Science of Running

Crossfit endurance, Tabata sprints, and why people just don’t get it

2012-01-12T18:51:00.001-06:00

Crossfit endurance, Tabata sprints, and why people just don’t get it

Not terribly long ago, I stopped dating a girl because she did crossfit.

Okay, it wasn’t the only reason, but it was a major factor. I mention this not to show how messed up my dating life/requirements may be, but to show how strongly I feel about the marketing scheme that is Crossfit. I’ve always wanted to write a blog post about it, but the article in this months Runner’s World has finally pushed me over the edge. I’m writing this blog to give a 2^nd opinion and to combat the marketing hype that surrounds crossfit. I wouldn’t take much offense to crossfit and would let it do its own thing, except when you start telling people that this is the way of the future and that Ryan Hall would run faster if he did this stuff , then I have a problem (Yes, CFE founder has made this claim)

For this post, we’ll focus on Crossfit Endurance because it got some major publication in this month’s Runner’s World and has been getting some hype lately. If you were at my presentation at the American Distance Summit in North Carolina, you got to hear me take a few jabs at crossfit (and Renato Canova even threw in a jab or two!). Since it’s a question I get asked a lot, lets take a look at crossfit endurance.

The claim and exploitation:

Crossfit Endurance and CF in general is a randomized non-system of training. It’s basically a set of random workouts that are high intensity circuit based workouts. In CF this refers to a variety of high strength circuits and in CFE it combines this with high intensity intervals like the famous Tabata “sprints” (sets of 20sec hard/10sec easy). There are no easy runs. It’s simply mix short intensity work with slightly longer high intensity work and that’s all you get.

Crossfit exploits a couple different natural reactions people have to get people on their bandwagon. First, they create a straw man “us vs. them” mentality. We’ll go over this straw man tactic a bit later, but they try and cultivate this idea that just because it’s different and new means its got to be better. They throw in some pseudoscience or misinterpretation of science and they’ve bolstered their selling point. Further exploiting peoples natural habits, they promise better results with less time commitment, which in today’s “busy” world is probably the number one selling point for many products or ideas. If you’ve ever watched late night infomercials, you might start to see some similarities…

Lastly, once you’re in they do something pretty creative. They first created their own new performance metric on which you’re judged. Because being good at all the other methods of establishing performance isn’t good enough, so now you’re judged based on some criteria that crossfit develops. Being a specialist at something is apparently bad? Additionally, they really go after this hard work/pain = improvement and results idea. This is also known as the Rocky effect. But if you’ve been in the coaching business long enough you know that hard stupid work doesn’t get you anywhere. You can’t just do work that is painful just because it hurts and expect to get better.

Getting beyond some of the basic philosophical tenants of CF that are ridiculous, let’s look at some of their claims in regards to endurance performance and training.

What crossfit doesn’t get:

The central claim is that you can get the same endurance benefits (or better) from doing high intensity work and limit any slower to moderate paced running. They go on to claim that endurance training ages you faster and is detrimental to performance. Their claim rests on their misunderstanding of VO2max as being equal to or critical to performance.

Let’s use their main research backed claim to look into their claims.
Tabata sprints and the high intensity misunderstanding:

A researcher named Tabata did a series of studies on untrained and then moderately trained individuals in which he gave them a workout that consisted of 20sec hard/10sec rest for 4minutes. When this program was researched, they noted that VO2max increased by a large amount and that certain aerobic enzymes also increased. Using this and similar studies as their basis, CF has championed the idea that you can get the same, or better, performance off of doing intense work like that done in the study. Lets use this as a way to look at why these claims are false.

#1 VO2max does not equal aerobic performance:

While I’ve written before about the measurement of VO2max and how it relates to performance and you can read more in depth on it in those blog posts, it bears repeating the conclusions reached by Vollaard et al (2009):

“Moreover, we demonstrate that VO2max and aerobic performance associate with distinct and separate physiological and biochemical endpoints, suggesting that proposed models for the determinants of endurance performance may need to be revisited (pg. 1483)”.

The basic idea is that VO2max and performance are separate things. Just because VO2max is increased or decreased, does not mean that performance will change to the same degree or even at all. This is a key concept to understand because often times studies will track training’s effects on VO2max and not performance. For instance, in much of the research cited by CF or even cited in journal articles that talks about the benefit of high intensity training or strength training, they talk about changes in VO2max.

#2 Intervals increase aerobic ability of FT fibers

At the coaching clinic I presented at Renato Canova made a nice point that somewhat fast interval training can increase the aerobic ability of Fast Twitch fibers. It’s best to think of it as an interplay between FT and ST fibers. In that different intensities and volumes will increase aerobic or anaerobic enzymes in each type of fibers along the spectrum. What that means is that although high and low intensity might both hit similar aerobic enzymes, they do so in different ways and in different fiber types.

#3 Why does VO2max improve?

Understanding why VO2max improves is another key to understanding this whole debate. VO2max does not simply reflect aerobic ability. Instead VO2max is influenced by several mechanisms. First off, if you’ve read Noakes central governor or if you’ve read recent research on VO2max testing protocols, you’d know that VO2max isn’t an actual max. You’re body self limits it. One way to improve VO2max in a test is to be familiar in pushing closer to that “edge”. If your body knows you can go there, it loosens the limits a little bit. Very hard interval training lets the body know it can handle high stress loads.

Secondly, we know that VO2max is influenced by muscle fiber recruitment. So if we increase the amount of recruitable muscle fibers during a test, the VO2max will rise. What’s a way to increase muscle fiber recruitment? Sprinting, strength training, etc. It’s one of the reasons why you see VO2max increases in untrained athletes but not so much in trained following strength training. The trained ones are pretty good at recruiting more and more fibers as they get closer to fatigue. The untrained, not so much.

#4 What Happens when we build a base and follow it up with intensity?

A major problem with research studies is that they are all short term. It’s the nature of the beast. But let me pose a few questions to all of you.

What does the typical recreational endurance athlete do?

If you answered jog around or do easy and moderate runs with little hard workouts you’d be correct. Most recreational runners for instance simply go run. Why does this matter?

What happens when you take people just doing mileage and add intensity?

If you answered they improve over a short time, you’d be correct! Think back to your HS days when you spent a summer building a base of almost just mileage and then you hit the season and your coach starts throwing interval training into the mix. You get a nice boost in performance right? This is essentially what happens in these research studies. They take recreational runners who just do easy/base stuff and then throw 6 weeks of training hard on them and they improve. Ask any coach and they’ll say this is just a simple old school peaking/training program. In fact, it might resemble your typical HS application of Lydiard training.

#5 What CrossFit endurance does is reminiscent of training done in the early 1900s:

I harp on people to know their history so that they don’t repeat training mistakes. In the history of endurance training it’s been a constant back and forth between intensity and volume of work. Early on there were very very big swings. So we went back and forth between training that was almost all easy slow running and that which was all hard interval training. As training has evolved we’ve gotten closer and closer to that sweet spot and mix.

What CFE has done is ignore all that and try and go back to a time when all that was done was very hard very fast interval work. It worked to a degree, but performance got much better when we modulated things so that there was a nice mix.

Essentially, Crossfit is living in like the 1940s. We’ve learned from those times and evolved.

#6 A straw man of LSD vs. high intensity:

Crossfit, and many others, typically create a straw man where they compare their training to a type of training that isn’t used but by very beginners. They paint running training as almost all LSD (long slow distance), when the reality is if you look at any elite, college, or high school training program there is a nice blend of volume and intensity. No one is just jogging around each day. Yet that is what they have you believe. This even happens in research when they compare interval training with just jogging around, as if jogging around was the norm for training.

What happens in the real world of course is that there is a nice mixture and blend between volume and intensity. Essentially, they are arguing for something that doesn’t occur.

#7 Two ways to improve aerobic endurance

In fact, if you look at how some endurance adaptations happen, you can see that to increase things like mitochondrial density, several different intensities trigger similar adaptations. This goes along with the point on enzyme activity and FT/ST fibers. But if we look at this nice graphic from Laursen (2009), we can see that two different pathways to achieve some of these functional adaptations are activated by endurance and interval training. So why the heck would we want to use only one pathway when two different means of getting these nice adaptations are there. If you just attacked the problem from one side, you’d maximize that side quickly and have nowhere to go!

Additionally, we know that repetitive stress and activation of signaling pathways is what triggers adaptation. It’s one of the reasons why we train pretty much every day for maximum performance even if some of it is low intensity. That low intensity easy to moderate work helps to enhance recovery and applies a consistent signal for adaptation. Pure rest in this case isn’t better (which is often the counterargument).

