Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
Whether you are just getting into running or have been at it a while, you should be actively working on improving your endurance. While there are many methods out there that are designed to help …
Continue Reading about 217. 5 Ways to Improve Your Endurance →
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 217 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners. Today, I’m talking about five ways to improve your endurance. So whether you are just getting into running, or maybe you’ve been at it for a while, you should be actively working on improving your endurance.
And there are many, many methods out there that are designed to help you improve your endurance. But there are a few key principles I think most runners overlook. So today, I’ve got five ways to improve your endurance to help you run longer, and make running easier in general, who doesn’t want that? I know I do.
But first, I know I share a lot of information here on the podcast about running and nutrition and weight loss and building strength and all these topics. And if you’re new to the podcast, this might all feel a little bit overwhelming and confusing to you. And you just don’t know where to start.
You’re like Patrick, where should I start? Well, funny, you should ask because I created a free hour-long training video that can get you started. It’s called 5 Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.
You’re going to learn all the basics of nutrition and endurance and mindset and building strength. All for you the runner who is maybe interested in improving your body composition, losing some weight.
So if you’re ready to get leaner and stronger, and you’re ready to become the most badass version of yourself yet, which you are, I know you are, then this free training is exactly what you need.
Just go to runningleancoaching.com click on Free Training. I know it’s so logical, right? And get started on your weight loss journey today. Okay, so five ways to improve your endurance. Why am I talking about this today?
Well, lots of runners that I talked to don’t know where to begin with this, or they are not really working to improve their endurance, and they don’t understand why they’re not improving their endurance.
So if you’re a new runner, you might have no idea how to build your endurance, you might be just thinking that you’re just going to run and just keep running and just see if it pans out, you know, see if it works.
Somehow see if some magic happens, where you’re going to be, have more endurance, be able to run longer, and maybe run easier. Seasoned runners that I know, might not be feeling very good when they run and they’re like, I don’t understand what’s happening here. I’m running all the time, but I can’t seem to get faster, I can’t seem to run longer, running still feels really hard all the time.
So you know, whether you are a new runner, and just getting started with all this or you’re a more advanced runner or a seasoned runner, and you want to improve your endurance, then you should be actively doing a few things to help you improve that endurance.
Okay, so, and like I said at the beginning here, there’s a lot a lot of principles, if you just start Googling, you know how to improve your endurance as a runner, you’re going to find 20, 30, 40 different ways of doing that. I’m going to narrow it down to a few that I found, or that I that I tend to help people with more than others.
Because these are the things that kind of get overlooked a lot. Okay, so I’m going to talk about some things that may be overlooked. Okay. So why would you want to be actively improving your endurance as a runner?
Well, you might want to run longer distances. So maybe you’ve got a certain race distance that you’re training for, or that you would like to do someday. So maybe you’re a 5k runner, and you want to be able to run a 10k.
Or maybe you’re doing half marathons and you want to run a full marathon, or maybe you run full marathons and you’re ready to take on an ultra marathon. You know, so whether you want to run, you know, five miles or fifty miles, I think that building your endurance as a runner, or improving your endurance as a runner is key, it’s just going to make running feel easier. Okay?
So you might run a longer race, you might just want to run more miles every week. So you might love running, and you just want to be able to run more. So you just want to instead of running, you know, 10 or 15 miles a week you want to bump that up to like 15 or 30 miles a week.
So you don’t necessarily want to train for some ultra marathon, but you just want to be able to run more days or, you know, longer distances. For each typical training run that you do, you might want to run a faster race. So you might want to get faster for a particular distance.
So that could be whatever, whatever distance your jam is, but you may want to get faster and improve your endurance. Sounds kind of counterintuitive, but it can actually help you to get faster, I’m gonna talk about that here in just a minute.
And you might just want to improve your endurance for your heart health because improving your cardiovascular system is so good for your heart, right? The bottom line here is that you probably just want running to feel easier.
And I think most of us would agree that yeah, I want running to feel easier. Now I have to say this running is never going to feel easy, but it can feel easier. Running is hard. You know what I mean? Like, you get out there and you run. And it’s kind of hard, you know, but have you ever had one of those runs where you’re like, that just felt it felt easier, like that felt really good, you know, for a change?
That’s what we want, we want running to feel easier, it’s still going to be a workout, you know, just like swimming is a workout, cycling is a workout, but we want it to feel a little bit easier. Because when it feels easier, you’re going to want to do it more, and you can go longer if it’s feeling easier, right?
So I’m going to give you guys a couple of keys, here, I have five different ways that we can improve our endurance. And the first one is this, and this is going to come as no surprise to you, but it is to just run more so increase your volume.
So increasing your volume is the easiest way that you can build your endurance and build that aerobic system. So the aerobic system, you know, is the slow running system that you use, for most of your running, hopefully, something around like 80% of your running should be done in that aerobic zone.
Which means you’re not pushing it too hard, you’re going pretty easy. So the simplest way to run to increase your endurance is to run more, you know, it’s just like anything else, when you practice doing it more, it becomes easier.
You know, like, if you want to play the guitar, you got to practice playing the guitar and you’re gonna suck at it for a while, it’s gonna be hard, but the more you do it, the easier, it’s gonna get the same with running, you want to run longer than you have to practice running longer. If you want to run more, you gotta practice running more. Okay.
So why this works is because you are building an aerobic engine here, right? This is your endurance engine, this is probably the most important factor in long-distance running is building that strong aerobic engine.
Okay, so most training programs, they feature a lot of aerobic running, and some of them have some speed work built into them. But that that aerobic engine, your ability to run longer, at a slower pace is slower, you know.
Pace is the number one thing you can do to improve your endurance, okay? So if you want to improve your aerobic engine, increase the volume that you are running, and that will help you to build a stronger aerobic engine, it also helps to increase your running efficiency.
So when you can run more efficiently, you’re going to be able to run further, this is going to improve your endurance as well. And running, you know won’t use as much energy. You know, a lot of running, especially when you get into longer distance stuff is about energy conservation, right? We don’t want to be spending energy, flailing your arms around, or running all weird.
I’ve seen some people that run pretty weird. And I’m like, man, how do they do that? Like they, they can run long distances, and they have some strange gaits, you know. But when you run more, you can typically improve your gait. And one thing I’ll just say, a little sidebar about improving your gait or changing your gait as a runner.
As a running coach, we’re sort of taught that we shouldn’t really mess with people’s gaits too much like you should just run the way that you run because that is going to be the most natural way for you to run.
So don’t think that you’re running wrong. Just because you’re going to gradually when you increase your volume, your running volume, you are going to get more efficient running the way that you run naturally.
So I know it sounds kind of weird, but like don’t worry about if you have a weird gait or something like that or if you don’t think your running form is very good. Don’t worry about it seriously. Just run the way you run and over time, you’re going to be very efficient running that way.
Okay, for the most part now, there are some rare exceptions of people that have really weird flailing legs or arms or something like that, which we probably want to check out a little bit. But for the most part, your running gait is fine. So don’t don’t stress out about that too much.
Okay, so we want to improve our running efficiency, we want to be more efficient as a runner, and we want to use less energy as a runner, and increasing your volume will help with this. When you increase your volume, you also are preparing yourself for fatigue in races especially the longer runs right, when you increase your mileage, you’re going to be dealing with fatigue pretty often, and you’re going to get better at dealing with fatigue, fatigue is something that will happen.
It just happens, you know, it’s part of running. And so consistently dealing with fatigue and pushing yourself to that point of like, oh, I’m feeling pretty tight, this is really hard. That’s a good thing.
And that leads me to the last reason why increasing volume will help you improve your endurance is it helps you to build resilience and helps you to build mental toughness, you know, you’ve done all this hard work, you’ve you know, hit fatigue a bunch of times in your training, you’ve run longer distances, you’ve improved your volume immensely.
Now you have some resilience and mental toughness, some grit, okay, so when it’s time to dig deep in a race when you got to like really push it towards the end of a race in order to hit that PR or something like that, you’re going to have that mental toughness that’s going to be there. Okay?
Now, a little pro tip about increasing your mileage. Don’t feel like you can just do a huge increases in your mileage, you know, week to week, you don’t want to do too much too soon. This is what most new runners do. They’re like, oh, I can run. You know, I ran five miles last week, I’m gonna run 10 miles next week, don’t do that.
Try to stick to the 10% rule. That means that we never increase our mileage more than 10%. So for new runners, I would stick to this pretty hardcore. If you’re a pretty experienced runner, and you have been running for years and you’re not injured or anything like that you can be a little looser with the 10% rule. You can do 15%, you know, sometimes 20%, but don’t want to go too much too soon. This is a recipe for disaster, especially for most new runners.
Most new runners, they get injured because they do too much too soon. So increase your volume slowly. That means if you run 10 miles this week, next week, you’re gonna run 11 miles, and then you’re gonna just keep using that 10% rule. Okay, it takes time. So just give it the time that it needs, but increase your volume. That’s number one.
Number two, and this is one where I don’t see a lot of people talking about this, but you probably want to change your diet, you probably want to start training your body to use a fuel source that you have onboard already. That will help improve your endurance immensely. That is your own stored body fat.
And this is called getting fat-adapted, it means that you are basically switching your main fuel source from sugar to fat, from carbohydrates to your own stored body fat. If you want to take a deep dive into this, I talked about getting fat-adapted and using fat as fuel in the last episode of the podcast, number 216: An Alternatieve Way To Fuel Long Distance Running.
So definitely check that out. But here’s some little key takeaways here. Number one, think of your energy stores as a fuel tank. And at the very top of the fuel tank you have this tiny little sliver of sugar or carbohydrate that’s available as fuel.
And then below that sugar, you’ve got this massive storage tank of stored body fat as fuel. So most runners what they’re doing is they’re using the sugar at the top a little tiny bit of the fat. Yeah, we always are burning a little bit of both.
But most runners are burning primarily sugar and when that is available, that’s all they’re going to burn so they have to continually feed with carbohydrates in order to keep that sugar fuel tank that sugar part of the fuel tank topped off.
When you’re doing that you are just relying on sugar as a fuel source and it is a good fuel source for running it does work, but there are problems with that. Eating a lot of sugar causes a lot of people to gain weight and I’m one of those people.
Eating a lot of sugar, especially during running can really upset a lot of runners’ stomachs. And that is not something you want. You don’t want to have disaster pants while you’re out there running. I hear too many stories about that actually, and I don’t really need to know about what’s going on during the run when you’re eating too much sugar.
But people have really upset stomachs with trying to consume all that sugar. And most runners are not really fat-adapted, so they’re not using that stored body fat as fuel. So they hit the wall pretty often, like they just run out of fuel, because that that small little bit of fuel once it’s gone, they haven’t trained themselves to tap into that stored body fat.
So getting fat-adapted just means you’re primarily burning fat as fuel, and you’re not really relying on all the sugar, which is such a good way to go. Because then you don’t need to feel as much during these longer runs, you won’t get the stomach upset.
And you can basically, you’re going to feel like you can run forever like you’re going to feel like you can run long distances much longer. So this is a great way to improve your endurance that just not a lot of people are talking about out there. Okay.
That’s one principle that most runners overlook. But it is key if you want to improve your endurance as a runner, change your diet, get fat-adapted, ditch the sugar, and start you know, relying on your own stored body fat as a fuel source and your endurance is going to go through the roof. Again, check out the last episode number 216 on a deep dive into getting fat-adapted.
Okay, the third way to improve your endurance is to get stronger. So you want to be intentionally building strength as a runner. And this means like head to toe, actively building strength every single week, this has to be part of your training regimen.
You can’t just go well you know, I do strength training a couple of times a month or whatever, once a week, that’s just not enough. And again, I did a whole episode talking about how to build strength and the benefits of building strength in episode number 199. So check out that episode for sure I take a deep dive into how to do it and, and how to actively build strength.
But when we’re talking about building strength, we’re talking about building stronger muscles, you go to the gym, you lift something heavy, you overload the muscle group that you’re working, and then you have a positive adaptation, you build stronger muscles, okay?
Stronger muscles take longer to fatigue, this is a good thing as a runner, that means you can run much longer before you hit the wall because you have stronger muscles and you can go longer before your muscles are going to give out on you. Okay?
Building strength does not just mean stronger muscles, it also means you build stronger connective tissues like tendons and ligaments, and stronger bones as well, which is really important. But that tendons and ligaments, this is where most runners get injured.
Most running injuries are tendon injuries, like a tendinitis type of thing, which basically just means like you have a pulled or strained tendon of some sort, you know. And if you are a runner, and you’re ramping up your mileage and you want to build your endurance, you do not want to get injured through this process, right?
So actively building strength on a regular basis will help you to stave off injury, and help you to improve your endurance at the same time. So win-win.
Now running will help you develop stronger muscles, especially stronger leg muscles. And runners are like, well, I’m running and so that’s enough. That’s all I need to do. But it’s really not enough, okay, it’s not enough to just run.
First of all, you have to understand that running is a catabolic activity, meaning it breaks down muscle tissue, especially if you’re running a ton of mileage. So if you’re not actively doing some strength training to offset that and getting enough protein, you’re probably going to be losing muscle in the process.
Now it doesn’t mean you’re going to you know, waste away to nothing because running does help to develop muscle. But there’s a little bit of a breakdown that’s happening as well. So what you want to do is you want to hit the gym, and you want to be actively building stronger muscles, especially the stronger leg muscles in the gym.
Because when you do that, that’s going to help improve your running endurance, it’s going to help improve your speed as a runner, it’s going to help you become a more powerful runner. Strong runners are fast runners, strong runners are more powerful runners and strong runners can go longer.
So the third key really to improving your endurance is to get stronger because you’ll be able to go longer, you’ll stave off injury, and you’re going to be running is just going to feel easier for you.
Okay, number four is to run faster. I know this sounds counterintuitive if you want to improve your endurance you have to run faster. But speed work is one area that gets overlooked by runners who want to improve their endurance.
Most people have a love-hate relationship with speed work, they hate doing it. Maybe it’s a hate-hate relationship. They hate doing it. And it feels terrible. But the love part of it would be this: when you do speed work consistently, running will get easier.
You know, if you want to be a faster runner, you probably understand that you need to do your speed work, right? But doing the speed work. And doing it consistently will also help to improve your endurance as well. And most runners don’t realize this.
And when I talk about doing speed work, we’re talking about anything where you’re running and you’re pushing it, you start to feel like you’re pushing it a little or pushing it moderately hard, too hard.
So if you’re not pushing it, then that’s what we call the aerobic zone or easy running, this is a good thing. Just think of the cutoff as just being like, I don’t really feel like I’m pushing it at all. That’s when you’re in the aerobic zone.
But if you’re like, oh, I’m pushing it a little bit or I’m pushing a priority right now, that’s then you’re into the doing the speed work type of zones, okay. So really, I love HIIT training and I love tempo runs.
Tempo runs are where you’re running consistently, at a faster pace than your goal, half marathon or marathon pace, whatever your race pace is, let’s say your race pace is a 10-minute mile, then tempo runs need to be done 30 to 60 seconds faster.
So you might do a mile warm-up. And then you’re going to run 2, 3, 4 miles at that tempo pace. So that is like 30 to 60 seconds faster than your race pace. And then you’re going to do like a mile cooldown, okay, that’s a tempo run.
HIIT training is high-intensity interval training, this can be any kind of interval, it could be four hundred repeats, it can be thirty-second sprints, it can be hill repeats, it can be, I like to do longer repeats like 1/3 mile repeats, that you could do eight hundreds, like there are so many different ways of doing HIIT training, but it is so good for you.
So doing the speed work is key. If you want to run longer, then you need to improve your speed. So you want to do the speed work. Here’s why. When you do speed work, this will help to improve your VO2 max. This is the maximum amount of oxygen that you utilize while you’re running.
Higher VO2 max levels will indicate better aerobic capacity and improved endurance. Also, the speed work helps to improve your lactate threshold. So it can raise your lactate threshold doing the speed work will cause your body to produce lactate while you’re training.
Your body will then adapt and burn the lactate more efficiently the next time, so you have a positive adaptation from doing this kind of HIIT training especially. So this means that at higher intensities, you can go longer before fatigue or pain slows you down. So you got to improve that lactate threshold in you know, raise the lactate threshold speed work is how you do it.
The other reason why speed work will help you build endurance is because it helps to improve your body’s ability to deliver oxygen to working muscles. Oxygen delivery is key in endurance. And one really good way to improve your endurance is to do the speed work.
It also helps you with energy production. So your body has this ability to produce energy with oxygen and without oxygen. So when you’re without oxygen is like what we call the anaerobic zone, that’s when you’re doing like sprinting, you’re gonna just run out of gas at some point, you can only sprint for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, something like that.
And then you’re going to absolutely hit the wall. So when we practice that kind of interval training, you’re training your body to use oxygen more effectively. Another key to doing this speed work is that it helps to improve your ability to use both fat and carbohydrates as fuel sources, which is really a key right there, okay.
Because when you’re doing the speed work, you can bump up your body’s ability to burn fat. And a lot of people say well, you know I’m running faster, so I have to have the sugar. I need gels I need to fuel up I need to use sugar. You really don’t.
There have been a lot of athletes. One that comes to mind is Jeff Browning. He’s an ultra runner. And this guy’s been fat-adapted for years. He’s an elite ultra runner, he wins all kinds of stuff. Amazing guy. But he has been proven.
They’ve done some testing on him. And they’ve shown that he has the ability to burn fat, like more than just about anybody else out there. So most runners who are carb-adapted, they hit this switchover point around 65% of their VO2 max where they’re going from burning mostly sugar, or I’m sorry, burning mostly fat to burning mostly sugar.
So 65% is the traditional cutoff point or changeover point for most carb-adapted runners. But guys like Jeff Browning, he’s trained his body to use fat, mainly fat as fuel up to 90-95% of his VO2 max.
Even some people can go up to 100% of their VO2 max using just fat as fuel, it’s pretty awesome. You know, because that means that you can go much faster than previously thought possible. Right.
And then lastly, running faster helps to improve your cardiovascular fitness, it helps to improve your muscular endurance, and just helps you to improve as an athlete overall. So the speed work is key to improving your endurance for all these reasons.
And then lastly, number five. The fifth way to improve your endurance as a runner, and this is probably the biggest key to all of this is you have to be consistent, it takes time to build endurance as a runner. And consistency is going to be the key to doing this.
If you only do these things here and there, so if you do the speed work, you know, once a month or something like that, because you hate it. I talk to so many people are like I hate doing speed work. But I want to get faster, oh, I want to run longer. Okay, well, then you got to do the speed work.
But if you do these things inconsistently, you’re gonna get inconsistent results, right? You’re just not going to get there. You need to be consistent with your training volume, with your diet, with your strength training, and with your speed work. Consistency is key.
The way you accomplish anything in this world really is to take consistent aligned action, what are the actions that you need to take that are going to get you to this goal? Okay, make sure you know what to do. That’s key, right? But then practice doing those things consistently. That’s it. That is the key right there. Okay.
