight or flight mode, like our body is in a state of like, chronic panic mode.

And this is something we’re we’re wired for, it’s something that we’ve evolved as humans to, for a reason, like, stress is a good thing. Okay, so if you’re facing a saber-toothed tiger, you know, it’s good to feel stress in that situation. So, cortisol gets produced, and that raises your blood sugar. And that gives you some energy, your heightened awareness, you know, your awareness is super heightened.

And you’re in this state of like, you know, fight or flight. And, oh, you know, it’s kind of like panic mode, right? And it gives you energy, you know, you get this release of like, sugar into your system so that you can fight or run away. And so this is why stress is this is kind of how we’ve evolved with stress. And it’s normal, and it’s good, it’s a good thing.

Like, we want to be able to experience that moment of stress when we’re faced with some kind of immediate danger like that. You know, and today, though, here’s the thing today is different. Like, we don’t have a saber-toothed tiger, we’re not faced with these types of immediate dangers, like you may step out into the street and not see that a car is coming.

And you know, all of a sudden, you have this burst of adrenaline, cortisol, heightened sense of awareness, and you immediately step back and don’t get hit by the car, like that’s probably about the equivalent of, you know, facing off the saber-toothed tiger.

But what chronic stress looks like today is, you know, you’re just all day at work, you’re worried about things, you’re getting bombarded with emails, and, you know, you’ve got five different managers yelling at you all the time. And then you come home, and maybe you’re in conflict with your partner.

And of course, on the drive home, you’ve had to deal with all this traffic, and you’re just like, we’re in this state of chronically being in panic mode, we’re chronically in that fight or flight mode. And this is not a good place to be at all. It can cause all kinds of issues, all right, we can cause all kinds of physical ailments.

And so we’ve got to really be careful not to fall into the trap of, you know, living our lives in a way where we’re chronically stressing ourselves out. Some other causes of physical stress would be, besides like work-related things, or maybe your relationship, you know, issues would be not getting enough sleep or poor quality sleep, this is going to put your body into a chronic state of stress.

If you never get enough sleep, if you just you’re not getting enough sleep every night or your sleep quality is really terrible, then you’re not getting the rest that you need. And you are going to be in a state of elevated stress all the time. Your diet can cause physical stress on your body.

You know, a diet high in sugar will cause stress and inflammation to your cells. And diets like, like actual like, quote, unquote diets, like when people go on these extreme diets where they’re super low calorie for extended periods of time, that puts your body in a, in a state of stress, that’s not good for you.

Another thing that a lot of people don’t realize they’re doing to themselves, but they work out too much. So they’re actually like, every single day is a hard day, you know, they’re doing two workouts a day all the time. And they’re just like, cranking it out every single day, they’re always they’re stressing out their body, they’re always like going hard, they’re never giving themselves a chance to recover, and repair, and, and get the rest that they need. Right.

So it’s just like too much, too hard, and too often. So we got to be careful about some of these physical causes of stress. And then we have like, emotional stress as well, as well, we have like, you know, like I mentioned, relationship issues, or, you know, some of the leading causes of stress with people is like the death of a loved one.

This is a huge cause of stress for a lot of people or loss of a job, or divorce, or getting married. And I think these two things are funny, it’s like getting married or divorced, or to vote one of two of the most stressful things that can happen in your life, right. And we think of getting married as being such a blissful thing, right? But no, it’s like one of the biggest stressful events in your life, or moving to a new home.

These are all stressful things that cause like emotional stress, okay. And I want to say this about these types of stressors, stressors in our life, like, the real cause of the stress is not these things, you know, getting married is not what’s causing you to be stressed.

Okay, stress is an emotion, stress is a feeling. And we know that all feelings are created by your thoughts. The fact that you are getting married, does not automatically mean that you are going to be stressed out. Getting married is, you know, for a lot of people, it’s just pretty chill and pretty fun. But for a lot of people it isn’t, it’s stressful, because they think it’s got to be perfect.

And they’re worried about how you know about the table seating and about relatives sitting with each other, or you know about the food or about, you know, what kind of cake they’re going to get whatever it is, you know, there’s like a million different decisions to make. Is it going to be as magical as is all the Instagram posts I see about it?

You know, the same thing with like, getting divorced, like it’s the divorce itself does not cause the stress, but it’s your thoughts about the divorce that caused you to feel stressed. It’s not that you know, somebody dies that causes you to feel stress, it’s your thoughts about them and what that means to you, you’re thinking to yourself, I’m never gonna see this person again.

You know, it’s those types of thoughts that cause you to feel stress. Or maybe it’s somebody that you have to, you know, you have to take care of the funeral arrangements and things like that, that can be stressful. But again, it’s all about your thoughts. Okay. I just wanted to like, quickly mention that, like, we’ve talked a lot about this on the podcast, where, you know, our thoughts always cause our feelings and stress is a feeling it’s an emotion, and that we have control over how much of this we want to feel now is sometimes, you know, stress a common and a totally applicable emotion and that experience.

Yeah, it’s okay to feel stressed out when you’re getting divorced or getting married or somebody, somebody dies that you love. It’s totally normal to feel that way. And it’s okay to feel that way. We don’t want to necessarily change that. But I’m just I just want you to know that it isn’t the event itself. It’s always your thoughts about it.