#8 Periodization matters:

It seems simple enough that people would know that how you plan and periodize training matters. Training isn’t a random collection of hard exercises or workouts. There has to be some sort of logical sequence and progression. If there’s not, then you can expect to get exactly what you trained for, random results.

The bottom line is that so called high intensity interval training (HIIT) which is the new fad word with strength coaches is good. But for endurance performance it’s even better when it is supported! You have to support it with something. Endurance work of various kinds and even pure speed work (with lots of recovery) serves as support for the intense stuff.

#9 Interaction matters:

Endurance and strength gains fight each other a bit for adaptation. While I don’t want to get bogged down in the details, if we look at the signaling pathway for some endurance adaptations and then muscle hypertrophy which are two goals of CF and CFE, we can see that they interact and in fact impair each other in some cases. For example, doing endurance work right after strength can impair hypertrophy because the mTOR pathway(which signals hypertrophy among other things) is basically switched off with endurance work. This isn’t meant to show that they are mutually exclusive, but instead to show that when you do things matters. Sometimes a whole heck of a lot! Thus why you have to think about and plan things, not just do random hard workouts.

This goes for not only sequencing of endurance and strength work, but also in regards to sequencing different strength workouts. You have to know what pre-fatiguing muscles does to the subsequent training effect. And you have to know what the effect is on the Central Nervous System. Crossfit doesn't think about this at all. They don't care.

#11 Individualization
My number one pet peeve. There is no individualization. Workout of the day. That's the norm. Beyond that, everyone does the same crap for the most part. I could go on for days on the importance of individualization, and CF and CFE fail miserably.

What does this all mean?

What happens in the long term?

Again, I’m going to ask a rhetorical question, for you HS coaches out there what happens if you mess up the balance and do too much intense interval training after that base phase? The answer is the kids fried. You see it all the time in High School. A kid hits the interval training hard, runs some amazing early season times and then fizzles out and is fried by the end of the year. That’s what happens training wise. If you want lactate proof, this is what happens aerobically if you mess things up. You shift the balance to working anaerobically too much (Test #3) and you produce more lactate at each pace, and you are done!

The reason is that there is an interplay between easy to moderate running and intense running or even strength training. If you work too much on the intensity or strength side you shift things towards that way. In practical terms your lactate produced at each speed might go up or you might decrease aerobic ability a little bit. Same goes if you do too much volume with not enough speed support. You’re speed side would be neglected so that would go down. It depends on what you are training for but achieving some sort of balance is key.

Additionally, if we look at very long term implications for performance we know that the foundational aerobic mileage does a few things. First in long term studies on Cross Country skiers, the high volume of training created a fundamental shift in fiber type towards those which improved their performance. So we got a ST fiber type shift for guys who needed lots of ST. Secondly, the high volume of training leads to long term increases in efficiency. Yes, high intensity work or even lifting can do this too but again it’s through different mechanisms. Lifting for example can increase efficiency via modulating stiffness of the system. Or essentially creating a stiffer spring. High Volume training on the other hand works via increase the efficiency of both motor program patterns (because of the repeated nature) and at the muscular level in terms of oxygen utilization and waste product removal. Again, two different ways to hit the same functional adaptation (improved efficiency), so why would we just want to work on one of them.

So we have research showing that in very elite runners, long term high volume training is needed to make functional changes. We have practical experience in that throughout history we’ve shifted towards the volumes we do now and that practically every single good runner does a solid amount of mileage (with good intensity mixed in) and we have the theory of why mileage should work.

If we simply put crossfit endurance through the same kind of review we have:
Research- short term studies on high intensity training shows improved VO2max and in some cases performance, but we have looked at why those don’t apply neatly already. No research on crossfit endurance in particular

Theory- It goes against all known scientific theory for how endurance performance should be improved and how it actually happens.

Practice- No good runners do it. We know from history what happens and what kind of performance you get even if you do a lot of high intensity work with very little volume.

And lastly, it doesn’t help that they subscribe to every fad from diet to pose method of running that there is.

Finally, if you want a very interesting research approach to the high volume/intensity paradigm read Stephen Seiller’s nice summary here:

http://sportsci.org/2009/ss.htm

And finally, I’d like to point out that finishing and racing are different. I’ve heard far too many times that so and so did crossfit and finished a marathon so it must work. No offense and sorry to sound elitist, but if I took off 6 months and did nothing I could still finish a marathon. It doesn’t mean my program of doing nothing worked.

What does this all mean?

While this was a lengthy rant, it only touches the surface of the Crossfit or Crossfit Endurance phenomenon. My point wasn’t to critique everything they did (that might be later) but to teach you why some of their claims they make, even research based claims, might be wrong.

In the future we’ll look at some of the specifics behind crossfit.

Altitude babies, Rats, and Epigenetics

2011-12-26T12:43:00.001-06:00

New born rats, altitude, and epigenetics:

Over the past few years, the term epigenetics has kind of exploded in the popular science world. I’ve discussed it at length in this blog and how it might have implications with a wide range of topics from obesity to African running dominance to how we adapt to altitude.

One of the basic ideas is that what happens in the time period before and just after birth is when a newborn is kind of adapting to its adjustment. So if we look at diet, if a mother is going through famine during this time frame, then the baby changes to be prepared for this environment. So it’s response to certain foods or its insulin response is adjusted. Similarly, there’s been some studies looking at mothers who have high stress loads during and right after pregnancy result in babies have altered stress hormone responses for the rest of their life.

I always joke with my friends that whenever I have kids, I’m going to stick them at altitude during pregnancy and right after just to develop super altitude adapted kids (and my friends always respond with you better find a wife who is crazy enough to let you do all this wonderful experimentation…and that you’re kids are gonna be messed up…but that’s besides the point…). Which brings me to the point of this…

A study in the Journal of Applied Physiology was recently published that took a bunch of rats that were at high altitude in Bolivia and made a group of them live in a simulated sea level environment. So you basically had an altitude group and a sea level group, but it was only from 1 day before birth to 15 days after birth when they were in these two different environments. Then they were brought together and lived their normal rat lives together. Well, they checked them periodically through their life and ultimately at 600 days post birth.

What is interesting is that those 16 days during development affected parameters for the rest of their lives. For example, the “normoxia/oxygen” group had lower hemoglobin and hematocrit for the rest of their lives. They also had “reduced right ventricular hypertrophy (both sexes); lower air space-to-tissue ratio in the lungs (males only); reduced CO₂ production rate, but higher oxygen uptake (males only);”

It’s pretty interesting that 16 days in the rat lifecycle affected various parameters for the rest of their lives. It just goes to show how important that development period actually is and it brings up some questions about altitude training and whether just copying altitude born athletes is the key or if we should attack it from a different way with sea level born athletes.

I’m not really sure what the practical importance of this is, except maybe my crazy joking of having high altitude babies might be on to something…

(study abstract here: http://jap.physiology.org/content/112/1/33.abstract?etoc )

2011-12-21T16:52:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be at the Canadian athletics coaching symposium to speak with Alberto Salazar on a couple of different topics. It was a great experience and I picked up a lot of interesting ideas from other presenters and those in the audience who I chatted afterwards with. While there, Jay Johnson asked me to sit down and do a podcast covering a wide range of topics from HS training to sprinting to what I do now with elites. So head on over to Jay's site and take a listen.

http://www.coachjayjohnson.com/2011/12/podcast-003-steve-magness-interview/
Also, a couple articles I wrote or contributed to for Running Times are online now so if you haven't checked those out, there might be something useful in them:

When to pull the plug on your season:
http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=24550

How to do a hard workout after a race:
http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=24260

Lessons from outside the running world

2011-11-28T10:41:00.001-06:00

This is going to be an interesting attempt at a blog. One that takes seemingly unrelated subjects and ties them into my main focus, running.

If you were to flip through any of the myriad of books I’ve read on some pretty random subjects, you’d see the margins littered up and down with notes. If a stranger was to read them, they probably would make no sense, because they’re almost all about connecting whatever random subject I’m reading about back to running. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. Recognizing similar patterns in other subjects, or taking overarching themes and tying them to your specialty is key to broadening your horizons and not falling into the same dogma that gets presented over and over again within a specialty. Making connections is a skill that should be learned. Given that, I’m going to delve through several of my books and highlight some of the abstract lessons I’ve learned and what that means to my specialty, running.