I mentioned like learning how to play the guitar earlier. If you want to learn how to play the guitar, you have to practice it and you have to be consistent with it. And it’s going to suck at the beginning and you’re going to be terrible. And everybody’s going to tell you to stop playing because it sounds awful. But you have to stick with it. And you got to keep doing it.
You have to take consistent aligned action if you want to accomplish anything in this world. Okay. Practice consistently improving your endurance and you’ll be running longer and easier before you know it. Cool. All right, that’s all I got for you today. I love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
There’s a lot of confusing information out there about how runners should approach strength training. Some people say you should use very light weights and do a ton of reps so you don’t bulk up too …
Continue Reading about 199. Strength, Power, and Hypertrophy for Runners →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 199 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners, and today, Strength, Power, and Hypertrophy For Runners.
So there’s a lot of confusing information out there about how runners should approach strength training and exactly what do we mean when we say strength training? Some people think you should use very light weights and do a ton of reps you know, so you don’t bulk up too much.
Other people suggest lifting heavy weights and doing fewer reps. But for a lot of runners, that seems kind of scary. And they’re like, oh no, is this good? Is it going to help me with my endurance? So what is the right answer for you? That’s what this episode is all about.
In this episode, I’m gonna explain the difference between training for strength, power, and hypertrophy and what all those things mean. Hopefully, by the end of this episode, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of these different resistance training methodologies and how to do them correctly.
But first, if you want a little help getting started with all of the stuff I talked about here on the podcast, I created something that I think is going to be perfect for you. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.
I will teach you how to lose weight the right way and how to keep it off for good without running a million miles a week, I created this training based off of years of doing this podcast and all the topics that I talked about, I kind of distilled it all into about a one hour training that you can go through.
It’s totally free, just have to enter your email address so you can get the follow ups and things like that. But this is going to teach you how to crush your weight loss goals and your running goals.
So, if you’re ready to become leaner and stronger, if you’re ready to run faster and longer and become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself, you owe it to yourself to check out this free training. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner.
You can find it on my website, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. And it’s free by the way. Okay, let’s talk about strength, power, and hypertrophy for runners. So first of all, I want to stress the importance of this topic today, which is resistance training.
So a lot of people just lump it all into strength training, they say strength training, and that’s what everybody thinks of. But there are actually different ways of improving your skeletal muscle, so you can strengthen your muscles or you can get bigger muscles, or you can get more powerful muscles. And I’m gonna explain the difference between those today.
But resistance training helps to improve your health in many, many ways. I always say that the number one driver of your health of your body composition is going to be nutrition. Food plays such a huge role in your body composition, your ability to burn fat, the second biggest driver of body composition and fat burning.
And overall health is going to be resistance training. So you got to be doing some sort of regular resistance training. I talked to so many runners every single day who tell me, oh, I’m great with my running. I do that all the time, but I just never hit the gym. I never do resistance training. I hate it. I don’t like going to the gym.
And I’m just like why? It is the best thing that you can do for yourself from a fitness standpoint, better than running, running is catabolic. Running breaks down muscle, it really does. And if you’re not, if you’re like running long distances, and you’re doing no strength training, that’s not a good combination.
Okay, so we got to be doing some regular resistance training. But there are different ways you want to do it depending on what your goals are. But some of the benefits that you get from resistance training and doing these things regularly, and becoming stronger and putting on a little bit of extra muscle is things like improved body composition, so you have more muscle mass and less fat mass so your body composition gets improved, and you look better, you look better naked, which is amazing.
Regular resistance training will help you burn more fat. It helps to improve your endurance because you’re able to run longer distances on fat as fuel number one, but also you’re able to improve your endurance because your muscles won’t fatigue as quickly as someone who doesn’t have as strong of muscles.
So when your muscles are stronger, you can actually run longer distances before you fatigue. Regular resistance training helps improve your speed as a runner because you can run faster and push yourself harder. Because you have more muscle mass, it helps to improve your power-to-weight ratio, which just means that, you know, the weight on your body isn’t necessarily fat, it’s more muscle.
And so that weight is actually propelling you faster down the road. Okay, so your power-to-weight ratio goes up because you can burn some more fat and then you have more muscle and so you’re going to be a more powerful, faster runner.
Regular resistance training helps to prevent injuries. This is one of the big keys that a lot of runners don’t understand why they keep getting injured. And the thing you have to understand is that when you’re stronger, your whole body is stronger, not just your legs, but you know head to toe, you are less likely to get injured.
Getting stronger, helps to protect muscles, but it helps to protect your joints as well because we have all these connective tissues, ligaments, and tendons that are holding our joints together in this thing, these things are really involved with running, most running injuries, our connective tissue injuries, you know, there’s tendinitis in different areas, that tends to be where people get the most injuries from running.
And so regular strength training can help prevent injuries in those areas as well. Regular strength training helps improve your lactate threshold, meaning you can clear lactate faster, it helps improve your metabolism and helps you burn more calories.
Also, muscle tissue that has been well trained, is more efficient at utilizing calories. So you know you’re more energy efficient at changing protein into muscle and things like that. So so many ways that your metabolism gets improved from doing regular resistance training. It helps prevent sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is muscle loss as you get older.
And I was just reading a study recently that showed that people as young as 30 are starting to experience sarcopenia. And if you’re getting muscle loss as early as 30 years old, and that just continues as you get older, you’re not going to be in good shape. When you get older, you’re not going to be able to pick up your grandkids or you know, you won’t be ambulatory, you won’t be able to walk.
You know a lot of people that as they get older, they lose muscle and they get injured because they can’t carry themselves properly, they fall down, they break a hip and then they’re like bedridden. And this really drastically speeds up the aging process. And people die a lot earlier when they don’t have as much muscle mass.
So you got to be doing regular resistance training, starting today, for the rest of your life. Okay. It also helps improve bone density, a lot of women talk about osteoporosis, and something that is a concern for a lot of people in general. Well, regular resistance training will help offset that.
Regular resistance training helps boost energy and helps improve your sleep. It just helps you to live longer. They’ve done studies that have shown that people who exercise regularly and they did studies comparing people who did cardiovascular exercise and resistance training, the people who did regular resistance training and no cardio actually live longer.
So I’m not saying don’t do cardio, but I’m just saying that regardless of whether they do cardio or not the people who did regular resistance training lived longer. So we’re just talking about quality of life here.
So there are so many benefits and there’s probably even more, I’m just listing the ones that I think are especially important for us as we get older and you as a runner, but there are so many benefits to regular resistance training. If you’re not doing this right now, just you have to start.
Okay, and I’m gonna give you some help here and give you a little bit of guidance to get you started. But just understand that it is key that you are doing something regularly which means twice a week at least, you can do more than that which is totally fine.
I think a lot of people get really great results when they do it three or four times a week. But you can get good results by just working out and doing some sort of resistance training twice a week.
I have a great program that I teach to my clients which is 20 minutes twice a week. It’s a full-body workout that you only have to do twice a week. And it is very effective and a great place for most people to start and once they get you know a few months into that they can start to change that up and maybe add more to that. But that’s a great place to start.
So if you’re thinking I don’t have time to do it, you have time you have 20 minutes twice a week. Or if you’re like oh I don’t have a gym membership. You don’t need a gym membership. You can do this a lot of this stuff at home you can at least get started at home.
You can get some resistance bands for a little money maybe 50 bucks, 75 bucks, something like that. You can get a set of resistance bands with different resistance weights on them, technically like the different weights, they’ll say like 20 pounds of resistance, 40 pounds resistance, 60 pounds resistance.
Those are great because you can use them anywhere, and you can take them on vacation with you. I mean, yeah, I take my resistance bands on vacation with me and I work out in the hotel room, you know, because it’s that important to me, you know.
So it doesn’t take a gym membership, it doesn’t take a lot of time, you don’t have to become a gym rat and spend all your time six or eight hours at the gym every week, just start right and start doing this consistently. And as you do this, you’re going to feel so much better. You’re just going to. Your quality of life is going to improve, you’re going to sleep better, you’re going to have more energy.
Running will improve, you’re not going to be as injured, you’re going to be burning more fat, your body composition is going to improve, people are going to go oh, man, you’re looking like your skeletal tone there.
You know, that looks great. All that stuff is possible for you, but you have to start. Okay. So one principle I want to go into before we talk about the different the differences between strength power and hypertrophy is the progressive overload principle, which means that in order to strengthen a muscle, or to grow a muscle, you have to overload that muscle.
And we don’t want to do that massively by lifting 1000 pounds, the first time you go and lift weights, it’s progressive overload because you have to progressively overload that muscle, or you’re not going to get the benefits.
So what I mean like that, like, imagine you’re doing bicep curls, we all know what that looks like. And you grab a 10-pound weight, and you’re able to do 10 bicep curls until you just can’t do another one, and you hit failure.
So you, you get about halfway up and you just cannot finish that rep. That’s called failure when you cannot finish a rep with good form. That is, that is where you’re gonna stop with that exercise, because you’ve hit your threshold, right? So you cannot go anymore.
So you’ve hit that threshold, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to, you know, give it a day or two to rest that muscle, and then you’re going to try it again. And this time, you might be able to do 11 reps, okay, so you’re gonna progressively overload that muscle.
And again, you’re gonna go and do 11 reps until you hit that failure again. And then you have, you have seen some improvement, you’ve made some progress, you overloaded the muscle, the muscle had an adaptive response, a positive adapt adaptation to that overload and said, I need to get stronger, I need to grow.
And there are different ways muscles grow, muscles can get stronger, or muscles can get bigger. And there’s a little bit of overlap between the different ways we’re going to talk about building muscle here.
But you know, when you’re doing strict strength training, you will see some muscle growth when you’re using when you’re training for muscle growth, you will see some strength improvements as well.
But just understand that we want to overload the muscle in order for it to have that positive adaptation, whether it’s to get bigger or to get stronger. Okay, so that is very important. We just have to remember that principle here.
Okay, so, first of all, let’s talk about strength and strength training. Why do we want to train for strength? Well, we want to get stronger as human beings, we want to be able to carry ourselves around, we want to be able to run longer distances, we want to be able to lift heavier things, you know, we want to be able to enjoy the quality of life.
As we get older, all these things are going to be improved when you do regular strength training, and you’re not going to get bigger, you’re not necessarily going to get much bigger muscles, they will grow a little bit, but it’s going to be pretty minimal. Okay, so people that think, oh my gosh, I don’t want to train strength training, because I’m afraid I’m gonna get all big like a bodybuilder.
Don’t worry about that. It is really, really hard to get big, like a bodybuilder. I know from experience, I’ve been trying this and I’m a little bit older. And it does get a little bit harder as you get older too. But I’m a little bit older. And I’ve been I’ve been doing very targeted hypertrophy and strength training to get bigger muscles, eating extra calories. And it is very hard to do. I am doing it. I am getting bigger, but it is it’s taking a long time. And it’s very hard to do. I don’t think you need to worry about that.
But I think it is important and we can all benefit from getting stronger. So I think strength training is something we definitely want to be focusing on at least at some point in your training cycle.
Let’s say you’re training for a marathon. You know, you want to be doing some sort of strength training throughout the entirety of that training cycle. You don’t want to be you don’t want to just do the strength training in the offseason I’ve heard people say that to like, oh, I’m only going to do it in the offseason. Why? Because you only want to be strong in the offseason? You only want to be injury-free in the offseason? You only want more energy in the offseason?
No, don’t do that. The only time you really need to not do any strength training is right before a race, I usually tell people to take the week of a race off. And the week before you can do some light strength training, but don’t get too, you know, don’t lift too much.
You don’t want to be sore, you don’t want to be sore go leading into your a race, you know. So you can train all the way through your training cycle, you can wait to train through your entire training cycle just that last week when you’re tapering, and you’re about ready to do your race. Cut it out, just don’t do any of it. That way, you’re just 100% for your race, okay?
But we want to get stronger. And if you’re somebody who wants to get stronger and be able to lift heavier things, and to be able to improve your running performance to become a faster runner and improve your endurance, then building training for strength is going to be how you want to do this.
Okay, so this is about improving the strength of your muscle fibers, not necessarily increasing size, the size will increase a little bit, but we’re more interested in improving the strength of those muscle fibers. And the way we do it, I’m going to tell you exactly how you train for strength.
The first thing to understand is that you want to shoot for around 85% of your one-rep max. Okay, now you’re probably thinking what the hell is he talking about? What is a one-rep max? A one-rep max is the maximum amount of weight you can lift for one repetition.
Okay, but you don’t have to go and lift something super heavy and hurt yourself to determine what your one-rep max is. Instead, there’s a calculator you can use online and I don’t have the website address in front of me here, I meant to write it down, but I didn’t write it down.
But just do a search for a one-rep max calculator. And what it’ll do is, it’ll take something you’ve done, like let’s say you’ve done a benchpress, and you’re able to do 12 reps on a benchpress at 100 pounds, then it’ll tell you what your one rep max would be for that exercise.
Okay, so let’s say you can do 100 pounds 12 times on a benchpress, you put this number into this calculator, and it says, okay, your one rep max for the benchpress is 140 pounds, I actually did this and I put the data in here. So 140 pounds would be your one-rep max.
So we want to take 85% of that, which is like 119 pounds, so we’ll just round it up to 120. So for strength, you want to be doing benchpress, around 120 pounds. Okay, easy peasy, right 85% of your one-rep max. That’s number one.
The next part of this, and this is going to be really easy to remember is for strength training, we want to use the three to five principle. That means we want to train each muscle group three to five times a week, we want to do three to five exercises each time, and we want to do three to five repetitions of each exercise. And then we want to do three to five sets of each exercise.
So three to five sets, three to five reps of each exercise, three to five exercises three to five times a week, and then a three to five-minute rest in between sets. That’s a long time to rest in between sets, but you want to start each new set, feeling like 100%.
Okay, so the three to five principle is exercise three to five times a week, choose three to five exercises to do three to five sets three to five repetitions of each exercise, and then three to five minutes rest between, okay, that’s easy to remember three to five, that’s all you got to remember.
If you do that, you will get stronger, you’re going to build strength right now that 85% of your one-rep max, which is going to go up as you progress with this. Okay, so we want to aim for three to five. And this is actually another three to five number three to 5% increase in resistance each week.
So when we’re talking about progressively overloading, we got to increase that weight that we’re lifting each week. So we want to have just a slight increase each week, don’t try to go you know, 20% increase each week or something like that, you’re gonna hurt yourself. Just go slow, and shoot for that three to 5% increase in resistance each week. Okay.
And I do need to just say this. Like, you have to make sure that you’re doing your exercises safely. I’m just taking this information I’m sharing here as generalized information. You and I are not working together. But just take this information and make sure that you’re cleared to do weight training, and that you’re doing these exercises safely. Okay, that’s very important.
That’s my little disclaimer right there. Okay, so that is strength. We want to shoot for 85% of our one-rep max and then use that three to five principle. Now the same principles are going to apply when we talk about power pretty much, there’s going to be a few exceptions here. But understand that power is going to be very similar to strength with one exception being that we’re adding in speed.
So we’re going to add speed, times of force force is the amount of weight you’re lifting. So speed is how quickly you’re lifting that weight. And that equals power. So what we’re using as the primary driver to build power is intensity.
So the intensity of these exercises is going to be different when you’re doing resistance training for power versus strength. Okay, we’re going to be using for submaximal weight here. So we don’t want to use it as heavy weight, we want it to be about 30 to 70% of our one-rep max.
So you could use like 50%, maybe, as the number, you can start there and just kind of see if you need to go up or down from there. But we want to lift fast, we want to lift powerfully. So intensity is the primary driver. And these workouts that you do, if you’re lifting for power, they should not not be fatiguing, they should be non-fatiguing.
That means that you should still have gas in the tank at the end of your workout. Okay, and again, we want to progressively overload based off of power, but we want to aim for that three to 5% increase in each in resistance each week, not the volume. So we’re not increasing the volume, when we’re talking about increasing resistance, we’re talking about the weight on the bar, okay, or the weight of the resistance, or the amount of resistance, I should say.
So we don’t want to increase the volume, we want to keep the volume low when we’re training for strength and power. When we’re training for hypertrophy, which I’ll talk about in a minute, the volume is going to be higher, the weight is going to be less.
So training for strength and power is going to be similar. With a few of these exceptions, you’re going to use a little bit less resistance with the power just because you’re going to be lifting it very fast. So and that’s the big difference. They’re slow and controlled with strength training faster with the power. Okay.
Okay, next, let’s talk about hypertrophy. What is hypertrophy? So, strength training means we’re trying to improve the strength of the individual muscle fibers. hypertrophy is all about increasing the size of those muscle fibers. So hypertrophy is building bigger muscles.
So when you look at like bodybuilders, they’re mostly focused on hypertrophy. And something interesting, I think, a lot of runners that think about weight training, they want to do lighter weights and lots of reps. And they think that this is the way to make sure they don’t get too big.
But actually, the opposite is true. If you’re a runner, and you want to improve your running performance, you want to be just focused on that speed or that power and strength, like you want to focus on higher weights and lower reps actually, okay.
The opposite of hypertrophy is atrophy. You’ve probably heard that word before. So atrophy is a gradual decline in effectiveness or vigor due to underuse or neglect, you do not want that. When your muscles atrophy, they are no longer strong, they’re no longer big, they get smaller. And we do not want that, we want to make sure that our muscle mass is we’re maintaining muscle mass as we get older, and maintaining muscle strength as we get older.
Okay, so hypertrophy is all about building bigger muscles. Okay? Again, there’s a little bit of overlap with these. But if you want to focus on hypertrophy, you’re going to do things a little bit differently. The three to five principle that’s great for building strength, and it’s great for power. But hypertrophy is a little bit different.
Strength is all about heavy loads. So you want to do fewer reps, but heavier, heavier weight, hypertrophy is all about volume. So hypertrophy is all about lots of sets, lots of reps with lighter weights, okay?
So when we talk about doing hypertrophy training, you probably want to start around 65% of your one rep max. So you can play around with that number, but that’s a good place to start. And what we’re looking for is something between like six and 30 reps per set, okay? Anywhere between like 12 and 20 is usually a good place to be like, that’s kind of the sweet spot, but it can be as high as 30 or as low as six.
I shoot for 15. Like, that’s just kind of a number that I think is a great number to get to for hypertrophy. And so that’s kind of where I go. If you can’t do 15, then you need to decrease the load.
You know, if you can’t get to that 15, or if you’re getting to like 25, and it’s still, you could keep going, maybe increase the weight a little bit. So you, you hit around 15 and maybe 17. I’ve been focused on hypertrophy lately at the gym, and I noticed that I’m getting between like 15 and 18 on most exercises. And then as I can continually do like, 18, 18, 18, I made up the weight until I can only do like 15.
And then I’m, I’ll get to the place where that would be that new weight if I can, you know, do 16 17, 18 pretty consistently, then I’ll up the weight again. Okay. So hypertrophy is, you know, we want to be around 65% of our one rep max, and then somewhere around 15 reps, and then three to 10 sets.
