Adaption to Training
So let's start with what is training?
The basic idea is that you are currently in some basic level of fitness (or lack of fitness). You have some goal to reach, For example, you want to lose weight, or you want to be able to run a mile without walking, or running out of breath. Maybe you want to run a 5K or a half marathon some day. Your current fitness level is unsatisfactory and you want to train so that your future fitness level will enable you to reach your goal.
If you want to run a mile without walking or breathing heavy, you know you have to do a bit of running on a consistent basis so that in say, 12 weeks, your fitness level improves so that you are able to run that mile without walking or breathing heavy. So how do I get from point A (right now) to point B (in twelve weeks). And there are great training plans that will help you do that. For a very basic runner starting out, things like Jeff Galloway's run/walk/run method or a C25K plan will help you get there. But can you break that plan down and explain in basic terms how that plan was created so that I can apply that to say training for a half marathon? That is what this blog post will attempt to help you with.
So training is about two very simple things. Create a stimulus in the area you want to improve upon in some sort of way so that you can recover and your body reaches a slightly new level of fitness. Repeat over and over again in a span of say 12 weeks, so that by the end, your body has improved to the new level of fitness that you are happier with.
When you run for the first time, you are forcing your body to do something it may never have done before or haven't done in a very long time. Very quickly your body feels worse. You are huffing and puffing, you feel weak and maybe sore, and your mind feels very defeated, and you feel very awkward while doing it. In other words, you endured something very short that is very uncomfortable to you. This is very natural in the beginning of a training program. Nothing is wrong with you.
A lot of people go out in the beginning thinking that their first run should feel great and I should reach that runner's high. And if I don't, then I am either doing something wrong or maybe I wasn't meant to be a runner.
But you created a stimulus in your body. Give your body a chance to recover with the proper rest and nutrition, then you are able to perform that activity again. You only feel uncomfortable for a very short period. Repeat the process enough times and you will be more proficient at that activity. We call this adaption to the stimulus and the end result hopefully is improved fitness over time.
The thing you have to realize when creating a stimulus... Whether you are running, swimming, lifting weights, playing a game of basketball... performing any physical activity will temporarily make you weaker at the moment (this is an acute response to training). You don't become a better runner from running. You become a better runner from after you recovered from running. You actually don't get stronger from lifting weights. You get stronger after you recovered from lifting weights. Keep lifting weights without the proper recovery (rest and nutrition) and you begin to get chronically weaker to the point of over training and you will find yourself injured from doing the very thing you thought was supposed to make you better. It's all a stair step process of 1 small step backwards and 2 small steps forward. Running is a step backwards, resting and getting good nutrition in you is the 2 steps forward. The end result is a chronic response to training.
Doing nothing and your body will slowly make repeated steps backwards and make you weaker or less fit over time. We call this atrophy. The goal is hypertrophy, which is the goal to fitness training.
The 4 Training Focus Areas
When you are training to be a better runner, you are training 4 very basic focus areas at the same time.
- Physical
- Cardiovascular
- Mental and Neurological
- Chemical or Hormonal
Physical: When we talk about the physical focus area, we are talking about making the muscles, and your bones, and your tendons & ligaments all stronger. This is your structural foundation. You run or even walk for a long time, and your muscles will feel very sore as a result of creating microscopic tears in the muscles. Again, this is an acute reaction to the physical stimulus of running or walking. When you run, your feet come in contact to the ground causing ground force reactions which do acute damage to your bones. I think you get the picture.
Cardiovascular: We call running an aerobic activity. This means that we depend upon oxygen to mix with a fuel to create energy that will allow our muscles to contract over and over again. The ability to breath this oxygen through our lungs so that the oxygen absorbs into our blood stream so that our heart pumps the blood to the muscles cells that require this oxygen is all about cardiovascular fitness. Aerobic activity also causes various waste products such as carbon dioxide that needs to go from the muscle cell, back out through our blood and then breathed out. Another reaction to aerobic activity is the increased amounts of lactate and hydrogen ions in our muscles and blood that can cause unwanted acute fatigue. Cardiovascular improvements can create adaptions in lactate clearance.
