Running Lean with Patrick McGilvray
A lot of runners believe that when it comes to exercise, running is more than enough. They love running, do it 6-7 days a week, and don’t feel the need to do anything else. Then there are those …
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When it comes to losing weight, there are many, many approaches you can take - some of them will work while others definitely will not. Runners especially need to be mindful of their approach to …
Continue Reading about 193. 5 Dieting Disasters Runners Need to Avoid →
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 193 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, The Weight Loss Coach for Runners and today, Five Dieting Disasters Runners Need To Avoid. So, when it comes to losing weight, there are many many approaches you can take.
Some of them will work, others definitely will not. Runners especially need to be mindful of their approach to weight loss because certain methods might help you lose weight, but will drastically impair your running performance.
So in this episode, I’m going to go over five dieting disasters that runners need to avoid if you want to lose weight without completely destroying your running performance. I’ll be talking about things like calorie restrictive diets.
The problem with the types of foods you might be turning to carbohydrate management, overtraining, one size fits all approaches. So I think there’s going to be something for everyone in this episode.
But first, I talked to a lot of people who want and need help figuring out this whole nutrition exercise stuff so they can lose weight and keep it off for good. And they want to change, they want to do something about it. But instead, they put it off, they say things like I need to think about it. Or maybe later, maybe now’s not the right time.
But if you’ve been thinking about this for a long time, now, you know that you’re going to have to eventually do something differently, or else nothing is going to change for you. Right, nothing changes, if nothing changes, right.
So thinking more about it or delaying this decision isn’t going to do anything, you have to take action. So you have to make a decision, and you have to take action, the only thing guaranteed to not work is to just do nothing.
And a lot of people continually put things off, because they’re afraid, because they fear failure, or they feel fear, the kind of changes that you’re going to have to make when you take on something like changing your diet.
And the truth is, yeah, you’re gonna have to sort of become a different person in this process. But think about this, where do you see yourself in, let’s say six months time, what would that different person look like?
Because if you do nothing, you’re probably going to still be right where you are, maybe struggling with your weight or your body composition, your energy levels, still wishing you felt better regretting that you didn’t start six months ago, right. But if you took some action and started now, in six months, you’re going to be six months closer to your goal, wait six months of having practiced good habits, having developed good habits, six months closer to that most badass version of yourself.
So don’t put it off. If this is something that you want for yourself, take action, make a decision. And if you want some help from me, great. If you want to do this on your own, I think that’s amazing, too. But I’m here for you.
If you want a little bit of help, just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Work With Me. And then you can fill out a little application, you and I will get on a Zoom call, we’ll have a conversation and see if coaching is a good fit for you. If it is, great. If it’s not, that’s cool, too. I want the best for you. That’s it, whether you want to work with me or not, it’s okay.
But I do want you to stop thinking about it, stop putting it off and just take some action and do something today. Okay. One thing you can do right now is if you just want a little bit of help getting started with all this stuff, you can take some action.
And check out the free training that I created. It’s called Five Simple Steps To Becoming A Leaner, Stronger Runner. And in this free training I put together I will teach you how to lose weight the right way and keep it off for good without running a million miles a week.
Some of the things that you’re going to learn is why running more and eating less does not work when you’re trying to lose weight. Some of the things that runners don’t do properly when they’re trying to lose weight, the best fuel to use to improve your endurance and you know, get weight loss really working for you.
And then I talked about the mindset shifts required to make these things last for life. So there’s a lot more in that training. I spent a lot of time putting it together. It kind of takes everything I teach on the podcast and combines it into about an hour long training. So definitely check it out.
Just go to runningleancoaching.com and click on Free Training and then you can go through that, and that’ll get you started on the right track. And if again, if you want a little bit of help moving forward with this stuff, you can always apply for coaching with me. Cool.
Okay, let’s talk about five dieting disasters that runners need to avoid. And the reason this came up is because I’ve been hearing a lot about a lot of different types of diets. Recently, I listen to a lot of books, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and read a lot of books on diet, nutrition, exercise, running.
And one thing that keeps coming up is that all of these diets that are out there are kind of designed for the general public. And they’re really not specifically designed for runners. And so the first dieting disaster I want to talk about is cutting calories.
And this is one of those things, cutting calories is one of those traditional ways of losing weight that a lot of people ascribe to that is, unfortunately, just not really good for runners, it really just doesn’t work for us as runners actually, it really doesn’t work for most people. I’ll get into that in just a second.
But just understand that as runners we have special needs, we are special. We need to make sure that we have the energy that we need, and the fuel that we need to power us through some long workouts, some long runs, some tough workouts, some higher intensity workouts.
And honestly, if you’re in a calorie deficit all the time, this is going to be kind of a problem. So cutting calories is one of the dieting disasters I think you absolutely want to avoid. So here’s a couple of problems with this. Yes, if you cut calories, you can lose weight, but you’re not really fueling your body properly.
If you are constantly in a calorie deficit, right, you’re not going to have enough fuel to properly not only fuel for your workouts, but recover from your workouts, which is probably even more important because running is catabolic.
Running breaks down muscle, just like lifting weights is catabolic. When you lift weights at the gym, you are breaking down muscle, you’re tearing muscle fibers, in order to get your body back into an anabolic state where you are building and maintaining muscle, you need to get enough rest, you need to make sure that you’re providing enough fuel enough calories, enough protein to build that muscle back up.
And unfortunately, a lot of these calorie deficit diets will not give you the proper amount of calories that you need and the proper amount of protein especially in order to get back into that anabolic state where you’re maintaining and actually building muscle.
Okay, so you’re constantly breaking down your body, you’re breaking down tissues, you’re breaking down muscle, and this is going to dramatically impair your progress as a runner. So when you’re in an anabolic state, you’re building and maintaining muscle mass. When you’re in a catabolic state, you’re breaking down or losing overall muscle mass.
The anabolic state happens when you are at rest and when you are fueling. And when you are recovering, when you’re sleeping and things like that catabolism being in that catabolic state happens while you are actively working out especially doing anything that’s high intensity.
So your running performance is going to take a huge hit if you’re constantly in some sort of a calorie deficit, okay, you’ve reduced your overall caloric intake, you’re not recovering from those harder runs. The next run you go out on the next workout that you engage in is going to feel especially hard because you’re not fully recovered from the previous workout.
And so you’re not going to recover fully from this workout. And then this cycle just continues. And this is a way of getting super burned out and really hurting your running performance. And it could lead to injury too, especially if you’re not building muscle actively. If you’re not gaining strength, if you’re losing strength through this process, this can really lead to injury. So this is a big problem. The other thing you have to understand is that this whole idea of calories in calories out, this is not really a sustainable weight loss method.
And I know that this kind of information is disseminated out there from everyone. I listened to so many experts talk about cutting calories as the way to control weight. But it is not sustainable. Studies continually show that cutting calories, yes, is an effective way to lose weight. No doubt about that.
Studies have shown that it’s also the number one least sustainable weight loss method. Why? Because when you are in a calorie deficit, it will actually over time will slow down your metabolism. So your body’s really great at keeping you in homeostasis, which is keeping your body in a balanced state.
So if you reduce energy coming in, over time, your body will reduce the energy that you’re putting out. So if you continually eat in a calorie deficit, your body will slow down your metabolism because it’s saying, hey, we’re only getting 800 calories a day, 1000 calories a day, whatever, we need to slow things down here. So we’re not burning so many calories here, we need to slow down this metabolism to match what’s coming in.
And when you continually do this, your ability to lose weight will eventually stall and stop. And then you cannot continually eat in more of a deficit, because then you’d have to reduce it by a few hundred calories more to get the weight loss going again.
And then you can see why this is completely unsustainable. That’s why shows like The Biggest Loser were great at first. All these people that are pretty overweight, they lose a ton of weight by restricting calories. But eventually they gain it all back.
And then some, in fact, I was doing a little research on this. And there was a study from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health that said that they followed 14 former Biggest Loser contestants over the course of six years. And the participants had all gained back most of the weight that they had lost on the show. And in some cases, they even put on more.
So this is not a sustainable weight loss method, the whole calorie deficit thing. You cannot continually eat in a calorie deficit and expect to, you know, keep performing well as a runner. Okay? I would argue that even as a human being, it’s just not sustainable. So cutting calories is a huge mistake. And I think it’s a disaster that you just need to avoid. Okay. So that’s number one.
Number two is not eating real foods. So runners love their fuel. They love their shakes and their smoothies and their bars and their drinks and their gels and their goos. And all this other stuff, whatever’s quick and easy for a runner, I need my fuel. And so you grab the latest, greatest thing and a little package or whatever.