So we’re doing a lot of volume here. So with a lot of volume, you can’t do as heavy weights, but you can do more reps, lighter weights. And I like to shoot for the middle of that. So maybe six sets, okay.
So an example might be you’re doing squats. So you pick a number that’s like 65% of your one rep max. And do six sets of 15 reps of squats, and then your rest period in between these sets is shorter. So the rest between you know, power and strength is going to be three to five minutes.
You only want to rest for like 30 to 60 seconds between sets when you’re training for hypertrophy because you want to keep that load going, you want to keep the volume up, you want to keep the intensity up. Okay. So only about a minute, you know, rest between sets when you’re doing training for hypertrophy. Okay.
So why would you want to train for hypertrophy? If you want to get bigger muscles, you know, if you’re somebody that is like, you know, I want to I want to get stronger. But I don’t want to get all big and bulky, then focus on lifting heavier weights, and don’t do as many reps and sets.
If you’re somebody that it’s like me and where I was like, I want to get bigger, I want bigger arms, I want a bigger chest, I want you know, bigger legs, then I’m going to focus on doing more volume.
Okay, now, I like to do this in cycles. So I go through six-week cycles where I do each one of these I go from strength to hypertrophy to power to strength hypertrophy to power every six weeks. And this is great, even through training cycles.
I feel like I’m always improving from a muscle standpoint, like getting bigger or getting stronger muscles. Okay, one more thing I want to tell you. And this goes for all the different methodologies that I’ve been talking about here.
Strength, power, and hypertrophy is the power of intention. So it doesn’t matter how you’re doing your training. One of the keys is intention. So you want to put your mind and your intention into each muscle that you’re working, right? So you want to think about the muscle.
So if you’re doing bicep curls, you want to be looking at that bicep muscle and thinking about that bicep muscle, this is something that Arnold talks about. He talks about looking at it and focusing on getting stronger, I’m not going to do my Arnold impression here, because that would be terrible.
But focus on that muscle getting stronger, getting bigger, getting more powerful, or whatever, contract that muscle tightly each time you do each single rep you want to contract your muscles as hard as possible during each exercise to get the maximum results from each rep that you do.
Like if you’re just sitting there going to do that you’re not really if you’re doing it super fast. I saw somebody at the gym doing this the other day, they were talking on the phone and doing leg extensions, and they were just there was almost no weight on there.
And it looked like there was no effort being used whatsoever. They’re not getting any results. Whatever they’re doing is not they’re not getting stronger muscles or bigger muscles. They’re just like goofing around is what they’re doing. Okay, they’re wasting time. They can say I went to the gym and I did all these leg lifts. But it’s not working. I’m not getting stronger. I wonder why?
Well, you’re not putting any intention into it. Okay. So think about this. If you’re doing a plank, and you’re holding that plank position, but you’re intentionally thinking about your core and you’re contracting your core, the entire time you’re doing that plank, that plank number one is going to be a lot harder, but it’s also going to be way more effective.
If you’re doing bicep curls you don’t need as much weight on the bar to get the same result. If you contract hard during those lifts, you don’t need to do as many reps. Let’s say you’re training for strength and you’re not doing as many reps. You can get massive results by going slow and controlled and then really contracting that muscle especially in that top, you know that top contracted position holding it.
Okay, so you want to get the most out of each rep that you do you want to be very intentional about this stuff. I know I rattled off a bunch of numbers, but it doesn’t mean anything. If you’re doing these things really passively like that. We have to put intention into how we’re doing our strength training because it is that important, okay?
If you want to live a long, healthy life and be strong all the way up until old age and live to be 100 years old or whatever, then you know strength training is going to be the way you get there. Okay? You want to lose weight, you want to improve your body composition, you want to be a better fat burner, you want to improve your endurance as a runner: strength training, hypertrophy training, power training, that’s how you’re gonna get there. Okay?
And as always, if you’re looking for help with any of this stuff, we can talk about coaching. That’s what I do. Just head over to my website runningleancoaching.com and click on Work With Me and we can set up a time to have a little conversation about coaching, and see if there’s a good fit for you. Cool. All right, that’s all I got for you today. Love to you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
There are a lot of metrics available to runners these days - pace, distance, time, V02 max, recovery advisor, race predictor, stress score, heart rate zones, lactate threshold, vertical oscillation, …
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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 194 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, VO2 Max Lactate Threshold and Running Economy.
So there are a lot of metrics available to runners these days, pace, distance, time, VO2 max, recovery advisor, race predictor stress score, heart rate zones, lactate threshold, vertical oscillation, I don’t know what that is, performance condition and on and on. And on.
A lot of these, I don’t think they’re really all that helpful. Some of these are important and you want to pay attention to them. So the whole thing is kind of confusing, and a little bit overwhelming. Especially if you’re trying to understand all the metrics or improve on them.
Okay, so today, I just want to look at a few key metrics. And I want to explain what they mean, and how you might be able to improve them. And the three key metrics you want to pay attention to as a runner are: VO2 max, lactate threshold, and running economy.
And I’m going to explain each of these, what they mean, how they affect you as an endurance athlete, and what you can do to improve them. But first, let me ask you a couple questions here.
What is it that you really want for yourself? Do you want to be healthy? Do you want to be happy? Do you want to lose some weight? How much weight do you want to lose? 30 pounds? 40 pounds? 50 pounds? Do you want to see your abs again? Do you want to PR your next marathon? What is it that you really want for yourself?
I would say most people want to be healthy and they want to be happy and they want to have that six pack abs they want to marathon their PRs. I think this is something that most of us probably would say yes, that we want those things. But not everyone is willing to endure the pain and the struggle required to achieve those things.
People want to lose weight or not, but they’re not willing to go through the struggle of giving up some of their favorite foods. People want the six pack abs, but they don’t want to spend the time that’s required at the gym sweating out those painful workouts.
People want to run faster, but they don’t want to struggle with the speed work the hill repeats the sprint workouts etc. The truth is the struggle is necessary. You can’t accomplish anything worthwhile without some degree of struggle. The struggle is a requirement of change, but most people will not choose it.
Instead, they choose a different kind of struggle. They choose to struggle with remaining stuck where they are. They choose to struggle staying overweight, or the struggle of never becoming a faster runner, or the struggle of never living up to their true potential.
Here’s the truth. Who you are is determined by what you are willing to struggle for. You can choose to struggle with where you are right now. Or choose the struggle that comes with change. So which struggle are you choosing?
If you want some help, want some support getting through the struggle of change, I got you, you can join the Running Lean Coaching Project. This is my unique weight loss coaching program designed specifically for runners. Just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn more. Book a call with me and we’ll talk about getting you through the struggle. Cool.
Also, if you want a little bit of help, just getting started with all this stuff with the right nutrition with strength training with, you know, improving your endurance and your mindset, I put together a free training, it’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner Stronger Runner. All you got to do is go to my website runningleancoaching.com and click on the link that says Free Training.
You’re going to learn how to crush your weight loss goals and your running goals directly from me The Weight Loss Coach for Runners, cool. I spent a lot of time putting this together. It’s sort of the culmination of what I’ve been teaching here on the podcast over the last few years. So definitely check it out, runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. Cool.
Okay, so this week’s topic is VO2 max, lactate threshold and running economy. And the reason I’m talking about this today is because Brent sent in a question. A couple of weeks ago I asked for topics. So if you guys have a topic that you’re particularly interested in, then I would love to answer your question here on the podcast.
You can send me questions about weight loss, about running, nutrition, diet, fueling for running, feeling for training, strength training any of that stuff, find me on Facebook Running Lean Coaching or Instagram @runningleancoach, or you can just shoot me an email at patrick@runningleancoaching.com.
But Brent’s question was about VO2 max specifically. And he didn’t really understand what it was. And he wanted sort of a one on one lesson on VO2 max. You know, what is it? Why is it important for him and how it might improve his running? And I thought, you know, as I was putting together notes for this, I started to really see that there was this correlation between VO2 max, lactate threshold, and then running economy.
And so I wanted to kind of lump these all together into this episode, and you’ll see why they’re all pretty related here. Okay, but there’s some confusion as to each of these and what they are. So I wanted to kind of clear up the confusion today, hopefully, and give you some practical tips on how you can improve these things, so you can become a better runner.
So the reason I want to talk about this today is that we always want to improve as runners. You know, we hear all these terms like VO2 max, lactate threshold, whatever, we don’t understand them. We don’t know what they mean. Is my number good? Is it bad? And should I improve it? What if it’s going down? Like, what does it even mean to my running performance? Does this mean I’m never going to get faster?
So we got to clear up some of this stuff. Okay. I want to help you make sense of these numbers, at least. There’s a bunch of other metrics. Now I just looked at my Garmin and was looking through all these metrics stuff I’ve never even heard of before, like vertical oscillation. And I could probably look it up and figure out what it means. But I was just like, that’s just so funny. Because does that really matter? I don’t know. I don’t know that it really matters.
And like to somebody out there, like, yeah, I want to improve my vertical oscillation. It’s like you do that, bro, you go and prove that vertical oscillation all day long. But for me, I’m looking at some of these key indicators. And I want to get to the bottom line after I talk about all this stuff.
But you know, just understand that some of these matter more than others, and some of this stuff is interesting. You know, I find the data is interesting, but isn’t really all that helpful. Okay. So VO2 max is one of those things where it can be a little bit confusing, a lot of people really just don’t even understand what it is. Okay. So let’s talk about that.
What is VO2 max? So, VO2 max refers to the maximum amount the maximum volume, so V stands for volume, O2 is oxygen, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can absorb and use during exercise. So it is a way to measure your aerobic fitness. Okay.
So if you’re looking to improve aerobic fitness, and you improve your VO2 max, sometimes it’s called your oxygen uptake, then you could see some improvements to your aerobic fitness. Okay?
Obviously, oxygen is important. It’s sort of involved with like breathing, right, but the other part of this is that as you breathe in oxygen, your lungs absorb it and turn that into adenosine triphosphate, which is ATP.
So this is energy, right, so your body will turn oxygen into energy and power your cells to help them release carbon dioxide. And this is great as the more oxygen that you can move, the more that your body can consume, the more effectively your body can generate ATP, right. So that is a good thing.
So having a high VO2 max means that your body is able to oxygenate more cells efficiently right and produce more energy. So your body can handle better aerobic fitness activities like running that require a lot of oxygen uptake.
Okay, so a high VO2 max can be a pretty good predictor of athletic performance, especially if you’re a runner. You can also look at your VO2 max as a benchmark. So you can look at it as a way of improving so wherever your whatever your number is now you can look at that as a way of like okay, I’m maintaining that number which is good over time, but maybe you can improve that a little bit as you go okay.
And it’s not just for athletes. It’s also a way of determining like cardio respiratory fitness and anyone right and medical professionals use this as a way of determining your heart health basically heart and lung health okay. So everyone you know should probably try to increase their cardio respiratory endurance and a higher VO2 max is associated with a lower risk of death which is a good thing in general okay.
So the way they typically measure VO2 max is you go to a metal colo facility like a lab or a hospital, and you’ve got a specialist there, and they hook you up to a metabolic cart, and in a VO2 max test, you put a mask on, a breathing mask, and they want to, they want to see how much oxygen you’re taking in, and how much you know carbon dioxide is going out.
And I don’t know, they measure all this information. And they can figure out how many milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute that you are using. So VO2 max is measured in millimeters of oxygen per kilogram per kilogram of body weight per minute.
Right and so, you know, if you have a VO2 max of 80, then you’re able to use or utilize 80 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. So it’s a good thing, right? There are also other ways of kind of getting a ballpark of what your VO2 max is.
So that’s why when you look at your watch, it is not doing that metabolic cart test, obviously. So it is just guessing basically, and it’s guessing based on a bunch of different numbers. I know some of these watches now have the ability to track not just heart rate, but also pulse ox.
So they can see how much oxygen is actually being utilized in your pulse somehow and so you’re looking at things like that, your weight, your performance levels during running, your heart rate, whether you know your heart rate is improving your age.
So all these different factors can affect your VO2 max. Other factors would be your age, you know, your training performance. Altitude affects your VO2 max and gender. So after about the age of 30, VO2 max typically declines at a rate of 1-2% per year. So just understand that.
So if yours is lower, if you’re older, then your VO2 max is lower than it used to be. You could be just maintaining your fitness but it’s gonna go lower in general for most people. Also training you can actually train and get your VO2 max higher. Some people are just gifted with super high VO2 maxes and some people will never be able to get them super high, but you can improve what you have, which is good. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
Gender affects your VO2 max. So men typically have higher VO2 maxes than women. Men typically have more muscle mass and higher hemoglobin levels which can affect the VO2 max outcomes there. And then altitude affects your VO2 max. So there’s decreased oxygen as you get higher and altitude and this affects your aerobic capacity and decreases your performance. Okay.
So if you’re planning on training at altitude, just think about that. You may not be able to get to your maximum effort and it takes some time to adjust to altitude. But then when you come down from altitude, you’re going to have more oxygen and it’s going to feel amazing, you’ll feel like Superman or woman.
Okay, so those things affect VO2 max. So just understand that there is a way of testing your VO2 max using a field test, okay. And there’s a test that you can do. It’s called a submaximal exercise test. So you can’t really get to that maximum number because you’re not hooked up to a cart in a controlled environment where they’re, you know, pushing you on a treadmill as hard as you can.
But you’ll be able to get a pretty good idea of where you are by doing something like the Cooper test. So the Cooper test is pretty simple. It’s just how far can you run in 12 minutes. So you do a warm up, maybe 20-30 minutes, and then you just run as far as you can in 12 minutes, and you have to push yourself.
And I have not done this one. I’ve done some other max heart rate tests, which is a little bit different. But this seems pretty terrible. It sounds like it would be pretty hard to do. But let’s just say you did this. You run as far as you can in 12 minutes. And then you can put this into an online calculator.
You just take your the distance that you ran, and you put that into an online calculator, but basically it’s saying this that you take the number 36 times the distance that you ran in miles, and then you subtract 11.3 from that and you don’t have to remember this like I said you can go online and do this. But let’s say you ran two miles.
So you take two miles times 36 and then you subtract 11.3. And that gives you 60.7. And that’s your VO2 Max. If you’re able to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes, you take that and multiply it by 36. So 36 times 1.5 minus 11.3 gives you 42.7.
My VO2 max is somewhere around there. It’s like 45. So probably a little over 1.5 miles in 12 minutes, I like I said, I haven’t done the test. But I should do that. So I can share that with you guys.
But, and then you could also look up, I’m not going to go through all this right now because there’s a lot of information out there, but you can look up what good VO2 max ranges are, depending on your age. So I’m in you know, I’m in between the like 50 and 59 age range. And having a 45 VO2 max puts me at like the 90 or 95th percentile. So like the top five or 10% of people out there for my age, you know, I’m in the top five or 10%. So that’s a good sign.
You know, if yours is lower than that, that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that you know, your performance sucks or anything like that, it just means maybe you’ve got a little room for improvement there. But you can look up those numbers online, you can just type in VO2 max chart by age, and it’ll give you a list of all the ages and stuff like that and what the different breakdowns are.
So let’s see. So what does all this tell you? So we want to, we’re focused on running improvement, right, we want to improve our running performance overall. So looking at VO2 maxes as one metric, you can see that having the ability to increase your oxygen intake can be good, it can probably help you to become a better runner. Right?
But it does not necessarily mean that just having a higher VO2 max means that you’re going to be a faster runner. Right? The potential is there. But there’s a lot of other factors that influence how you run. And we’re going to get into all that in just a minute. But just understand that VO2 max might tell you how big your aerobic engine is. But it doesn’t tell you what you can do with it.
Okay, so let’s say you have two runners who are training at the same speed, but one runner is using less oxygen than the other at that given pace, the runner who’s using less oxygen to maintain the same pace is running more efficiently right and probably running a faster race.
So you would think the one that’s running faster would have the VO2 max higher but not exactly. So the faster runner can actually have a lower VO2 max and still be the superior runner. And this boils down to how well that runner can effectively use the oxygen that they’re taking in. Just because you can take it in doesn’t mean you can use it properly.
Okay, so one can have a bigger engine. So you could have the increased capacity for more oxygen, but you may have a poor ability to use it because you haven’t trained for it. Right so you can’t produce the energy that somebody else can produce with a lower VO2 max.
Okay, so just understand that it’s not a direct correlation to running performance or speed okay. But if you want to improve your VO2 max you can you want to train at or near or above that VO2 max intensity.
So, when you increase oxygen intake, you’re going to improve the uptake in muscle fibers you’re going to improve how those muscle fibers function, you’re going to increase the ability to slow the buildup of waste products like lactate, which I’m going to talk about in a minute VO2 max training can increase the efficiency of your running and helps you improve your form as well. But running form is something that is separate from your VO2 max. Okay, so just understand that as well.
But training at VO2 max also increases your leg muscle strength that increases power which will help to improve running economy. And that’s really what we’re after here is going to be improving running economy with all of these things here.
So your muscles will become stronger and your muscle fibers will be able to last longer and produce more energy and that’s where you get faster and running becomes easier for you. Okay, so the way you’re going to do this is to train at your VO2 max or near it.
So that would be doing stuff like HIIT workouts, high intensity interval training. So an example that might be 10 by 400 meter intervals at a 5k pace that’s gonna put you close to that VO2 max and intensity.
Okay, tempo runs where you are holding a five or 10k pace for an extended period of time, maybe two miles up to four, six miles, something like that. Hill repeats where you’re finding a relatively steep hill, and then you’re running hard up at something that you can run has to be long enough where you can run up for like two to three minutes.
So if you can hit that two minute mark two and a half minutes, that’s perfect. Run hard up the hill, jog it back down and just repeat that. And all of these workouts, just make sure you’re doing a warm up and cool down, so that you’re not risking getting injured, you never want to, like go sprint from cold states, like you want to make sure you warm up before you do any kind of high intensity workouts like this.
So here’s the thing, knowing your VO2 max is only important if you make it important. And if your training plan like demands that you have to know this and that’s for most of us, we can estimate, it’s really not going to be that important.
But at some point, you can look at this number and see that maybe you’re improving it and that’s a good sign, that means that you’re improving your fitness, okay. But understand that highly trained people, people that have got like very fast runners, they may see their VO2 max go down, even if they’re running harder and faster and running feels great for them.
So it is a marker of cardio respiratory fitness, but it doesn’t necessarily relate to endurance training as a whole, because there’s so many other factors involved here, which I’m going to go over here when I get into these next couple of topics here. But just understand that, you know, it’s a nice measurement, and it’s something that we can look at, but it’s not everything. So just understand that.
Okay, so the next thing I’m going to talk about is lactate threshold. So, lactate threshold is the point during exercise, when lactate builds up in the bloodstream faster than the body can remove it. So this is the border between what we call like low intensity and high intensity work. And that lactate threshold is that divider, okay? So it’s a good predictor of your fitness.