Okay, so anyway, we want to try to prevent these types of emotional stress though, we want to try to prevent these things from becoming chronic. You know, if you get a divorce and it’s been like three years and you still are just eaten up about it, like, that’s something we need to work on, right?

You need to learn how to manage your thoughts and feelings around these types of situations. Yes, it’s okay. If somebody you love dies and you feel stressed, and you feel sadness, and, and all these other emotions, that’s totally normal. But if it’s chronic, that’s when it becomes problematic, okay?

So chronic stress from whatever the cause whether it’s emotional stress, or whether it’s physical stress, you know, from working out too much or not getting enough sleep. Chronic stress can put your body into that panic mode into that fight or flight mode, and it just stays there. So your cortisol, always high, your blood sugar, always high insulin, always elevated, you’re storing fat all the time, because your body’s in this survival mode, right?

It’s not in, you know, the mode of like, you know, everything is cool and chill. It’s like, oh, I got to hold on to all this extra body fat because, you know, I needed it for survival. And this causes a ripple effect on your hormones, you end up you know, feeling hungry all the time, and you end up overeating and you can’t lose weight and your athletic performance suffers, you feel tired and sluggish all the time.

Chronic stress can just lead to all kinds of physical issues. And, you know, I mentioned earlier the NIH talked about, you know, stress-causing heart disease and blood pressure and diabetes, depression, anxiety disorder, and other serious illnesses, and maybe not causing them 100%.

But absolutely, leading to these things and, and a factor in these things becoming prevalent in our lives. Even more disturbing though, according to the American Psychological Association, chronic stress is linked to six leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide.

This is a problem. Chronic stress is not good, it is not good. And we need to be doing whatever we can to eliminate chronic stress from our lives so that we don’t end up one of these statistics, right. So there’s, there’s another side of stress that I want to talk about here today.

And that is the one I’m just going to call it the good stress. Okay. So we’ve talked about chronic stress and how it can have really detrimental effects on your mental, emotional and physical well-being.

But then there’s a different kind of stress, it’s the good type of stress, which is acute stress. So acute means severe and sudden, acute is short term stress is the kind of stress that’s here momentarily, and then it’s gone. As opposed to chronic stress, which is long-term, it’s ongoing.

Chronic stress is like never-ending there’s no end in sight to it. Okay. So why is acute stress good. So acute stress is actually required, in order to improve certain systematic functions in your body, right, we need to have certain stressors on our systems, in order for them to adapt, grow and improve and get stronger.

Okay, so for example, if you want to get stronger, if you want to build stronger muscles, then you need to do some weight training, you need to do resistance training, you need to overload your muscles, you need to stress out that system.

Like you need to literally lift things that are so heavy that they cause microscopic sub-cellular tears in your muscle fibers so that you will become stronger so that those muscles will then those muscle fibers will grow stronger in repairing themselves, right? This is the overload principle, we overload the muscles so that they will repair and get stronger. But we don’t do this you know, 10 times a day every day, right?

You do weight training a couple of times a week. And then you do it for a short period of time, maybe 30 minutes, maybe an hour, and then you take a day off or two days off. And when you do it this way you’re creating acute stress, acute stress in your muscles. Very short term, very severe, and sudden.

And then you let them rest. You let them prepare, you let them grow and you become stronger in the process. There’s no other way around it, if you want to get stronger, you have to stress your muscles, you got to stress your muscular system, your skeletal muscular system has to be stressed in order for it to get stronger and grow.

Same thing with if you want to become a faster runner like you have to do some sort of speed work, right? For example, sprinting, sprinting is an amazing workout super hard, though, right? But we’re talking about sprinting as fast as you can for like 20 or 30 seconds at a time very, very hard, very acute, very severe, very sudden, very short term, but very stressful, very stressful on the system, on your cardiovascular system.

And on your entire muscular system that is you know, functioning that is up responsible for your muscles functioning properly for good running form, and to get faster as a runner. And so you do like 30 second sprints, then you may rest for a minute or two, you do this like five or six times, and then boom, your workout is done.

And again, it may be 30 minute, 45 minute workout, something like that. It’s very short but very stressful on your system. But then your system responds by becoming more efficient, you become more efficient at running faster, you develop more cardiovascular endurance, from running faster, faster, so you can actually run faster for longer periods, and your muscles become stronger in your form becomes better.

If you want to become a more powerful runner, maybe you do something like hill repeats, right, so this is a terrible workout, right? Pick a hill and run up the hill hard. You know, by the time you get to the top, you should be totally cooked, like your lactic acid should be building up and you should just be like, I can’t run another step. And then you know, jog it back down and do it again, do that six times, right?

Again, we’re stressing out the system, but it’s a very quick, very short bursts of highly stressful situations on your body here. But this is what makes you become more powerful, you’re going to build much more power in your legs, because then when you’re running the flats, you’re going to be like this is easy.

And then when you do face a hill in a race or something like that, you’re like got this no problem at all right. And this all like ties into just building cardiovascular endurance, you know, if you want to improve your cardiovascular system, and improve your endurance, as a runner, you want to be able to run longer and longer, you just got to you got to get out there and run longer miles, you got to keep increasing your mileage.

Slowly, you don’t do it all at once you don’t go out there and run 50 miles every other day. That’s because that’s just going to put your body into way too much stress. So what you do is you build up your mileage slowly, you increase it by, you know, I think a good rule of thumb is 10% a week.

