04 July 2022
Race Nutrition
Guest post by Max Roger
The number one principle when you look at your nutrition for races is not to do anything new on race day: Trial things out beforehand. Now, when it comes to trial and error there will clearly be errors, but without this process in training the error will be during your race and that’s the last thing that you want.
In your general week-to-week training, protein is important throughout your day to preserve and promote the recovery of your muscles. During a run/race that’s not the case. What you need then is energy. Getting energy from protein is a very inefficient process. Getting it from fats is a bit better but by far the quickest and most efficient way is through carbohydrates. The protein comes in after your race. That’s when you need to make sure you get a good-quality protein source in to help with your recovery.
Focusing on those carbohydrates let’s simplify it into two types: slow-acting and quick-acting. Slow-acting is the energy you’ll get from things like oats (think porridge), or pasta. Quick-acting is the sugary stuff – energy gels, jelly babies, etc.
Both have a place in your nutrition plan. If you have a meal including slow-acting carbohydrates the evening before your race, and then a breakfast that does too then your muscles will be full of the energy that they require for the race. We know this as muscle glycogen. As it depletes throughout a race you’ll want to top it up. If these levels drop too low that’s the main reason that people often ‘hit the wall’. It takes too long and too much effort for your body to digest the slow-acting carbohydrate sources during a race, so this is when you switch to the quick-acting ones.
Start early in your race with these quick-acting carbohydrates. If you wait until you feel really tired, it’s too late! This is where most of the trial and error is. If you eat too much, you’ll have digestive issues. If you eat too little you’ll not have enough energy to perform at the level that you were planning for. There are guides as to how much you should be having, but at the end of the day everyone has different comfort/tolerance levels.
Roughly, in a long race like a Marathon you should aim for an energy gel (or equivalent) about every 5km, or 25mins. This is a rough guide as a starting point. Doing this in your longer training runs will give you an idea of what feels right for you. For your shorter races, like a 10km, you might just want a gel halfway around as by the time your body has digested it and needs more you’re almost at the end of the race. If you find that you start the race feeling like you have a lack of energy that’s likely down to poor nutrition (such as not enough slow-acting carbohydrates) in the days leading up to the race.
Use your training runs to practice your race-day nutrition. It’s best to start with slightly less fuel (the carbohydrates) than you think you might need, and build up over your runs as you require. If you start with too much then you’ll likely run into digestive issues on a few runs.
30 May 2022
Your Hips
Guest post by Max Roger
One of the common injury issues that runners get is pain around their hips. This can range from some slight discomfort on a longer run, to being unable to even do your warm-up because you can’t lift your legs high enough to run properly.
A lot of what we do all day contributes to tighter hips (which is what often causes the pain). For example, we sit down for hours at our desk, then we slump on sofas in the evening. Got a commute? Sitting in your car doesn’t help either.
There are 2 main things to counter this: mobility and strength.
Strength training is using external load to challenge your posture and position
Having more mobile hips takes a consistent effort. There’s no point in stretching on an ad hoc basis. Make it a part of your daily routine. Even better is combining this with your strength training. If you were to stretch so that your hips were more mobile, then immediately do some lower body lifting such as lunges, you’d then be strengthening your hips in that deeper range of motion. You have to really go as deep as you can to get the mobility benefit.
Your body being stronger in that position means that it feels safer there. If it feels safer there, then it’s going to stop giving the signals of ‘tightness’ and ‘pain’ to your brain. Those signals are there to protect yourself – if you are weak in a position then your body wants to avoid it, and so it sends those signals so that you don’t go into that position.
When I say that you want to be strong in a position this doesn’t just mean that you get as strong as possible with a heavy barbell. Firstly, it means handling your bodyweight, moving into, holding, and moving out of that position in different ways. This could look like squats, pause squats, squat jumps, duck walks (where you walk forward in a squat position). After that you can challenge these movements with external load, using dumbbells, barbells, etc. That’s what strength training is – using external load to challenge your posture and position.
[If you are performing strength movements or stretches and you are getting a sharp pinching feeling in your hips, or the pain becomes worse, then stop and seek medical advice. But if the pain disappears as your body gets warmer during a session, or once you’ve stretched a little then continue on.]
01 May 2022
Niggles
No matter how hard you try you can’t outrun niggles. A niggle? A small injury/pain that seems to hang around and disrupt your training. For runners this is often pain around their feet or Achilles, or a hamstring that keeps tightening up. It might even be a stiff lower back.
Runners are notorious for trying to push past this – but that doesn’t work. It will almost certainly worsen your issues until they are so bad that they force you to stop for a prolonged period. That’s every runner’s worst nightmare: not being able to train.
So, what should you do?
The overriding principle is to realise that pain is a signal. You shouldn’t just have some painkillers and ice up and then run on. In fact, there is a danger to anti-inflammatories when you’re doing endurance training as they thin your blood, making it even harder for your heart to pump enough oxygen and nutrients around your body.
That’s every runner’s worst nightmare: not being able to run.
Instead, listen to that signal. The pain is warning you that you’re doing something wrong. It could be that you’re overworking something, which is often the case if you develop extensor tendinopathy (where it hurts to move the top of your foot). If it’s a niggle on 1 side of your body (i.e. 1 leg) then your running technique is probably uneven, leading to that issue. In that case the pain is telling you that 1 leg is working harder than the other and that you should address this before it becomes a bigger issue.
Unless the pain is signalling that you are working too hard, it’s likely a technical issue, or maybe a strength issue. How do you know which it is? I wrote a previous article on the volume of your run training. If you stick to those guidelines then it’s unlikely that you’re doing too much. Strength is easy to identify but you need to spend some time on it: there are some basic tests to do to see if your body is strong and robust enough to handle the volume of your running. These are things such as a MAX rep single leg calf raise – can you do 20 on each leg? I will look at those tests in a future article.