Okay, so higher lactate threshold means that an athlete can run at a higher intensity effort for longer before they hit exhaustion. Right before that lactate becomes your body’s ability to clear it becomes impossible. So the lactate threshold training is where you’re, you know, doing some exercise at a specific intensity range where the blood lactate starts to accumulate, okay.
So if you did 20-30 minutes of sustained tempo effort, something like that, and you hit that lactate threshold intensity, for that 20-30 minutes, that’s going to put you into that place where you’re really pushing the limit of that of that lactate, okay. But this is how you increase your running intensity by pushing that limit.
Okay, so that lactate threshold is a measure of the effort that you can sustain at a steady state for longer periods. So when we exercise we break down glucose to create energy. And part of the process is lactate is produced and hydrogen ions are produced, right, it’s just part of the process, these things hit our bloodstream.
And at slower paces, your body’s able to clear these byproducts pretty easily, that’s called buffering, your body’s able to buffer them. So if you’re doing a steady state workout, and you’re running at a comfortable pace, you can maintain that pace all day, right, you can do 24 hours. You know, people do that all the time, you run 100 miles, you get that 24-28 hours, something like that of a steady state, but it’s a low intensity, your body’s clearing that lactate.
But as you run harder, these byproducts are increasing in your blood faster than you can, you know, flush them out. And so that’s where you start to get into that threshold place. And once they accumulate so much that you can’t flush them out anymore, then you’ve hit your threshold, right and your muscles are gonna start to burn, you’re gonna feel like your blood is on fire, and you have to stop. Right?
You’ve probably felt that before doing some sort of interval training. Okay. So there’s lots of ways of measuring lactate threshold. Sometimes they do this with blood tests. So they will actually have you run intervals and gradually increase the intensity of these intervals.
And then they do like a finger stick or something and they test your blood to see how much lactate is there. And they look at your heart rate and your perceived exertion and and then you can kind of figure out where is that threshold? Or like, where’s the point where, you know, lactate accumulates too much, and you have to stop?
And again, this is one of those things where it’s probably not very practical, you’d have to get some kind of a doctor or scientist or somebody that understands all these things and have the right equipment to be able to test your blood while you’re running. But you can do some tests that are similar to the VO2 max test, you can do your own lactate threshold sort of testing.
And there’s a few different ways that you can do this, like you can do a 30 minute time trial, just to estimate your lactate threshold. And the way you do this workout is by doing this, like on a day where you’re feeling pretty recovered, so you don’t want to do it on a day when you’re super tired, and you go to a track or some flat road, you can even do this on a treadmill, but you you do a little bit of warm up.
And then once you’re warmed up, you start running at the fastest speed that you can maintain for 30 minutes. So this is going to be a 30 minute time shot. So you’re going to maintain a steady pace. So that’s important, you want to maintain the same pace if you can over 30 minutes. So you don’t want to start out too fast or too slow. But you want to maintain the same pace as close as you can to that same pace for 30 minutes.
And then at the 10 minute mark 10 minutes into that run, you check your heart rate, and you have to like write that down or make note of it, okay, and you could probably look at your Garmin data to see what that is. And then you continue running and then you check your heart rate at 30 minutes.
So at 10 minutes, you check your heart rate at 30 minutes, check your heart rate, you take those two numbers, you divide them by two to find the average between the 10 and the 30 minute mark. And that is what is called your lactate threshold heart rate.
Okay, so let’s say your heart rate after 10 minutes is 130. And then at the end, your heart rate is 170. So you take those two numbers divided by two that becomes 150. So 150 becomes your lactate threshold heart rate. So it may not be exactly the number that you know where your lactate is building up, but it’s a pretty good indicator.
Again, this is what we call a submaximal test, because you’re not going to be able to push yourself to the point where you’re getting to that place where lactate builds up so much that you have to stop because that’s a horrible, horrible place to be. But this is a good way of getting a number that you can look at and try to shoot for.
So then you know that that lactate threshold heart rate, let’s say it’s 150, or whatever it is that you know that you want to be working in that zone right there. Okay, so and you can create training zones based off of that number, they’re not the same as max heart rate training zones, just understand that it’s a little bit different.
But then you have something that you can kind of play with. And again, you can go online and look up calculators for lactate threshold heart rate training zones, and they’ll show you how to determine all that stuff. Okay. But here’s what I’m gonna talk about here, how to increase your lactate threshold.
So the way you improve this, because you want to be able to buffer more lactate. So you got to be doing your training at or above that lactate threshold pace or that effort level, or that heart rate. Okay.
So one thing that’s great about lactate threshold is that you can improve this over time with training. Much like you can improve the VO2 max with the type of training that you do, okay. And there’s a couple of different ways you can do this. One is steady state training. And then the other one is this lactate threshold training that you want to do a couple times a week.
So steady state aerobic training is where you’re just, you know, running at the same pace for an extended period of time. And this is great because it helps to improve lactate clearance in general and buffering, okay.
The lactate threshold training is where you’re going to be pushing yourself into those higher intensities, okay, so you don’t want to do these too frequently. And you got to keep them pretty short. So maximum might be 20-30 minutes, something like that. But the goal with these lactate threshold training runs is to keep your pace steady throughout the run.
So you want to meet that heart rate goal and the pace goal and you want to be consistent with that okay, so lactate training is generally below your race pace, but it should be done comfortably hard, like it should be challenging, but not maximal intensity like the VO2 max training.
Okay, this is where the pace calculators are handy since they can help you determine what pace you’re going to be running at the different lactate threshold numbers that that we all have, right? So what does this tell you about your whole performance and speed and your ability to improve and all that stuff?
Well, much like VO2 max lactate threshold is important. It’s actually I think it’s a great number to know and then to be able to improve. But it’s not the whole story. Right? It’ll help you to run faster. And at higher intensities. It might be a better indicator of overall running performance.
But I think the one thing that we really want to look at and it’s a little more nefarious here, just because it’s tough to like really dial this in, but it’s it’s running economy. Okay. So running, running economy is one of the cornerstones of physiological performance and distance running. Okay, along with lactate threshold, and VO2 max.
And the latter two are the ones that did get all the attention because it’s just a number you can look at. You know, lactate threshold is the measure of the effort that you can sustain at a steady state for longer periods. VO2 max is a measure of the total amount of oxygen you can take in and then you write running isn’t just about oxygen, though.
It’s not just about, you know, a threshold number or a certain pace, right. So when I talk about running economy, we’re talking about a whole range of factors that influence your running like your running form, your technique, your strength, your training, balance, all these other things.
So typically, when people look at running economy, though, if you go online and start doing some research on running an economy, they kind of lump it in there with VO2 max and the way they measure it is using the same equipment that they use to measure VO2 max.
So you put on this gas analyzer you put a mask on, you run on a treadmill, that I’m using this sort of broader definition of running an economy as a combination of VO2 max, lactate threshold, power, speed, strength, endurance running form, all of these things are more important as a whole to look at.
So this is more of a holistic look and improving your running performance than just looking at these two numbers, these two metrics that are, frankly, kind of confusing for some people, even though I just explained all that stuff, you might be still scratching your head a little bit. And thinking like, I don’t understand this stuff. It’s okay. You are not alone, for sure. Okay.
So I like that broader definition. I like just looking at running economy as your overall running performance and all the things that go into affecting that. Okay, so let’s just talk about, like how we can improve this running economy?
How do we improve that, one thing that’s going to help improve this a lot is just getting stronger. Right? We want to focus on strength work. And I talk to my clients about this every single day, the importance of strength training for runners, if you want to improve your body composition, like diet is going to be probably the number one driver there. But the number two driver is going to be strength.
If you want to improve your running, if you want to get faster or be able to run longer, strength training is going to get you there. It’s so, so important. In fact, they did a study in the Journal of Applied Physiology. And it showed that a group of runners replaced 32% of their running training with explosive strength training. And they improve their 5k times without any changes to their VO2 max.
So they were running less but they just did more strength training and they were able to improve their running performance. They’re running 5k times and their VO2 max stayed the same. So you can see that VO2 max isn’t all that great of an indicator, right?
But strength training is going to be one of the best things you can do for yourself. Like I said, it helps you improve fat burning helps to improve your ability to run faster. It helps you to run longer, because you’re going to be able to run longer distances before your muscles fatigue, it’s going to help you to prevent injury. So overall running economy is going to be improved by getting stronger.
Another factor is the type of strength training that you’re doing. So part of the strength training would be lifting weights and lifting heavier weights to build stronger muscles. But another form of strength training would be to do something like plyometrics and jumping exercises, hopping exercises, those kinds of things that help improve tendons and ligaments.
So this is going to improve flexion, it’s going to approve the elasticity of your tendons and ligaments. And so you’ll have a little bit more like spring in your step. All right. And they’ve done some studies where they showed that runners who performed five minutes of a double legged hop exercise, so they just like jumped up and down, saw improvements in the running economy at higher speeds.
So just doing something as simple as that can help improve your running economy as well. So stuff like Plyometrics, super important for runners. It’s one of those things, you can’t really improve tendons and ligaments through strength training alone, that does help, it takes a long time to get there to improve those things. But doing the plyometrics will help speed that process up a little bit.
Another way that you can improve running economy is just working at your goal, race pace. So the more you train, at your goal, race pace, the stronger your body’s going to be at that pace, and you’re just going to become more economical at that pace. Right, it’s pretty simple to just say like, hey, if you run a, you know, nine minute pace for a marathon, then you got to do a lot of training, a big volume of training at that nine minute pace.
And the more you do that, the more efficient, you’re going to be at that nine minute pace, right. So don’t be afraid to spend some time doing that kind of work and working at that goal, pace, right. Also, training volume is going to help to improve your running economy and the frequency of your training.
Like we want to make sure you’re running enough to where you are improving your volume, increasing your volume, and maybe your your frequency of running, but you got to make sure you’re doing in a way that isn’t too much, right, because if you increase your overall volume, a lot of people do that.
And they end up getting injured because they’re running too much too often. So you got to build that strong aerobic engine and volume will help you to do that. But then you got to be careful of the frequency and be careful of not, you know, going too fast or too adding too much volume too soon. Because that’s how you risk improvement.
Another way of improving your running economy is doing these interval workouts that I’ve mentioned, you know, the HIIT workouts, the high intensity interval training, and running faster, because when you run faster, you improve all these metrics, but you also improve your running form.
It’s really hard to run with terrible form when you’re sprinting. Or if you’re running hard up the hill, you’re naturally going to have better running form and better running form means that you’re improving your running economy there as well. Right. So there are a number of factors that affect your running economy, including VO2 max, including lactate threshold.
I hope you understand that I know this can all be a little bit confusing to the average runner, right. But I hope you understand now that how, you know just trying to improve one of these metrics may not be really worth it, or may cause a little too much stress or condition for whatever.
If it was me, I would focus on improving overall as a runner, I would look at my whole running economy in general. Is your effort level at a certain pace improving? Yes or no? Is your pace for that 5k 10k half marathon, whatever distance you’re using as a benchmark, is that improving? Does running generally feel easier? Or is running feeling hard? Or are you recovering properly from one workout so that you’re able to do the next workout to your full potential?
These are better questions to ask and better ways of looking at how you’re improving. I mean, the numbers are interesting, and there’s a lot of good data you can get from there. And improving VO2 max and improving lactate threshold will improve running economy as well. But just understand that there’s a bigger picture we want to be looking at here. Okay.
All right. I hope you guys got something out of this episode today. And as always, if you’re looking for some help with any of this stuff, we can talk about personal coaching, just head over to runningleancoaching.com click on Work With Me. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
Most people will agree that exercise should be included in any weight loss plan. Unfortunately, most people think that exercise should be the ONLY component of their weight loss plan. Eat less …
Continue Reading about 178. Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs to Know Part 2: Exercise →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 178 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs To Know, Part Two: Exercise.
So most people will agree that exercise should be included in any weight loss plan. Unfortunately, most people think that exercise should be the only component of their weight loss plan, eat less and move more. Right?
Isn’t that the mantra that’s been forced upon us for several decades now? How’s that actually working for you? Not so great? Well, the good news is you’re not alone, it didn’t work for me either. There’s more to losing weight than just exercising more and eating less.
I know that if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a runner, and you think that you’ve probably got the exercise thing down pat. But running alone, or just running more isn’t the answer when it comes to getting lean and strong and keeping the weight off for good.
So today, I’m gonna lay out several exercise principles that every runner needs to know, especially if you want to lose weight and keep it off. This is part two of a three part series called Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs To Know.
Part one, focused on nutrition principles. And next week, I’m going to do part three, which is all about the most important mindset principles you need to adopt in order to become your healthiest and most badass self.
But first, let me ask you this, does any of this sound familiar? You work out every day, and you don’t lose weight, you train for something like a marathon, you actually gain weight, you track all your food, you count all your calories and still the scale never budges.
Your eating feels out of control, you just can’t seem to put the consistency that you need together. And you can’t ever make any significant progress. It’s always like one step forward, two steps back. Or maybe you’re just finally ready to be done with all of that, all the struggling.
I know exactly what this feels like. Because I’ve been there. I struggled for years. I tried every diet you can imagine. Nothing ever worked for me, not long term. And all these diets had one thing in common, they all said, eat less, run more.
And the more I ran, and the less I ate, the more miserable I actually was, I was just like hungry all the time. And being that hungry all the time makes it very hard to lose weight, right. So that approach just doesn’t work.
So if you can relate to any of this or all of this, just know that there’s nothing wrong with you, you don’t lack willpower. You don’t lack self control, you’re not a failure. You’ve just been given bad advice. Whatever you’re doing doesn’t work, right?
Nothing changes if nothing changes, so maybe it’s time for a change. If you’re ready to try something different, something you’ve probably never tried before, just consider coaching. Coaching works where most cookie cutter plans fail.
Why? Because coaching gives you the expert guidance, support and advice that you need for you and your particular goals that the cookie cutter approaches just can’t do for you. Okay.
Coaching also provides encouragement and motivation to keep you going, especially when things get hard. Coaching even offers up a little bit of tough love every now and then because sometimes we all just need a little kick in the butt to get us back on track.
Coaching has been the one thing that changed everything for me, and I’m confident it can be the game changer for you too. Whether you’re just getting started on your weight loss journey, or you want to drop those last 10 pounds, check out The Coaching Project.
This is my lifetime access weight loss coaching program designed specifically for runners just go to runningleancoaching.com/join to learn all about it. I would love to see you in The Coaching Project. Alright, let’s get into these principles.
These are weight loss principles that every runner needs to know. And today we’re focused on exercise. So if you want to lose weight and you want to keep it off for good, there’s a certain way of doing things that may go against some of the standard practices out there.
Like I mentioned before, like running more and eating less. That just doesn’t work for most people, it didn’t work for me. And a lot of people I work with say it doesn’t work for them either. That’s why they come to me for advice and help and so what I’m going to lay out for you today is the exercise principles that we need to start to kind of wrap our head around, okay.
So I’m just going to jump into these and the first one is this: that it is okay to keep exercising. I know this may sound a little crazy. But there are a lot of coaches out there who tell people when they start out losing weight that they should stop exercising. And I know that sounds a little crazy.
Here’s why. Here’s why they do it because I had to look into this little bit. If you want to lose weight, and you’re not someone who exercises regularly, it might be a lot to completely change how you’re eating, and start exercising at the same time.
Think about that, if you’re somebody who has weight to lose, and you have not been exercising, to try to start a whole new diet and exercise at the same time can be a little overwhelming, right, it’s hard enough to stick to a meal plan. Now you want to stick to a whole new exercise plan too?
That can be a little bit much for people, especially if they’re just getting started. They’re not somebody who exercises regularly. But I have to say, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a runner, and you probably run pretty consistently already, right? If so, great.
Just keep doing that you don’t really need to change anything. Right? Keep running, let’s focus on making changes around your nutrition at the beginning. Anyway, if you’re not somebody who runs consistently, and you want to lose weight, I’ll suggest just focus on the food for a while.
Go back and listen to the episode I did last week on nutrition, start with that, but get used to eating differently, wrap your head around that. Start developing some good habits around nutrition first, then we can start working on an exercise plan.
Okay, so it’s okay to keep exercising, if that’s something that you’re doing now just keep running. If you’re going to the gym, if you’re doing yoga, whatever it is you’re doing, just keep doing it. Don’t really change anything at the beginning, just focus on the food at the beginning. Okay.
Second principle, it’s not all about running. So this is another one that runners will push back on me with beyond a little bit. But listen, you have to wrap your head around this. Losing weight is not about running a million miles. I say this all the time. Okay, this isn’t about just like increasing your running till you’re running 85-90 miles a week or something like that. Okay.
I talked about this last week, you can go back and listen to that episode, again, if you want to understand what the biggest driver is when it comes to weight loss. So that’s going to be nutrition. There’s lots of reasons why. But it isn’t more cardio, you know, it’s not all about the cardio.
If you’re running, keep on running, just understand that you can’t outrun that bad diet, right. So you’ve got to get your nutrition dialed in first. That’s the most important factor when it comes to losing weight.
Cardio, or just running more is not going to solve your weight loss problems for you. You cannot run so much that you will just you know lose all this weight and be able to keep it off. And it’s something that isn’t really sustainable.
So this leads me into like the next principle, which is just say no to chronic cardio. No, that kind of rhymes, just say no to chronic cardio. Okay, what is chronic cardio? Chronic cardio is when you get out there and every single workout you do is medium hard, right?
You never work out hard enough to get the adaptive effects of those hard workouts. And you never work out easy enough to get the adapted cardiovascular effects of those workouts. So everything you do is a medium-hard intensity. All your runs, all your, you know, sessions at the gym, yoga, whatever. Everything is at this like medium-hard intensity. And this is the way that I used to do it. And every run, I would go out there and just push myself not too hard, but not too easy.
Here’s what happens when you do that, right. And the reason it’s called chronic cardio is because it’s constantly happening. It’s constantly recurring. It’s what you do every single day day in and day out.
Some of the problems. Number one is that this puts your body into a state of chronic stress. So stress is okay. And there’s two types of stress. There’s the chronic stress, which I’m going to get into in a minute here.
But then there’s acute stress, acute stress is where you go and do like speed intervals. And you do a HIIT workout where it’s very short and very intense. And it’s a very intense amount of stress on your body but you’re you have an adaptive response. Your body gets stronger, your cardiovascular system improves.
You go to the gym and do a less hard weightlifting session. Very hard, very intense but short, you know, and your muscles grow because of that, right? That’s the adaptive response to acute stress, then we have what we call chronic stress.
Chronic stress is the kind of stress we don’t want. Chronic stress is where your body is in a state of that fight or flight. Stress, fight or flight or freeze, you know, kind of all the time, you know, think about how we’ve developed as human beings where, you know, we saw the saber toothed tiger, and we became stressed out about that.