And you build up to that, and then you back it down you like you know, then you go through you might do up week, like three weeks where you’re increasing mileage, and then you do a couple of down weeks, and then you go up up up a couple of down weeks, you know, and this is how we increase our endurance, you know, we can run 50 miles or 100 miles, you know.

So this is the difference between acute stress and chronic stress. Another thing is, that’s kind of cool. Like, let’s say you want to increase your body’s ability to burn fat. So you could do something that’s kind of acute, you can kind of stress your system a little bit by doing like a 24 hour fast.

This is something that on the outset, you might think, oh my god, that’s crazy. How can you not eat for 24 hours, it’s not that big a deal, to be honest with you. You eat dinner, and then the next day you just eat dinner like, right, it’s not a big deal. Especially if you’re not eating a lot of sugar and carbohydrates, you’re going to find this actually pretty easy because your hunger is not out of control anymore, right?

But again, this is kind of stressful on your system, right? Because your body is like goes into this little bit of like panic mode in a way. And it starts tapping into your stored body fat for fuel because it’s like, oh, we need fuel. We’re not getting anything. So let’s tap into the stored body fat over here.

Again, this is like stressing out the system in a very short burst and in a very controlled way. And then you go back to eating normally after that. And so this is how we improve our systems. This is how we get stronger. This is how we become more powerful. This is how we get faster. Faster is how we improve things like our fat-burning system, right?

So intermittent stress is actually a good thing, it’s good for your brain too. They’ve done these studies where they’ve shown that short-term stress actually primes the brain for improved performance. Intermittent stressful events help keep your brain more alert. And you tend to perform better when you’re more alert, right?

So these researchers at UC Berkeley, this is about 10 years ago or so now. But they did this study on rats, and they found that significant but brief, stressful events. So like acute stress caused these rats, they cause the stem cells in their brains to proliferate into new nerve cells that improved the rats’ mental performance.

And the researchers’ findings reinforce the idea that stress hormones help an animal to adapt to become more aware to become more resilient. The next time they’re faced with that same type of stressor, like think about this, like, let’s say, you are you go through a tough breakup, well, in your next relationship, you’re going to be more resilient and less fragile, right? If you end up in a breakup again, right.

And the same principle applies to, you know, lifting heavier weights will build stronger and more resilient muscles. Alright. So stress has a ripple effect. And it can be a good ripple effect or a bad ripple effect. So chronic stress has this negative ripple effect, right?

Like I mentioned earlier, cortisol is higher, insulin is higher, blood sugar is higher, you’re in the state of elevated, elevated panic mode, like all the time, and this leads to chronic diseases, and a lot of times it can lead to death. Right.

So chronic stress has a ripple effect, but it’s not a good one. Acute stress, though, has a ripple effect. But it’s a positive ripple effect, right? Because it leads to adaptation to improved cognitive function to improve muscle growth, to improve speed, and improve endurance, even fighting disease is a ripple effect of a good stressor.

So if you think about how we fight disease, like a pathogen that comes into your body, like a virus or a bacteria, that’s a stressor on your system. But then our body responds in a way and fights that off. Right. So this is a natural kind of stress response, which I think is kind of cool.

So my kind of takeaway that I want you to kind of take from this episode would be to choose your stress intentionally. I want you to seek out stressors that are good for you, like seek out the good kind of stress, the ones that have positive benefits. And here’s something I need to say like, yes, these types of stressors are going to be hard, and they hurt and they’re stressful, right? If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be an adaptive response.

So you cannot get stronger without going through the stress. You cannot get faster without stressing out your system. Like people want to run faster, but they don’t want to practice running faster. Why? Because it’s hard because it sucks because, you know, it’s just like, it’s really terrible like to do sprints or speed work or hills or anything like that. Like it’s really tough, right?

But if you don’t do it, and they’re just like, oh, I’m so slow. You know, I don’t understand why I’m not getting faster. Okay. Are you doing speed work? No, no, I hate speed work. Oh, okay, then I got nothing for you. Like you got to do the work. You know, if you want to get stronger, you have to lift weights.

And so many people are like, I wish I was stronger, but they’re not doing anything to change that they’re not doing the hard stuff. And again, it’s hard, it feels terrible. It hurts you know lifting weights hurts it should you’re literally tearing your muscles a little bit, you know, and but it’s a good thing, right? It’s that good kind of acute stress that we want, we want to embrace that we want to choose that type of stress intentionally.

Even some type of like mental and emotional stresses like you know at work if you have to complete some big project on time or maybe you got to give a speech in front of a large crowd these things will create some acute stress for you. But then what happens you adapt you grow. You increase your comfort zone, you improve your cognitive function.

The next time you have a big project do like you’re going to be more confident the next time you have to stand up in front of a large crowd and talk, you’re gonna feel more poised, like, all these things help you to adapt and grow.

So choose acute stress, choose your stress wisely, you know, becoming faster or stronger or more emotionally involved, it requires a certain amount of stress, it requires some discomfort, some unease, you know, intentionally, putting your body and your mind through stressful events will help you to adapt, and grow and become more.

Listen, there’s no easy button, you can’t just sit around watching Netflix all day, and hope to become a better runner. Right? You can’t just sit around running the same, you know, speed all the time. And hope to get faster, you have to push yourself, you have to push yourself past your level of comfort, you have to get out of your comfort zone, right?