This is somewhat related to a previous post where I gave my kind of overarching principles and rules for everything:

http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2010/04/my-rules-of-everything.html

Complexity-

One of my favorite sayings is we constantly underestimate the human body and its complexity. You can see this in almost every field, but in exercise science some recent controversies that demonstrate this are the hydration issue and the running shoe cushioning issue. Reading other science type books does nothing but cement the idea of the complexity of the body. My quick example will be from the book Evolution in four dimensions, where in one part there is a discussion one pigenetic changes to DNA leading to evolutionary changes. The authors state that recent findings result in an ability to change their way of thinking. “We are now free to think in realistic molecular ways about rapid genome restructuring guided by biological feedback networks.” This quote was made in reference to how for years, it had been assumed that the gene was all that mattered. Nothing changed, environment mattered little and the gene dominated. However, more recently we know that that isn’t how it works. Another quick example is that of hydration where we assume that weighing ourselves and forcing down fluids is better than listening to our body and thirst mechanisms. The lesson here is obviously to be aware of the complexity of the body and its almost genius.

We’re in the age where technology allows for improvement. That translates over to the somewhat false idea that we can engineer things to be even more optimal. As mentioned earlier, the overbuilding of shoes is a great example. Another more relevant to performance change would be the reliance on “fake” foods or vitamins. For more information on this, see sweatscience.com and the recent findings on whole vs. partial foods and what our brain senses, or see my many diatribes on why antioxidants after/during exercise isn’t a good idea.

Knowledge reflects what we experiment on and study:

This is a seemingly obvious statement, but the impact is profound. We only know about what we study in science. In reading the book Evolution in four dimensions, they make the nice point that since early genetic studies were on flies and then bacteria, our ideas on how genes and evolution work was based almost entirely on what happened in these organisms. The problem became when we transferred that into overarching principles for all of genetics. This happens all of the time in every science. Theories are developed and become dogmatic because they fit with what was initially studied by happenstance almost. You can see this in running science literature or coaching.

We only know what we study. So if some early pioneer focused on VO2 measurements because that’s all they had to measure with, then that becomes important simply because we could measure it. The same goes for lactate during the 90’s, and so forth. This is one problem with a strictly evidenced based program. We know far too little to be able to measure what matters, performance, and in many cases we don’t even know what we should be measuring.

Short vs long term- pg. 57From the book the 10,000 year explosion- “sometimes the apparently inferior choice has a better upgrade path: Evolution can’t know this, and we aren’t particularly good at recognizing it ourselves….”Natural selection may solve the same problems differently in different populations, and what appears to be the most elegant solution at the time may not in fact turn out to be the one that works best in the long run”

The principle of immediate versus long term results is a paramount. The above idea fits well in running in several ways. First off, in terms of workouts, there are certainly workout types or methods that would produce very good short term gains, but then would sputter out. It’s important to keep the big picture in mind and realize that sometimes we do things because we know they will increase your ceiling in the future. A good example is running form changes. Sometimes when you make form changes you get an immediate decrease in running economy, because the movement is new and awkward (and that’s what researchers will point too…). However, what proper form changes do is increase the potential ceiling of efficiency. So that once you get adapted to the change, how efficient you can actually be increases.

The second part of this quote is very pertinent to coaching. Sometimes the easy solution doesn’t work in the long term. For example, we might see big improvements by throwing a bunch of fast interval work with no mileage background for a few weeks. But what happens most of the time is the athlete gets sudden improvement and then plateaus or bottoms out. So fast work might be the easy answer to the question “How do I improve for the race in 3 weeks?” but long term it might not be the best option.

Adaptation length-

Again from the book the 10,000 year explosion, they give a nice example of how adaptation time matters. In terms of food, the popular example is how the Polynesians or aborigines have more western diseases then even western cultures, probably because of very recent changes in diets. The western cultures have had a much longer period of time to adapt therefore the stress response isn’t as great.

I like to translate this to the length of time that an athlete has had of a particular training stimulus. A runner who has years of mileage and tempos will be much more adept at doing those workouts or that load, then one who has done low mileage and lots of fast work. What that means, is that even if two athletes run the same times, it doesn’t mean they should be doing the same total workout load of one particular aspect. Instead, you have to look at where they are in terms of adaptation.

Connectivity- “science requires communication and cooperation between people who are unusually good at puzzle solving.”

This is self explanatory, but connections are key and you need someone to bounce ideas off of and tear apart those wonderful theories you have. It allows you to get a viewpoint that doesn’t include your biases. Sometimes the most productive conversations I have on training/running are with those who know running well enough, but who are very smart in fields outside the exercise science/training world. They aren’t trapped by traditional thinking and will ask the question “why?” on things we just accept and take for granted. It’s amazing how many things you just skip over and your brain doesn’t even think about, that probably should be questioned.

Averages-

“If you are advising or treating individuals according to the average effects of a gene, you may be doing the wrong thing.” Average mask individual variation- that’s the whole point of an average.” Both from Evolution in four dimensions.

The fact that everything relies on the average is a common theme. If you look, almost every single research study is based on the average. That is a necessary evil, but far too little attention is paid to variability. This is the single reason why we can’t have an entirely research founded practice in training or coaching. If we just did what the studies said exactly, then we’d be training the way X average person in X population should train. What about the outliers (of which we mainly deal with in elite sport…). Individualization is key. Don’t forget that when coaching, and don’t forget that when evaluating research. Just because X works on average, doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for your individual.

Again, not to nitpick, but it’s why we can’t just say “X worked in research, so it should work for you.” This applies to every field and it’s why the best in whatever field are the ones who can take principles learned and think outside the box using those principles. They simply don’t prescribe some workout or some diagnosis because it worked for the average person.

Part vs. whole- “Whether or not a length of DNA produces anything, what it produces and where and when it produces it may depend on other DNA sequences and the environment. The stretch of DNA that is a gene has meaning only within the system as a whole” e4D-

We tend to isolate variables and concepts and take a reductionist approach to everything. Do x “Vo2max” workout to improve one variable, do x Threshold to improve another. We forget that the interplay and interaction is what is truly important. What a workout does is defined by what surrounds it. Renato Canova once put it nicely when he said that an athletes fitness can change even if X indicator workout is the same if what has surrounded that workout has changed. It’s why one single workout in time doesn’t matter.

This also relates to nutrition where we see a reductionist approach to we need X vitamin or nutrient or macronutrient and it doesn’t matter how we get it. Recent research, however, shows that the brain is much smarter than we are. It changes how it reacts based on the combined effect of whatever we are taking.

Forget- Darwin thought use and disuse and heritable variation occurred, but over time this part of his belief was lost and forgotten. So everyone thought he didn’t think the above was how it worked.

“at this point in time, as at most previous stages of the history of evolutionary ideas, certain findings in biology are being ignored or underplayed”

We go through a cycle of forgetting and remembering what’s been done before us. You see this in the reintroduction or rememphasis in certain training methods in the coaching world. That’s why it is incredibly important to know your history. And if you can, know your history from a primary source where you attempt to look at it through their eyes during that time period. For example, going back and reading Lydiard’s original work gives a greater appreciation of what he was trying to do, then reading someones summary now, 50 years later. We lose a little bit of the original message.

Know your history. The more history you know, the more you realize why certain methods stuck around and certain ones were discarded. You’ll also learn methods that were successful that may have been overused but still have a place in your arsenal (think Igloi training…).

Commitment- In the book Sway, they talked about the reluctance of football teams and coaches to adapt to new styles, “they had used the grind it out and hold on to the ball strategy for so long that it was simply hard for them to let go. They were committed to continuing down the road they had always walked. They were so committed, in fact, that it was virtually impossible for them to take a different path.”

This relates to another one of my favorite sayings, it’s okay to fall in love with an idea or philosophy, but don’t marry it. If you start identifying solely with an idea or “marry it” then you put yourself in a hole and will resist change even if that is what needs to be done. This is particular important in training because there is so much individual variation that at times you are going to have to go against your norms and do something different. It’s one of the reasons I hate when people say “I’m a high mileage guy” or “I’m a speed guy” in terms of their coaching philosophy. Well, that’s great, but your pigeonholing yourself and there will be a day when an athlete comes along that needs the opposite of your philosophy and you will have to change if they are going to be successful. Can you?

Value attribution- Another one from the book Sway. Value attribution is our tendency to imbue someone or something with certain qualities based on perceived value, rather than on objective data. “we may turn down a pitch or idea that is presented by the wrong person or blindly follow the advice of someone who is highly regarded.