This can be a real problem because you end up eating a lot of processed food. And processed food is processed food is food that no longer looks like food. It’s like heavily processed food that has been ground up and you ‘ve pulled the certain ingredients out of whole foods and then combined them.
And all you gotta do is look at the back of a package of whatever you’re eating like an energy bar, and look at the ingredients and you’re gonna see tons of ingredients, tons of ingredients you don’t understand, usually tons of sugar, and refined grains like flour.
And there was another study from the NIH that said that when people ate a diet full of ultra processed foods that they just consume more calories and gain more weight than when they just ate minimally processed foods. So just the fact that eating processed food will cause you to gain weight.
I was looking at the back of a Clif Bar recently. Actually, I just looked this up online, I don’t buy Clif Bars anymore. I used to eat this stuff all the time back when I was like 40 or 50 pounds heavier, but I was looking at the ingredients of a Clif Bar.
And I’m just gonna read through a bunch of these ingredients so you understand what I’m talking about. This is processed food. This is highly processed food. And you’re gonna notice a couple things.
The first ingredient is organic brown rice syrup, and they use the word organic in front of everything here to make it sound like it’s healthy, just so you know. Okay, organic brown rice syrup. That’s sugar, by the way. Organic rolled oats, soy protein isolate, organic cane syrup, sugar, organic roasted soy beans, rice flour, cocoa, organic soy flour, organic high oleic sunflower oil, organic cane sugar, sugar, organic oat flour, organic oat fiber.
Why do you need organic oat fiber if you have oat flour and rolled oats in there anyway? Natural flavors. What does that mean? Alkalized cocoa, organic cocoa butter, sunflower oil, salt, barley malt extract, green tea extract, unsweetened chocolate, soy lecithin, baking soda, dye, calcium phosphate, magnesium oxide, ascorbic acid, tocopherol, acetate, beta carotene, NYAS, cinnamon, global, I’m not going to try to pronounce a lot of these words because they’re crazy.
Here’s the thing that I want you to take away from this. This is a highly processed food loaded with sugar. The reason people love Clif bars is because it’s just a candy bar wrapped in a quote unquote healthy package. Look at the word organic on there. Oh, they’re organic. It’s good for you.
If you’re an athlete, you know, they got a picture of somebody like climbing a mountain climbing rock climbing on the package. So of course it’s for the athlete, it’s good for you. It gives you energy. Yeah, it gives you energy. It’s just pure sugar.
Okay, so just understand that this is an ultra processed food. And this is not healthy food. Okay, this is not something that is good for you. And to eat a bunch of stuff like this constantly is a problem. Right? This is going to be a disaster.
So what happens? What if you ditched all the highly processed foods? What if you just ate real food? Well, a couple of things. Number one, eating real food will help you to stay satiated. Protein and fat are filling. And when you eat foods that are high in protein and good quality fats, your body’s getting all the nutrients it needs.
You’re gonna stay more satiated through the day, you’re gonna feel full, your body gets everything it needs, your hunger signals will return to normal. All the sugar and processed food will kind of mess with your hunger signals.
Ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, gets overproduced when you’re eating foods high in sugar high in carbohydrates. Leptin is the fullness sensor. It’s a fullness hormone. And that gets downregulated and will cause you to stay hungry even after you’ve eaten a bunch of food when you’re eating processed food and carbohydrates and things like that.
So it causes you to stay hungry all the time, which makes controlling your eating really hard to do and you end up just massively overeating. It’s very, very easy to overeat stuff like Clif Bars, right? It’s pretty hard to overeat like chicken or steak or broccoli or eggs like you don’t eat so much. And then you’re like, poof, I’m full.
That’s the way we’re supposed to be. That’s the kind of food we’re supposed to eat. So eating real food will help to reset your hunger and satiety signals, you’ll naturally and easily just kind of eat the right amount of food. Your body is very good at knowing, hey, I should stop eating when you’re eating real food. It doesn’t have those same sensors working properly when you’re eating all this junk food.
All this processed food, especially food, it’s super high in sugar, like a Clif Bar. Okay, so what is real food? Real food is food that still looks like food. You look at it, you’re like, oh, that is an egg that is an avocado. That is a steak. Like you know what that is, your ancestors would recognize that stuff as food.
So examples of real food that we can find in the grocery store would be that stuff that we find around the perimeter of the grocery store. The outside edges of the grocery store stuff like fresh produce fruits and vegetables, meat fish, cheese, dairy, eggs, nuts, seeds, legumes, healthy fats, olive oil, butter, coconut oil, you want to stay away from those toxic seed oils that would include things like canola oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, grapeseed oil, rice bran, all these things are toxic and highly highly processed.
And if you understand how they process these quote unquote, like vegetable oils, it’s a horrible process that they go through. This stuff is just not good for you. Stick to real quality healthy fats, okay? Also just stay away from the package foods if it has a label and an ingredient list and a marketing message. I would just say no to that stuff. Okay.
Now sometimes this kind of stuff is okay like, I’ll go to the frozen foods aisle and I love getting like bags of frozen broccoli, or riced cauliflower because I love love riced cauliflower. It’s a good substitute for rice and a lot of dishes and stuff. And to make it myself is a pain in the butt, super messy and a huge pain in the butt so I can just buy that stuff. Yes, it is, quote unquote processed because they’ve chopped up the broccoli and they froze it.
They’ve like shredded the cauliflower or whatever they do to it, they’ve erased it. But it’s minimally processed. If you look at the package, there’s one ingredient, it’s like cauliflower. There’s one ingredient, it’s broccoli. So that kind of stuff is okay. Stay away from the stuff with a package, and a label and a bunch of ingredients, and you’re going to be fine. So just stick with real food, okay, because eating all the processed food is going to be a disaster for you. All right.
Number three, carbohydrate mismanagement. So carbs are not the enemy. And I just did a podcast about this a few weeks ago, you can check out episode 190 and listen to that. And I talk all about carbs and why carbs should be included in our diet, and everybody needs to kind of figure out their own number of cards and things like that.
But just understand that carbs are not the enemy, but carbs need to be managed. You need to control your carbohydrate intake, if you want to improve fat burning, so fat burning will help you to improve your body composition. Because fat burning is how you lose weight, you have to burn fat.
Fat Burning also is how you improve your endurance as a runner, you have to get good at burning fat. So the goal with our diet is to eat the kinds of foods that will help us to keep our body into a fat burning state. Right, so we do eat some carbs, but we don’t want to go crazy on the carbs. We need to manage our carbohydrate intake because carbohydrates are just sugar. And there’s a spectrum there.
Of course, you know, there’s table sugar, and brown rice syrup and cane sugar syrup and things like that, which are super concentrated forms of carbohydrate. And then there’s like, you know, blueberries or a sweet potato, which are carbohydrate, and they’re a little bit higher and carbohydrate, but they’re pretty low, and they don’t spike your blood sugar, okay, but when we consume carbohydrates, sugar, some of that energy is used, or some of that sugar is used for energy, and then some of it is stored as fat.
And depending on the concentration of carbohydrates, it’ll determine how much of that is stored as fat. So eating just pure sugar, if you drink like a big 32 ounce Coca Cola or something like that, that’s going to have like, I don’t know, 28 grams of sugar, or I’m sorry, not 28 grams, probably have like 28 teaspoons of sugar in there or something like that’s crazy.
It’s like a ton of sugar. Most of that’s going to be just stored as fat because your body can’t use that much sugar, right, right all at once. So too many carbs, too much sugar, and your body will not turn on the fat burning system, you will be storing fat.
Because when you raise your blood sugar, which happens when you eat most foods, but especially things that are very concentrated and carbohydrates, you raise your blood sugar quite a bit, insulin gets raised quite a bit and insulin is the gatekeeper, they will keep fat locked up in your fat cells.
So we want to keep insulin levels managed. We want to keep them pretty low most of the time. So fat burning should be your goal. This is our natural state as human beings. Fat Burning is what we’ve always done, we feast and famine, or feasted and fasted. As human beings we’ve had these times in our evolutionary history where we developed this amazing fuel system that can be used in times of famine when we did not have a lot of food available.
So we’d go on a hunt, where you would eat some large animal, let’s just say like a woolly mammoth or something like that. And then we would fast for days because we have this storage system, you know, we’ve stored some of that energy as fat and we can use that for energy. Right.
But nowadays, we’re eating all the time we’re eating tons of processed food, tons of sugar, and we just keep storing the fat and storing the fat we’re not tapping into that stored body fat for fuel and that’s what we want to do. So our goal, from a dietary standpoint, from a nutrition standpoint, from an exercise standpoint is to enhance fat burning, right?