This is the does the hard hard part, I know. You got to get uncomfortable, right? And you have to do it the right way. You have to do it acutely, not chronically not every single day, this does not mean you go and do speed work every single day. You know, I suggest doing speed work once a week, do it hard. You know and do it quickly and get it over with and then give yourself a break. Give yourself a chance to adapt to that.

So your work this week is to embrace it, embrace the good stress. So whatever that means for you lift the heavy things, do that speed work, run those hill repeats. But do these things intentionally and quickly, and then give yourself a break. Take a rest day so that you can recover and so you can grow and adapt and then we continue this process right?

So here’s a good example yesterday at the gym, I did some heavy back squats. Very very heavy is very hard. And right after that, I did a sprint workout. And when I started running for my sprint workout, I just did like a mile warm-up. My legs were cooked. I mean, I was it was so hard just doing the warm-up to get to where I was going to do my sprints.

I was like, I don’t know about this. This isn’t a good idea. Because my legs were literally like pretty toast but I’m like okay, here’s my goal for today. A hard leg workout. And then sprints like I did some this is acute stress, total, totally good example of acute stress, right. But I knew that today was going to be my rest day. And then I wasn’t doing anything. No, no lifting today, no running today.

And I knew that today was going to be a day where I can repair and adapt and recover. And that I’m going to improve. You know, so that workout yesterday was really hard. I did my sprints, I did six by 30 seconds and 30 seconds is my limit like I’m running as hard as I can for 30 seconds. And those last 10 seconds are just miserable, right?

So the point here is that today, I’m just giving myself a chance to adapt and grow and totally recover from all of that. So that really acute stress on my body yesterday is a good thing. I’m not going to do that every day, there’s no way I could do that. And I actually have been combining my strength workouts and my speed workouts. And so that I can actually have a day off.

So I make my hard days hard and I make my easy days super easy. And that way I am not burning myself out. Because I was kind of getting in that way when I was running every day, I was running or working out or lifting weights or whatever, every single day. I wasn’t running every day. But I was doing some sort of a quote-unquote hard workout seven days a week.

And I was starting to feel pretty burned out. This is like my body going into this panic mode and staying in this state of chronic stress. So I was like, Okay, I got to do something about this. And ever since I’ve been, you know, making my hard days, combining my hard workouts on the same day and then taking like a total rest day.

Oh my gosh, I’m sleeping better. I feel more energized. My workouts have been improving. So this is all good stuff. And this is the way we’re designed, right? Avoid the chronic stress. Embrace the acute stress, choose your stress wisely, you know, and become stronger, become faster, and become that badass version of yourself. Cool. All right, well, I hope y’all got something out of this episode today. And if you did, consider sharing it with a friend I love you all keep Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

64. Warning Signs and Dangers of Overtraining

March 19, 2021 By Patrick McGilvray

Overtraining is something that a lot of runners experience but very few actually know that it’s happening. You might be feeling overly sore or fatigued but you keep pushing through those tough …

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Podcast Transcript

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 64 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, sports nutritionist personal trainer, health and fitness expert, and the weight loss coach for runners. And today, I’m talking about the warning signs and dangers of overtraining.

Now, overtraining is something that a lot of runners experience. But few runners actually know that it is happening. So you might be feeling overly sore, or overly fatigued, but you just keep pushing through those tough workouts because, hey, that’s what you do as a runner, right?

The problem is that if you keep this up, it can result in overtraining. And overtraining can lead to all sorts of health issues like poor performance, burnout, and even injury. So in this episode, I’m going to go over some of the warning signs of overtraining. And some of the dangers of overtraining and the things that you want to try to avoid. Okay.

And I’m gonna also offer some solid strategies for what you can do to avoid overtraining, we don’t want to do this, we don’t want to be overtraining. Okay, but first, please come check us out on Facebook, if you haven’t already, you can join the Running Lean podcast community. And all this month, the month of March is motivation month.

So all month long, I’m talking about motivation, how to get more motivation, how to maintain motivation, and how to get your motivation back when you’ve lost it. It is a fun group. It’s a bunch of positive runners who are all sharing their experiences, who ask great questions, support one another, and encourage one another.

And we’re all trying to hit certain health and fitness goals. And we all support each other in this group. So just come check us out search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us. Also, just a quick announcement that the Running Lean monthly coaching group will be open again for enrollment very soon, just a couple of weeks here.

So the monthly coaching group is my membership program. And it is a community of runners who support each other working towards the same goals, who are trying to, you know, become fat-adapted, who want to lose weight, and who want to become the healthiest versions of themselves.

And there’s an entire library of online training materials that you get access to when you’re a member of this program as well. And then we do twice-monthly group coaching calls where we get on a Zoom together and you can ask questions and get help from me and other people in the group as well.

So if you’re looking to dial in your nutrition plan so that you can, you know, become fat-adapted, sleep better at night, have all-day energy, start losing weight, feel better, all that stuff, then you need to join this membership program. I’m in the group, I’m here to answer your questions. And it’s pretty effective.

So I only open the group once every few months, like once a quarter basically. And that opportunity is coming up very soon. So you don’t want to miss out on it if you want to get on the list. So you can be the first to know when I do open the doors. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join.