For a detailed look at the strength work get in touch at www.max-performance.co.uk as strength work for runners is what I specialise in.
If it’s not those things then the focus should be on your technique. If you’ve never had someone film you run then that’s a start. All you need is to see a 10 second clip from behind, seeing your full body. Ideally this is outside, but you could do it on a treadmill too. A side-on clip would also be useful. You will have seen enough top-level runners to instinctively know what ‘good’ technique looks like, so take a look at yourself and you can hopefully identify some easy technical work-ons. Again though, if you want more help here then get in touch and I’d be happy to look at your technique.
Remember: pain is a signal, not something to push past.
Max
27 March 2022
Training Using Minutes, Not Miles
Guest post by Max Roger
When you plan your running for the upcoming season, it’s important to make sure that you do this using minutes, not miles. People tend to set out for a set distance (the miles method). This is ok, and can get some improvement. But it also carries risk of overtraining with it.
Yes, you do want to get a certain amount of miles in (kms really, as we are metric). But the way that you go about it to let your body adapt should be through using minutes, not miles.
“We want to stress your heart rate for a certain amount of time”
This is because you can run 16km one day (10miles if you’re Old School), and it takes 1hour 20mins, and another day it takes you 2 hours. This could be because you’re fatigued, ran a hillier route, it was hotter or more humid… there are loads of potential reasons.
The idea for your long, steady state runs is to stress your heart in certain zones so that it adapts. To do this you want to progress it in small increments, as you do with your strength training. A good guide is to only increase by a maximum of 10% from the previous week. Gradually increasing the amount of time that you have your heart working hard means that it adapts to be able to supply more oxygen to your muscles. This will allow you to run for longer.
That’s why we use minutes: because you can control the increases. For example, 100 minutes for your big run one week, then 110 minutes the next week.
You might end up running the same distance as before, but in a longer time in one of your training weeks, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the length of time that your heart is working hard.
And what zone do you want your heart to be working in? For your easy runs it should feel easy. You should be able to hold a comfortable conversation the whole time. Do I suggest doing that though? No. It’s better to breathe through your nose the whole time. Nasal breathing has a whole host of benefits. If you’re able to nasal breathe as you run then that’s also a sign that your heart rate is in the right zone. This will roughly equate to 50-75% of your maximum heart rate, but that shouldn’t be the focus. There’re different variables that affect heart rate too so it’s better to focus on keeping the run feeling easy and nasal breathing the whole time.
27 February 2022
Running Volume
Guest post by Max Roger
Understanding volume is key for your training, whether it’s in the gym or on the roads and trails. When we are talking about training, volume refers to the amount of work that you are doing. In the gym this is easy: it’s the sets and reps. A proper training programme will have this planned, with the volume being adjusted week by week so that your body can be challenged appropriately and adapt to the training stimulus that you’re putting it through.
Now let’s move to running. When you’re running the underlying principles behind training and your running volume are often ignored. Your body needs time to adapt to the stresses that it’s put under. When you run, as relaxing as a run can be, it’s putting your body through stress. There are various physiological things going on but I’m going to focus on the pressure that your bones, muscles and connective tissue (ligaments and tendons) are put through.
“Follow these 2 rules to give your body the space it needs to recover and avoid injury”
Whether you go fast or go slow, each pace that you run puts a lot of pressure (let’s term it ‘loading’) through your foot. There’s a lot of small stuff in your foot too; 26 bones (that’s a quarter of the bones in your body), 33 joints and more than 80 ligaments and tendons. You can’t just finish a run and think that you’ll be ok to run again the next day. Over time your body will break down unless you allow it to recover properly, and all that stuff in your foot needs time to recover.
How long does it need? That’s where looking at your running volume comes in. If you follow these 2 rules then you’ll be giving your body the space that it needs to recover properly and avoid injury through training too much.
Rule 1: the 10% rule. Only add a MAXIMUM of 10% to your weekly training volume. eg. You run 50km in Week 1; 10% is 5km so in Week 2 you’d run a maximum of 55km. This ensures that you only add on a little bit each week, which allows your body to adapt to the running without being overloaded by too much before it’s ready for it.
Rule 2: the deload rule. When you’ve had 3 training weeks, progressing the volume slightly each week, take the 4th week as a deload week. You can still run fast (in fact this is a great week to get some faster runs in that usual, as you will be running less overall and so feel fresher for these fast runs). But you want to take 10% off your previous training week and make that the absolute maximum that you run that week. Ideally make it closer to 20% that you take off. This will make sure that your body is completely rested and recovered ahead of the next 3 progressive weeks of training. Where do you start again after that deload week? With your old week 3 volume.
As an example, 8 weeks of training volume could look like this (if you were maximising the increases and getting a 20% deload):
|
Week |
Running volume (total kms) |
|
1 |
50 |
|
2 |
55 |
|
3 |
60.5 |
|
4 (deload) |
47.5 |
|
5 |
60.5 |
|
6 |
66.6 |
|
7 |
73.3 |
|
8 (deload) |
58.6 |
The problem comes when people just consistently chase a higher number each week. You need to plan things out and let yourself recover. Also, if you’re doing faster runs this will take a higher toll on your body so the training volume shouldn’t be as high, so the number of kms run won’t always go up on every week that’s not a deload week. You also need to learn how to listen to your body: if it feels particularly fatigued, more sluggish than usual, then maybe put a deload week in earlier than planned, or just don’t increase the running volume that week.
For more detail around how a running training plan would look for you contact Max at www.max-performance.co.uk