In the book, they describe how the value that people attributed to drinking the same Sobe drink affected their score on a subsequent test. Meaning that if they paid more for the SoBe, the scored better because if they paid for it (and attributed value to it) then the claims must be true.

“we often ignore all evidence that contradicts what we want to believe.” From Sway

Lastly, we’ll end with this quote. Don’t take offense if evidence points to a different conclusion than you thought. Read it, analyze it, and see if it fits in. It doesn’t have to change your opinion, but if there is enough of it, you might want to consider. You see this all the time in Science. Whether it’s global warming or shoe pronation/cushioning. Take evidence as data. Don’t ignore it for convenience.

There ya go. There’s my mishmash of random recent lessons I’ve learned from reading books outside my field and how they relate to my field. I highly suggest stepping out of your comfort zone at times and trying to see if you can tie overarching concepts back into your own specialty.

The Sole of the Shoe: Looking at inside the midsole

2011-11-07T19:02:00.003-06:00

The sole of the shoe:

With this whole barefoot/minimalist/running mechanics thing exploding right now, one fo the more productive outcomes in science is the realization that the body is smarter than we give it credit for. All those old biomechanical models that presented the body as rigid mechanical body don’t quite accurately reflect what’s going on. Instead, the body works in a nicely complex way where stiffness, tension, and muscle activity are adjusted on the fly based on feedback the body receives. So it’s constantly calculating and preparing for what’s going on. So that means adjusting for the ground surface type, the position of the legs and feet throughout, and so on. Essentially, your body has an in built cushioning system.

You might remember those Adidas shoes that had a computer chip in them that attempted to adjust the cushioning every stride? Well, in this case, the body already does that and better than any technology we have currently can do. (Which makes me wonder, if the shoes adjusting cushioning constantly for the ground, and the body is adjusting the cushioning based on the shoe, among other things, that just seems like a bad situation of constant adjustment going on that is fighting against each other.)

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/2015/adidas-updates-its-computer-controlled

A couple recent studies published in Footwear Science help illustrate this point even more so. First, a study entitled “Relationships between impact variables from running in 20 different footwear conditions” showed that the traditional mechanical tests used to measure cushioning do not translate over to what actually happens cushioning wise when a person is running in those said shoes. While it might be obvious, this is significant because that’s how they classify the “cushioning” that a shoe has….And it doesn’t actually translate to real world application. So we have a situation where the classification doesn’t match what actually happens.

A second article, “Impact characteristics in shod and barefoot running” took several different custom shoes with wide varying midsoles (from 4mm thickness of cushion to 20mm). The basic conclusion was that in terms of impact forces and loading rates the amount of midsole thickness didn’t matter (for statistical significance). And Barefoot running changed the impact charactistics largely through an adjustment in foot strike and placement.

The point of the above is to reinforce the idea that the body is a complex dynamic system.

Which brings me to the point of this:

Cobbling shoes:

Recently, I decided to cut up a couple different pairs of shoes just to take a look at the insides. It’s rather interesting what certain shoes have in the midsole and the perceived reasoning behind them. You always hear the fancy names thrown around for the technology, but it’s pretty interesting to see it hands on. So that get’s me to the point. If we assume that the following is true:

-We know that the body adjusts stiffness and muscle “tunes” itself to the surrounding environment. So it adjusts based on the surface the foot will hit.

-We know that shoe structure impacts proprioception which changes our in built “cushioning”.

THEN, it would make sense that sense our body adjusts for what it is going to hit that the midsole of the shoe influences our bodies adjustment. Therefore if we look at the midsole of the foot, the fact that it Is not uniform begs the question of how does the body adjust to it?

For instance, if we look at running on a soft/unstable surface versus a pretty stable surface like concrete, then we see differences in muscle tuning and preactivation. So, if we have a midsole that has a variety of “stuff” in it, what is the body adjusting for? I don’t have the answer to this question but it seems interesting and plausible.

For example, if we take a look at the two shoes here. One has a firmer outer lining of the shoe with a very soft midsole in the middle. So, does the body prep for the initial striking of the firmer outsole when you either land on your heel or on the lateral edge of the fore/midfoot. Or do you prep for the super soft middle of the midsole?

Similarly, if we look at one of the other examples here, if you are a heel striker, does the firm crashpad get adjusted to, or the soft white midsole or the air pads underneath the forefoot and heel? It seems like the constant change in cushioning would change how our body accurately adjusts or "tunes" to the surface. It's akin to the story Biomechanist Benno Nigg tells about the Circus performers who install a flexible shock absorbing floor and the injuries skyrocket. Why? Because the way the floor was made you had sections near the "support" stiffer than the furthest points in between the support, which were very pliable and responsive. So you created a situation where you had a way too soft area and then firmer areas, so the body never knew what to prepare for. The injury rate decreased as soon as the floor was changed by the way.

And finally, we get to another shoe design that puts gel basically along the center of pressure of where a heel striker would travel. That seems like a great idea, but again, perhaps you create a level of unstableness and mixed firmness that might create a bit of confussion.

The point of all of this is does the mixing of hardness in the shoe itself create a slightly unstable situation, like if one we’re to step partially on sand and partially on hard dirt?

I really don’t have the answers to these questions at all. It just strikes me as interesting and I wanted to ask the question.

My gut feeling is that creating a highly non-uniform midsole would create a situation where the body doesn’t know exactly what to adjust for and it creates a situation where the foot functions artificially. Because of the variance in hardness you influence the natural motion of the foot in the shoe itself. So it might sink more in certain places or alter the loading in certain areas based on the variance in stability.

I could be off here, but if research from Irene Davis’ group shows that even socks influence the proprioception of the foot, then a crash pad or gel and air insert at various places in the midsole could certainly have an effect in what our body does to prepare for the ground.

Just something to think about..

Training to Kick

2011-10-06T16:53:00.003-05:00

How to train a kick:

In the last post, we took a look at the physiology behind the kick. That’s all well and good but it’s pretty much useless unless we can translate that knowledge into something practical. So let’s give that a go based on theory and practical experience. Here’s my guide to creating a kick:

Finding the weak point and attacking it from multiple ways:

If you are at all familiar with my training style, one of my central premises is to attack a problem from multiple different directions. The same thing applies to the kick. What we ideally do is look at what each runners strengths and weaknesses are in terms of why they can or can not kick, place the emphasis on developing that attribute, but make sure we cover the opposite side too.

That means the first question that needs to be asked is, what’s the balance between their aerobic strength and anaerobic capacity? Obviously increasing both is needed, but this answers the question of whether they run out of gas during the race (lack the strength to stay more aerobic deep into the race) or whether they have the speed ability to actually kick. This will develop the proportion of emphasis. You want to attack both sides, but sometimes one side needs a little bit more emphasis because it’s a bit weaker. Given that, let’s go into the different ways of developing a kick:

The steps:

If you remember in the last post I gave a general outline of what you need physiologically. Let’s use that as a template and I’ll show you how to develop those abilities:

Get to the end more aerobic than anyone else

Essentially we need to get to the “kicking point” as aerobic as we can without delving deeper and deeper into our anaerobic and muscle fiber reserves. To do this, we’ve got to build the aerobic system. The first step is easy and any coach could tell you how to do that. We need a general aerobic base, which means mileage, tempo runs, aerobic intervals, etc. to build the foundation. That changes slightly with mid-distance 8/15 runners where we have to develop the aerobic system more through igloi style intervals

Once a general aerobic foundation is built, then the key is getting more aerobic at race pace. My favorite way to do this is through Canova style alternations. Why? Because it’s a nice progressive way to work aerobically while increasing race specificity. My typical example for the 5k would be start at 200m at race pace alternated with 1400m at a steady pace (just slower than marathon pace to start with) for a couple miles. Then progress that until you’re running 800/800 or 1000 at pace/600 steady, with the fast pace staying at around 5k pace and the steady getting a little faster.

So a general template would be to start with increasing threshold work (unless a speed orientated 8/15 guy, then less threshold stuff…) duration and then speed. Mix that with some slightly slower tempo work of longer duration (6-10mi tempos). That gives you the general foundation. Then to work on specific aerobic ability, add “stuff” to the tempo, add alternations, and add some aerobic “igloi” intervals.

Have a larger degree of anaerobic capacity to use and a larger motor unit pool to call upon.

These two physiological goals tie together nicely, so we’ll cover them jointly. The other main component of a kick is having the ability to recruit additional muscle fibers when fatigued and call upon our anaerobic energy reserves. Before working on the ability to use these under fatigue, we have to increase the total capacity of each of these which are done through similar mechanisms.