Okay, and then here’s a quick five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This is from BLS2003 and BLS2003 says, “Love the inspiration. I love this podcast. Listening to this podcast gives me the inspiration to keep moving forward toward my health goals.”

I love it. Share the love. If you enjoy this podcast, it would mean a lot to me if you could just take a moment and leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts. Okay, let’s get into this topic because I’m kind of excited about talking about this. I know I’m weird, right? The warning signs and dangers of overtraining fun. That’s just me.

So I just got back from a run. And I will tell you, I usually run in the mornings and I got up this morning and I was just feeling a little tired. We recently changed the clocks. You know we spring forward and that always messes me up for about a week and so I’m not sleeping really well. I’m a little bit like my circadian rhythm’s a little out of kilter.

And so I was a little too tired this morning, and it was pouring down rain as well. And so already, I’m just like not looking forward to going out and running five miles. But this is what I wanted to do. And I thought, okay, how am I feeling?

I really checked in with myself and was like, Am I in danger of overtraining if I go out there and try to smash this five-mile workout, and I had to really, you know, think about this and check in with my body and with my brain and just say, like, no, I think I’m okay. I’m definitely not overtraining, but I was feeling a little tired.

So I made a decision, I was gonna go out and go slow, and just take it really, really slow, like super low heart rate. And just, you know, I didn’t care about the time or how long it took, I just wanted to get out there and enjoy the outdoors in the pouring rain. And so as I set out to run, and with this intention of going really slow, which I did, but about five minutes into the run, it stopped raining.

And I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I got done with my run, took it nice and easy throughout the whole thing. Got done with my run, got upstairs into my apartment, and I heard this noise outside, I looked outside, it was pouring down rain again. So somehow, magically, I went out there and ran at the perfect time to avoid the rain, which was totally awesome.

But the other thing I want to say about that is that I was really cognizant about this idea of like pushing too hard when you’re tired or just not feeling it. And this is one of the reasons why I want to talk about this today, okay, because sometimes we just need to take it easy and slow down. Okay. So we’ll talk more about that in a minute.

But let’s get into like what it means to train right. So if we want to talk about overtraining, first, we want to know what normal training looks like. So in order to develop our muscles to get stronger, all skeletal muscle tissue has to be developed if you want to get stronger.

And there are three basic principles that underline all training progress. And these three principles are the principles of specificity, overload, and progression. The principle of specificity states that you must exercise the specific muscles you want to develop, right? I think we all know that if you want bigger biceps, you got to like, do some bicep curls.

You know, if you want to develop stronger legs, you got to do squats, right, if you want to become a faster runner, you got to run faster. Right? So specificity, you must follow specific exercise guidelines to produce the specific type of change that you desire, whether that’s muscle strength, muscle size, or muscle endurance. Okay?

The second principle is overload. So this is the principle that states that a muscle has to be overloaded in order to develop this is the principle of all training programs, right? Anything that you want to improve has to be overloaded or first forced to work harder than normal. The overload and this is the important part, the overload must be enough to stimulate improvement, but not enough to cause injury. That’s the important part.

And then the third principle is progression. So once a muscle has adapted to a given workload, so once you’ve overloaded a muscle, and you’ve done it enough times where you’re you’ve adapted to that workload, okay, your muscles are no longer overloaded, the workout must be increased progressively, as the muscles adapt to each new demand. Right? So the progression in the workload needs to be enough to continue to stimulate improvement. But again, not so much that it causes, you know, some sort of injury.

So, these three principles are the basis of all training. All right, so we want to do specific workouts specific exercises, and we want to overload our systems, and we want to progress. Alright, so this is all good. This is the way the system is supposed to work.

And when I say the system, I’m talking about your muscular system, your connective tissues, ligaments, tendons, your cardiovascular system, your nervous system, all of these things make up your, your whole body, basically your physiology, but all these things I’m just calling lumping them all together to talk about stressing the system.

But all these things work together to keep you running fast, running strong, and running further. Okay. But when we take these principles, and we don’t adhere to them properly, or we push ourselves beyond the limits, this can result in overtraining. And then there’s a host of issues that go along with that, a bunch of bad things that happen in our bodies when we overtrain.

So overtraining is basically putting your body under chronic stress, never letting your body recover and adapt. So you’re basically overstressing the system. stress on your body is good, right? We’re talking about overload, we’re stressing a muscle or stressing your cardiovascular system. But it has to be done in a way that is specific, and slowly progressive, or else you risk injury and burnout and all kinds of other things.

Okay, so stress is good. But it has to be done the right way. So there’s this thing I’ve talked about before called chronic cardio. And for a lot of runners, overtraining looks like this, it looks like chronic cardio. So here’s, here’s what I mean by chronic cardio. All of your runs are done pretty hard, like medium-fast, right, they’re not slow enough to be considered a true recovery run.

So recovery runs should be done well below your aerobic threshold, they should be done at a very low heart rate, something you could literally run all day at that pace. And that’s kind of what I did today, I chose today to be a recovery run, I did five miles at like a 10:45 pace. Normally, I would run about a 9:30, something like that.

And so I just purposely was like, I’m just gonna go super slow. And it felt great. I could have run all day at that pace, I was not burned out by the end of it. Slow. So chronic cardio is where all of your runs are done faster than that recovery run, but they’re not fast enough to be like true speed work.

