 |
| Picture from http://www.9run.ca/2014/03/book-review-science-of-running-by-steve.html |
Anyway, here they are:
1. Fatigue is located in the brain. When you exercise hard, it places a significant stress on your body and homeostasis becomes threatened. Your brain is programmed to not let you go until you are actually exhausted - it forces you to slow down at a certain point on a subconscious level. Without this defense mechanism, pushing your heart and lungs to the limit in a race would be catastrophic and result in something like myocardial ischemia, which is when your heart does not receive sufficient blood. The fact that your brain intervenes to slow you down is a recently-discovered phenomenon and is crucial to several areas of exercise physiology.
2. Kicking is possible because of the way the brain regulates exercise. Throughout a race, your brain is collecting feedback about all sorts of factors to determine how fast it is safe to go. Most of the factors are internal and have to do with how tired you are, but one external factor it considers is how much distance is left in the race. When the finish line becomes near, it loosens its grasp a little bit and allows you to push a bit harder because the probability of sustaining damage in such a short time is low.
3. The brain anticipates fatigue in hot conditions - When running in hot weather, your core temperature is higher, so running the same pace is more stressful than it would be in cooler weather. But running in the heat feels harder from the start - before your core temperature gets a chance to rise. That's because the brain is anticipating that "danger" will be reached sooner than usual.
4. The benefits of heat training - It does more than prepare the body to be ready for hot weather. In hot conditions, the muscles have less blood to use because the skin needs extra blood for cooling. Similar to training at altitude, this can cause the body to increase the volume of blood flow.
5. The multi-faceted base - A lot of people focus almost exclusively on endurance during the base phase, as this is what Arthur Lydiard did. But Magness (and some others, like Renato Canova) advocate approaching your target race pace from both ends - so the base phase should build general endurance (easy mileage, marathon pace etc.), as well as general speed (hill sprints, flat sprints). Then throughout the season, you gradually bring each end closer so that by the end, you are doing a lot of specific work.
6. Progress or maintain workouts - One of Magness's eight Rules of Training is "Never leave anything behind." This means that at every point in a training cycle, you're training everything; what changes is the emphasis. Early in the season, it's general fitness. Later it's specific fitness, but whatever is not being emphasized is in maintenance mode. Maintenance workouts (ex: 4x8sec hill sprints for general speed, or 15 minutes at HM pace for a 5k runner's aerobic support) are low in volume and can be combined.
7. How adaptation happens: Training wears your body down, but as long as it's not overdone, the body can repair itself. In a process called supercompensation, the body actually rebuilds itself stronger than it was originally, as a way of protecting itself against the perceived danger of being pushed to the edge of homeostasis. "Embarrass the body" is what Magness frequently says. Just show your body how it needs to improve, give it time to recover, and it will get the job done. This knowledge is what led to the hard-easy philosophy that is now ingrained in the sport.
(Quick aside: We know from my first blog post that trainability varies between different people. If supercompensation is an evolutionary adaptation, does that mean that trainability correlates with ethnic background? (i.e. was this kind of adaptation more important in some environments than others?) I don't think there are any studies on this yet.)
 |
| Galen Rupp is a very fast runner. Apply these principals to your training, and become more like him! (Picture from http://www.usatf.org/Athlete-Bios/Galen-Rupp.aspx) |
8. Anti-inflammatories are counter-productive - This has gone out of fashion to a large extent, but some people still think it's smart to take Advil after a tough workout. When inflammation is reduced artificially, the muscles will not be rebuilt stronger than before - that is something only the body can do.
9. Muscle tension - This is probably the most important factor in peaking. Runners rely a lot on stored elastic energy in their muscles and tendons. If muscle tension is too low, you won't feel as much spring in your stride, but if it's too high, efficiency will suffer. A balance is required to optimize muscle tension. There's a lot more on this on Magness's blog, including what factors affect muscle tension.
10. Muscle fiber type isn't simply binary - there are multiple kinds of Fast Twitch muscle fibers. And actually, the categorization is arbitrary; muscle fiber type is really a spectrum. This is a good example of how science get simplified in the hope that people will be able to understand it. But Magness simplifies less than most, and that's part of the reason I found his book to be great.