This helps with weight loss. It helps with improving endurance and it helps with your energy throughout the day. If you want all day energy, just burning more fat helps with focus and concentration. All kinds of positive benefits of becoming a good fat burner, okay? Too many carbs. Fat Burning just gets shut down. So carbs don’t need to be eliminated. We just have to manage them properly. Okay.
The other side of this is just not eating enough. So people think, oh, carbs are bad, I just got to stay away from carbs, I’m just going to eat zero carbs. Okay? Some people do really well, eating very few carbs, it’s almost impossible to eat zero because even if you eat like an egg, it’s got like a one or two grams of carbs in there, okay?
Some dairy has carbs, if you just ate nothing but meat, which a lot of people love this, like carnivore diet, they’re gonna get close to zero carbs, but probably not zero. And they do okay, and they, they might do fine. I don’t personally think that is the best for everybody. I think there are some people that really do well on that.
I’ve tried it, and it was great for a period of time. And then I felt like I needed just a little bit more in the way of carbohydrates. So I added some more carbs into my diet. But carbs are not necessary, I want to make sure that it is very clear that our body will produce the glucose that we need to keep our brain functioning. And all these people that have been doing carnivore for 5-10 years. They don’t eat anything but meat and salt. And they do really well.
And they’re functioning great, you know, they’re improving their performance, their athletes, whatever. And that’s great for them, doesn’t mean everybody has to do that. Okay. So I think sometimes we can go a little bit too low.
And if you’re somebody who isn’t performing well at super low carbs, then we got to increase those carbs. Some people do well, when they’re 50 grams or less per day, other people feel better when they’re at 100-150 grams per day, something like that. But again, this is still considered kind of low carb, okay?
The average American is somewhere around three to 500 grams of carbs a day, it’s crazy. So a lot of carbs, I couldn’t eat that much today, if I tried. Why? Because I probably could if I really tried. But that is a ton of carbs to eat in a day.
In my opinion, I’ve been doing this low carb thing for years and years, I feel so much better when I keep my carbs pretty low. Right? So some people do well, if they’re super low, let’s say under 20 grams a day, that would be like the carnivore type people, others do something called carb cycling, that might be where you, you for like three or four days in a row, you might do around 50 grams, and then you have a day where you up that to 120 or 150. And then you go back down and every third or fourth day, you increase your carbs, you know, by 100 or 150 grams a day.
And some people do well with something like that. So in the course of a week, you know, your average daily carb intake is a little bit higher than somebody that’s doing, you know, a much lower carb intake. But again, this is individualized, you gotta figure this out for yourself. Okay, carbs will help your body to recover from hard workouts, they help you to get back into that anabolic state so they help you to signal proteins synthesis in order to build muscle.
So insulin is one of the ways that you can activate muscle protein synthesis. Another way of signaling muscle protein synthesis is eating foods high in leucine. Leucine is an amino acid and it helps to activate that protein synthesis so eating foods high in leucine will help you to build and repair muscle things like chicken beef, pork, fish, tofu, can beans, lentils, milk, cheese, cottage cheese, eggs, all these foods are high and leucine.
Anything that has a complete protein typically is going to give you higher amounts of leucine. So eat some carbs, eat the right amount of carbs for you and your goals and it takes a little bit of trial and error sometimes to figure this out. You might do better if you’re eating some carbs to help signal some protein synthesis as well. Okay.
The other problem is that people who just eat the wrong kinds of carbs so it’s easy to say okay, I need to eat a few more carbs every day and then you’re just going crazy on like doughnuts and pasta and muffins and cookies and Clif bars or whatever. And these are all junk carbs right they’re not healthy foods.
Refined sugar is not healthy food. There’s no study out there that is going to show you that sugar has a bunch of health benefits unless it’s sponsored by like the sugar industry like Coca Cola or something like that.
And I have seen those kinds of studies before they’ll be like, sugar is good for you. It’s clean energy and blah, blah, blah. And I’m just going to tell you right now there is not a nutritionist or a dietician, no matter what sort of method they prescribe that they are not going to tell you that sugar is good for you.
Okay, doesn’t mean you can never have sugar but you just got to be really careful with that again, it comes to control management, but the right kinds of carbs are the ones that are not going to spike your blood sugar. Like our goal here is to keep fat burning going.
Our goal here is to keep your blood sugar managed relatively low, not super low. You don’t want to be hypoglycemic. But we got to kind of manage our blood sugar so it’s not constantly spiking and crashing. So the right kinds of carbs and the ones that I like talk to my clients about including in their diet would be things like fruit, berries, dairy, legumes, starchy vegetables, like sweet potatoes, root vegetables.
Again, these are all real foods, they still look like food. Our ancestors look at these things and say, oh, yeah, I know what that is. That is a sweet potato. Oh, yeah, that is a blueberry. Okay, so carbohydrate management is very important.
Number four is increased cortisol. Cortisol is the stress hormone. Your body produces cortisol when you get stressed out, and this is normal. And this is actually good. Because when you’re in this stressful situation, and we’ve evolved to produce cortisol in stressful situations, like the saber toothed tiger comes at us from the jungle, and we’re staying there and we’re like, oh, my gosh, your body raises cortisol raises glucose produces a bunch of blood sugars, so that you can like fight or flight like you couldn’t run away, I would run away if it was me.
Same thing happens when we are under stress, though today. And this stress could be from an inbox full of emails, or financial issues, or work related stuff, or family or relationship stuff. Like there’s so many things that stress us out in society today. And if you’re in the state of chronic stress, where cortisol is chronically raised, this is a big problem. All right.
Cortisol, in small amounts in in short term is fine like it is actually it’s a good thing. Because your body will have an adaptive response to that. So you do a hard workout, you do a hard hit workout, cortisol is gonna go up. As soon as you get into the rest mode, like that’s gonna go back down again. And then cortisol is back to normal, and you’re good to go.
The problem is that we have these lives, you know, stresses that keep us in a chronic state of stress, which keeps cortisol chronically high, which keeps our blood sugar’s chronically elevated, which keeps insulin chronically elevated, which keeps us storing fat. It keeps us from burning fat. So if you want to completely avoid fat burning, just stay stressed out all the time.
So this is like lack of sleep, too many hard workouts, not enough rest and recovery days. One way that a lot of runners will put themselves in a state of chronic stress is doing what I call chronic cardio, this is where you’re just doing all your workouts at that sort of medium hard level of intensity, they’re not easy enough to be easy.
They’re not hard enough to be hard. It’s like you’re doing everything at the high end of zone three or something like that. And it’s just all your workouts are a little too hard. You’re never giving your body a break. You’re never pushing yourself so hard that you’re getting into those higher zones, and you’re never really doing anything that’s easy enough to help you to respond and recover and repair.
So we got to be careful with this chronically elevated stress, chronically elevated cortisol, and chronically elevated glucose peruses, that chronically elevated insulin and then you’re chronically storing fat, right? You cannot burn fat while your body is stressed out.
So you have to manage stress. This means managing your day to day stress. And any sort of exercise undue stress. So you got to prioritize rest and recovery days. You can’t really improve your fitness if you’re out there just cranking out the miles day after day after day, your fitness improves while at rest. So you do hard HIIT workout speed intervals, something like that.
And then the next day you take a rest day, maybe an active recovery day, something like that. Well, that’s when your body has the positive responses and your cardiovascular system improves. Your lactate threshold improves. Same for lifting weights, you don’t get stronger while you’re lifting weights at the gym. That’s when you’re breaking yourself down. You get stronger during the rest and recovery phase, right.
So you have to improve stress. You have to manage stress, you have to improve your sleep quality. Sleep is so important. People don’t understand the importance of sleep but getting enough sleep and getting good quality sleep are super important because if you’re not getting enough sleep you could keep yourself in this state of chronically being stressed out. And stress leads to a lack of sleep. And a lack of sleep creates stress.
So this is a terrible cycle to be in. So you have to manage stress from the outside and you got to manage stress from the inside. And you have to make sure that you are getting quality sleep, whatever it takes, okay? A better approach to running is the 80/20 method. I’ve talked about this before, this is going to help you to keep cortisol at normal levels at 20 just means that 80% of the time, you’re you’re running workouts are going to be pretty easy conversational pace, pretty low zones, one or two 20% of the time, heart zones, 3, 4, 5, where you’re going to be doing speed intervals, you’re going to be doing HIIT workouts, you’re going to be doing tempo runs anything that’s going to really push the needle hard, but that’s only 20% of the time.