So speed work is where you’re, you’re hitting close to that anaerobic zone. So you’re getting into those higher zones, those higher aerobic zones. And when we do fast speed work, we’re eliciting an overload response from the body, right, so you do sprints, I did a sprint workout on Tuesday.

And I did a quick little one-mile warmup, and then I did 6/32 all out sprints as fast as I could, with about a minute rest in between each. And that is really hard. And that is like an overload. I’m overloading my cardiovascular system, when I do that I’m getting super close or into that anaerobic zone, when you’re gonna hold anaerobic efforts for you know, 15-20 seconds, maybe because your anaerobic means without oxygen.

And when you’re in that anaerobic zone, you cannot do that for very long, I could feel the lactic acid building up very fast, and I had to stop, you know, so 30 seconds is about the limit for that kind of speed work. So really slow runs are great, really fast runs are great, and they both have a place.

But instead, what a lot of runners do is they just do all their runs at the same sort of medium-hard pace. And it’s always just kind of stressful on your system. So you’re chronically stressing your system, you never give your body a chance to fully recover. And then you go back and just do that same running effort again, and again. And again. And again, I see so many people just I did this for many years, I’m totally guilty of this. And this is why I want to talk about this today because you don’t need to do this. Learn from my mistakes.

But this kind of chronic cardio thing, can really start to degrade your performance. And you’ll start to not be able to run as fast or as far and it will degrade your body too. Right, you’re going to start to feel fatigued, and your training will suffer. Next thing you know you’re injured, you’re out for the season, that kind of stuff.

So we do not want to partake in chronic cardio, we want to mix it up, okay. But here’s a little bit more of what’s going on in your body because I want you to really understand what this kind of looks like from a physiological perspective.

So here’s an example of what is going on. And this is a very common scenario for a lot of runners. And you might be able to relate to this. So let’s say you start training for a marathon. So you go out there, and you’re doing all your runs at this medium-hard effort, like I mentioned, right?

So you’re not really doing much speed work. You’re not really doing recovery runs when you’re supposed to do recovery runs you’re still doing them at that same right medium-hard effort, right? I know what you’re doing. And things are probably okay for a while. So you might be getting a little bit faster, you might be able to increase your distance and you’re feeling pretty good.

You don’t know it, but your body is not recovering properly. Okay, your sympathetic nervous system, this is your fight or flight system is put on high alert, right? So you’re constantly engaging the sympathetic nervous system, which releases cortisol. So cortisol is the stress hormone. So cortisol is constantly elevated in your body.

So you’re under stress, mentally and physically. And elevated cortisol causes your body to increase blood glucose production. So you’re going to be producing more glucose because your body’s in this constant fight or flight mode. And it’s like, we need the energy to run away or fight. And so the increase in blood glucose causes an increase in insulin, right.

And now we’ve gotten to where insulin is a problem, right? We know this. Now, your body’s in this chronic fat storage mode. So you’re stressed out, you’re starting to like, store all this x as glucose, then maybe your diet isn’t helping with this either. So maybe you’re storing all this excess glucose as fat.

So you start gaining weight, even though you’re like, hey, I’ve been training for a marathon for like, eight weeks now. And I’m gaining weight, right? I know, I know exactly what that feels like, I know what this looks like, I hear this all the time from runners who are struggling with this, okay.

Part of it could be this chronic cardio, this chronic state of stress that you’re putting your body in, okay? The state of chronic stress also disrupts your sleep cycles, your circadian rhythm gets kind of messed up, right. So you have trouble falling asleep at night, or you’re no longer sleeping through the night, you’re restless all night long tossing and turning, that lack of sleep adds to the stress that your body is under. Okay?

So all these things are a very common scenario. And I’m not saying that, you know, if you go out there and train for a marathon, this is going to happen to you no matter what, like, this isn’t the case with everybody, but it’s pretty common. This is a pretty common scenario.

So your body is under stress. You’re not getting enough sleep, you know, everything’s just kind of thrown out of whack, but you keep on running. And it’s like this badge of honor for runners to get out there and do all their training runs, no matter what, no matter how terrible you feel like oh, I just gotta go crush this time. Even though I feel like crap, you know, and we never give ourselves a break.

Your body is not recovering properly or not, your body’s not rebuilding properly, and your body will begin to break down, and your cells will become damaged. Muscle tissues cannot repair themselves, you will become fatigued, your energy levels will keep dropping, your immune system becomes compromised, you might get sick, you might get injured.

And then you got to put your training on hold for weeks while you’re getting your body back to healthy back to homeostasis back to normal. This is not some fairy tale Adventure Land story. Okay, this is very, very common. This is my experience and the experience of many, many other runners.

I’ve overtrained so much you guys I’m like a professional over trainer. I’ve developed stress fractures from overtraining. Muscle tears from overtraining. Groin pulls. I even did this recently. Back in the fall of last year, I was lifting weights too much too soon, too fast, too heavy.

And I developed a shoulder injury I pulled or tore some sort of muscle in my shoulder. And it’s still bugging me. It’s taking a long time to heal. So I didn’t follow those principles of, you know, progression and overload and I didn’t do it the right way. So this is not something that is like super rare. This is very common. Overtraining is very very common, but you may not even know you’re doing it.

You may not even know that it’s an issue for you. Okay. So here are some warning signs. Here are some warning signs that you might be overtraining. So if you have lingering muscle soreness that just doesn’t ever go away. That might be a sign that you’re overtraining.