That’s acute stress, we run away, you know, cortisol goes up, glucose gets produced, our bodies are, the adrenaline gets produced, whatever. And we can run away, so we have the energy for running away.
But now, a lot of times we put our bodies into this state of chronic stress where our cortisol levels are always high, our glucose levels are high, which means our insulin levels are always high, which means we’re always storing fat, which means it’s really hard to burn fat and lose weight.
Chronic stress leads to chronic weight gain, or the inability to lose weight. So if all your workouts are medium-hard, you’re going to put your body into that state of chronically being stressed. And we do not want that, okay. Exercising this way will not help you to lose weight.
In fact, the opposite might happen, you might just gain weight. And this is why a lot of people come to me and they’re like, Patrick, I don’t understand I workout all the time. And then they start describing their workouts. And I go hmm, I think I know what the problem is here.
So we have to switch how you exercise and how you structure your runs. So what do you do instead?
This leads me to the next principle, which is the 80/20 principle. So what is the 80/20 principle? This is where 80% of your runs, 80% of your workouts should be easy, comfortable, low intensity, conversational pace, zones, one and two. And 20% of your workouts should be hard, high intensity, you cannot carry a conversation in zones three to five.
This is what the best runners in the world do. They focus 80% of their effort on low intensity and they build that cardiovascular base, they build that aerobic engine. And then 20% of the time, they are focused on running super hard, super fast tempo runs. Fartlek speed work, HIIT training, that kind of stuff.
And if you want to take a deep dive into this, read the book 80/20 Running by Matt Fitzgerald, it has a lot of great science in there. But he does explain how this principle works, why it works in great detail, I’m not going to get into all the details of it here.
But if you just take this 80/20 principle, and you start applying that to how you’re running now, this principle is going to help you immensely right, you’re going to start to improve your running, you will actually improve your cardiovascular system, you’ll improve your running engine, so you’ll be able to run longer distances, you’ll improve your speed.
And you don’t risk all the negative effects of having this elevated cortisol all the time and putting your body into that state of chronic stress. Okay, so just understand that if you want a better approach, stay away from the chronic cardio, focus on 80/20. And this is gonna go a long way for you here.
Alright, next principle, resistance training beats cardio every time. So lean runners are strong runners. I told you the first and most important principle when it comes to losing weight is going to be to focus on nutrition. The second best thing you can do for yourself if you want to lose weight is resistance training. This is going to have the most impact over cardio.
Okay, most people don’t understand this. So number one is going to be nutrition. The second biggest driver of your weight loss of your body composition is going to be resistance training. And what is resistance training?
So resistance training is weightlifting. It’s called strength training a lot of times, but resistance training is using some sort of resistance and this could be your own bodyweight. It could be weights at the gym. It could be anything heavy that you carry or resistance bands to cause an overload in your muscles, so they have an adaptive response.
That adaptive response can be more than just building strength. So when we say strength training, yes, we want to build strength, we want to become stronger, but you can also build endurance power speed hypertrophy, which is larger muscles.
So, depending on what your goals are, you might want to build power and speed because you want to increase your running time, you want to be more explosive, maybe you want to run a faster 5k.
So you might want to focus on power and speed versus hypertrophy, like you don’t want to get big and bulky. Okay. So here’s what happens though, when you do not focus on resistance training. So most runners kind of neglect doing resistance training the right way, they just don’t do it the right way. Or they don’t do it at all.
And when you neglect regular resistance training, weight loss will take longer because your metabolism will actually slow down a little bit, you’ll be actively storing more body fat, you’re at a higher risk of injury.
Runners who don’t build strong muscles and connective tissues are more likely to get injured. So being strong means you can run hopefully, injury free, you won’t be able to run as far as having weak muscles means your body won’t be able to carry you as far before if fatigue sets in.
So being a strong runner means you can run longer, and you won’t be able to run as fast. Being a strong runner means you can run at higher intensities for longer. So strong runners are faster and more powerful.
On the flip side, here’s what you can expect when you stick to a regular strength training routine, you will lose weight faster so the more muscle mass that you have means the more fat you’re burning. Carrying muscle around requires more energy than carrying fat so your metabolism actually increases just by getting a little bit bigger and a little stronger.
This doesn’t mean you’re going to be big and jacked. That’s really hard to do, you don’t need to worry about that. Building muscle also speeds up the fat adaptation process which helps you burn even more fat. Building strong muscles means you’re at a much lower risk of injury especially from those connective tissue problems.
Most runners’ muscles adapt pretty quickly but your connective tissues, ligaments and tendons, they take a little bit longer to get strong. That’s why most running related injuries are ligament intended injuries, not muscle injuries. Also your endurance will improve your ability to run longer distances before fatigue sets in vastly improves.
So become a better long distance runner and you’ll get faster. Carrying more muscle means your power to weight ratio improves substantially. So you’ll be able to run faster at higher intensities for longer periods.
Lastly, you’ll live longer. A new meta study in the British Journal of Medicine says that people who do regular strength training are less likely to die prematurely than those who don’t, even when they don’t do any cardio at all.
So, in my opinion, I think that the number two thing you can do besides changing your nutrition is focus on resistance training, and then decide do you want to build stronger muscles? Do you want to build more power, more speed, more endurance? Or do you want to put on more muscle you know, focus on hypertrophy. So you got to figure that out. But resistance training beats cardio every time.
Next principle, you have to understand this: running is catabolic. So long distance running is catabolic, which means that it does break down muscle to some extent. So running is not a muscle building activity on its own. It’s a muscle depleting activity.
This is another reason why doing regular resistance training is so important, you got to keep up with this so you don’t lose muscle. This is also why you need to prioritize protein as a runner, you can lose weight while training for a marathon or any other race, you just have to make sure that you’re not losing muscle weight, right.
So regular resistance training, and getting enough protein will offset the catabolic effects of running, it doesn’t have to be catabolic, it doesn’t have to be a problem for you, you just have to make sure you’re doing regular resistance training and getting enough protein too.
Okay, next principle, I want to just kind of break these two things down here activity versus exercise. So, physical activity, this is any bodily movement produced by your muscles that require energy expenditure.
Exercise, on the other hand, is a subcategory of physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and purposely focused on improvement or maintenance of one or more components of physical fitness.
So for example, activities would be things like walking the dog, playing with kids, yard work, house cleaning, these are not forms of exercise. They are activities.
Exercises are things like running, weightlifting, cycling, swimming, yoga, and on and on, right.
I think we kind of understand this, but I just want to make this very clear to you. And here’s why I’m bringing this up. Because the key words I want you to focus on here are planned, structured, repetitive, and purposefully focused on improvement.
So, think about your current exercise regimen. How often do you plan your workouts? Do you have a plan? You should have a plan. All your workouts should be planned for the week, whether you’re running weightlifting, doing cross training, swimming, yoga, whatever, these should all be on your calendar, they should be planned ahead of time.
How repetitive are they? How consistent are you with that plan? You should be consistent with your exercise routine, because that’s the only way you’re going to see improvements. Right? How purposefully focused on improvement? Do you have clear goals? Are you tracking your progress? And are you making steady progress? If so great. If not, why not?
Like for running, you need clear running goals, you need a solid running plan. You need to be consistent with your training like don’t ever miss two workouts in a row. And then every run, every workout has to have a purpose. Like you need to be continually making progress towards those goals.
And if you’re not, you need to kind of look at why am I not making progress? Am I overtraining? Am I not getting enough rest? What is the problem here? How can I change things so that I’m getting good results so that I’m moving closer to those goals that I have for myself?
So I just want you to understand that when it comes to exercise that has to be planned, structured, repetitive, and you have to be focused on improving. Most people don’t do it this way. They treat running like it’s, you know, yard work, right?
Running just becomes another activity, which is great. If that’s all you want to do, you just want to treat it as like something that you do, like walking the dog, that’s fine. But if you want to improve if you want to get faster if you want to run farther, you know, if you’re focused on weight training, and you want to get bigger muscles or improve your body composition, or get more toned, especially for the beach, whatever, then you need structure, you need goals, you need to be planning this you need repetition and purpose. Okay?
If you want to PR your next half marathon, you can’t just wing it with your training, you have to have it planned and structured. And you have to have this focus on improvement. Okay, so that is the big difference between activity and exercise.
Which leads me to my next principle, which is you have to prioritize rest and recovery. I know a lot of people do not want to talk about this. And I know a lot of runners who run or workout every single day. And they do not give themselves a chance to rest and recover properly.
And I just have to say when it comes to changing your body composition, losing weight, too much stress, a lack of sleep, lack of proper rest and recovery will result in chronic stress and the inability to lose weight. So just understand that you have to prioritize rest and recovery.
You cannot train every single day hard, like I mentioned earlier, unless you make sure that you’re prioritizing rest and recovery, you have to have those days built into your training plan, right? So think about how we build muscle, right? So you overload your muscle, you have an adaptive response, which means your muscle grows in response.
Or let’s say you want to improve your running, you do a hard intense speed workout and then the next day you rest and your body improves in that off time in that downtime in that rest period. That adaptive response does not happen on days when you’re doing intense training. It just does and it requires rest and recovery for this to happen.
So if you’re not seeing progress in your weight loss, if you’re not seeing progress in your running or your strength training, then you need to look at how is my rest and recovery? Right, remember we don’t want to be in that state of chronic stress, chronically high cortisol levels because that’s just going to keep us holding on to excess body fat okay.
And it leads to chronic fatigue and if you feel like tired all the time, maybe you can’t get a good night’s sleep which is a key component of rest. Maybe your workouts have diminished like your your ability to work out. Well has your performance gone down? Do your workouts feel harder? Your endurance has tanked.
If any of this stuff is happening, then look at rest and recovery, right, this also has a mental impact, right? You don’t have as clear of a head, you might be in a grumpy mood, you might start to lose your motivation, you just don’t feel like running anymore, right?
So you need to focus on rest and recovery. Because when you do, you give your body a chance to rebuild to repair and recover from those hard workouts so that you have that positive adaptive response, you’re able to go harder on your hard days, which means you’ll improve your fitness even faster.
And that’s the thing that people don’t understand. They think, oh, I don’t want to miss a day, I’m just going to do these hard workouts everyday so that I improve faster. Well, the opposite is actually true. If you want to improve faster, focus on rest and recovery days, okay, you give your body a chance to adapt to your training load.
Adapting means that you’ll get stronger, and you’ll improve your cardiovascular system, you can increase the intensity and the duration of your workouts. As long as you’re getting enough rest and recovery time, you won’t be as fatigued, you’ll feel better, your workouts will actually get easier. And you’ll get those positive mental benefits.
So you’ll feel more clear headed, you’ll be happier and less moody and stuff like that. Okay. So just understand that rest and recovery have to be a priority. And if they’re not, put them in your schedule, just put those days in your schedule.
All right, the next principle is this, you need to be working on flexibility and mobility every single day. One of the most debilitating aspects of this world we live in today is sitting in chairs all day, right? You run, you lift weights, and that’s all great.
You know, you get your exercise in every day. But what about the eight hours or whatever it is a day that you’re sitting in a chair at work, or the two or three hours at night, when you’re sitting down watching TV before you go to bed.
I did a little research on this, the average American adult sits down in a chair for about seven hours every day, that’s average, some people it’s a lot more, some people a little bit less. For teenagers, it’s around eight hours a day.
And research has linked sitting for long periods of time with a number of health concerns like obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat, unhealthy cholesterol levels, and these all make up what’s called metabolic syndrome.
And by the way, about 88% of the US population is considered metabolically unhealthy. This is not where you want to be, this is not a good trend. So sitting all day contributes to this, it’s not good for you.
But I get it, you have to work. Your kids have to go to school, they got to sit at desks, whatever. So what do you do? Work on improving your flexibility and your mobility every day. And this is one of those areas where I talk to people about this.
I talk to clients about this, and I can see their eyes kind of rolling back in their head and they’re like, oh my gosh, just one more thing I got to do. I don’t have time for this. I’m already working out all the time. I don’t have time to work on this. But listen, you got to make time for this. You do not want to be one of those 88%.
Okay, so there’s a few things you can do. I’m gonna just talk about a couple of things you can do. They’re super simple, but they’re gonna make such a huge difference for you. Number one, get a standup desk. If you don’t have one already, just get one. I have one. I love it. I’m up and down all day. I’m sitting right now. But a lot of times I’ll record this podcast while I’m standing.
And so I move the desk around, it’s actually one that can go up and down. And I’ll move it up and down and switch every meeting that I have all stand up for one and then I’ll sit so that I’m cutting the amount of time that I’m sitting in a chair and half by doing that right there. That’s a huge game changer right there.
Another thing you can do, which is so simple, and this is going to sound ridiculous. But this is just get on the ground. Spend time on the ground sitting on the ground, squatting, getting up and down from the ground laying on the ground. You could do this any time during the day, grab your laptop, put it on the ground, just sit on the ground.
You can do it while you’re watching TV. You can, you know, do it while you’re eating dinner, put your dinner on the coffee table and just sit there on the ground. You know, there’s cultures that do this already, right.
And little kids do this all the time. I recently spent some time with my grandson. My son and his wife had to go to a wedding and they were like can you come and watch, you know, Vigi’s his name. Can you come and watch him for a few hours while we go to this wedding? So we spent a lot of time together. And which was really interesting.
I was just watching him for a long time. He’s probably thinking like, geez, what are you doing weirdo, but I’m just watching him and he’s on the ground the whole time. He’s squatting. He’s sitting, he’s crawling around.
He wants to play this game with me called crawlies which is just like I’m crawling around, and I gotta chase him around while we’re both crawling and it was super fun. But the point is that little kids do this.
Naturally, this is our natural state as humans getting and moving around on the ground, is how, how we evolve and how we learn, good posture and sitting. And this is very natural for us too. But we’ve gotten far away from this, this world that we live in now with chairs and couches, and we sit everywhere, it’s not good for us, right?
There is this field of study, this field of what’s the right word like rehabilitation, that’s called DNS, or dynamic neuromuscular stabilization. Fancy word I’m going to explain. I’m going to describe what it is, I’m going to give you like their definition of what it is. And then I’m going to tell you in a nutshell what it is.
So DNS, dynamic neuromuscular stabilization, is about the nervous system, and how it establishes programs that control human posture, human movement, and our gait. So this motor control is largely established during the first critical years of life.
DNS emphasizes neuro developmental aspects of motor control in order to assess and restore dysfunction of the local motor system and associated syndromes. Okay, that was a lot, right? Here’s what DNS is. In a nutshell, it’s about restoring our natural movement.
It uses postures, positions, and movements, based on what babies and toddlers do naturally. So if you look up DNS positions, DNS exercises, you will see pictures of babies, and then the adult version of that thing. So a baby may be in a squatting position, and then the adult is in the squatting position.
And they explain, you know why these movements are so natural and so important. But I noticed that my grandson has all this flexibility. Like, it’s crazy how flexible he is. And I’m trying to do the same things he’s doing. And I’m like, dang, I can’t do that anymore. Like I used to be able to do that, you know, so we lose that as we get older.
Okay, so I know this sounds crazy, but I’m just telling you right now that the main benefits of DNS are going to be improved mobility, improved flexibility, and improved stability. Every mobility issue, tight muscle or stuck joint is really an underlying stability issue. So if you can improve your stability, all this stuff goes away.
So get on the ground, this doesn’t take any extra time, just get on the ground, and do what little babies do. It’s so fun to just roll around on the ground and sit up and get up and down. If you find that if you’re older, like I am, and you find that getting up off the ground is like oh, my knees are cracking and it like takes a little bit more effort than it used to, then this is something you need to focus on. Okay.
Here’s the thing, if you did this regularly, if you focus on this type of DNS training this like getting on the ground, spending time on the ground, and consistent resistance training, you would feel amazing, you would improve your health, your body composition, your vitality, your longevity, and just become an overall badass, really.
If you just did these two things running fine, run, keep running. But I’m just going to tell you that this and resistance training are going to go so far for you and feeling better, but also in improving your body composition, losing weight.
So this brings me to my last principle I want to talk about today, which is run because you love it. Don’t run to lose weight. It doesn’t work. I think you understand why by now. Run because you love running. And people say this to me all the time. They say, Gosh, Patrick, I just love running. Running is like my therapy.
And I love this because just like therapy, running helps you to feel good about yourself. It helps you to build self confidence and self esteem. It helps you to improve your self awareness. It helps you to connect with yourself and with other people better. And just like therapy, running can help mitigate depression and anxiety. Lots of studies have shown this.
So running makes us feel better about ourselves. People who run regularly are typically happier. So run because you love it. Running helps you improve your focus and your concentration throughout the day. So you can actually be more productive. It’s an amazing stress reliever. So run not to lose weight not because you have to run because you love running, right.
If you’re running just to try to lose weight, you’re going to be very stressed out, it’s just going to cause a lot of unnecessary stress in you, okay? And don’t run because you have to, it’s not a chore, right? You’re not trying to prove something to others either, just run because you want to prove something to yourself.
Run because it feels good to run, run because you, you want to become healthier and happier and you want more for yourself, you want to improve, run because you love running. So maybe it’s time to change how you run a little bit, maybe leave your watch at home, leave your phone at home, just go run naked, they say that doesn’t mean without clothes. It just means running without your watch and your phone, no headphones, just go out and run.
Focus on your breathing, focus on the surroundings. Focus on nature. Maybe use this time while you’re running to give thanks for everything that you have in your life. Think about the trees and the birds on the sidewalk and the dirt path beneath your feet.
Think about how grateful you are for everything in your life. Maybe you can use this time to meditate or to pray. However you do this, it’s up to you. But I just want to encourage you to to run because you love running not because you have to.
So those are the principles I wanted to share with you today all about exercise. Remember, this is part two of a three part series called Weight Loss Principles Every Runner Needs To Know. Check out last week’s if you haven’t already, it’s all about nutrition.
And next week, I’m going to come up with part three, which is going to focus on the mindset principles every runner needs to know. And to make sure you never miss an episode, just subscribe to the podcast on whatever podcast app that you use.
And listen, if you’re ready to begin your weight loss journey, I have just the thing to help you get started on the right track. I put together a brand new hour long training just for you. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner.
In this training, I’m gonna teach you how to lose weight the right way and how to keep it off without running a million miles a week. A few things you’ll learn in this training, why running more and eating less is not an effective way to lose weight and what to do instead.
The one thing runners don’t do or do wrong when they try to lose weight, the best fuel to use to improve your running endurance and help you lose weight. How to create the mindset shifts necessary to develop new habits that last for life.
And then the one thing that I did that was really the key for me being able to lose the weight and keep it off for good and something you should probably do too. And tons more. It’s super fun. It’s free. If you’re ready to get leaner and get stronger, if you’re ready to run faster and run longer and become the healthiest version of yourself. Check out this free training and did I mention that it’s free? Well, it is free.