And if you kind of stick to that formula, the 80/20 formula, that’s where the magic happens, right. That’s how you improve your endurance, you improve your speed, you improve your strength without burning yourself out. So you do have to include the 20% of hard workouts, but it should only be 20%. It shouldn’t be chronically hard workouts, okay? All right.
And then number five, dieting disaster that runners need to avoid is one size fits all approaches. And I have done all this stuff. I’ve read the books, I’ve tried all the fad diets, I’ve tried everything that’s out there, pretty much. I’ve even experimented with some of these lately, just to see like, hey, this actually sounds interesting. I wonder if this might work.
This diet that somebody wrote out there, you know, the problem with that is that they don’t work. They don’t work for everyone. There’s not one diet that is going to work perfectly for everyone. Why? Because you are an individual. You have your own body, your own metabolism, your own goals, your unique lifestyle, your own culture, food preferences, food likes and dislikes food allergies, you got your own athletic goals, your own training schedule, your own particular body composition goals, your own hormonal makeup, genetics have a factor in this too.
If you think that one fad diet is going to work for you exactly the same as it did for that celebrity who’s selling it, I’m sorry, but you’re just mistaken, it’s not going to work for you. I mean, it might, but there is no one size fits all diet out there. Okay.
That is why I am a coach and I don’t have a book to sell you on how to lose weight, right? Because it just doesn’t work that way. Everybody’s different. And coaching works, where all these other diets fail. Because what I do is I’m going to meet you where you are, and treat you like the individual that you are, we’ll take a look at what you’re doing today.
And then we’ll start making some changes. And this looks a little bit different for each person I work with because we’re starting from where you are. And then we start making some small changes. And we start small, and then we layer things on. And you know, we got to make sure that your body adjusts to each of these changes. But this is the right way to approach any type of dietary intervention, like you can’t just change 27 things all at once.
This is not sustainable, this is very overwhelming, and most people will not stick with it. So when you look at some fad diet out there, and they say okay, here’s the 27 things you need to do. Here’s the food you need, this food’s naughty, here’s the kind of thing, here’s my carbs, calories, how many macros and blah, blah, blah. Like it’s just overwhelming for a lot of people.
So it has to be something that is a progressive approach. I always take an progressive approach with my clients. And coaching is about feedback and results like is this working for you? Yes or no? Are you seeing positive results? Yes or no? If yes, cool. We’re going to keep going. If no, then we need to change something so that we can start getting results again.
And I’ll even say this, and this might sound a little bit arrogant, but coaching pretty much always works as long as you stick with it. As long as we are constantly analyzing results and making changes when necessary. You’ll always be moving towards your goals. You’ll always be getting results as long as we take that approach.
Because it’s not about any particular diet. It’s not about some dogmatic set of principles. Coaching is about what works for you as an individual. Yeah, sometimes it takes a little bit, a little bit of time to figure things out. Sometimes you have some setbacks, sometimes. It just doesn’t work.
But then we get into detective mode and we figure out a solution. And every other diet that’s out there, every other like one size fits all diet. You know, here’s what you do. And if it’s not working, sorry about your luck, you’re probably just doing it wrong. That is not the approach you need to take, you need to take an individualized approach.
And I’m not even saying you got to have a coach to help you through all this stuff. But you do have to constantly be analyzing, is this working for me or not? And if it isn’t, there’s something that has to change, you can’t keep doing the same things and expecting the results to be different, right?
So that is why I don’t just have a document, I can hand it over to you and say, here’s what you’re going to do. And this is going to work perfectly for you. Because there is no such thing. There just really isn’t. Okay. So this is a very dynamic process. It’s a process of trying some things and seeing if it works, and if it does, great, try something you know, later on the next thing, if it’s not working, though, we have to make a change. You can’t just keep doing the same things. Okay?
So you have to take more of a dynamic approach to whatever method you want to take on here. And that’s again, that’s why I do coaching and I don’t just hand over a book or document or something like that.
Okay, so those are the five dieting disasters that runners need to avoid. Number one, cutting calories and number two, not eating real food number three, carbohydrate mismanagement, number four, increased cortisol and number five, the one size fits all approach is just don’t do those things. And you’ll be fine. Cool.
And as always, if you’re looking for some help with any of this stuff, we can talk about it just head over to runningcoaching.com and click on Work Withork with me. We’ll have a conversation, see if coaching is a good fit for you. Okay, that’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean, and I will 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.
I get a lot of questions about how to improve running performance and one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer or faster you have to improve your …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, sports nutritionist, Master life coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to Episode 158, of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners and today, building your aerobic engine. So I get a lot of questions from people in general and clients about how to improve running performance.
And one concept I keep coming back to is building your aerobic engine. Before you can run longer, or run faster, you have to improve your aerobic fitness. So building and maintaining a solid aerobic base should be the goal of every runner, regardless of your running experience. But many runners skip this step, because they just want to get to the faster running the higher intensity running.
So in this episode, I’m going to explain how building your aerobic engine is essential to helping you improve both your running speed and your endurance. And Happy New Year everyone. This is the first episode of 2023. And is this going to be a new year and a new you or a new year and the same old, same old you?
So I want you to think about this, where do you want to be this time next year? When you look back? Over 2023? What do you want to have accomplished? Where do you want to be with your health and your fitness? Do you want to make this year the year that you finally lose the weight and learn how to keep it off for good?
So I really want you to think about this, what do you really want for yourself this year, because here’s the truth. Whatever you want for yourself, it’s available to you, it’s achievable for you. So let’s get you there together. When you sign up for coaching with me, you get all the knowledge, support and accountability you need to achieve everything that you want for yourself in 2023.
So let’s make this year 2023 your best year yet, to learn more, just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply fill out a quick application. You and I will get on a call, we’ll see if coaching is a good fit for you. If it is, boom, we’ll get you started. And we’ll start making this the best year yet for you just go to runningleancoaching.com/apply.
Okay, so lots of people who are new to running, especially the newer runners, want to kind of skip the part where they have to focus on building their aerobic base, or what I like to call the aerobic engine. And this is a good time of the year to be talking about this, because I think a lot of us are just about to start marathon training, or maybe half marathon training, a lot of spring races happen in the United States.
And so the beginning of January is when a lot of training begins. The problem is that most runners don’t do a really good job of building their aerobic engine properly. At the beginning of a training cycle, lots of runners, even very experienced runners who are maybe following some sort of training plan.
So they may have some sort of marathon training plan that they’re doing. They just begin by, you know, doing all their miles at a kind of medium hard intensity, and they end up kind of maybe getting burned out or getting injured. A lot of overuse injuries happen, especially with new runners, but even with experienced runners.
And a lot of these overuse injuries happen kind of at the first half of the training cycle, which leads me to believe that when we start our marathon training or start our half marathon training program, you need to be you need to have developed a good solid aerobic base, you need a good solid base on which you can build, right?
So you want to start with a good base, start with a good aerobic engine, and then you can get faster and build your intensity levels on top of that. So what does it mean when I’m talking about your aerobic engine? So really what I’m talking about here, as I’m talking about increasing the efficiency of your cardiovascular system, right?
The cardiovascular system is the different functions of your body that can combine to enable you to run for longer distances, right? Your cardiovascular system is, you know, your heart, your blood, carrying oxygen to working muscles and organs to every working part of your body. So it’s mostly, you know, how, how efficient is your heart? How much blood can your heart pump out at a time, like how much blood volume can you pump out?
Because the more blood volume in your heart can pump out, the more oxygen you will be delivering to working muscles, the better you are at delivering oxygen rich blood to working muscles, especially those muscles used for running, that easier running becomes. So we want to improve this system. And it’s something that you can absolutely improve.
Now, if you’re a new runner, and you’re just starting out, and you get out there, and maybe you’re training for your first 5k, and you get out there and to run a mile is takes everything you’ve got and you feel completely winded at the end of that mile, that is fine, that is normal. If you’re just getting started with this, then that is something where if you continue running, and you continue doing the right kind of running, you will find that running a mile becomes very easy.
And then running two and three miles becomes a no big deal. And then all of a sudden, you’re like, I’m just gonna go ahead and, and run a half marathon or trust our training for a marathon, right? But don’t get ahead of yourself. Work your way up to that slowly. And I’m going to be talking about that in a minute here.
So really, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about your aerobic engine, is your cardiovascular system, you know, your body’s ability to deliver oxygen rich blood to all the working muscles and organs and all the functions in your body that help you to improve your running efficiency and your running performance.