We have to lay the foundation and develop the ability to recruit a larger percentage of our muscle fibers in a fresh state first. No one can fully recruit all of their fibers because we have some protective mechanisms involved to prevent this from happening as catastrophe would likely result. However, you can train to edge the percentage of fibers you can recruit towards that 100% max. Research shows that elite athletes in various sprint or explosive events are much closer to max recruitment than regular athletes or untrained people.

To increase total fiber recruitment, we need to do activities that have a high force requirement and ideally do so in a specific running manner so that we recruit the same muscles in the same sequence that we do when running. For distance runners, this simply means we need to sprint!

(For mid distance or shorter athletes, we can often build a foundation of muscle recruitment via doing explosive/ballistic type non-specific activities first as they “violate” the size principle to a degree and make it where Fast Twitch fibers are preferentially recruited. Then you follow that up with a specific period where you try and translate those gains to the specific action of running through sprint work.)

I prefer to use a method where you start off with hill sprints because of the reduced injury risk and the fact that the hill will increase fiber recruitment and then transition to sprints on the track. The reason for this is that we get a little bit more specific as the training progresses as we get a bit more reactivity from doing flat sprints and a bit more strength when doing hill sprints.

To work on the energy system side of things (the anaerobic capacity) we have to go fast for a little bit longer so we’re stressing the anaerobic systems ability to produce energy maximally. That means extending sprint work both on the hill and on the flat. The key is that these are anaerobic capacity workouts. They’re not designed to get us to deal with large amounts of fatigue or running fast when tired or anything like that. Given that they require long rest, and the best way to do them is initially as an add on at the end of sprint work. Later on they can be their own “workout” but most distance runners can get away with just doing a bit of an add on. A typical example progression of all of this work would be:

6xHS

8xHS

10xHS

6x60m

8xHS

6x80m

6x100m

8xHS+ 1x15sec

6xHS +1x20-25sec

2x60, 2x100, 2x130m

2x150, 2x200

250, 200, 150, 100

Be able to use them in fatigue!

Now that we have built up the capacity, then the goal is to learn how to use all of this “stuff” under fatigue. There are numerous methods to do this, and I could go into tons of detail on each. So that this doesn’t get too long I’ll outline the general principles and then give some examples.

The basic idea is that now that we have the ability to recruit additional fibers and the like, we now need to extend that ability to being able to recruit them under fatigue and to extend their endurance. To accomplish this we combine a mixture of higher strength activities to recruit the fibers with either faster stuff (i.e. under fatigue) or longer stuff (i.e. extend the endurance). I generally go about it by training to extend the endurance and develop some strength endurance and then go about doing it under heavy fatigue.

Strength endurance:

You should move from general to specific. Meaning, start with just hilly runs or like one of my past coaches Scott Raczko liked to do, hilly long runs. That establishes a base of strength endurance. From there, move to hill fartleks or what I like to call up/downs which just means short aerobic hills with a run up/jog down at about 5k effort (200m in length is good). From here you can move to more specific work.

You can search my previous blog posts for strength endurance development for more information. But the use of circuits and in particular Canova style circuits are of great use.

The most specific phase is when we combine strength activities with heavy fatigue. One of my favorite is to include either hills or bounding in the middle of fast work. So at first it might be doing a set of intervals followed by a few hills, then back to a set of intervals on the track. Later on, it will be a more specific activity where we actually try and force recruitment of additional fibers in the middle of the workout. Any of the High School kids I’ve worked with will tell you about my affinity for running 500’s where they go 200m at 800m pace, 100m bound, and 200m kick in one continuous motion. Another good way is to mix sprint work in between interval sets or at the end of a set of hard intervals.

There are numerous examples, but here’s a couple quick ones:
-3 sets of 500m w/ 5min rest going 200m at 800m pace, 100m bound, 200m kick in

-3 sets of 3x800 at 5k pace with 4x200m hill in between sets run hard.

-3x (3x800) w/ 4x60m sprints in between sets

-Intervals run on a flat/hill/flat section where it’s 200m hard on the flat, 100m uphill, then a final hard 100m on the flat once you crest the hill

-Strength endurance circuits alternating strength exercises w/ running uphill (see videos).

Have the ability to change gears:

Doing this stuff on it’s own is easy. You might have the best sprint mechanics, be highly aerobic at race pace, and all that jazz, but the ability to transition from your race pace to the final 200m or so is often what seperates the kickers from the non-kickers. Therefore you have to tie everything together nicely instead of having a bunch of different singular components. What this means is practicing the switch/transition.

To do this you simply do some race simulation work and some cuing of the changes. The first step is to work on transition mechanics. That means running 200s with the first 100 at race pace and the last 100 a gradual acceleration for example. The goal of the coach should be to help the athlete learn how to transition and control that increase of speed. Most athletes will simply try and do the same thing only quicker if they want to run faster. With those types of athletes, we have to equip them with the ability to increase stride length or range of motion, so that they have two options available when it comes time to kick. That may mean working on opening up the arms for example. With other athletes, the tendency might be to try and reach out to cover more ground. We’d have to take the opposite approach as above with these types of athletes. The bottom line is that we need to put the pieces together and figure out a way to transition from that steady rhythm they have to the sprinting ability which we have developed in isolation.

That’s my rough guide for developing a kick. What exactly you do depends on the athlete and their strengths and weaknesses. But the overall requirements of a kick remain the same. It’s just up to you as a coach to figure out the right way to mix the ingredients.

The Science of the finishing kick

2011-09-19T07:17:00.000-05:00

Kicking it into gear.

I’ve explored the phenomenon of the kick a little before but with recent research and with the fact worlds has just happened, let’s explore the kick phenomenon a bit more. First, let’s look at what actually happens physiologically, and then what we can do about it.

The physiology of the kick:

Energy systems dynamics:

An interesting new study sheds some more light on why we might be able to run faster, particularly at the end of a race. You can read about it here (LINK) but they took cyclist and had them do either solo time trials or against a computer which was really their previous selves. What they found was that when racing someone, they were able to increase their speed and the sole reason was the anaerobic energy component. In other words, the cyclists used the same amount of energy aerobically, but in the faster trial they were able to tap into more of their anaerobic capacity. This has implications in regards to motivation which we’ll discuss shortly, but for now lets look at what this and other research means for the kick in terms of energetic.

If we define the kick as the last 100-400m or so of the race where the pace is increased you have to look at two factors in terms of what effects the kick.

How we got there- If we look at things in terms of energetic, the person who gets to X point in the race when it’s time to kick the most economically will be in best position to tap in his energy reserves. If we think in terms of energy systems, this could be the person who is most aerobic at X point. Looking at lactate, previous data has shown us that some elite Africans tend to get to this X point with lower lactate levels then their counterparts. What that means is that they haven’t used as much anaerobic energy to get to the point, thus they have much more in reserve to throw it down. This reason alone is why “faster” pure speed athletes sometimes can’t kick. They may have better speed, but they’ve used all their “speed” (and anaerobic capacity) just to get to that point, so when they try and go, there is nothing left.

How much we got left- Given the above, there’s another factor that plays a role energetic wise. How big that anaerobic energy tank is. Someone could get to the X point the most economically, but if he has a very small tank of anaerobic gas to use, he’s still not going to have a good kick. If we think in terms of lactate, then having an ability to increase their peak levels to a high amount at the end of the race is critical.

So for the ultimate kick, the idea energetically is to get to the point X as efficiently as possible and having a big tank of anaerobic energy to throw down that wasn’t tapped into during the race. If we think in terms of lactate, it’d be having a low lactate at X point then being able to jack it up to a really high amount at the end of the race.

Motor unit recruitment

Another similar factor that has been studied is motor unit recruitment. This ties into and is similar to the above energetic model. If we look at studies on kicking, they show that the increase in speed is directly related to an ability to increase muscle motor unit activation. It makes sense. The more motor units we can activate, the more power/force we can produce.

Once again, this is like energetics. As we fatigue during a race, we have to call in more and more muscle fibers to do the work and we have to cycle them through faster. If we’ve cycled through everything when we reach our X point, then there’s nothing left to access and we have no way to increase force production. Therefore the goal is to be able to be very efficient in terms of muscle fiber use getting to point X, and then having an ability to access a large number of motor units at the very end. So once again, the goal is efficiency to point X, then having the neural ability to recruit more fibers.

If we look at some past studies measuring EMG, there’s a clear correlation between the increase in speed during the kick and the increase in EMG signal, or motor unit recruitment. Being able to send a stronger neural signal to recruit more fibers is key during the kick. How’s that done? By having the neural pathway ingrained so that you can access it, and by having sufficient “motivation”, which we’ll discuss shortly.