11. The importance of using moderate paces - Although FT muscle fibers are eventually recruited on a long run, for the most part muscle fibers are used for the kind of work to which they are most suited. Therefore, the most efficient way to make sure you're training the whole spectrum of muscle fibers is to use a variety of paces in your training.
12. Flat Sprints - Few distance runners do these, but they increase the maximum number of muscle fibers you can recruit, which will delay fatigue in a distance race.
13. Recruiting muscle fibers in order to train them - Sprints are great for recruiting lots of muscle fibers, but it's even better if you follow the sprints with a specific workout. That way, you are training the muscle fibers to run at race pace. Without this kind of workout, you're asking the hard-to-recruit muscle fibers to do something (run at race pace) in a race that they haven't been trained for.
14. How aerobic and anaerobic capacities can oppose each other - Aerobic capacity can be thought of as the ability to minimize lactate levels. Anaerobic capacity is analogous to pyruvate produced. Through anaerobic respiration, pyruvate is converted to lactate. This means that a larger aerobic capacity sometimes can actually shrink the anaerobic capacity. FT runners should be careful not to overload on threshold work because of this.
15. A higher lactate threshold isn't always better - This follows from #14. A higher lactate threshold is usually the result of a greater aerobic capacity, but it can also be the result of a decreased anaerobic capacity.
16. Runners should not focus on VO2 max - There is an entire chapter entitled The Fallacy of VO2 Max. This is where #1 becomes important. VO2 max is simply the maximum amount of oxygen a runner can use. Runners need oxygen to run but, even if oxygen use does plateau at some "VO2 max" (many runners don't even appear to have one), since the brain regulates exercise to protect the body, rather than fatigue being a direct result of exercise, the fact that oxygen uptake levels off is not necessarily an indication that that was the limiting factor. Also, VO2 max does not significantly increase in well-trained runners, even as they get faster. Runners of the same speed can have drastically different VO2 maxes.
17. Play to your strengths (which raises the question of why I am writing a blog...) - There is always more than one way to elicit a given adaptation, but some ways are more stressful than others for certain types of runner. For example, a runner with a relatively high proportion of FT muscle fibers relies more on the anaerobic system than an equally good ST runner would at the same pace. Because of this, the FT runner would need to train the anaerobic system more than the ST runner.
18. Endurance athletes are tough - Studies have shown that marathoners and triathletes have a higher pain tolerance than sedentary people. Interestingly, there was no significant difference in pain threshold, which means the athletes were simply better at handling pain. There is a long explanation for this, but basically, it's because endurance athletes train their bodies to tolerate pain - it's simple training and adaptation.
19. Lactic acid doesn't actually make you tired. Conventional wisdom says that when you run at a fast, anaerobic pace, lactic acid builds up in your muscles and forces you to slow down. It turns out that that "lactic acid feeling" every runner knows is not actually caused by the lactate, but by the accumulation of other by-products, like H+ ions, ammonium, and potassium, as well as a drop in pH in the muscles. The reason people talk about lactic acid is that it correlates strongly with the production of these other by-products and lactate levels are by far the easiest to measure.
20. When feeling beaten down by a lot of anaerobic stuff, it can be beneficial to take a quick break for an aerobic refresher. This can be done on a small scale, like one workout, or a large scale, like a season. In both cases, the aerobic work should not be pretty easy - the point is to allow the body to recover a bit. In either case, the aerobic work promotes lactate clearance and provides another (small) stimulus.
21. Alternating interval workouts - A cool idea where each interval alternates between slower than race pace for your target event and faster than race pace. Then, over the course of the season, the slow intervals can get faster, and the fast ones can get slower, until you're left with a highly specific workout.
23. Different training works for different people - This was something I hypothesized in my first blog post, so it was cool to see Magness back it up with science. First, relating to VO2 max, he found that people have different strengths and weaknesses relating to oxygen use. Some runners would benefit from increasing VO2 max; others would be better off trying to improve oxygen utilization. Secondly, there was a study on sub maximal and maximal intensities that found a wide range of adaptations by different people at different intensities. Someone who was a high/low responder for one stimulus was not necessarily a high/low responder for a different stimulus.
Hardcover: http://www.amazon.com/The-Science-Running-maximize-performance/dp/0615942946
Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/The-Science-Running-maximize-performance-ebook/dp/B00II6SY4W/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1
Great summary. Thank you! Happy running!
ReplyDelete