Okay, so why do we want to build an aerobic engine? Like why is it important to build this? Well, you know, you just can’t expect to go out there and run a fast half marathon or a fast marathon. Without doing the work to build your cardiovascular system, you can’t improve your running performance, if you don’t start with a good base, right?
So you need to first build a solid aerobic base, then you can work on getting faster, and increasing the intensity of your running over those longer distances. But I want to make sure this is very clear, do not skip this step, do not skip the part where you build that aerobic base. And something that is actually kind of counterintuitive. But I’ll explain why this works in just a minute here, you will actually get faster, just by improving your aerobic engine.
So by doing more slow, easy running and improving your cardiovascular system, you will become more efficient at running and you can actually run faster at the same intensity levels. This is one of the huge benefits of building a strong aerobic base is that you can improve your running efficiency, you can improve your running speed.
In fact, there are many benefits to improving your aerobic engine here. So when your cardiovascular system gets more efficient, when you improve your aerobic fitness, running becomes easier. This is like one of the number one reasons why we want to do this, it just gets easier, right? You can run longer distances and you can run faster at the same perceived effort level.
So let’s say you go out there and you run out a perceived effort level of a three or a four and you’re like this feels great, it feels pretty easy for me. And you might notice your pace is a 10 minute pace. For example, over time, if you build your cardiovascular system the right way, if you build your aerobic engine properly, over time, you can run at that same three four effort level.
Oh, this feels pretty easy. But now your pace is a 9:30 or a 9:00 minute pace because you’ve improved how your body is fueling itself and how your body is using oxygen and and how much blood volume you’re pumping out there. Okay, so you actually get faster at the same effort level, which is amazing.
Another reason why we want to improve our cardiovascular system, or our aerobic engine is that it actually increases the number of mitochondria in your body. So this is the powerhouse of your cells. And you can actually increase the size and strength of your mitochondria as well. So this right here is going to give you an edge and this is one of the reasons why you run easier and you can run faster at the same effort level.
You also get denser capillaries and you can deliver more oxygenated blood with more capillaries working in your bloodstream. So your working muscles will actually get more oxygen, which makes running easier. Another kind of benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to build mental toughness. So as you improve your cardiovascular system, you start to feel more confident. So you can go out there and run three miles and it feels tough.
But as you, you know, increase your running volume as you increase your distance as you increase your aerobic capacity and your aerobic performance, then running becomes easier and becomes more confident you can run 8, 10, 12 miles and and feel like well, yeah, I can do this. And it makes you more mentally tough because it pushes you, enables you to push yourself a little bit harder, enables you to shoot for higher and higher goals. And next thing you know you’re running a half marathon or you’re running a marathon, you’re starting to train for an ultra marathon.
Another benefit of improving your aerobic engine is that it helps to improve muscular strength, you know, you’re delivering more oxygen to muscles, you’re able to run longer, you build more muscular strength, you improve your running economy, you improve your running efficiency, you become more energy efficient, you know, you’re using the same kind of you have the same inputs, but your output is much more efficient. And then you get faster, you know, you’ll be able to perform better at races.
So all these reasons are why we work hard to improve our aerobic engine, okay. So do not skip this, we absolutely want to make sure that before you begin your training, or the first phases of your training for any kind of endurance events should be to really build a strong aerobic base. Now some people like to do this in the offseason, they like to spend, you know, four to six weeks building that aerobic engine, even up to 12 weeks, you know, really building a strong aerobic engine before they get into their training cycle.
But you can absolutely do this at the beginning of a half or full marathon training cycle. So how do we do this? How do you start building your aerobic engine? What are the keys to improving your aerobic fitness and improving your cardiovascular efficiency?
So the first tip I’m going to give you here to improve your aerobic engine would be to increase your running volume. Right? The simple fact of running more will help you to increase your aerobic capacity, increase your running efficiency, just running more and increasing your volume helps to improve your running form and helps to increase your cardiovascular system.
You build stronger muscles. Running becomes easier, just by running more. But the caveat with this is you don’t do too much too soon. This is one of the biggest rookie mistakes that new runners make is increasing their volume too much too soon. So the standard sort of rule of thumb has always been to increase by no more than around 10% a week in your weekly volume.
So that means if you’re starting out and you’re running about 10 miles a week, you know, for the first few weeks, I would only increase that by like a mile each week. So maybe week one you’re at 10 miles and then you build up to 11, 12, 13. Maybe you can jump up to 14.5 or 15, 16, 18, 20. But you don’t really want to increase volume too quickly.
So people get excited when they start running and they’re like oh running is amazing. I feel so great doing this and your muscles might be ready to take on the miles but your connective tissues, your tendons and ligaments are not quite ready for that yet. And a lot of the running injuries that people experience are tendinitis issues or strained, you know ligaments or tendons. They tend to be more connective tissue issues than they do with muscular issues.
It’s pretty rare to strain the muscle from running in the beginning especially. It’s more common to have these connective tissue issues so definitely be careful and don’t do too. Too much too soon try to keep it around that 10% increase in weekly volume, then, you know, if you’re a more experienced runner, you can increase that from 10 to maybe 15 or 20% per week. The idea is that you have to do what feels right for you. And don’t overdo it. That is the key here. Less is more in this case, right. So just slowly build your volume, but definitely increasing your volume is going to be one of the best ways to improve your aerobic engine.
Another way of doing this is to run slower. So when I talk about running slower, there’s different ways we can look at this. So running slower means you’re running in, maybe you’re running in a zone one or two. From a heart rate standpoint, maybe you’re someone who likes to just use RPE, rate of perceived exertion, the scale of 1 to 10. And you might like to stay in the one to four range.
That would be nice, easy running, maybe you’d like to just run at a conversational pace, you’d like to just, you know, go by if you can carry on a conversation or not. The idea here is that you need to slow down, and you need to do a lot of running slower. When you do a lot of running slower, you increase your distance, but if you keep the intensity levels very low, you are at lower risk of injury. And you put less stress on your systems, you put less stress on your bones and muscles and those connective tissues like I talked about.
So slow running is one of the best ways to build your aerobic engine, it’s one of the most effective ways to build your aerobic engine, you’re not going to be able to get more aerobically fit by just cranking out every workout, you can’t go out there and do every workout hard or medium hard, you know that you have to spend a lot of time running easy and rolling slow.
So something I noticed here, so I took about three months off of running. And since August, so August, September, October, getting into November, I’ve been running very consistently since the middle of November in my room or maybe like Thanksgiving, let’s just say. And I’m noticing that I’m paying very close attention to my effort level and my heart rate.
And I’m noticing that I’m staying very consistent from an energy standpoint, very easy running most of my runs, I would say 90% of my runs right now or at a very easy conversational pace, probably that one to two zones, and the heart rate zones, and maybe three to four on the RPE scale, or two to four somewhere in there and that our RPE scale.
But one thing that’s interesting here is I noticed that my effort level is staying the same, my heart rate is staying the same, but my pace is increasing. So I’m getting faster, at the same effort level. So this is a sign that I’m building a strong aerobic engine. And this is what I want for you too. You should notice that over time, doing a lot of running 90% 80% of your runs at this slower pace, just slowing things down, will help you to increase your aerobic engine and help you to get faster.
So now as I get to the place where I’m you know, going to get into marathon training here, and I’m training for an ultra marathon event here in May, I will continue doing a lot of this slow, easy running and see my pace continually increase, you know, to a certain degree here, okay? The other way that you can really increase your aerobic engine is by running faster.
And I know that sounds a little bit counterintuitive here. But doing higher intensity, like short, higher intensity workouts is another amazing way of building that aerobic engine, right? So why these work is that these workouts put a very high amount of stress on the cardiovascular system, very high amount of stress for very short intervals. This elicits an adaptive response where your system improves.
Think about it, like you know building muscle, like if you lift heavy weights, and you do you know six to eight reps of a very heavy weight. And you get to the point where you just cannot lift one more rep of that weight.
And then you stop and so that’s a short interval but very intense. Your muscle is going to have been put under a high amount of stress for a very short amount of time. That muscle is going to have an adaptive response. It’s going to get stronger. It’s going to grow. You’re gonna see some growth rather than that muscle, and the next time, you’ll be able to lift a heavier weight.
The exact same response happens in our cardiovascular system. So we put high stress for a very short amount of time on that cardiovascular system that improves, this isn’t there’s an adaptive response, your body’s like, hey, we need to, you know, change the way we’re doing things here, we need to increase the amount of blood we’re pumping out per heartbeat. So increase our blood volume, you know, we need to deliver more oxygen working muscles.