Okay, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training. There’s never going to be a better time than right now to get started. So just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on free training today. Well, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
There’s a bit of a debate going on out there in the running community around whether or not runners should be lifting heavy weights. Some people think no, runners should never lift heavy weights …
Continue Reading about 160. Should Runners Lift Heavy Weights? →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster, and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 160 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today should runners lift heavy weights? So, there’s a bit of a debate out there in the running community around whether or not runners should be lifting heavy weights.
Some people think no, runners should never lift heavy weights. And they give a bunch of valid sounding reasons why others think that runners should always lift heavy, and they have their own logical point of view on the topic. And the two sides both have some good points. Today, I’m hoping to clarify this for you and give you my stance on the subject.
So in this episode, I’m going to definitively answer the question should runners lift heavy weights. And before we get into this topic, I want to give you a quick recap of my personal weight loss journey. I’m sharing this with you today because I want you to understand something I want you to know that I get it that I’ve been there and that I’ve come out the other side.
So a few years ago, I found myself around 40 pounds overweight. Very recently, I was running like a madman and I was trying to burn off all these calories. And it just wasn’t working. I was logging all my food. I was doing these like whatever the latest fad diets. I was running every day, and still nothing was working for me.
My cravings for sugar and junk food were like crazy off the charts. And I was seriously riding the struggle bus. And then I did something that changed all this for me. So I went against everything I’d been taught as runner like you need sugar to run, you need carbs to run. And I finally got off the struggle bus.
I started fueling differently for running, I began lifting weights consistently. And I fixed my mindset so that I could make all of this a sustainable way of life. I ended up losing the 40 pounds, running became way easier. I’m stronger now than I’ve ever been. I have more energy than I know what to do with and my cravings for junk food are basically gone.
So, this is what I do. Now I teach runners like you how to stop struggling with your weight and start living like the healthy, strong, lean, badass runner that you know you can be. Of course, it’s up to you, you can continue to struggle like I did for a long time there. But listen, when you’re ready to be done with all that, I’m here for you.
If you want to learn more about coaching, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a quick application, we’ll have a quick chat, see if coaching is a good fit for you. Cool! runningleancoaching.com/apply I hope to see you in the Running Lean Coaching Project.
Okay, so let’s talk about this: should runners lift heavy weights? So, the reason I’m bringing this up today is because I think there’s a little bit of a debate out there. And if you look up, you know, hey, should runners be lifting heavy weights, I think you’re gonna get some mixed opinions about this subject. And especially if you talk to other runners, or you talk to people at the gym, don’t talk to people at the gym about this kind of stuff.
I get it, butI always hear people say oh, I was talking to this guy at the gym and I’m always like, oh boy, here we go. Right. Some expert quote unquote expert at the gym. So why am I talking about this? Well, a lot of runners think that they should never lift heavy weights like they should always do very lightweights lots of reps and others you know have a different opinion they think you should always lift super heavy and so like what are you supposed to do?
Like how do you decide as a runner, what you should do? And it doesn’t matter which you know, side you kind of fall into. I want to help you kind of make this decision clear today. Okay, so the first thing I want you to think about is this. What are your goals? What are your goals?
First of all as a runner: so, are you planning on running your fastest half or full marathon? Are you running your first ultra or your fastest 5k? Maybe you are you’re a miler, maybe you’re running your fastest mile. Maybe you just want to run every day, maybe you just want to run and continue running forever and that just wants you just want running to be part of your life forever. And you want to stay strong for that. Because your goals as a runner will a little bit determine like which way you want to go with this. Okay.
The other thing I want you to consider is what are your overall health and fitness goals? Like, are you trying to lose weight? How much weight; 10 pounds, 50 pounds? Are you trying to get stronger? You should be. Are you trying to build some lean muscle to improve your body composition? Like lose some fat and gain some muscle weight? Or you just want to live longer, like be very, very clear on your personal health and fitness goals.
Okay, because at the end of the day, you get to do this however you want. And I’m going to give you kind of my opinion here today. And I feel very strongly about certain what I think about this in my certain approach. But I just want you to think about what are your goals, okay.
So how you lift, how often you lift, how much weight you lift will largely be affected by your goals. So, think about like what your personal goals are, as we’re talking about weightlifting and talking about how much weight and how many reps you should be doing and stuff like that. Because if you want to build some muscle or maintain the muscle that you have, there’s a little bit of a different approach you want to take to this, okay.
But whatever your goals, whatever your goals, there’s a place for strength training in your workout regimen, or at least there should be. Lifting weights should be something that you do all the time no matter what. So, there’s nothing really inherently bad about weightlifting. But the interesting thing is that most runners are notoriously bad at weightlifting, they just don’t do it or they don’t do it right. They think that they don’t really need to lift weights because they run. This is very, very wrong. And I’m going to tell you why in just a second.
If you want to be a healthy fit runner, if you want to be a healthy fit human being, you need to be doing some sort of resistance activity, you need to be lifting weights, right? Running is just not enough. In fact, running is catabolic. It’s a catabolic activity, it breaks down muscle, long distance running is amazing. I love it so much. It’s like my life, you know, I love running.
And there’s a lot of people who think that running is enough to build muscle like, Oh, I’m just you know, I run a lot. So, I’m good to go there. And I’ve got some bad news for you. Running is what’s considered a catabolic exercise. So, anything that is cardio considered like cardio or aerobic exercises, especially over long, longer durations. These are great activities, cardio, aerobic exercises, these are great for helping you to improve your cardiovascular system, helping to build a healthy heart helping to improve your lung capacity. But they also cause you to lose some body mass both fat, which is good, and muscle, which is bad.
Running effectively breaks down muscle over time, this is very important for you to understand: is that running is a catabolic activity. Over time long distance running will break down muscle tissue. In order to offset this, you need to be doing anabolic exercises regularly. Anabolic is in the state of muscle building that’s building muscle growing muscle getting stronger.
So, what you really want is a good balance of the two to maintain a healthy, strong, fit body to maintain that lean body mass and we’re talking about not just you know, bigger muscles, we want stronger muscles. So too much catabolic exercise without enough anabolic exercise and you lose muscle you lose strength. And this is going to affect running negatively, too.
Okay. So it’s very important that you understand this concept that running is a catabolic activity. It will break you down over time. So you need to be doing something to offset that. So here are some of the here’s the flip side of this right here. Here’s some of the positive benefits of weightlifting of doing regular strength training for runners. Right, so the first thing you have to understand is that when you do regular strength training, regular resistance training, you’ll lose more weight and faster so the more muscle mass you have, the more fat you burn.
Carrying around muscle requires more energy than carrying around fat. So, your metabolism actually increases just by getting slightly larger, stronger muscles. Building muscle also speeds up the whole fat adaptation process, which will help you burn even more fat. And you know, like everything we talked about here, we’re all about fat burning, right?
So, lift weights, get a little bit stronger, build some muscle, and you increase your metabolism, you burn more fat, boom, this is awesome. Building strong muscles also means that you’re at a much lower risk of injury, especially from what we call connective tissue issues. So like, most runners’ muscles adapt pretty quickly.
But your connective tissues like ligaments and tendons take much longer to get strong. That’s why you see most running related injuries are ligament and tendon injuries, not necessarily muscle injuries. So, building strong muscles will also improve and strengthen those connective tissues and prevent running related injuries. So if you want to run injury free, one of the biggest things you can do, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to get stronger.
Also, when you get stronger, your endurance improves. So your ability to run longer distances before fatigue sets in is vastly improved when you’re stronger. So you can become a long distance running machine. But you need, you know, good strong working muscles in order to do that. Also, you get faster, carrying around a little more muscle means that you are stronger and your power to weight ratio improves the stance substantially.
So you get a little bit leaner, you lose some of that fat weight, you gain some muscle weight, and now your power to weight ratio has gone up, and you’re more powerful and lighter, and you’re able to run faster at higher intensities for longer distances, right. So as far as improving your running performance, getting strong is one of the best things you can do for yourself, you’ll get faster, your endurance improves, you get lighter, your power to weight ratio goes up, all those things are amazing.
And then lastly, when you lift weights regularly and you get stronger, you will live longer. Evidence continues to point to the benefits of strength training. And a new meta analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has concluded that people who do strength training regularly are less likely to die prematurely than those who don’t, even when they don’t do any aerobic workouts. So they’ve kind of factored that even if you don’t do any aerobic activity whatsoever, strength training will lead to a longer life.
And of course, doing some aerobic activity, improving your cardiovascular system, helps you to live longer as well. So you want to live longer: strength training. Okay. And so there’s all these amazing benefits to weightlifting for runners, right?
So here’s what I hope for you. I hope that your biggest takeaway from this episode right now is that you have to get into some sort of regular strength training routine, like you just have to get stronger. This is what I want you to take away from this, it doesn’t matter what your goals are, it doesn’t matter, you know, where you fall on the line of whether or not you should be lifting heavy weights or not.
I think the most important thing is that you are doing some sort of regular strength training, it has to be part of your weekly workout plan. Doesn’t matter what you’re training for. Make time for it. It’s that important, okay? Okay, so what happens when you lift weights, so let’s get into kind of the, what’s happening in your body when you lift weights, okay.
So before we talk about how heavy you should lift or how light you should lift, I want to explain what happens when you lift weights like, or at least what you’re trying to make happen in your body, okay? So your muscles will grow as a response to stress. So, you stress out a muscle or a group of muscles, essentially, you overload them. And then because of that overloading, they have an adaptive response.
So they grow more muscle fibers are produced those muscle fibers band together, they get stronger, the muscle grows a little bit and, and they grow. So you have this adaptive response. This is called the overload principle. Overload a muscle and in response, it gets stronger. Do this over and over again and you get bigger, stronger muscles, right? But in order to overload the muscle, you need enough resistance.
So resistance can come in many forms. Resistance could be your own bodyweight: hold a plank for a minute or two. See how long you can hold a plank just with your own bodyweight, or do push ups. Do some pull ups, these are all bodyweight exercises that are pretty hard, you know, you’ll find yourself getting pretty fatigued pretty quickly. With some of these bodyweight exercises, right.
Then we have free weights, we’ve got dumbbells and kettlebells, and barbells. And all kinds of machines at the gym, they’re designed to work certain muscle groups. And then we have resistance bands, things you can attach to a door or two, or you don’t even have to attach to anything, you can just pull on them, step on it, lift it up and create the resistance. That way, you can even use logs or rocks or heavy books or milk jugs filled with sand, it doesn’t really matter, you can literally use just about anything to create resistance, right?
The important thing is that you have to have enough resistance in order to over load the muscle if you want it to have that adaptive response, if you want it to get stronger. So the way you overload the muscle, as you get to muscle failure, you have to get to muscle failure in order to create that adaptive response.
So you can get to failure a couple of different ways you can overload that muscle in a few different ways. But you’ll you know that you’re there, when you can no longer lift that weight, like you cannot do another rep with good form, like you just your form breaks down, you start cheating, so to speak, you know. So for example, you can get to overload by lifting a one pound weight lifted like 100 times I promise you, you know, at some point, you’re going to probably get to overload with 100 with a one pound weight if you if you lift it 100 times or you can lift a 100 pound weight once or whatever amount of weight you can lift one time that will get you to that failure place, right?
So then we say like, okay, which is better? Should you lift 100 times should you do 100 reps? Or should you do one rep, like, what’s the right number? Like should you be lifting heavy? Should you be lifting super light? So, let’s look at what each of these kinds of looks like. Kind of looks like here.
The first one let’s talk about light weights; light weights, lots of reps. So, think about what it looks like and feels like to do a lot of reps with very light weights. So, lots of group workout classes are based on this approach, right? Everybody grabs some light little dumbbells and you’re lifting them and you’re like, you know, doing a ton of reps. And at the end of the workout, you’re like, oh, that was fun, you know, and you’re tired and you know, you’re probably, you know, pretty sweaty and things like that.
So you’re doing a ton of reps, you’re using very light weights. But what is this? This is mostly a cardio workout, right? Here, you’re really working out the cardiovascular system, you’re adding a little bit of resistance. But really, you know, it’s a cardio workout, right? And there’s nothing wrong with this, right? But as a runner who does pretty much nothing but cardio everyday when you go out and run, do you really need to be doing another cardio workout? Do you need to be lifting super lightweight a million times and making it some new some other cardio type workout? I don’t believe so.
I don’t believe you want to be doing that. You don’t need to do a bunch more cardio. Remember that you’re already engaged in a catabolic activity. And you need to be doing something to offset that. So more cardio is not going to be the answer. Even though you might be using some weights, it’s probably not enough resistance to make a difference and offset the amount of catabolic activity you’re doing from already. Right.
So the other thing to think about is you’re probably never going to see someone in a workout class like that get to muscle failure, you’re just never going to see somebody get to failure. So that’s, that’s a sign that that’s probably not the most ideal approach. Okay? So if you’re doing some kind of workout and you’re lifting, let’s say 10 pounds for the duration of the workout, and you really never get to failure, there’s no overload happening. There’s no adaptive response happening.
You’re not growing muscle fibers. You’re not getting stronger. What’s the point of all that? Yeah, it’s a good cardio workout. But you don’t probably need to be doing more cardio, okay. It’s good to improve your cardiovascular system, right? It’s good to do that, right, but that should not be your goal from weightlifting. Your goal with weightlifting should be to overload your muscles so you get stronger period.
Okay, so let’s look at now the other side of this, which is lifting heavy weights, right? And you’re probably thinking, I’ve kind of figured out, Patrick, this is probably your preferred approach. And yes, it is. Yes, it is. And I’m going to explain why. So when you lift heavy weights, you will absolutely get to muscle failure. So I want to make this very clear: to failure doesn’t mean it’s hard. Failure isn’t like, oh, man, this is really hard. I can’t believe I, I’m doing these reps, oh, gosh, this is really hard. This must be failure. No failure means you cannot do another rep with proper form. Failure means you’re trying with all your might as hard as you can to lift that weight, and you just cannot move it any longer. It should hurt. It should look ugly, feels terrible. And it’s pretty amazing, all at the same time. Okay.
So failure means you cannot move the weight. Again, you cannot finish that rep. That’s what failure is not oh, it’s hard. It’s like you cannot do it. Okay. And then heavy, lifting a heavy weight heavy is relative for you. It’s just, it’s heavy for you. It’s how strong you are, it’s relative to how strong you are. Heavy means that you can only do around six to twelve eps before you hit failure. Six to twelve reps is a good amount of reps to fatigue the muscle enough to stress the muscle enough to produce that adaptive effect.
You don’t have to aim for a one rep max like bodybuilders do and power lifters do. Although I do like doing this sometimes just to see how strong I’m getting. I’ll do a one rep max on bench press. And what have I been doing like bench press and deadlift? I’d stopped kind of doing the squat one rep max because my knees are a little bit jacked up right now. But I want to get back to that as well. And I’m seeing some progression happening.
So I can see that I’m getting stronger with the one rep but you don’t have to just do a one rep max. That’s not what we’re getting into here. Six to twelve reps is where you want to be. So aim for six to twelve and do a full body workout. And you only need to be doing this twice a week, you don’t have to become a gym rat, you don’t have to spend two to three hours every day in the gym.
And I have this very specific strength program that I teach my runners, my clients, and it’s a full body workout, it’s twice a week should only take you about 20 minutes each time. And it’s enough, it’s plenty. Like it doesn’t have to be super time consuming, okay. But the important thing you have to understand here is that you really want to get to muscle failure. And in my opinion, it’s just much more efficient and better for you to get to failure with fewer reps. So aim for that six to twelve rep range, lift heavy weights, there’s you don’t have to worry about getting too big.
This is one of the biggest fears around lifting heavy weights that I hear from runners is that and you’ll hear people say this all the time. I don’t want to get all big and jacked and like I don’t want to be carrying around tons of extra muscle weight. You know, I don’t want to look like one of these big bodybuilders. Listen, remember I said running is catabolic. Lifting heavy weights is a great way to offset this.
In fact, it is very, very hard to look like a bodybuilder it takes years of very hard work to look like a bodybuilder they lift five, six days a week, they’re in the gym for hours, they eat a ton of extra food, you know and they really limit the amount of cardio that they do in order to gain all these muscles and stuff. Okay, so please do not worry about getting too big. Do not worry about gaining too much muscle or looking like a bodybuilder, it is extremely hard to gain that much muscle.
We want to offset the amount of running that we’re doing with some good strength training, we want to build some muscle we want to get stronger. So lift heavy weights, aim for that six to twelve rep max, get to failure with each exercise. If you really want the best bang for your buck, from resistance training, lift heavy weights, save the cardio workout for all the running that you’re doing.
If you want to become a stronger, faster, more powerful runner, if you want to burn more fat, lose more weight. And if you’re interested in living longer, lift heavy weights. Alright, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re a runner and you’ve been struggling to lose weight or you keep losing and gaining the same 10 pounds over and over again. Or you’re finally ready to get to your natural weight and stay there for good this time then I have something you will love. I’ve created a powerful new training just for you called running lean for life. You’ll learn exactly how to transform yourself into a lean fat-burning running machine. So you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting and develop the habits required to make it last for life. To get this free training right now go to runningleanpodcast.com/leanforlife and start your transformation today.
Some of the most asked questions in the Running Lean Community on Facebook are about running-related injuries. Runners just seem to get injured pretty often. In fact, more than half of all …
Continue Reading about 92. Preventing and Treating Running Injuries with Brodie Sharpe →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there and welcome to episode 92 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today we’re talking about preventing and treating running injuries with Brodie Sharpe.
So some of the most asked questions that we get over in the Running Lean community on Facebook are about running-related injuries. People are constantly asking about hey, this hurts. What should I do? Or I did this when I was running? What does this mean?
Runners just seem to get injured pretty often. In fact, more than half of all recreational runners will experience an injury at some point. Why is this? Why do runners get injured so often? What are the most common injuries that runners are experiencing? How do we treat these injuries? And how can we prevent getting injured in the first place?
So in this episode of the podcast, I brought a very special guest to help answer these questions. Brodie Sharpe is an experienced physiotherapist and host of the popular Run Smarter podcast. And today he’s talking all about preventing and treating running injuries. This is going to be great. You guys are going to really enjoy this interview and this particular podcast, especially if you are worried about an injury or experiencing an injury right now.
But first, if you like this podcast, come check out that Running Lean podcast community over on Facebook, you can ask questions how what’s hurting, or anything else that has to do with running with sports nutrition with diet and exercise, weight loss, the group it goes hand in hand with this podcast, it extends the conversation.
It gives you a place where you have a voice where you can ask questions and get answers. So just search for Running Lean community on Facebook and join us. It’s fun. We have fun over there.
Here’s another five-star review of the Running Lean podcast. This one’s from Wendy and she says, “Thank you for the great podcasts. I know it’s consistency that will take us where we want to be. But it’s the motivation that gets us to start. Thank you for the motivation. You are awesome.”
Thank you very much money that was very sweet of you. And I love getting these kinds of reviews on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you guys listen because it just means that the message is resonating with you. So thank you for sharing that.
