During the holiday season, many runners are strapped for time but not for calories. How can you keep your hard-earned fitness and not gain weight under these conditions?
The answer is to substitute the CESW (Convenient Efficient Speed Workout) for one or more your regular runs.
Why? This workout really cranks up your metabolism so that you burn calories long after finishing.
Convenient? You can perform the CESW right out your front door, without having to travel to a track or gym. You can also run the CESW indoors on a treadmill.
Efficient? The entire workout including warmup and cooldown takes only 30-40 minutes.
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The Athlete’s Kitchen
Copyright: Nancy Clark MS RD CSSD January 2012
What’s best to eat for recovery after a hard workout?
That’s what runners, triathletes, and body builders alike repeatedly ask. They read ads for commercial recovery foods that demand a 3 to 1 ratio of carbs to protein, tout the benefits of a proprietary formula, or emphasize immediate consumption the minute you stop exercising. While these ads offer an element of truth, consumers beware: engineered recovery foods are not more effective than standard foods. The purpose of this article is to educate you, a hungry runner, about how to choose an optimal recovery diet.
Which runners need to worry about a recovery diet?
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(Central Governor Theory)
Conventional wisdom holds that during running and racing, muscular fatigue is caused by the buildup of toxic bi-products and/or muscles becoming depleted of glycogen (running out of fuel). It becomes impossible for muscles to exert the force necessary to sustain the desired speed. Therefore, the runner must slow down or even cease running.
The problem with this theory is that it doesn’t explain what many of us commonly experience:
- An ability to sprint to the finish at the end of a distance race
- Running the last repeat of a tough track workout faster than the two preceding ones.
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Consider the following scenario: Your training schedule includes a weekly track or hill workout. One week, you hit your workout targets right on. You are brimming with confidence. The following week, the identical workout is awful with no apparent reason why. You feel bewildered and discouraged.
Knowing where you are in your menstrual cycle can provide valuable insight into your performance. Let’s examine why and how to use this knowledge to your training and racing advantage.
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Any active adult over the age of 40 can attest to requiring more recovery time from training and injury.
Progressive training causes muscles to break down (on a microscopic level), repair and grow stronger. As we age, muscle fibres decrease in number and shrink in size. New muscle fibres are generated at a slower rate than in a younger person, resulting in a slower buildup and strengthening of muscle in response to the demands of training or the incidence of an injury.
I know this fact of life from personal experience. When I was 44 years old and my daughter was 12, we both suffered mild ankle sprains…………on the very same day. As our sprains were of similar severity, we both underwent identical treatment programs, consisting of physiotherapy and strengthening and balance exercises. Ten days after spraining our ankles, she was hopping and I was hobbling! Nothing beats experiential learning for driving home a fact of life.
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Today’s Featured Article, “Twelve Tips For Better Sleep”, is the second article in a two part series on how sleep affects running (and vice versa), how much sleep is enough and how to improve the duration and quality of your sleep. The first article appeared in last week’s issue Run More Sleep Better or Sleep More Run Better?
How much sleep do we need?
James Maas, Cornell University psychology professor and sleep expert states: “Most adults function best on 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep, but runners – especially those training intensely – can benefit from more.
Yet, many North Americans are sleep-deprived. Recent American research indicates that 71% of Americans get less than the 7.5 hours nightly, with one third sleeping less than 6 hours on average.
Are we runners better than the general population at getting adequate sleep? Unfortunately, no. A poll published in the September 2009 issue of Runner’s World showed that 68% of 6,212 respondents got 7 hours of sleep or less.
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Today’s Feature Article is the first of a two part series on the relationship between sleep and running performance. Next week’s article will examine how much sleep you really need, as well as how to improve both the duration and quality of your sleep.
Getting adequate sleep is not just “a good idea”. It is critical in giving body the opportunity to regenerate, repair itself and to adapt to the stresses of training. More importantly, research shows that adequate sleep enhances immune system and reduces probability of contracting serious diseases such as cancer and diabetes or experiencing a heart attack.
Yet, sleep is an often neglected aspect of running’s training and recovery cycles. Many training programs pay no more than lip service to this topic.
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Today’s Featured Article is not about nutrition, injury prevention or how to run faster. It concerns a more serious matter – personal safety. Many runners consider headphones a mandatory article of clothing. You can’t run without tunes. However………
Safety (a.k.a. proving a point to your teenager)
Running with headphones results in a reduced awareness of your physical surroundings. If you are treadmill running, by all means, hit the playlist. Outdoors, being less than totally conscious of your physical surroundings compromises your personal safety. Like it or not – all runners (especially women) must run defensively at times. Headphone wearers range from being less attentive to totally oblivious of other people, cars and dogs – all of which are potential attackers that can pose real threat to a runner’s physical safety.
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Conventional wisdom among runners is that dehydration is to be avoided at all costs. After all, doesn’t dehydration cause overheating? Doesn’t dehydration often result in heat distress? Doesn’t dehydration severely impair performance? Aren’t runners who collapse near or at the end of a race severely dehydrated and should be treated with rapid hydration?
Most of the running community will answer these questions with a resounding “yes”. This all seems very logical and commonsense……….but it is not true!
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Barefoot running/minimalist shoe is not a new phenomenon. Olympian, author, running guru and IAWR Faculty Member Jeff Galloway writes: “I’ve seen this fad come and go 5 times during my 52 years of running”.
The current craze results from the simultaneous popularity of two publications: 1) Bestselling book “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall and 2) Research paper “Foot Strike Patterns and Collision Forces in Habitually Barefoot versus Shod Runners” by a team headed by Dr. Daniel Lieberman of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
The mainstream media started publicizing claims that barefoot running reduces the risk of running injuries. Running shoe manufacturers were quick to jump on the bandwagon and bring out their own minimalist models, citing the Harvard study that purportedly concluded that these shoes would both overcome current injuries and reduce the risk of future ones.
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