And this is another very effective way of improving that aerobic engine. And especially when you combine it with your longer slower runs, right, your very easy lower stress run. So very low stress, long runs, and then very high stress, short runs. So running fast and hard for short intervals, like this could be like, one to three minutes, a very hard running 4-10 minutes of moderate intensity running maybe 12-30 minutes.
For tempo type workouts, these are just examples of different intensity levels that you can add in there. But you know, anything short is one to 30 minutes, maybe. And it just kind of depends on the event that you’re training for. But high stress for short intervals, and low stress for the long runs equals a badass aerobic engine, right there. Okay?
So those two combined are a really, really good way of improving your cardiovascular fitness. So the slower runs focus on 80-90% of your runs at that slow pace, and then higher intensity, shorter workouts, you know, 10-20%, depending on where you are in your training cycle, when we’re talking about building your aerobic base here, I would I would focus on more of a 90/10 breakdown there, okay.
And then probably the most common method people think of when they want to improve their aerobic fitness would be the long run, like improve the length of your long run. And when I say long run, it depends on what you’re training for, again, so this could be 30 minutes, if you’re training for your first 5k, that could be a long run for you, or six hours, if you’re trading for for a 50 miler, you know, so, long run is very subjective. So it just kind of depends on what you’re training for.
Most of us, if we’re training for a marathon, let’s say, most people are going to be doing a long run anywhere from an hour to three and a half hours, something like that, okay. So when we’re talking about in increasing the distance of your long run, the effort level has to be low. So we’re talking about, you know, heart rate zones wanting to wonder for on the RPE scale, this is a conversational pace, this is a easy, I could run all day at this pace.
Okay, this is gonna be one of the most powerful ways of improving your cardiovascular system. So we’re, we’re not just doing one of these things. By the way, we’re not just picking one of these things and saying, like, Oh, I’m just going to improve my long run, I’m just gonna increase the distance on my lawn, or I’m just going to do some HIIT workouts or I’m just going to run slower.
No, you got to do a mile, you got to increase your running volume, you got to run slower, you got to run faster for shorter distances, and you got to increase the distance of that long run, you got to do all these things. But when you do and you combine them all, you’re going to find that your aerobic engine is pretty badass. Okay.
And then the last thing I’ll add to this list is really just getting better at burning fat. You need fuel for running. And when you’re especially running slower and running at these lower intensities, the preferred source of fuel your body’s going to want to use as fat, the better you can get at burning fat, the easier running is going to feel for you.
Listen, we as human beings, we’re naturally good fat burning machines, we’ve just gotten very far away from that state. You know, we’ve been eating a diet that forces us to use glucose as our main fuel source. And granted, it is a very easily available and very quick burning source of fuel especially for running but you run out of that fast and your body isn’t using a whole lot of glucose. When you’re running at these lower intensities fat is going to be the main fuel source, so you got to get good at burning fat.
I suggest you get fat adapted stop using sugar and carbs as fuel. stop relying on glucose as a fuel source. Start training your body to tap into your own stored body fat as a source of fuel for running run in the fasted state. That means you don’t need to fuel up before you run. Maybe for a long long run or a high intensity run, yes. But for the most part, you know, you don’t really need to feel up before the runs, train your body to get good at burning fat.
And this isn’t about like zero carbs or anything like that, this is just about using the right kinds of carbs and using carbs properly. Keeping the carbs pretty low, though, okay, so get better at burning fat. Listen, we’re great at storing fat, right? We’re really good at storing fat, we’re just not good at tapping into our own body fat for fuel. And if you’re somebody who has, you know, 10-20 pounds to lose, you’ve got way more than enough body fat to get you out there and run for many, many, many miles for days, days.
I’m pretty low in the body fat percentage, and I’ve got hundreds of 1000s of calories of body fat on my body right now that I could use, I could literally run for, you know, weeks at a time or something like that. So get better at burning that fat. And you’ll find that your aerobic capacity, it gets better too. And just running just becomes so much easier. Okay.
So remember, we want to build our aerobic engine, we want to, you know, we only want to be delivering more oxygen to working muscles. The way we do this, as we increase our running volume, we run more just more often, we want to run slower, keep it in those zones wanting to keep it in the fat burning zone, right? You know, RPE should be, you know, one to four, run faster, do some HIIT workouts, do some high intensity, but short workouts run longer, like increase the distance of your long run, and then get better at burning fat.
And when you do these things, and you combine all these things, you’re going to be well on your way to being a fit faster, more efficient runner, running is going to become easier for you, you’re going to be able to get faster, and your spring marathon or spring race, whatever it is that you’re training for, will be a huge success for you. Cool. Awesome. That’s all I got for you today. Love you all, keep on Running Lean and I will talk to you soon.
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If you’re anything like most runners, you have a very hard time taking time off. Rest days can feel like torture, you feel like you’re losing fitness, and you are convinced that your running is …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Sports Nutritionist, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve dedicated my life to helping runners just like you properly fuel your body and your mind. So you can get leaner, get stronger, run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode 107 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m talking about prioritizing rest and recovery. If you are anything like most runners, then you probably have a pretty hard time taking time off right?
Rest days can feel like torture, you feel like you’re gonna lose your fitness and you’re convinced that your running is going to suffer, right? But the reality is most runners do not prioritize rest and recovery properly. So most runners are not getting the most out there training. You cannot become that lean badass runner you want to be if you never take the time to rest and recover properly. That’s just incredibly important. I cannot stress this enough.
That’s why I’ve dedicated this whole podcast episode to this topic, rest and recovery has to be part of your training plan. Okay, so today I’m going to just share the importance of prioritizing rest and recovery. I’m going to talk about how to do it because I want you to be able to show up at the start of your race in peak fitness and you cannot do it if you’re not taking rest days properly.
Okay. But first, if you like this podcast, please come check us out on Facebook, you can join the Running Lean Community. It’s a group of like-minded runners that support encourage and motivate one another. You can ask questions you can get answers. Get the kind of like, the camaraderie that you get from your running pals, you know, and I do some weekly coaching and training in the group. And we just have a lot of fun. It’s one of the most positive communities that I’ve experienced on Facebook. And a lot of people tell me that too. That’s not just my opinion. This is what I hear from other people.
And the Facebook group is full of people that are just like you people that are tired of struggling and ready to become more I talk about this all the time, we are people that are becoming more. If you’re tired of struggling or if you’re tired of feeling sluggish all the time. If you’re tired of gaining and losing the same 10-20 pounds over and over again. If you’ve ever been there, it’s not a fun place to be. I’ve been there.
If you’re done with all the like fad diets and meal replacement shakes. If you’re ready to end all this struggle with you know not feeling how you know you should feel, then I want to encourage you to take action for yourself. Nothing changes if nothing changes, right. So I want to encourage you to get into action starting now. I want you to start this new year, by learning how to create the good habits you need to make eating healthy a permanent part of your life.
Listen, we’re not interested in short-term results here. We’re focused on the long game. I want to help you make being healthy, just a part of who you are from now on out. And the easiest way to get there is to have someone there guiding you every step of the way, helping you overcome the things that you always struggle with. Like giving into cravings on the weekends like you do find all week long, and then the weekend comes along, you just blow it right, you keep reverting back to these old patterns of behavior. Having a coach means that you have someone in your corner, someone supporting you, someone who’s got your back, someone who’s holding you accountable to do the things you need to do to become the healthiest, most badass version of yourself.
I want you to make this year count. I want this year to be the year that you finally take control of your health and fitness for good. I want you to make this the year that you finally become the lean, strong, badass runner that you’ve always wanted to be. Everything I do here on the podcast and in the Facebook group I do with my group program with my one on one coaching clients is to help you to become the most amazing, most better version of yourself yet. And I put my heart and soul into doing this.
I put my heart and soul into helping you become your best self. Why? Because I want to be an example of what’s possible and I will inspire you to do the same thing and so on and so on. I’m on a mission to create a ripple effect of health and positivity in this world. But it requires action change requires action. So I want to encourage you to take action now. And make this the year that you make some permanent changes for yourself and become that badass runner that badass version of yourself that you know, you can be.
You can apply for coaching over at runningleanpodcast.com/apply. Let’s do this. Let’s make this your year. Cool.
Okay, let’s get into this topic of prioritizing rest and recovery. And let me tell you a little bit about why I’m thinking about this so much right now, you’ve probably heard me talk about this already, I’ve been kind of talking about this on the last couple of episodes, that I’ve been sort of forced to rest, right. I’ve been forced to take some time off from running from lifting weights from really doing any kind of strenuous activity at all.