Now, sore muscles are normal. If you go out there and do some speed work. Your legs are going to be a little sore. I did a pretty heavy lifting session yesterday and my quads are sore today. And I’m like that’s normal and they’ll be fine by tomorrow, you know, or the next day for sure. Probably back to 100%. That’s normal to have a little bit of soreness.

But if you are chronically sore, this can be a sign that you’re overtraining, if you don’t seem to be recovering as fast as you used to this can be a sign, you’re overtraining. So you should be able to get out there and run the next day after a long workout, or a hard workout, you should be able to run or walk the next day, you shouldn’t have much soreness or stiffness like you should just you should, you know, your recovery.

You know, when you’re recovered, like when you’re feeling ready to go again, I have to tell you that since I changed my diet since I started eating more low carb and high fat, my recovery is much, much faster, much, much faster. And a lot of that just has to do with the reduced inflammation from not eating all the sugar and refined grains.

So those things can cause a lot of inflammation in your body. Now I’ll talk more about that I’m going to talk about some nutrition that we can do to help with all this stuff here. But if you’re not recovering, like used to this could be a sign that you’re overtraining. So if you’re feeling chronically fatigued, physically and mentally, so if you have zero energy for anything, you’re always tired, you’re always run down, this could be overtraining.

Or mentally, if you’re like, the brain is just burned out, you can’t focus, you can’t concentrate, you have that brain fog, this can be a sign of overtraining as well. If you have increased irritability or mood swings, this could be a sign of overtraining, like different from normal, if you’re already an irritable person, we’re talking like, different, you know, maybe it’s more than normal, okay.

Or if your running performance has plateaued, or is declining. So if you don’t see any improvement in your running, and you’re trying to improve, it’s like you’re not getting faster, even though you’re working on getting faster, or you just hit some plateau with your workouts and you just can’t seem to improve at all, this might be a sign of overtraining.

Again, if you can’t sleep well at night, if you can’t fall asleep, or you’re tossing and turning all night long or if you wake up off and you can’t get back to sleep, when you do wake up, this could be a sign of overtraining. Also, if your resting heart rate is higher than normal, this could be a sign that you’re overtraining, this is actually a pretty good indicator that you’re overtraining.

Now you would have to track your heart rate and your resting heart rate over a period of time, so you know what your baseline is, so you know what your normal is. But elevated resting heart rate, is a sign of chronic stress and could be a sign of overtraining. So those are some of the warning signs.

So what do we do about this? Like, what can we do to kind of prevent overtraining? Well, the first thing to do is to train smarter. So you want to stop it with the chronic cardio, stop doing all the medium, hard efforts, and slow it down every now and then. And then sometimes you need to speed up.

Variation is key, though, okay, so you want to do your recovery runs at a true recovery, pace, like really, really slow down. And then when you are, when you are doing speed work, really, really smash it, like, crank it up, okay? Variation is key.

Now it’s okay to do some of your runs that medium-hard pace, you know, some runs should be comfortably hard, especially if you’re doing like tempo runs and things like that. But every run shouldn’t be like that. Another thing you can do is to remember the training principles, specificity, overload, and progression.

And make sure that everything you’re doing all of your training, whether you’re doing, whether you’re lifting weights, doing a HIIT or some sort of cross-training, yoga, even any kind of like CrossFit or running all of your training all of your exercise, make sure you’re hitting the principles of specificity overload and progression properly and not overdoing it.

And the other thing you can do is to think in terms of training cycles. So here’s what I mean by that. Training cycles would be periodization. That’s one way of doing a training cycle. So breaking down your training into periods of stress and recovery. So some weeks you go hard, some weeks you go long, some weeks you go easy. Some weeks, you go short, right, some days you’re doing speed work, other days, you’re going really slow. This is periodization, right?

You can also think of training seasons, like think of your whole year, and then you can break it down into seasons. So like right now this is March and this is like marathon training season for most people who are doing a spring marathon. So we want to think in terms of seasons so that we’re not always in training mode the whole year-round.

It’s okay to have an offseason, let your body recover for a few weeks or a month or two, especially after a really hard event like a fast marathon or a long ultra-marathon. One of the most important things you can do to prevent and avoid overtraining is to get enough rest. And this seems like a no-brainer, right?

But I will tell you, people. I talk to runners who are notoriously not good at resting, like you need to take a rest day seriously. And then just like, rest, get horizontal. Especially like after a long run, it’s okay to kick your feet up.

Like I love Saturday afternoons, Netflix on the couch. This is my jam. Like I run I do my long runs on Saturday mornings. And then Saturday afternoons, I get horizontal, I’m on the couch, I’m you know, hydrating, I’m eating good food, and I’m watching some Netflix like I do let myself recover.

You know, you might want to work out every single day like you might want to like just, you know, make sure you’re getting some sort of exercise in every single day. And it’s okay if you do that. But you’ve got to take at least a day where you go a day or two where you go easy has to be a recovery day.

So usually for me, Fridays, and Sundays are my kind of rest days. So I don’t do any hard workouts on those two days, I usually take a walk, and I’ll go for a two or three-mile walk through the park. And listen to some podcasts, get outside, get a little walk in, it feels great.