And then people ask how they can work with me there are two ways number one, the Running Lean coaching group and starting in October. Oh man, October is already upon us. This episode will actually be coming out on October the first so starting the first Tuesday in October we’re going to be talking all about injury prevention and strength and flexibility.
And so the focus of our coaching and the focus of the training for this whole month is going to be on building strength becoming more flexible to prevent injuries. You know injuries are preventable, you don’t have to be injured as a runner, you don’t have to be one of the half of runners that get injured.
Okay, so I’ve got some special guests that I’m bringing in to teach us how to get stronger how to become more flexible how to stay injury-free so if you’re interested come and join us just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join.
And then the other way that you can work with me is one on one as I can be your coach this is what I do, I’m a coach. And working with me one on one is probably the best way for you to reach your goals. I mean imagine how much you can accomplish working one on one with a coach for like three months I mean, what is not possible for you now can definitely be possible for you in 90 days’ time.
Okay, so definitely think about this and you can learn all about coaching and apply and then we can have a conversation about it. Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/apply and see if coaching is good for is a good fit for you. And in addition to the one-on-one coaching, you also get access to the monthly coaching group as well when you’re a one-on-one client. Cool.
All right, let’s get into this episode because I’m excited about sharing this interview with you guys. Brodie’s a cool guy and I really enjoyed this conversation. Brodie Sharpe is a physiotherapist from Melbourne, Australia, and he’s the founder and CEO of the Run Smarter series and host of the Run Smarter podcast.
Brodie helps runners identify the common misconceptions about running and running injuries so that you can become a faster, healthier, and smarter runner. He teaches powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist.
He also interviews the best running gurus in the world on his podcast. And I was recently a guest on his podcast does that make me one of the best running gurus in the world? I don’t know. I guess I’ll throw my name that will lump it in there.
But it’s a great podcast, you definitely need to check it out. His podcast is designed for injured runners or for runners who are looking to prevent becoming injured runners or runners who just want to improve their running performance. So it covers a wide range of stuff. He interviews a lot of great people on that podcast. He has so much knowledge.
Brodie is an experienced runner himself. He’s dealt with his share of running injuries so he knows exactly how frustrating being injured can be as a runner. This is one of the reasons why he became a physiotherapist so that he could help other runners get back to doing what they love doing the most, which is running, right.
So in this episode, we talk about what are the most common running injuries, we talked about how we can prevent these injuries from happening in the first place. Brodie shares his thoughts on stretching, foam rolling, and what the science actually says about these things, and how beneficial they actually are, or are not for us as runners.
We talk about whether or not running is just bad for your knees. And if we should all just expect to have bad knees as we get older because we run a lot. And then we get into some of the common misconceptions about running injuries, and how to properly treat running injuries.
Like there are some ways of treating injuries that we’ve been kind of conditioned to do over the last few decades. And are these things still the right way to do it or not. So this is great. Like I learned so much from this interview, and I know you will, too.
So without further ado, let’s get into this awesome conversation with Brodie Sharpe. Today, I’ve got Brodie Sharpe from the Run Smarter podcast.
And Brodie, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself? Tell us about what you do. Let’s talk about what your jam is because I’m very interested in this topic today.
Brodie Sharpe
Thanks, Patrick. Thanks for having me on. My name is Brodie Sharpe. I am a physiotherapist from Melbourne, Australia. And a couple of years into my physio career I became a recreational runner, I transitioned out of team sports playing basketball, to training for a half marathon with my sister.
And a couple of things happened at that time – one I caught the running bug very quickly, two I became injured very quickly. And three, during when I was seeing patients in my clinic, I was just an employee, just a random private practice clinic see anyone under the sun.
But as soon as I’d see a runner, I’d just have this heightened passion around wanting to pull out my best self and really like help educate them as best I can, get them back to pain-free running as best I can. And it was just years and years of seeing those and self-reflecting on what my passions were, where my passion lied, and what brought out my best self what gave me energy rather than depleted my energy.
I was seeing these runners and so slowly would transition my career into still being a physiotherapist, but tailoring to only treating runners and educating runners as best I can. Because I found a big passion with educating runners recognized there were a lot of misconceptions out there, recognized that a lot of runners need to be educated on certain topics if they wanted to reduce the risk of injuries or increase their running performance safely.
And a lot of times, there’s a lot of confusion out there. If you Google something, if you type a message onto running Facebook groups and you ask you know, I have plantar fasciitis, what’s helped you, or I just want to reduce my risk of injuries. What should I do? And you just see the wide array of not only different types of answers but also contradictory answers.
Some would say you know you need to rest an injury. Some will say you know, you need to run through an injury, need to foam roll, you need to stretch you need to continue loading, you need to do all these sorts of things that perhaps sometimes contradict one another.
And so recognizing that and talking with a lot of runners and a lot of their confusions, decided to launch the Run Smarter podcast, where I help bring clarity, bring control to recreational runners try and deliver information in a way that’s easy for them to understand, kind of break down the science and bust a lot of these misconceptions.
And so that brought me to a couple of things. So venturing into online physiotherapy where I only train runners in my own business now, the Run Smarter Physiotherapy Clinic continues to build the podcast. It’s a big kind of lead generator, but also just helps people if they just want free resources, free information just to go there and help build on their own running IQs.
So it’s kind of like the long answer of where I find myself today. And there’s probably a lot of your listeners are runners and maybe have gone through that same path of being quite confused when they are injured. What caused that injury? How do I overcome it? How do I reduce the risk of it coming back? A lot of those kinds of answers. So hopefully, we delve into a lot of that today.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. And you’re so right, when it comes to like people posting, you know, questions in forums and on Facebook groups and stuff. And the Running Lean community is an awesome Facebook group. Tons of just great positive people in there.
And I always crack up when somebody says, hey, my leg hurts here. What should I do? And then you get all the answers that all contradict each other. And it’s like, what is the right answer? And I always want to just tell people, like you need to go talk to somebody that knows what they’re talking about here, you know.
So let’s, let’s get into this a little bit. What are some of the major injuries are the most common injuries that runners face? And I can think of a few off the top of my head, but what do you see as the most common injuries that runners are presented with?
Brodie Sharpe
I think if we were to fall back on like the research and say, what is the most common running-related injuries in the recreational population, it would be knee pain. So the most common form of that would be runner’s knee, or patellofemoral pain, which is essentially just pain around the kneecap quite hard to localize.
People point to different margins of the kneecap itself inside, it’s kind of around here. And that’s what the research would show. A lot of the runners that come to me would be plantar fasciitis, and it would be a high hamstring tendinopathy or proximal hamstring tendinopathy.
Because those two conditions really don’t get better on their own unless you have really good management and they can get quite nasty, and severe and carry over outside of running into everyday life. Like sitting for the hamstring becomes an issue or just like standing for your job becomes an issue when it comes to plantar fasciitis. They’re definitely the two most that I see.
Other ones would be shin splints, others would be like ITB friction syndrome, they’re quite common amongst the running population, then you have some stuff a bit higher up, you have like a lateral hip pain or like hip flexor type of issues.
Rarely do we see low back pain. But it can happen. Sometimes a lot of these things, someone might get low back pain outside of running, say if they’ve moved house, or they’ve done something they shouldn’t have done too much lifting beyond their capacity.
And then they try and run and it’s the running that stirs it up. But isn’t the thing that actually triggered that pain. But yeah, definitely those issues at the knee and below the knee are definitely most common.
Patrick McGilvray
So when people say you hear people that are not runners say this all the time, like oh, running is just gonna, it’s just bad for your knees. You know, you just it’s just bad for the knees. And do you find that to be the case? Or is that one of those misconceptions that people have about, about running injuries?
Brodie Sharpe
Definitely one of those misconceptions. Yes, we know that the knee is the most common area where someone might develop an injury. But it’s only the knee has developed the injury because you have had some sort of training error, or there’s been some sort of under recovering kind of aspect.
Before we delve into maybe I’d best describe like what causes running injuries because that would like layout the foundation for the for my actual answer. If you were to look at all running-related injuries, they’re called overuse injuries because it’s not due to direct trauma. It’s not due to a twist or rolled ankle or you haven’t got tackled or fallen to the ground.
It’s been in most cases you’re running load, what we call repetitive type of injuries. So hitting the ground with a certain striking the ground with a certain pattern and just doing that over and over and over again hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of times if you do something that goes beyond your capacity, so every tendon, every muscle, every ligament, every joint has a certain load capacity that we need to train just below that capacity which is within in what we call your adaptation zone.
So if you train enough and foster enough loading within that adaptation zone frequently enough, it will get stronger, your adaptation zone grows, and you need to progress your training and continue following that new adaptation zone and you just get stronger and stronger.
But where these running-related injuries, these overuse injuries, these training errors happen is you have caused an abrupt shift in your training, either running too far running too fast, having an abrupt shift to your terrain.
So you might be running on flats, and then all of a sudden, you’re doing hills, and your tendons, ligaments, whatever structure fails first has said wait, that’s way too much for me, I’m not used to this type of load, it’s gone way past my adaptation zone, and it starts breaking down getting sore getting stiff, rather than building up.
And so when we talk about running injuries and around the knee, in most cases, it’s been due to some sort of training error or some sort of abrupt change, either loading it too much, or you’ve under recovered too much. So that’d be like lack of sleep, increased stress, and your body doesn’t hit this recovery mode like it once used to. And that can develop an overuse injury as well.
And so, yes, running too far, running too fast beyond your capacity, doing too many hills, if you’re used to running on the flats, that would increase the amount of load that goes through the knee, and it can start getting sore because of that.
When people say that running is bad for your knees, they kind of think if you were to run throughout your career, that your knee joint is going to slowly degrade because of too much.
Too much wear and tear too much repetition too much load constantly, throughout your running career, that it’s only going to be a finite kind of expiry date before the cartilage in your knees will start to slowly wear away, then you’ll start to get early-onset osteoarthritis, and then it’s going to be needed a replacement down the track. That’s where people tend to head towards.
However, we know that there’s research out there to show the complete opposite. If you have loading of the knee – if you strike the ground, and you hit the ground with some ground reaction force that actually stimulates cartilage growth, we actually want that stimulation, we want to keep the joint healthy, we want to keep the joint strong.
And we want to engage the lower leg, the whole entire body with some sort of ground reaction force to trigger and stimulate cartilage growth, muscle strength, tendon adaptation, all those healthy things. And we can point to really nice robust evidence.
There was one study in particular that looked at a systematic review of 123,000 people, mainly in the US, but they looked at the prevalence of osteoarthritis, and this cartilage wear and tear amongst sedentary people, amongst recreational runners and amongst elite runners. And they showed that you’re three times more likely to get osteoarthritis if you are in the sedentary population compared to a recreational runner.
And if we know anything about what I’ve just explained around – you need stimulation, you need strength, you need to trigger your body to adapt to these sort of loads – that’s why we say that that general population was around 3.5% of recreational runners have knee or hip osteoarthritis and that the sedentary population was around about 12%.
So we’re looking at those sorts of numbers. And it kind of makes sense why we do these massive studies and see the prevalence numbers if we know anything about adaptation, and so someone says running is bad for your knees, yes, it is bad for your knees. If you go out and you run a marathon when you’re not when you’re only used to running 10 K’s – yes, your knee will get sore.
But if you train sensibly if you run smarter, which is why I’ve developed the Run Smarter podcast, you will start to find out that it’s actually better for your knees if you train smart and have running longevity compared to someone who does who while definitely compared to this entry population. But we do need that constant adaptation we do need that constant trigger. So that would be my answer.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s awesome. And the way that I understand this and so this is why a lot of new runners I think face these kinds of issues is because they do too much too soon. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand that your muscles will develop pretty quickly.
And so, you know, you might develop the muscles in your legs, in your you know, feet and your hips and things like that to be able to run for longer distances. But the connective tissues, the tendons, the ligaments have not developed the load capacity like you said.
And so I think that is one of the reasons why newer runners develop these kinds of injuries because it’s not because their muscles aren’t, you know, capable or they’re doing too much pounding on the ground. What it is, is their connective tissues have not, you know, gain those the strength that they need to handle the wear and tear that they’re putting on them.
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, you can just look at any kind of recreational runner in the type of injuries that develop like Achilles tendinopathy, patella tendinopathy, like a lot of these tibialis posterior, like these tendons that are kind of around the feet and the ankles, they are very prone to developing high levels of forces.
Because the tendons themselves actually have to generate or they cop a lot of load during your running. The muscles yeah, they work with propulsion a little bit, but the tendons themselves, accumulate a lot more than the actual muscles themselves. If we look at the size of them, if we look at the structure of them compared to a big kind of quadriceps muscle or those particular kinds of structures.
And then if someone’s developed an Achilles injury, they have gone, you can just assume that that capacity is a lot lower than what the muscles could have been. Because compared to the load that running is required, and you exceeding whatever capacity of whatever structure might be, if it is a tendon, that means that tendon was the weakest point.
I know from my career of playing in basketball, like constantly running on my toes, constantly jumping, landing, taking off like sprint kind of things, my calf, and Achilles my Achilles, especially a quite strong, and I have, I’ve almost had every injury under the sun.
I’ve never had an Achilles injury when it comes to running, never had an Achilles issue when it comes to any other sort of training, just because I assume that the capacity of both of my Achilles are just really, really high. And I’ve just simply within my training, haven’t managed to exceed that capacity. Whereas something else like my knees, something else like my hamstring is a different story.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I don’t know, many runners who have not experienced some sort of injury during the course of their career running, you know, so. So how do we prevent these kinds of injuries from happening in the first place? Like what are some of the things we can do as runners to prevent this stuff from happening so we’re not sidelined?
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, I think it’s just following that same kind of universal principle. It’s just understanding the adaptation process, understanding your own adaptation capacity. I know in my podcast, episode one is called adaptation education. And that’s number one for a reason.
It’s the number one thing that we need to at least start with, where we need to start that conversation before we continue and start talking about more, more niche kinds of complex kinds of terms.
But if you’re a runner, and you want to try and reduce your risk of injury as much as you can, you need to understand, okay, we know abrupt changes in training will increase and elevate the risk of injury.
So running too far too fast beyond your capacity. Having abrupt changes, like I said, changes in terrain changes in surfaces. Sometimes some scenarios like if you have a change in footwear, so changing footwear is totally fine. But you need to transition gradually enough so that the body adapts to that style of running.
If you have the same type of shoe you’ve ran in for 10 years, you can continue running that shoe. If you buy a new shoe that’s exactly the same design, the exact same properties as the past shoe, then that’s fine as well. But if you want to run from a traditional kind of shoe to a minimalist type of shoe, you need a lot of time to transition into that shoe because it changes the load on your body. It changes the requirements.
And so if you just transition straight away, a lot of injuries happen. There was actually a study where they had 12 runners, no 14 runners go from a traditional shoe into a barefoot shoe. And they gave them this pamphlet. They taught them about how to transition gradually. And they just let them see how they went. They followed them for 8 weeks and 12 out of the 14 runners developed an injury and that is an enormous amount of risk.
And they interviewed them afterward and said okay, did you follow the pamphlet, not one person abided to every single transitioning rule that they provided at the start of the study. And so it goes to show – runners we get a bit of ahead of ourselves, we want to just get in there we want to try and rush our way through things. We can be a bit stubborn can be a bit impatient at times.
But if we make those training errors and we’re a bit hasty in our decisions. And we’re a bit hasty in our training. That’s where the injury risk comes into it. So that’s the adaptation side of things. That’s the external load on the body type of thing.
But we also know that recovery is key, when it comes to reducing the risk of injuries. Someone might be sleeping seven hours a day, their diet might be adequate, their stress levels moderate. And that’s totally fine for their situation that they’ve currently have placed themselves in.
But then they decide to train for a marathon. And it seems that like some way throughout their marathon training plan, where their loads are accumulated, the old recovery strategies just don’t seem to match, it needs to be this balanced equation, your recovery strategies need to match your external load.
And so if people keep to their old recovery strategies, and expect to build up their load and be fine, it just doesn’t happen. So there might get to this sort of tipping point where overuse injury happens.
And they say, Brodie, like I’ve been so gradual with my training, have followed this plan to the tee. And then you ask them, like, how’s your diet has your sleep has your stress, and they don’t score very well on those parameters. So you say, alright, you have been building up your external load, it’s time to match that with recovery because you don’t get stronger and you don’t adapt during the running.
You adapt and get stronger after the bout of running once your body is in this recovery mode. And so we need to have a discussion around maybe extending their sleep, getting better quality sleep, maybe mixing in some naps a couple of times a week, if they have that luxury of time.
Improving on nutrition, which is right in the in line with this podcast, monitoring levels of stress and all those other things.
And so it’s that balance between external load and recovery. If you’re balancing that really well, your likelihood of getting an overuse injury significantly reduces.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and taking some time off, like runners are notorious about sticking to their training plan no matter what. And I think that’s to our detriment, sometimes, you know, it’s great that you have a run streak going, or whatever it is, you know, maybe you’re training for something, you’re running five days a week, and you know, you’re training for a marathon, and you’re gonna stick to that no matter what.
But you could be just burning yourself out, you know, and I think it’s in our best interest, I love the idea of taking naps, by the way. But I think it’s in our best interest to like, slow down sometimes and take the day off when we need it.
Because in the long run, you’re going to stay healthy, you’re not going to be injured, you’re not gonna get sidelined, you’re not going to be losing, you know, training time. But if you do get injured, then you know, the doctor is going to tell you, you know, you need to take eight weeks off of running, of course, nobody is going to do that. But you know, runners are really stubborn, right?
Brodie Sharpe
So it’s also like when an injury starts to surface like if there’s just a bit of stiffness, not pain or just like the initial signs of an injury occurring, the runners are more often going to just run through that and see how things go. We’re stubborn, we love running. And that’s all we want to do, for most for some cases.
But when an injury happens, they kind of convinced themselves, it’s not happening that convinced themselves if they continue training should be fine. And that injury gets worse and worse and worse, especially if it continues to exceed that adaptation zone.
And so it can be really tricky for some runners, if they don’t have any other cross-training alternative, say if like an injury arises in my high hamstring, I know Okay, running speed work probably isn’t the best. Maybe I’ll take a couple of days off running, but swimming is good. Cycling is okay for my hamstring. And I know strength training is fine. And I’ll come up with these alternatives.
But it’s those runners who they run for, like their mental well-being as well as their physical well-being, and they just need to run every day or most days. When they get injured and they can’t run, it’s really tough for them. That’s a real mental battle. It’s real, causing a lot of frustration. It’s causing a lot of angst.
And they’re very likely to just go out for a run. I’m just, I just need it. I need this to be done. I don’t care if I’m sore or not. And that’s where they can get into real trouble because they don’t have any alternatives.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and that kind of brings up my next question, which is about maybe it’s prevention, maybe it’s not is so what role does things like stretching or foam rolling play in injury prevention or in like, kind of treating some of these injuries?