So six weeks ago, I had rotator cuff surgery to repair three torn muscles in my rotator cuff. This is a pretty brutal recovery from this surgery. It is a long process is like three or four months of really not being able to do a whole lot. You know, I mean, I’m in physical therapy, I’m starting to get more active and starting to move things around a bit. But it’s still, you know, I’m still in a pretty good amount of pain. And there’s still a very limited range of motion. I’m only about halfway through this recovery process, right. And then, and this is something I really haven’t talked about before.
Back in September, of this past year, I developed a hernia and probably developed that from, you know, some really heavy weight lifting. Maybe I did something wrong. I’m not really sure exactly how I did it. It’s sort of just kind of appeared one day. And I was like, well, that’s weird what’s going on there when saw the doctor.
And yeah, so I had an inguinal hernia that needed to get repaired. And because of COVID, and because of the way the hospitals have been jammed up and stuff like that, I had to wait. I had to wait. And I had to push that surgery off until just a week ago. So I had to finish up my marathon training and run a marathon with a hernia, this is not a good situation to be in. I’m just going to tell you right now.
I ended up having this like neoprene belt that I wore under my clothes to kind of hold things so that I could actually run. But I’m telling you right now having like this shoulder pain, and then having a hernia at the same time made this whole marathon experience that much tougher and more challenging for me, but I got through it, okay. And I finally had the hernia surgery a week ago. And so within five weeks, I’ve had two pretty major surgeries.
Alright. So I started to make some progress, I started to get back to the gym, up until you know, had hernia surgery. So now I’ve got to like scale everything back. Again, I can’t lift anything more than 20 pounds, I can’t do any strenuous activity for six weeks, which is kind of fine. It’s kind of just goes along with what I’m doing with my rotator cuff recovery period here.
So long story short here, I’ve experienced a lot of downtime, right? I’ve just been like having to take time off. And it’s gonna be a while for me until I get back to where I want to be and the level of activity and doing all the things that I want to do again. But this really got me thinking about how hard it is for runners, especially to take time off.
It’s really hard to just give yourself a rest especially when you’re in training mode, especially when you’re in the thick of your marathon training, let’s say prioritize prioritizing rest and recovery days is something that runners just they don’t do well, right runners don’t like to rest they’d rather just go go go go go, go, go. And when you can’t just go go go all the time it can be very frustrating. Right?
You feel bad when you can’t run or you can’t do a workout. And so most runners just don’t do it. They don’t make rest and recovery days a priority. It’s like the last thing they want to do, right? So most runners just would rather do anything than take a rest day. Right? It’s so hard like mentally, physically. Emotionally.
It’s hard to tell yourself that this is an important part of your training plan. So most people just don’t include this kind of rest and recovery time as part of their training program. Okay. So why wouldn’t we do this though? Like, why? Why aren’t we making rest and sleep and recovery time a priority?
And I think it goes back to like this mindset of like, if you’re not doing something active, if you’re not like moving and pushing, and just grind in and out all the time, that you’re going to lose fitness, that you’re not going to perform as well, on race day, that you’re going to be taking steps backward.
And I have to say that this is absolutely not true. In fact, if anything, the opposite is true. If you want to perform well on race day, if you want to maximize your training program, whatever it is, you’re training for, whether it’s a 5k, half marathon, marathon, whatever, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not prioritizing rest and recovery days. All right, you are doing yourself a disservice. And you’re actually going to perform worse than if you are making rest and recovery part of your training program and a priority. Okay.
So here, I just want to kind of list out some of the problems that happen when you don’t prioritize rest and recovery when you don’t take the time off that you need. In order to give your body a chance to kind of heal and repair and recover from your hard workouts right? Not prioritizing rest and recovery days will have a bunch of negative impacts on your running performance, and basically your overall health and fitness.
Okay, so here are some of the things that we need to be careful of, right. First of all, running is catabolic, it breaks you down, if you’re just running all the time, you are just constantly breaking yourself down. So when you run, especially when you do like a hard workout, there are micro microscopic muscle tears that happen in your, in your muscles, in your legs, in your arms, in your glutes, and it’s very much like weight training.
You know when you lift heavy weights, you get these microscopic tears in your muscles. And then you give yourself a chance to rest and recover and your body repairs and get stronger. Right, you don’t gain muscle at the gym, you gain muscle on your rest days you gain muscle while you’re sleeping and recovering. And it’s the same thing with running Okay.
Without the rest and recovery days, your body will not heal properly, okay, you’re not going to adapt your body to the training load that you’re putting yourself under. Right, so this goes to the overload principle which I’ve just kind of talking about here, which is you overload a muscle. So you put a strain on a muscle to the point where you get to failure on a muscle and you overload that muscle.
You cannot lift the weight you’re trying to lift that creates an adaptive response in your body and your muscle grows stronger and bigger in response to that overload. The same thing happens with your other systems in your body like your cardiovascular system okay. You overload the cardiovascular system by doing something like a sprint workout, right you go out there and crush a hard you know hit training or interval workout you know, hill repeats or you know, sprints or whatever, and your cardiovascular system in response will will improve it will get stronger, right? It’ll become more efficient.
But this does not happen while you’re doing it. It only happens on the rest and recovery days. It happens when you are taking the time off when you are inactive. So, rest and recovery are required for this overload principle for this adaptive training principle to actually take place okay?
So if you’re not giving yourself the time off that you need, you’re just going to be constantly in that breaking down mode, right, you’re just breaking yourself down. And you’re never really giving yourself a chance to repair and adapt and get stronger. Okay. So that’s one of the biggest reasons why you have to prioritize rest and recovery.
The third thing to think about is this: when you are going hard all the time, you are putting your body under a lot of stress. And chronic stress will keep your cortisol levels very high, all the time. Cortisol is a stress hormone. And when cortisol is high, you actually get this like increase of blood sugar, you get this insulin response because of the cortisol. And you kind of keep your body in this fight or flight mode, you keep your body in this fat storage mode, you keep your body in this place where it makes it very hard to burn fat. It makes it very hard to become fat-adapted, which makes it very hard to get the most out of your training. Because you’re just overstressing your body, you’re chronically stressed out.
Chronic stress is not a good thing, right? I think we can all agree on this, right? And this idea of running hard or medium hard all the time is going to keep your body in that chronically stressed state. Okay, so too much stress on your body, constant stress on your body is going to have a definite negative impact on all the good things you’re trying to do for yourself here. Okay?
What we’re really talking about here is overtraining. Overtraining means you’re just not giving yourself the rest and recovery time that you need. Okay. Overtraining can lead to not just chronic stress, not just like breaking yourself down. But also you can be chronically fatigued. So you can just feel tired all the time. And if you’ve ever experienced this, believe me, I have.
I have done some training cycles where I was running like six days a week. And on those off, off days, quote, unquote, off days, I was like doing something else really active. And I was never getting a good night’s sleep, I was never giving my body a chance to recover. And I was like, I would get sick, I would be tired all the time. couldn’t keep my eyes open, like I was crashing and burning every afternoon like just, this is not a good place to be in right, this is not good for your, for your overall health and fitness much, much less for your training program.
If you’re training for an ultra marathon or you’re training for a marathon or half marathon or whatever it is, you cannot perform your best if you’re chronically fatigued if you’re just tired all the time. And sleep is another component of this, which I’m not going to get into today.
But I just want you to know that getting a good night’s sleep is a key component of rest and recovery. I want to do a whole other episode just on the importance of sleep because there are so many studies that have been done. And so much evidence out there that says that first of all, we are chronically under, we’re not getting enough sleep like we are a nation of people who are chronic under sleepers like we’re not getting enough sleep.
We need something like 7-9 hours of sleep a night and if you’re training hard, especially at the peak of your training cycle, you need more you might need 9 or 10 hours of sleep. But most people a lot of runners I talk to most will say they don’t get enough sleep and most will say they’re getting somewhere between like 5, 6, 7 hours of sleep which I don’t think is enough.
But if you’re experiencing this chronic fatigue, if you’re experiencing being chronically stressed out sleep could be a big part of this, okay? Another thing is that when you are chronically overtraining when you’re not getting enough rest and recovery, your running, performance will suffer. You will see your workouts really start to suffer, okay. Your workouts are going to start to feel harder than they are. So that rate of perceived exertion the RPE you know, when you go out there and run and you’re like this feels pretty easy. Or whoa, this workout feels really hard for the same effort.
Those workouts are gonna feel much harder if you’re not prioritizing rest and recovery properly. So just know that if your workouts if you’re out there running, you’re like, ‘I don’t know why running feels so hard right now’, it could be that you’re just not getting enough rest. It could be that you’re just in that chronic cardio chronically stressed out, chronically overtrained state. All right, like prioritize rest and recovery days here.