But it’s definitely a recovery, those two days are recovery days. For me. Another thing you can do is to make sleep a priority. And this takes a while to get good at it takes you got to train your body, you got to train your body and your mind to get good at sleeping. But it’s so well worth it.

And most people should be getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night. This is what we need as human beings just to be healthy, right. And sleep is when the majority of our muscle and tissue repair happens this is when we recover when we sleep. So if we’re not getting good night’s sleep, we’re never recovering properly.

And then another thing you can do to help avoid overtraining is to just reduce stress and other ways in your life. So whether that’s doing something like meditation, taking long walks, yoga, reading, dancing, whatever works for you to kind of reduce stress. Do that in addition to your exercise, because it’s so important to keep your stress levels down.

Because again, overtraining is just overstressing your body. Now, I do want to talk about nutrition. And nutrition is a role in overtraining because I think it plays a role and can help you if you pay attention to what it is that you’re eating. So you know, you want to make sure that whatever nutrition regimen you’re on that it is support supporting your training and your recovery as well.

So, you may have heard this before, but you probably want to limit or eliminate sugar and refined grains, and other high glycemic foods. Also, processed foods, vegetable oils, and alcohol, these types of foods tend to create a lot of free radicals in your body that damage your cells. That makes it even more challenging for you to recover from these tough workouts. Okay.

Sugar and refined grains especially tend to spike your blood sugar, and then they cause blood sugar surges and then crashes. And these energy ups and downs can be very stressful on your body.

Also, you’re putting your body into a state of high inflammation when you’re consuming sugar, refined grains, processed foods, vegetable oils, alcohol, that inflammation can lead to your body not being able to recover properly, and not being able to build the tissues that it needs to recover and repair.

And so this can be very stressful on your body as well. So limit those things or just eliminate them just get rid of that stuff. You know, eating that stuff. Watch the calorie intake. So I don’t talk a lot about calories because I just don’t think it’s the one thing we need to be paying much attention to or you know, we should pay a little bit of attention to it.

But when it comes to overtraining or chronically stressing out your body things can have a problem or increase the problem with that which is you’re not eating enough so you’re in a calorie deficit all the time.

This can actually lead to actually being undernourished, you know, and again, putting your body in into a highly stressful state, and contribute to overtraining and all the stuff that goes along with it.

Eating too much can also be a problem. So you’re overloading your body with too many extra calories. This can also create a stress response, right? High blood sugar and insulin response. And you ended up storing a lot of that energy as fat. And especially if you’re not eating the right kinds of food, if you’re eating too much, then you’re, again, creating a stressful situation in your body.

So you just want to make sure you’re getting, you know the right amount of it. Also, you want to be getting the right amount of protein. Protein is key to repairing muscle and connective tissues. And most runners just don’t get enough protein. You know, most runners are a little, little low in the protein department, you know, most runners are, are good at getting enough carbs, and we love our carbs.

But when it comes to protein, we tend to not be getting enough. So you want to make sure you’re getting enough protein to initiate that muscle protein synthesis where your muscles can synthesize protein to help build and repair. So getting the right amount of protein will help you to recover faster, and you’ll be less sore. And it’ll help stave off overtraining, too.

So how much protein is the right amount of protein? People ask me this. And it’s hard to say, like for an individual, because it is kind of an individual thing. But I will just give you a couple of ballparks here and you can kind of see what you think about this. Adjust accordingly.

Obviously, this is not the same for every single person in the world. But it’s just some general information, right. So how much protein is the right amount? Somewhere between 25 and 30% of your daily caloric intake should be from protein. And we’re talking high-quality, nutrient-dense sources of protein.

For me, I’m 165 pounds, I eat around 2500 calories a day, roughly. And so that works out to about 150 grams of protein per day. And I’m actually eating probably more protein than that because I’m trying to build muscle right now. So I might be in the 161-165 range. And that’s normal. And that is a safe amount of protein for me.

So you need to kind of figure out what works best for you. Those are some guidelines you can use though. And then the last thing I’ll say about the nutrition piece here, and again, this should go without saying you guys but water, you got to hydrate, you got to be drinking enough water. Water is just so key to maintaining human health and fitness.

And most people just don’t drink enough water. Every single cell in our body uses water and is made up of water. Our bodies are made up of so much water, we have to be drinking enough water. So what is the right amount of water again, here’s a ballpark for you. Like take your body weight and cut it in half. And that’s how many ounces of water you should be drinking a day.

Again, for me, um 165 pounds, divide that by two, around 83 ounces of water a day. And that works out to about five pints of water a day. So I have this pint glass and I just fill it up like five times a day and I’m good to go. I know I’m good to go with that. Okay.

So, the bottom line here is, overtraining is a real issue for a lot of runners, right? It’s not just some fringe thing. This is a problem for a lot of people. So if you think you might be overtraining, if you’re experiencing any of the symptoms I mentioned earlier, then you might be overtraining. So think about it, get off of that chronic cardio merry-go-round, start training, smarter training cycles, prioritize sleep, get your nutrition dialed in to make sure you’re supporting recovery and rebuilding of your system.

Okay, and then get enough rest. I mean it, you have to recover properly. You have my permission to kick your feet up every now and then and binge-watch some Netflix. That’s cool. I gotcha. All right, you guys, I hope you got something out of this episode. I hope you all have an amazing day as well. And as always, lots of love. Keep on Running Lean. Now talk to you soon.

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