Biomechanics- ability to change gears (strides rate/length)

These ideas all tie together to a larger degree and one of the results of the two above mentioned factors can be reflected in the stride mechanics. There are two ways to increase speed. Either increase stride rate or stride length. Each runner tends to have their preferred way to do it to a degree. Some are more length dependent, some more rate, and some a nice mix of both. Everyone uses both ways, but the exact combo depends. What’s interesting is that when we pick up speed to kick, something has to change, and that for the most part, people tend to increase via whatever way they haven’t maxed out during the race. So if they’ve kept their stride length slightly lower and relied more on a high stride rate throughout, then they’ll jack up the stride length, or vice versa.

The bottom line is we have two ways to increase speed and it’s best to have both at each of our disposal. If you have two ways to go, then you’ve got an out if you are so fatigued that you can’t increase stride length for example. A good example of this is shown in this data from the 2007 world championships:

http://www.scienceofrunning.com/2010/11/speed-stride-length-x-stride-frequency.html

Motivation

Lastly but certainly not least is the issue of motivation. The aforementioned study on the cyclist also points out a seemingly obvious but subtly important issue. When we have competition or are motivated, we can improve our performance. That’s a no brainer right?

But what’s interesting is how. We always have stuff in reserve. Our body is too well controlled to let us push so deep that we risk injury or death (my boss Alberto Salazar might be the only exception here…). So it has all sorts of safety mechanisms to shut us down (or fatigue us) before we reach that point. One of the most obvious is once we get near deep fatigue, the brain might start shutting down muscle fiber recruitment.

What’s interesting is that motivation, or importance, changes this equation slightly. It lets us push just a bit further. In essence, our end “governor” point is extended just a bit. The extreme example of this are those stories where you hear some lady lifting a car to save their child or someone lifting a big boulder to save someone. These are feats of superhuman strength where our bodies have essentially weighed the risks and decided risking muscle/bone rupture/breaking is preferential to death in most cases. So, the limiters are gone and boom, we have super strength.

The same thing happens to small degrees in races. If we are highly motivated, if the competition means something, and if we are in the thick of things and believe we can hit some goal, then we’re more likely to be able to extend that governor and call upon a stronger kick.

What’s it all mean?

Get to the end more aerobic than anyone else

Have a larger degree of anaerobic capacity to use.

Have a large reserve of motor units you can call upon

Be able to use them in fatigue!

Be close enough and feel good enough where your body extends it’s limits a little- be motivated and challenged with goals just far enough to challenge yet close enough to be achievable.

How to train a kick?

This will be the next follow up post. And here's my heavily biased favorite kick for a guy who sucked at kicking for a few years...:

Watch more video of Ryan Dohner on flotrack.org

Factors affecting distance running performance: A literature review

2011-08-20T15:33:00.001-05:00

Free Lit Review on the Science of Running and performance!
I've decided to make my literature review for grad school available to all because I'm too busy to do anything with it at the moment and it's better to allow others to get some useful info out of it then sit on my computer.

This document is a full literature review of all there is to know about the science behind distance running. Going beyond a literature review, it also contains a critique from my coaching perspective and some insights on how to translate the science to the coaching field. It took more time than I care to remember, so I'd like it be of some use to someone besides me and hope those who decide to read through it find it interesting and thought provoking. I welcome any comments or questions about anything contained in the document.

It's 130 pages including well over a hundred citations. The best part is it is free. I like sharing information and figure that some coaches and athletes might get something out of it and that's good enough for me. If you find it extremely useful and want to contribute any money, feel free to do so with the donate button. It is greatly appreciated.

Download and donate at the following link:
http://www.scienceofrunning.com/p/get-science-of-running-literature.html

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: How Running Happens

Motor Programming

Sending and Receiving the signal

Muscle Contraction

Energy Needed

Muscle Fiber Types

A Recruitment Issue

Passive Mechanics

Chapter 2: Fatigue: Friend or Foe?

How Fatigue manifests itself

How Fatigue occurs

Oxygen’s role

Chapter 3: An Oxygen Problem

The measurement: VO2max

Oxygen intake

Oxygen Transportation

Oxygen utilization

The VO2max limiter.

Chapter 4: The Fallacy of VO2max

How the VO2max concept developed

Efficacy of basing training paces off of VO2max

Should we train to improve VO2max?

Chapter 5: Lactate, Acid, and other By-products

Buffering/Dealing with high acidosis

The Lactate Threshold

Maximum Lactate Steady State

Lactate Testing

Chapter 6: Efficiency

The Measurement: Running Economy

Biomechanical Efficiency

Neuromuscular Efficiency

Metabolic Efficiency

Problems with Running Economy

Chapter 7: The Brain-Muscle Connection

Neuromuscular and Anaerobic factors in performance

Fatigue and the CNS

Temperature Regulation

The Psychology of it all

Chapter 8: The Genetics of Training

Steps of Adaptation

Long Term Adaptation

Training Applications

Chapter 9: Theories of Training Adaptation

General Adaptation Syndrome and Dose-Response

Individuality of adaptation

Chapter 10: Volume and Intensity of Training

Volume of Training

Intensity of Training

Interaction of Volume and Intensity of Training

Training in the Real World

Supplemental training

Training Frequency

Chapter 11: Periodization

Periodization in Endurance Sport

Individualization

Chapter 12: Training Models- Example of Integration of Theory and Practice

Chapter 13: Where do we go from here?

European Travels- High Speed race video

2011-08-04T18:09:00.005-05:00

While I've been doing this little new job I have which includes bouncing around Europe for a while, I've kind of neglected this blog a little bit. Before I write anything substantial, I figured I'd fill the gap with some high speed video I took of a couple of professional 800m races that took place in Lignano, Italy.

When i get time, I'll go through a little bit of the process of post-season evaluation that I go through using Tommy Schmitz as an example. He had a kind of crazy season filled with some rookie mistakes by me and some ups and downs but came away with a nice 3:39 PR and another 2 races under his old PR, so no complaints, but I'll go through what went right, wrong, and how to fix things.

Also, here's a brief interview I did with Runner's World on how my job's going so far:
http://racingnews.runnersworld.com/2011/07/a-brief-chat-with-steve-magness.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RwDailyNews+%28Runner%27s+World+Racing+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Until then, enjoy the videos:

Stress Fractures in Runners:Risk Factors and Prevention

2011-06-07T16:52:00.000-05:00

While I'm off in Utah enjoying altitude training, I thought I'd pass along a journal article I wrote back in grad school that just got published in the July issue of the International Journal of Athletic Therapy and Training.

It's a quick practical article looking at tibial stress fractures and runners. In particular, what the possible causes may be and some potential things to address these problems and prevent the development of stress fractures.

Enjoy!

The table of contents is here:
http://journals.humankinetics.com/att-current-issue

and you can read the full article here: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B-ztvsHGfyICODZiNzQyNDctNDk5MC00NDg0LTllM2ItNWQ4ZTRiZGI0YTkz&hl=en_US

How to spot bad science and fads- Determining whether an idea is worthwhile:

2011-05-10T16:53:00.000-05:00

This is a blog straight from email requests. It’s not exactly about training, but one of the most frequent and perhaps most important question I get asked is how the heck do you spot the good stuff from the crap…

A while back I read the book Bad Science, which is an excellent read, and then just started reading the book Proofiness because of a recommendation. Both books are in a similar vein in that they both touch on how people can get fooled into believing wrong things. One focuses on the use of statistics while the other goes over how “guru’s” use bad science to fool the masses.

While it’s not directly related to training or running, it plays a crucial indirect role. As a coach or an athlete, we are bombarded with different training philosophies every day. If that isn’t enough, many of us browse through the latest scientific journal findings to see what’s going on in that side. It’s hard enough filtering through it if it’s your job and you’re a coach. While it’s impossible to come up with some tried and true method of evaluating claims, I’d like to go over several ways to spot a bad idea, bad science, or a bad expert, first and then offer a few brief suggestions on how to avoid the trap.