Another thing is that not only will your workouts feel harder, but your endurance starts to tank like you won’t be able to run as long, you won’t be able to go as far. And it’s gonna be, it’s gonna really create this negative impact on your endurance.
So if you’re somebody who’s out there trying to run, you know, you’re training for a marathon and you’re trying to get, you know, you got your 18-20 mile runs coming up, and you just feel like you just can’t do it, you’ve got no gas in the tank. It could be that you’re just not taking the time off that you need, you know, your endurance will suffer the more overtrained that you are.
And it sounds so counterintuitive, doesn’t it? It’s like, ‘Well, shouldn’t you just keep going longer and longer and harder and harder?’ And the answer is no, you have to like, push hard, and then you have to back off. You have to go longer, and then you have to go, you know, shorter. You have to run longer distances, and then you have to back it off, you have to have hard days, you have to have super easy days, and you have to have rest days. Right.
Another key aspect of this that most people don’t really realize is that chronically overtraining and not getting enough rest and recovery can have a negative impact on your mental state. Your mindset is so important. And I talk about this all the time mindset is like 80% of the equation.
If you’re trying to lose weight, if you’re trying to change habits, if you’re trying to like create a better relationship with food, if you’re trying to improve your running, if you want to run your first marathon or PR – 80% of your results are going to be because you have the right mindset. 20% is going to be based on what you’re doing what you know, what you don’t know, things like that.
But 80% of this is mindset. And if your mindset is negatively impacted, because you’re overtraining, you’re not going to be as clear headed, you’re not going to be able to focus as much, your head’s not going to be in the game.
You know, you’re gonna be moody, you know, you’re not in a good mood, you’re like a grumpy person. Are you a grumpy person? Maybe you’re overtraining. And all this can lead to this dip in motivation to you can really start to feel like, ‘Oh, I just don’t want to run, I don’t feel like it. I’m in a bad mood. I can’t think clearly.’ And then doubt starts to creep in. And just don’t feel like running and you just like, want to give it up, you just want to like just lay on the couch watching Netflix, right.
And all of this can just be a result of not giving yourself the rest that you need. Okay. And then obviously, all of this can affect your race day performance. If you’re somebody that’s out there training for a race, and you know, you’ve got a marathon coming up. And you’ve been training for, you know, six months, or even if it’s just like three or four months of a training program, you’re putting a lot of effort, you’re putting a lot of energy, you’re putting your heart and soul into training for this race, and everything needs to be perfect on race day, right?
Everything needs to be in perfect working order. And overtraining can just have you showing up on race day, and ready for like disappointment, feeling like crap, poor performance. You know, you’re gonna feel like you’ve wasted all this time training when really all you did was you just overtrained, right? You just overtrain, you didn’t give yourself the rest and recovery that you needed so that you could show up on race day properly.
I was just talking to somebody last night about tapering, right. So you know, somebody who’s one of my clients, you know, they’ve got a marathon coming up this weekend, and they’re in this taper mode, and they’re just like, Ah, it’s driving me crazy. I hate tapering. I just want to be active, I want to be moving.
But the important thing to understand, here’s that tapering is there for a reason, right? You have to show up on race day fully rested and recovered and ready to go. If you’re just like going hard, hard, hard, all the way up to race day. You are not optimizing your body in your mind for that race. You’re going to be you’re going to show up overtrained and you’re going to show up tired and you’re going to show up stressed out and you’re not going to have a good day out there. Okay.
When you start making rest and recovery days a priority. You give your body a chance to rebuild, to repair. And to recover from all those hard workouts, we want to do the hard workouts, you want to be able to go hard on your hard days and make your easy days super easy, right?
When you are properly rested, and you can recover, and you’re repairing from these hard workouts, I’m going to tell you something, those hard days, you’re actually going to be able to go harder, you’re going to be able to run faster, you’re going to be able to run harder, you’re going to be able to run longer, which means that if you do it the right way, you should improve your fitness exponentially.
Because you’re giving your body a chance to adapt to your training load. Right, you’re improving the systems, you’re improving your cardiovascular system, you’re improving your your body’s ability to oxygenate your muscles, you’re improving your ability to get stronger, like you’re building stronger muscles, you have to give your body a chance to adapt. And that’s what happens during the rest recovery phase, okay.
You’ll be able to increase the intensity and the duration of your workout. So you can go longer without feeling fatigued. But it requires rest and your workouts will actually feel easier. So not only will you be able to go harder and things like that, but you know, your rate of perceived exertion actually goes down.
So that same run that you did when you were chronically stressed out, that same workout is gonna feel so much easier because you’re properly rested. And then there’s all these positive mental benefits to like you’re you feel more clear headed, you’re more focused, you can concentrate, you have improved cognition, you’re going to feel happier, you’re not going to be all moody and grumpy and negative, you’re going to be more positive.
And this goes a long, long way to your running performance, you know, you’re going to wake up feeling motivated, ready to go get out there and get at it. And then, you know, obviously showing up on race day, you’re going to be giving your body everything that it needs, you’re going to be setting yourself up for success. You’ve given your body the exact formula that it needs for adaptation, go hard, rest and recover, go hard rest and recover.
So that on race day, you show up at that starting line and you’re just firing on all cylinders, you’ll be operating at peak performance, you’ll be stronger, faster, and ready to go. That’s what we want. That’s what we want out of our training plans. Okay.
So rest recovery means just that just means like, you gotta like, take some time off, okay? The ideal way to do this is to just take a day off, take a day or two off every week. This is ideal. And I know that for a lot of people, they’re like, ‘I just need to do something.’ It’s like, okay, fine. You can have active recovery days, but they have to be a very minimal activity, like taking a walk.
And a lot of people are like, ‘I walk my dogs every day. I’ll go walk the dogs or I’ll go for a bike ride with the kids, you know, we’re just like on the bike’s just like really easy. Or maybe I’m going to do some stretching and foam rolling, or some gentle yoga.’
Those kinds of things are fine as recovery days, you know, those kind of active recovery days, but there’s nothing wrong with just taking a day off, you’re not gonna lose fitness if you do nothing for a day or two every week, right?
The idea is that you’re feeling fresh. The idea is that you’re repairing and you’re adapting and you’re becoming stronger so that you can go harder at your next workout. So I want you to start prioritizing rest and recovery days, put them on your training schedule. Schedule, rest and recovery days into your weekly training regimen. Right.
And rest days are not just for the early stages of your training cycle. In fact, it’s even more important that the harder you’re working out, the more intense and the longer duration of your training, the more important rest days become. Right as you get closer to your race, your intensity and your duration of running are going to increase right?
So those are the times when you need to prioritize rest days even more. And the cycle looks like this. It’s like you go harder, you rest, adapt, you get stronger, you go hard, you rest and adapt, and you get stronger, and then just kind of repeats throughout your training program.
And then there are other times where you might consider taking rest days, or you might be forced to take rest days, and I’m going to encourage you to just like, lean into this a little bit. It’s kind of like what I’m doing right now, like, I had surgery. And it’s gonna be, it’s not just a day or two, for me, this is like weeks and months of time off, and I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that.
For me, I know I am losing some fitness, I’ve lost some weight, I’m losing some muscle during this process, I’ll get it all back, and it’ll come back. Fast, it’ll come back, you know faster than it went off. I’m going to take the time and make this work, I’m going to become the strongest, most badass version of myself. This year, this is my goal, right?
So I’ve got to give myself a chance to recover. This is some pretty brutal stuff I’ve gone through here, I’m going to give myself a chance to recover. If you get sick, a lot of people are sick with COVID and stuff, you know, you need to take some time off, just embrace it and really give your body a chance to recover.
Because if you’re sick, and you’re like, I’m just gonna keep pushing through this, I’m going to keep pushing through this, you’re probably going to prolong the time it takes you to recover, I’m going to want to do that right. Or maybe you have an injury that you need to take a little bit of time off from, take the time off, it’s gonna be okay. And then like, take time off after a race, obviously, you know, anytime you have like a super intense workout or race, you got to take some time off from that, okay?
If you’re the kind of person who lays it all out there on race day, then you have got to take some time off. After that, prioritize rest and recovery, put it into your training schedule. And I promise you, you’re going to feel better your runnings going to improve, you’re going to be able to go harder and longer and faster. And you’re just going to become the healthiest version of yourself.
Okay, so make sure you’re making rest and recovery days a priority. All right. Cool. Well, I hope you guys got something out of this today. Love you all. Keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
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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