Mental: While mind over matter plays an important role to training, this focus area is actually much more in depth. We are also talking about the various signals that go to and from the brain to all areas in the body. In order to contract your leg muscle to lift it off the ground, it starts with a signal in your brain, through your nervous system and then to your muscle fibers telling it to contract. You can make adaptations over time to make this pathway more efficient. Your various body organs also send signals to your brain so that your body can adapt to changes in the environment. For example, as your exercise, you are creating body heat. Various sensors in your body sends signals to the brain to alert the brain that your body is beginning to overheat. Your brain reacts by sending signals to the sweat glands to release warm water from the body to the surface of the skin in order to cool the body down.
Chemical: In addition, your body relies on chemical reactions in the body. Chemicals like hormones which have a very specific purpose such as glucagon which tells your body to release stored fat or carbohydrates into the blood stream because exercise activity is creating a higher demand for energy. All of this also requires adaptions over time.
Increasing Stimulus
Next I wanted to touch briefly on are the 3 ways to create a bigger stimulus. Lets take a generic run walk training method to improve your running fitness. You run for 10 seconds, get out breath, walk for a minute to catch your breath, then start running again for another 10 seconds. Let's say you repeat these steps over and over again for 30 minutes. You end the workout exhausted. But 2 days later you do it again. After the 30 minutes, again you feel exhausted. Do it again 2 days later and after 30 minutes you feel exhausted but not as bad. That's week one. Repeat this week again and you begin to feel better about what you are doing because you seem to feel some improvements. You notice that after 10 seconds of running, you don't feel so out of breath. And after doing that for 30 minutes, you still feel tired, but not as exhausted as your first week. You have begun the adaption process to the training. After 2 weeks you feel really good. If you keep this up over and over for many weeks, you eventually find out another important principal to training. You reach a diminished return on your investment to training. In other words, your body has reached a level of new fitness so that there is no longer any room for improvement to that particular stimulus. Running for 10 seconds no longer makes you feel out of breath, You no longer get exhausted from the 30 minute workout. You have adapted but you also plateaued. In order to continue to make improvements you need to increase the stimulus.
The 4 characteristics to training that Dr. Jack Daniels speaks about in the video above to increase the stimulus (or stress) is by 1) increasing intensity (run faster for those 10 seconds), 2) increase the duration (run 20 seconds at the same pace), or 3) decrease the rest (run 10 seconds at that pace but only walk for 45 seconds instead of the minute). You can also increase the duration by performing this workout for 40 minutes instead of the 30 minutes. You can also increase the 4) frequency by adding another day to the week (do this 4x a week instead of 3x a week). You can increase the overall stimulus in your training by focusing on 1, 2, 3, or all 4 of these characteristics at the same time.
Creating a bigger stimulus becomes more important when you can run a mile straight without stopping. From here, we begin to ask, how many miles a week should I run? I currently run 10 miles a week but how do I get to 15 miles a week, or 20 miles a week? Or how do I long term get to 45 miles a week? This is a very important principal for adding mileage and there is a safe way to do it and an unsafe way to do it that can lead to injury. There are many different methods that can be prescribed and some may create big benefits for you, but to others can lead to over training.
Another question comes to mind is, well I am now able to run 3 miles non stop. But I want to be able to run those 3 miles faster. Do I just keep training to run those 3 miles but run them faster? Or do I run farther because I know running farther can also make me faster at those 3 miles? It depends.
Identifying Weaknesses
This brings us up to one more aspect to training. When you train, you first need a goal. Say finish a 5K race in 35 minutes. Right now I can only race it in 40 minutes with some walking involved. Well a couple strategy changes can make you think, well if I slowed my pace down in the beginning of the race by a little bit, then maybe I don't have to walk at that last half mile. The end result would be a faster race time just by strategy.