Falling into the trap:

The crossfit phenomenon is interesting to me. I don’t want to get caught up in the efficacy of it, but instead focus on some of the claims made about endurance performance from them. Why? Because it serves as a perfect example of falling into the trap. Before I get a backlash from the crossfit people, my premise is that using only high intensity max work to race a distance event isn’t the optimal way to do it. CFE has claimed before that runners would be better off maximizing their running performance if they ditched the traditional way and trained their way, random high intensity, low volume work…

I was browsing through Tim Ferris latest book at Barnes and Noble the other day and read the portion that applies to my area of expertise, running. I was saddened to see that Tim jumped on the bandwagon and essentially fell for the trap in buying into crossfit endurance, pose, and the Barry Ross way of sprinting. Ferris is highly educated and while he does make his living finding “hacks” it made me wonder why intelligent people make that mistake. So keeping the examples in mind from Ferris book, let’s look at how people get hooked in and fooled:

1. Establish expertise:

They’ve got to establish expertise in a persons mind. Whether it is through personal experience (“Hey I was once like you guys, but now I did this…”), connections with random professional athletes, degrees, or some other way, they’ve got to establish being an expert. And it’s not that hard to do, which is a post for another subject.

2. Enthusiasm-

The next step is for whoever is presenting the idea or concept to be extremely enthusiastic. We equate enthusiasm with passion, confidence, and trust. The logic is that if this “expert” seems to genuinely believe what he is saying, it must be true. Enthusiasm and passion are good things, but not when it replaces knowledge.

3. Exploit people’s goals- Give them a magic bullet

Make big promises that people can reach those goals that always seem out of reach. Guarantee them that they can and the only reason they haven’t before is because they were given the wrong workouts/information.

4. Tell us what we want to hear- It’s easy.

They’ll give people a shortcut. No need to run 80+mpw for an ultramarathon, just do 400’s! This is a common tactic in those wonderful infomercials or diets. Why did Atkins take off in popularity (before plummeting)? Because it was much more appealing to eat all the steak, fat, etc. you wanted than to eat a bunch of fruits/vegetables and the like.

5. Blame someone else

It’s not our fault we are out of shape, overweight, etc. If the guru can shift the blame from ourselves to someone else they gain an upper hand. There are many example sof this in the diet and exercise industry. Right now the trend towards blaming our obesity epidemic on the government dietary suggestions is an example. By shifting the blame to the outside, the guru is telling people what they want to hear. After all who wants to be responsible?

6. Go Against the accepted norms

In looking at the publication of scientific journal articles, there is an interesting trend. Whenever a new theory is tested and some positive results come back, there’s a swarm of papers on the theory trying to substantiate the fancy new theory and go against the previous norm. However, after a while, the tide turns and once this theory gains some ground, the trend switches to more and more papers trying to disprove the new idea. The point is that it’s human nature to like to be the first on a new trend. We like to go against the accepted norms. People will exploit this. Sometimes the norms are wrong, but often time they are the norms for a reason.

7. It’s a conspiracy

The previous two points bring us to this one. If the guru’s go against the norms they have to provide a reason why the norms are wrong. The easiest way to establish this is to develop a conspiracy. People love conspiracies. For example, a common tactic is to blame the government diet or exercise recommendations and say they are controlled by pharmaceutical, agricultural, or any other industry.

8. Hide behind Science and complexity

At a recent track meet I was having a conversation with a friend in college, who made the astute observation that if the coaches inserted random scientific terms to explain things, even if they were totally wrong, the runners seemed to buy into it more enthusiastically. That’s a very common reaction, we all do it. We associate science and complexity with being smart or correct. As I've said before...people trying to fool you go from simple to complex...good coaches translate complex things into simple understandable ideas.

The problem is most of us don’t have the knowledge or filter to figure out if what they are saying is correct or not. Even scientific experts don’t have the expertise at times, so how is a normal person going to? These guru’s will blend correct scientific terms (think: Neuromuscular, lactate threshold, VO2max, fascia, energy systems, etc.) and use them either incorrectly or out of context to explain something. Crossfit is a great example of this. They hide behind science, saying there way is based on science. Well, they use a lot of science in their lectures online, but the problem is they don’t understand it and use it wrong. The same can be said for Pose. They rely on a ton of science, and not all of it is bad, but when published in a reputable journal, the response from several biomechanist was nothing short of amusing.

9. Hide Behind numbers and statistics

The easiest way to trick someone is to throw in some numbers and statistics. Most of us (myself included) go a little brain dead when a bunch of stats are thrown out. We don’t ever question what they mean or how they go there. It’s human nature to just accept statistics. If you want to ramp things up even more, throw in a bunch of charts or graphs. Once again, these are very easy to manipulate in your favor (something as easy as changing the scale for example) and people rarely question them.

10. Rely on testimonial

Lastly, a common tactic is to rely on testimonials. It’s a tactic that is designed to make it plausible in the consumer’s mind that they too can reach the same results. After all, if all these “normal” people had success how can they be wrong? This line of thinking prevents us from delving deeper into the claims or legitimacy of it.

I don’t want to pick on any one group or get into the efficacy of any of them, but if you look at the latest trends or fads or whatever you want to call them in the exercise or diet world you can check off a number of the above tactics. Whether it’s atkins, Gary Taube’s book, Crossfit, Barry Ross’ sprinting ideas, High intensity interval training, Tabbata sprints, pose, chi running, supplement companies, SOMAX, or choose your own example, similarities between them all are readily noticeable.

How to avoid the trap:

Now that we know how to spot the trap, how can we avoid it? There’s no easy way and this would require a separate post in itself but here are some useful tips in deciding whether or not the particular training method or gimmick is worthwhile or not.

The Stool Test:

I’ve discussed the stool test previously, so I’ll just briefly go over it again. My thesis advisor, Jason Winchester, was the one who brought this concept to my attention and it’s a simple yet effective way to decide whether something is worthwhile.

Basically, you have 3 legs to a stool. If you have all 3, well then it works. If you only have 2, it could work but it depends on the strength of those 2 legs. If we only have one of the three, chances are it’s not going to work.

The three legs of the stool are:

1.Practical- Does it work in the “real world.” What this means is have you tried and it works or have many others tried it and it works.

2. Research- Is there scientific research on it and does it confirm that it works.

3. Theory- Is there a legitimate, non-pseudoscientific, theory for why it might work.

Look towards the elites:

Elite athletes aren’t perfect and don’t always get it right, but the chance that the majority of the successful ones are doing the right thing, is slimmer than looking at a bunch of recreational runners. Why, because elite runners generally have access to the best coaches and rely on maximizing performance as their job. There is more at stake for them to be right.

Secondly, many elites are always looking for an edge training wise. It’s not always the best of the best guys, but the ones a level below who are trying to make that jump. That’s why you’ll see an occasional pretty good athlete try crossfit or pose or some supplement. The key is not whether one guy tries it or not, but if they succeed and then several follow suit and succeed. It’s a copycat game and if someone has a lot of success with a particular training method, it will catch on. It’s why we went from a high interval training program to a higher volume one after the success of Lydiard’s athletes. Lydiard was bucking the norm but it worked, so it rapidly gained popularity.

Similarly, in the high jump, Dick Fosbury completely changed the game. The key again was that it worked and it was soon adapted by others. With fads that don’t work, you’ll see a handful of good athletes try them, but the results over the long term won’t be there and you won’t see more and more elites copying them.

Innovation is key, but the right innovation is even more important. If someone is doing something completely opposite from what the best do and claim their way is better, it’s doubtful. If they are still making that claim after a couple years, it’s even more doubtful because if it worked it would likely have caught on with someone as the results would be their (ala Lydiard or Fosbury). So look towards the elites as a general guide.

Know your history:

Last, but not least, know your history. A ton of different training methods have been tried before. Often they are repackaged and sold as new or breakthrough methods. The reality is that they may be useful but there is a reason we have evolved past them. For instance, the very low volume tons of intervals has been tried several times throughout the past 100 years. It doesn’t mean that intervals are bad, it just means that if you know your history, you know that we used to do a ton of them, and through evolution of training that amount has settled down into a more reasonable place. It doesn’t mean that innovation has to stop. It just means don’t throw away 60 years of evolution of training. Use the lessons learned as your guide and evolve from here.

The general pattern in history with anything training related is that with each generation we have a slight blowback against what the previous generation goes. So it’s a constantly swinging back and forth pendulum that gets closer and closer to the center with each generation. So we started with extreme swings of all mileage or all very short fast stuff. Now, we argue over how much and when to do each and the variation between most good programs is more minimal than in the past. The point of all of this is that if you know what happened before and the road that has been traveled, you don’t have to make those same mistakes in figuring things out. You progress…

What’s the take away message here?