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, we can start with stretching. Most of the research revolves around static stretching, so like that stretch and hold, sort of stretch. If someone loves running, they’re not going to like what the research shows. But there is research to show that static stretching before a run doesn’t do anything for injury prevention, it doesn’t do anything for running performance, it doesn’t increase your running performance.
And when it comes to like a cooldown afterward, physically speaking, the static stretching doesn’t do much for recovery. If there’s going to be delayed onset muscle soreness the next day, it’s not going to reduce that time, it’s not going to reduce that recovery time.
However, we know that stretching feels really good for some people. For some runners, they just love stretching. And this is often what I recommend, I recommend that runners try a whole bunch of different warm-up routines, a whole bunch of different cooldown routines, and see what best feels good for them.
In the last couple of years, I have, say, if you were to have looked at me five years ago, I wouldn’t do a lot of stretching, I would just if I was to do like a warm-up, it would be jogging on the spot, it would be just doing my first couple of minutes of running just really slow. And then just getting into my rhythm and then increasing my speed, that would be my warm-up.
If I was to do a speed session, like intervals really hard, really intense, might do a little bit of stretching, might try and increase the mobility of my hips and my ankles a little bit. And then I would be very diligent with increasing my speeds slowly when I run. That would be my routine.
Fast forward to today, I am focusing a lot more on stretching, a lot more on mobility work only because I’ve tried different routines. And I’m finding now that for some reason or whatever my stretching, and my mobility work is making me feel better before a run. And so that’s what I recommend for runners.
Try a whole bunch of routines, you might want to do a 20-minute yoga session before a run, see how you feel. And if you feel a lot better from that, then maybe implement that into your strategy if you have the time.
But if you have tried a whole bunch of different strategies, and then you go for a run, and compared to not stretching, you’re indifferent, which would be me five years ago, then maybe it’s not high on your priority list. And maybe it’s something that you might not need to implement because we know from the research, it doesn’t reduce your risk of injury doesn’t really increase your running performance. So there’s that side of things.
When it comes to recovery, though, like I said, we want the body, it’s important for the body to switch into recovery mode, after your bout of exercise. And we enhance those recovery kinds of techniques.
If foam rolling, stretching, yoga – if that is a really nice way for you to unwind, instead of you going straight into a work setting and being quite stressed, or not getting a lot of sleep if you find that you just mentally unwind with a stretch session, yoga, foam roll whatever have you – that can be your recovery strategy.
Mentally, it switches your body into recovery mode really effectively. And so that can have real benefits mentally as well as physically because if you mentally unwind, then you physically recover. And so it depends on the person, I don’t have these absolute kind of rules around Yes, you should be foam rolling, yes, you should be stretching just depends on the individual how they feel.
A lot of people say, oh, I’ve tried foam rolling, it’s not really for me, I don’t like it. It just is painful the entire time. I’m kind of a bit tense the entire time when I do it. I’m thinking about other things that I could be doing. I don’t recommend it for them. I think we can count on other strategies and other ways to unwind. So that’s kind of where we fall on to it.
We know that foam rolling doesn’t release muscles, particularly the ITB is a really big misconception out there. A lot of people think they need to release their ITB or stretch their ITB because it feels tight. You’re not doing I’m telling you now you’re not doing anything to release that structure. It is so thick, it is so fibrous, it actually bluntons the scalpel of surgeons who try and cut through it.
It is that thick, and it doesn’t have any muscle properties. So pushing a foam roller or trying to stretch it in a particular stretch might feel good for you. So continue doing it but not releasing it. So we really need to be honest with ourselves and really educate ourselves on what effect it’s actually having.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I’m glad you sort of cleared that up, because I’ve heard the stretching argument for years. And I’ve sort of heard that too, that there really isn’t a lot of data that supports that stretching is actually doing much for you. But if it feels good, do it and I love that, you know. Because I love doing I do some foam rolling I do a little bit of stretching. I love doing a little bit of yoga. And this stuff feels good for me. And so I’m going to continue doing it.
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, and it’s probably worth saying as well that stretching, foam rolling – it’s not detrimental. There are studies done to show that there’s no detrimental, it’s not gonna make you slower, it’s not going to increase your risk of injury, it’s not gonna do anything detrimental to your performance in your recovery. So if you love doing it, then it definitely should be still implemented.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. And so when it comes to certain injuries, I know that there’s this acronym RICE that we’ve all heard, you know? R, which is Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation, right? And is this still legit? Like, do we still want to use this, this methodology when it comes to most running injuries?
Brodie Sharpe
No, because, as I said, at the start running injuries aren’t necessarily trauma-based. They’re not a rolled ankle where people sometimes might roll ankles if they’re on the trails, but running-related injuries refers to overuse injuries, which means there’s not there’s no inflammation, it’s not the primary driver of pain.
We know that if you develop, say tendinopathy, we know we’ve changed our terminology from tendinitis, which was 10 years ago to now which is tendinopathy because that itis refers to inflammation, inflammatory component as the primary driver. So now it’s a tendinopathy, which we know the pain signals aren’t inflammatory driven.
And so overcoming that injury, usually, if you were to roll your ankle, they would say, Okay, you need to rest definitely from any aggravating factors need to ice because there’s inflammation there, and that settles down inflammation, you need to compress because it also helps circulate that swelling, or that inflammation present and elevate because if you keep that body part above the level of your heart, there’s not that the body it has to work against gravity, and that inflammation just doesn’t seep into that area as easily.
I think that whether that method for even inflammatory driven components, like a rolled ankle that is starting to be challenged these days anyway but talking about running-related injuries, that’s not the case.
There is a very long acronym that has come out maybe about five years ago, it was called PEACEANDLOVE. And that’s a long acronym. But the peace side of it was more towards that real direct trauma kind of blunt force if you get tackled. If you twist something and there’s, it’s swollen, those sort of things.
So the peace side of it was protect, elevate, avoid anti-inflammation medication, compress and educate. So the Protect being like anything, it’s really anything that’s really irritating it best to avoid that kind of thing. Elevate Yes, getting it above your heart probably does about 5% effectiveness, but it’s still a little bit of something. Avoid anti-inflammation, especially when it comes to overuse injuries, running injuries, tendon injuries, we know that long-term anti-inflammation medication is actually detrimental to long-term recovery. So best take it for one to two days, if you must.
But you know, generally speaking, if you don’t need to take it, you probably shouldn’t. Compress the area a little bit if there’s swelling, and educate, educate about the injury, educate around the aggravating factors, exactly what you need to do. Those sort of things is really key in those inflammatory, blunt trauma, twisting, popping kind of injuries. But we’re continuing with this acronym.
So you’ve got peace, and then you’ve got love. So peace and love. And love is the one that’s more to do with definitely like day one, running-related injuries, or once you’ve passed that inflammatory phase, that primary inflammatory driver, probably three or four days moving into this kind of like recovery phase.
So LOVE – L being load. You need to find your new adaptation zone to this injury. If it’s a knee injury, you need to find how to load it that doesn’t exacerbate symptoms. So load being maybe squats, maybe wall sits, so static wall sets, maybe doing step-ups, maybe doing low levels of running, you need to find where that new adaptation zone is and train within that adaptation zone and build your way back up.
O is optimism, and that kind of comes along with education as well. It’s knowing that you can recover. It’s having a good management plan forward. It’s feeling good about your recovery. So we’re looking at the mental side of things as well.
The V is vascularisation which is just getting the heart pumping. If you have a knee injury, maybe it’s going swimming, if you have a shoulder injury, maybe it’s going for a jog or a bike ride, just getting some blood flowing. Because we know, when it comes to healing, blood flow is very, very good.
We know that for certain structures that don’t have a lot of blood supply, those recovery times are a lot longer than that of a muscle or something that has a lot of very rich blood supply. So keeping optimistic, keeping exercising can feel really good as well, if you’re injured and find another exercise alternative, then you feel really good, which is going to be the E, it’s that exercise component.
So you’ve got the vascularization mixed in with loading mixed in with just getting moving all of these really positive, proactive steps that you can take to be very active, rather than just completely resting your injury, which can actually be detrimental if you follow that particular path, which we can delve into, in a bit more detail if you want.
But that’s a bit more of a detailed explanation acronym when it comes to entry management, which I hope didn’t confuse a lot of people.
Patrick McGilvray
No, I think that is awesome. Because it’s just, you know, we hear these things we hear for so long, and we just kind of take them at face value. And we take them at face value for sometimes decades. And I know that there’s always, you know, new studies that are coming out or, or new ways of doing things. And so that’s why, you know, we got you here because we want to hear like what should we be doing, you know, what’s the, what’s the new methodology that’s going to help us with this kind of stuff?
Because, you know, I can’t tell you how many people I know that, you know, deal with injuries, and they don’t know what to do. You know, that kind of brings me to my next question, which is like, how do you know if you even have an injury, or if it’s just like, you’re sore, because you’ve been running.
Like we all run and we get sore, you know, you go on your run, and you start building up mileage, and maybe you’re training for a marathon, you run, you know, 8 miles and then you’re up to 10 or 12 miles or up to 14 miles, you’re gonna get some soreness, there’s gonna be some delayed onset muscle soreness, you know, that kind of thing?
How do you know that you’re actually dealing with an injury? At what point do we need to go and like take some more dramatic action?
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, it’s a good question. There are certain pain characteristics, certain styles of pain behaviors that you can pay attention to recognize, okay, is this going to be good pain? Or is it bad pain, and let’s talk about the good pain.
So good pain is that delayed onset muscle soreness like you described, we need to, sometimes if you go to a gym, or if you do a new exercise you hadn’t done before you do a new gym class most people have experienced next day waking up and like just being completely sore.
First of all, the onset of the pain, it’s not during that class or that exercise is not straight after during that warm down, it’s the next day you wake up some maybe sometimes 48 hours later, you just feel super tired, you feel super sore. And it’s that timeframe that we also need to pay attention to.
The location of the pain. In most cases, delayed onset muscle soreness will be located throughout the muscle, it’s kind of this widespread, it’s not focal like this pinpoint kind of pain, it’s a bit more widespread than that.
And also, when it comes to the subsequent days of that we know that delayed onset muscle soreness hangs around for two or three days, if it’s really severe, might be four to five days. But then it just dissipates just goes away because that’s what the body is done. And that’s why it’s necessary.
If you do a new gym class, and you wake up the next day, and you have this delayed onset muscle soreness, that’s the body processing itself, rejuvenating yourself in order to be stronger next time. So that’s why it’s it’s called good pain.
Converse to that when it comes to bad levels of pain. We know okay, from the onset, yes, a bad pain can be the next day. So we need to be quite mindful of that. But definitely, if the pain comes on during the run and gets worse as you run if it comes on quite severely once you’ve cooled down, they are worth paying attention to.
It’s worth trying to modify your training. It’s trying to be proactive with managing that it’s like changing things in that time. Over the next couple of days, try and make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Like I said, sometimes especially with tendon injuries, they can come on the next day. But this comes back to the location side of things. If it’s a tendon injury that’s flared up the next day when you first wake up and move around, that’s usually more localized. You can point to the tendon or you can always pinpoint where that pain resides. And it’s not that widespread kind of ache through the muscles that just feels tight and stiff and sore.
And subsequent to that, like over the next couple of days, we know that delayed onset muscle soreness generally will go away in two or three days. Injuries can persist for a couple of weeks, sometimes a couple of months.
And so if you’re trying to figure out is this little niggle, this little sore spot, is this an injury, is this good pain or bad pain, but you’ve had it for two weeks? It’s definitely not good pain, it’s definitely not going to be this muscle soreness, this is going to sporadically go away unless you change something in your training.
And so it’s those kinds of things that happen. Definitely, if you have like a bad pain, we know that niggles kind of happened, we know, if you’re doing marathon training, then the foot might get sore during the run, we know that like the calf might start getting really tight and sore, at the end of your long runs. We know that it’s not delayed onset muscle soreness, but you’re just challenging your body quite a lot.
So you’re kind of on this cusp. And modifications will be needed. Like if you continue to ignore it, and continue building up your training and your speed work, and just totally ignore those symptoms, then it can tip into something very hard to manage.
But I always say on my podcast, we can’t reduce the risk of an injury down to zero, that just doesn’t happen. It’s unachievable, but we can train smart to reduce that risk of injury as much as we can.
But then if injuries do arise, if we catch it day one, day two, day three, and we be quite proactive and do all the right things, then we overcome that injury very quickly. Within like a couple of days, we haven’t lost any fitness. We continue to learn from our past mistakes, why that came up in the first place. And we can take proactive measures to interact with that.
And so that’s what I call like the real injury prevention strategies. It’s once something arises, overcome a quickly train smart, learn from it, modify and then continue progressing without losing any fitness. It’s sometimes hard to achieve. You need a lot of education, you need the right people on your team.
But that’s, that’s kind of where real life kind of falls into it. We can’t just get the injury risk down to zero. And if you’re injured, you’re like, Oh, God, I tried everything I can, what else could I possibly do? We kind of need to be a bit more realistic in that sense.
Patrick McGilvray
And so I mean, geez, everything you’re talking about is just so awesome. And the not overloading, not doing too much too fast seems to be like a theme that I hear. And that seems to be the cause of most of these injuries. So does the 10% rule still apply, is that’s something we should sort of stick to, or is that just kind of can we kind of debunk that one as well?
Brodie Sharpe
It’s a general rule that has a lot of limitations. One, if you’re just starting out as a new runner, it’s going to be extremely slow, you’re going to be progressing, getting nowhere very quickly if you have to try and increase by 10%. So there are limitations on that side. But if you’re an ultra-athlete, maybe 10% is too much for you. If you’re doing like 200 kilometers a week, that might be too much. Who knows, it depends on the individual.
So it is a very general rule that we can apply if you want. But also, the limitation lies with a lot of like intricacies – like it doesn’t incorporate spade doesn’t incorporate recovery doesn’t incorporate like terrain. So you can increase your mileage by 10% every week, but you just get faster and faster and faster, you’re just gonna break down.
If you go from doing flats to doing hills, you’re gonna break down. So what I like to do with a lot of my runners that I work with, is have these arbitrary exercise units. And so you train for the amount of minutes, and you train. And you rank on average, how intense that was out of 10.
And so 10 is like this max out sprint, you cannot last for very long at that level, a 2 or a 3 is just, you could just go for hours, just jogging at a really low intensity, do that for hours. And then you kind of just rank yourself on okay, my session went for 30 minutes, my intensity was like a 4 out of 10. And then you just combine that to give you, you multiply those two numbers to give you these arbitrary exercise units. And you want to make sure that that doesn’t increase by more than 10 or 15% per week.
And I’ve actually followed this myself quite diligently and seeing really good results with it because you’re incorporating distance or duration, so in minutes, but you’re also incorporating intensities or speeds or those sort of kind of workouts and can be really nice for a structure for someone to follow.
It covers plenty because you could be running at the same speed. But all of a sudden, you’re running at that same speed up the hill, and just feels really intense. So speed itself can have its limitations, because it depends on the terrain or the elevation, but you feel really bad.
But also, we also know if you’re under-recovered, we know that an easy 5K run can feel quite challenging at times. Whereas if you are well-rested, well recovered, training well with the right intensities, a 5K run might be a 5K, slow run might feel really easy.
So it’s in the moment as well how your body’s feeling how you’ve recovered, you might say, look, I went really slow with that 5K. But I feel like that was a bit of a workout, maybe it was more of a 4 or 5 out of 10 rather than a 2 or a 3, and then you’re incorporating that into these arbitrary exercise units as well.
So it’s this internal process, listening to the body, listening to your recovery, a lot of things that just really work well. So people can do that, rather than just following a general kind of mileage 10% rule as well.
Patrick McGilvray
I love that. That is solid advice right there, Brodie. Thank you for that. Anything else you want to add? This has been really, really awesome. We’re gonna have to get you back on here and have a more in-depth conversation about some other specific topics, because there are so many things that are kind of coming to mind now that it’s like we could just talk all day about this stuff.
Brodie Sharpe
Yeah, I think just as a general takeaway, as well, if people want to delve deep into these sorts of topics, then they always listen to the podcast. But resting in injury, like the complete rest of an injury can actually be detrimental. You need to continue to stay active, sometimes even run, but just pay attention to symptoms along the way.
If there’s an increase in your symptoms during the run, after the run, or the next day, like a significant kind of flare-up, then we know that’s way too much. But sometimes poking into a little bit of pain in order to stay active and stay strong and keep your capacity quite strong is the way to go.
And I can talk about that topic for another 40 minutes. But it’s still a really key message for a lot of runners to hear. And it resonates a lot with a lot of runners as well. But you do need to be smart, maybe have the right guidance if you’re not too sure.
If you continue to flare up an injury because you’re returning too quickly or doing something you might not then maybe having a running coach or a health professional to guide you through that process. But that’s something I often see people say there, they get a sore knee and they’re like, Oh, damn, I’ve overdone myself, let me just take a week off and let me try running again next weekend and see how things go. And then it comes back that next weekend, that next weekend, I think, damn, maybe I need more time off.
And so they take two weeks off, and all of a sudden, this knee is completely weak. It’s completely painful. It’s completely sensitized and just can’t tolerate any sort of loading. And so that’s something that we need to be really proactive about, have a lot of education about and yeah, in order to overcome these injuries quite quickly and without losing fitness either.
Patrick McGilvray
Love it. So where can people find you and learn more about all this stuff?
Brodie Sharpe
I always recommend going to the podcast first if they are one for like that audio format. My first 10 episodes of the Run Smarter podcast covers 10 universal principles to overcome any injury. I think number seven talks about this pain, rest, weakness downward spiral, which delves a bit more in detail of what I was just describing with this complete rest is an injury.
If you don’t like the audio format, or if you want to just read and watch things, I am quite active on Instagram as well. So @runsmarterseries is my handle quite active on that. Releasing, like reviewing articles, reviewing like papers around running and overcoming injuries, blogs, and exercise examples, all those sorts of things. So if they want to digest a bit more of that, that sort of information, they can go there.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. This has been really interesting. And I just want to say thanks, Brodie, for coming on here and sharing all this stuff with us. And I know that people are going to be really interested in this topic because it’s a hot topic – injury prevention. And just like what do we do when we get injured? It’s like one of the top things people ask about. So we’ll get you back on here again, but thanks so much for being here today, I appreciate it.
Brodie Sharpe
I’d love to come back on. Thank you very much.
Patrick McGilvray
Wasn’t that good? Brodie is such a cool guy and he has so much knowledge to share. Definitely check out the Run Smarter podcast. He shares a ton of great info on there to help you keep running injury-free.
And then remember October is injury prevention strength and flexibility month over in the Running Lean coaching group. The focus all month is going to be on building strength, building flexibility, and staying injury-free. And I’ve got some special guests coming in to share their thoughts and ideas and teach you how to get stronger and be more flexible and keep running without getting injured.
Just go to runningleanpodcast.com/join. And I really hope that you got something out of this episode today. I know you did. And if you did, please consider sharing it with a friend. That’s all I got. Love you all keep on Running Lean. Talk to you soon.
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