Another way you can look at it is my endurance needs to improve so that I can run the entire 5K at the same pace. Or maybe I need to strength train (lift weights in my leg muscles) because the reason I needed to walk was because my muscles started to feel a little weak up that last hill. Or maybe I stopped to walk because my leg tightened up, so maybe I need to stretch more during training. What we are doing here is analyzing your weaknesses. So after you make a goal, you need to list some potential weaknesses that prevent you from reaching your goal. Then you train in such a way to improve on those weaknesses without sacrificing the gains you made in other areas. This requires you to become smart on how your body works at a deeper physiological level so that you know how to improve upon those specific weaknesses.
Accumulation of Workouts
So as Dr. Jack Daniels already mentioned in one of the videos above, consistency is the key. If you get a good amount of sleep all the time, having one night bad of sleep should not effect you much. On the other hand, having one great workout and not doing much the rest of the week won't get you far. It's about consistency.
Adding to that is your accumulated training. Take for example, some people will focus too much on their long run, but not enough on the remaining runs in the week. For example, you may run 10 miles on Saturday. Is this good or bad? It depends, what else did you do in the week? Well I ran a mile on Monday, and 2 miles on Wednesday and that was it. So you ran a total of 13 miles this week. And this may represent a typical week in your training. The 10 mile long run represents about 77 percent of your total miles for the week. This goes against the standard 25-35% rule. According to this rule, if you wanted to run 10 miles on Saturday, then your weekly miles should be 30-40 miles the entire week.
Another way of looking at this, do you do enough activity for the entire week that will make you a strong enough runner to create the correct stimulus for that 10 mile long run? You can't just wake up one morning and say, I want to run 10 miles if you never did that before. You build up to that with a balanced approach.
By consistently working up your mileage in the week, will make support you to eventually run the 10 miles. Otherwise, you will cause to much of a stimulus that requires more rest. So if you run 10 miles on Saturday, but you also plan to run 4 miles the following Monday, you will want to make sure the 10 miler on Saturday does not make you so tired so you end up doing only 2 or 3 miles on Monday (or none at all). In training, you don't do anything in your 1 workout that will have a negative effect for your next workout.
This does not work with just duration (the 10 miles). It also works with intensity. Most of the running you do in training should be an Easy conversational pace. If you run with too much intensity, this will effect your next workout. In a 40 mile training week, you may run that 10 mile long run on Saturday safely. But say you run it with too much intensity (too fast beyond the easy pace). This could have the same effect of running too many miles, in the way that come Monday, you are too pooped out from running the 10 miles on Saturday too fast that you decided to skip the Monday workout. Or instead of doing a tempo run on Monday, you had to change it to an easy run. This is what we mean by allowing one workout to cause a negative effect on future workouts.
Training is all about an accumulation of all your workouts working together. You don't get big fitness improvements for that big PR because you had 1 great hard workout (and sacrificing your next 3). At the same time, you won't hurt your training just because you had 1 single bad workout. It's all about what you did over a period of time.
Technique and Equipment
Finally we will talk briefly on technique and equipment. Many say the best way to run is to run with your natural form. But I tend to disagree with this. There are sometimes things we can do to improve our technique to make us a more efficient runner. Maybe we swing our arms way out to the side or across our body. Maybe we are over striding and need to focus more on cadence and our landing. Maybe we are not engaging our glute muscles correctly and is causing us to compensate with our muscles and effecting our technique and causing injury.
Then there is equipment. Having the proper shoes and socks for training. Having comfortable and supportive clothing. Do we carry water with us during training and if so, what kinds of gear will enable me to do this without impacting my running. Do I need to wear a hat or sunglasses. Sunscreen on sunny days? All of these things are important to consider in training and on race day. One rule I will mention here. Nothing new on race day. Your shirt, your shoes, your gear, even your refuel, all need to be tested during training so come race day you have no unexpected surprises. For example, it's unadvised to wear the t-shirt given the day before race day in your goody bag during the actual race. You have no idea if that shirt is ill fitted and will cause chaffing to your body.
That is all for now. Maybe more to come later if I think of anything.