In this internet age, there’s a ton of information available. It’s almost too much. So come up with a model to figure out how to separate the worthwhile info and the crap info. I’ve generally found that at first it all kind of flows together, but if you keep at it, eventually you hit a point where it all clicks, and sorting through things isn’t that difficult. For coaches out there, my best piece of advice is to know the basic foundation and use that as your guide. That means, know the history of training, the basics of human movement/biomechanics, and exercise science. If you know how we basically work, then spotting crap science is a lot easier.

High Speed Video from the Stanford Payton Jordan Invite

2011-05-02T18:31:00.000-05:00

I was down in Palo Alto this weekend for Stanford's Payton Jordan Invite. While I was there, I took some quick high speed video (210fps) of several of the races. Below you'll see video from the fast heats of the Women's 5k, the Women's 1500m, and the men's 1500m (heat 1 and 2).

Enjoy!

Women's 5,000m (Fast Heat):

Women's 1,500m Heat 1:

Men's 1500m Heat 1:

Men's 1500m Heat 2:

Hydration- A lesson in interpretation

2011-04-29T14:12:00.000-05:00

I’ve used the example of hydration during running to demonstrate the natural cycle of under/over emphasizing until we kind of naturally move towards the sweet spot. What I’d like to do now is use hydration as a way to show error in interpretation.

When we rely on scientific data, we tend to look at the conclusions as fact. After all, most people simply peruse the abstracts and jump straight to the last one or two sentences that basically say what the heck the article was all about. Even if we browse the article, we often skip the methods and the results section which tells what they actually found and head straight towards the conclusion statement where the author’s give us a “what does this mean practically.”

Problems arise when we interpret the conclusion as exact fact. Instead, it is the data that should be factual and relevant if the experiment was done correctly, and the conclusion is left for human interpretation and error. I’m not saying that the author’s concluding remarks are false or useless, as they often provide great insight. My point is that even the best and brightest of us make mistakes in interpretation and that’s when we run into problems.

It’s not the science or the data that is the problem. It’s often us.

Human interpretation is faulty:

Hydration provides a perfect example of when we take good data and misinterpret what it is telling us. Way back in the early days of marathoning and exercise science, some early pioneers took some data and found that there was a direct correlation between weight lost during the marathon and the finishing speed of that runner. Put simply, the faster runners lost more weight during the race. The data was right on.

The human interpretation wasn’t. Seeing this data, the conclusion at the time was that it was bad to drink water during a marathon. It seems logical enough right? The faster runners lost more weight and thus didn’t replenish their fluids as much, so taking water to maintain fluid loss most negatively affect performance. So for several years, the prevailing logic was that in order to maximize performance, runners should not drink. After all, there was a direct correlation between weight and water lost and performance!

When health became more important than performance and some more data come out that dehydration was a bad thing. We overreacted and decided to push full weight maintenance during the marathon, which resulted in a lot of problems, such as a huge spike in deaths related to drinking way too much water (Hyponatremia). This isn’t a post about that cycle but you need to know that to set the stage to where we are today.

Hydration today: Fastest runners still lose the most weight/water

Which brings us to today. Alex Hutchinson does a nice job summarizing the latest research, which not surprisingly found the same results that were noticed over a half century ago. (http://sweatscience.com/hydration-faster-marathoners-lose-more-weight/). Today though, we interpret the results differently. It’s essentially the same data, but the conclusions are remarkably different: We should simply drink to thirst. It’s okay to be slightly dehydrated at the end of a marathon. The key is listening to your body and figuring out where that sweet spot of consuming enough fluids versus forcing fluids down is.

One interesting thing about all of this is that it demonstrates how we easily can override our own body’s feedback signaling just because of the way we think and what we’ve been taught. Essentially, if we are inundated with the importance of (over) hydration enough, then we’ll ignore the thirst or fullness signals our body might send.

What do we take away from this example and the interpretation problem?

Well the simple answer is to drink to thirst. The complex answer though is that it might have been so long since we’ve paid attention to our thirst mechanism that it’s going to take some practice and adjustment. Which leads me to one a quick tangent: Paying attention to feel or running by feel is great, but it’s a skill most of us have to relearn. One of my former HS guys (who is just ran 14:26 for 5k for Texas! Congrats Will!) told me last week that it took him almost 2 years to figure out how to do a threshold/tempo run correctly. Even with emphasizing the importance of running by feel, and banging the concept into his head a million times, it took him 2 years to be self disciplined enough to stop letting his competitive instincts of running with some of the other guys like Ryan, take over and block the feedback he was receiving while running. Part of it was my fault because I was spending too much time making sure the (at the time) better and older guys like Ryan, Jeremy, and Cody were getting it and there was only one of me to run with everyone, and an at the time over 5min miler as a freshman didn't get as much attention as he should have!

On the science side of things, the lesson is a little more subtle. Instead of browsing the author’s conclusions on research, look at what the research actually found. Look at the actual results first, think critically, and form your own quick opinion before reading the Author’s remarks and interpretation. This way you’ll at least avoid falling into the trap of simply relying on others interpretation. If both you and the author’s interpretation matches up, you’re probably on the right track. If it doesn’t, then I wouldn’t jump right into whatever the research claims. Additionally, after reading the research, think if you could interpret the data in another logical way, just as the hydration data could be seen from two different viewpoints that were both seemingly logical at the time.

The data is seldom wrong or off, it’s just us humans that get in the way of it.

Motivation in Elite and High School Runners

2011-04-18T23:37:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick "study" I had to do for a sports psychology class in grad school. It was just a quick thing I had to put together for class, but it's kind of interesting because I got to look at elite runners, which no one ever does. So I figured I'd share it for those interested.

MOTIVATION IN ELITE AND HIGH SCHOOL RUNNERS

ABSTRACT
PURPOSE: To evaluate what motivates High School (HS) and Elite level distance runners using Self Determination Theory. It was hypothesized that HS and Elite runners motivation be different, levels of amotivation in Elites will be lower, and Elite runners will have lower levels of introjected regulation. METHODS: Thirty five runners were recruited (19 HS and 16 Elite) to take the Sports Motivation Scales survey. Motivation was broken down into 7 sub categories: Amotivation, Extrinsic Motivation (EM) external regulation, EM introjected regulation, EM identified regulation, Intrinsic Motivation (IM) to know, IM to accomplish, and IM stimulation. Results were analyzed using one and two tailed t-tests. RESULTS: There were no significant differences between Elite and HS runners motivation, although several approached significance. Levels of amotivation were not significantly different, although it approached significance (p=.07). Lastly, EM introjected was not significantly different, though it closely approached significance (p=.06). The one significant difference found was that Elites had lower amotivation than low level HS runners.

Introduction

Running is an activity that requires dealing with a large degree of pain, a high injury risk, and the ability to handle high training loads. Despite these factors, running as an activity continues to grow. According to Running USA’s annual state of the sport report, in 2008 over 14 million people in the United States were considered frequent runners, meaning they ran over 100 times per year (Running USA). This leads to the question of what motivates runners to run?

Literature Review

The motivation of runners has been researched from a variety of different approaches. Clough et al. (1989) took an interesting approach looking at running in terms of other leisure activities. They found that runner’s motivation could be divided into six groups: Well Being, Social, Challenge, Status, Fitness/Health, and Addiction. The most important factors were challenge followed by fitness/health and well being. While the first four factors were similar to those seen in other leisure activities, the last two factors were different. This study set the stage for acknowledging that there was something extra that set running apart from other similar activities.

While studies initially compared runners as a whole group, latter studies pointed to the idea that there are different groups of runners motivated by different factors. One such study was done by Slay et al. (1998) in which they found that obligatory runner’s motivation differed from non-obligatory runners. The obligatory runners were more motivated by negative or external factors such as guilt of stopping, and weight control. In another study on committed runners who ran more than 40 miles per week, it was found that the committed runners were more motivated by mastery, competition, and weight regulation (Scott and Thorton, 1995). Lastly, Ogles and Masters (2003) found that marathon runners could be divided into several groups based on their motivation profiles. These groups were: Running enthusiasts, lifestyle managers, personal goal achievers, personal accomplishers, and competitive achievers. These studies demonstrate that runners’ motivation differs based on their level of running, goals, and experience.

Motivation also tends to vary based on skill level. Although not done with runners, a study by Chantel et al. (1996) looked at the differences in motivation in elite athletes. They looked at motivation in terms of Deci and Ryan’s Self Determination Theory, using the Sports Motivation Scale (SMS) as a way to measure Self Determination. The Self Determination Theory states that there is a continuum of motivation that includes three different levels of internal motivation, three levels of external motivation, and one level of amotivation. Internal motivation refers to participating in the activity for its own satisfaction or pleasure. In other words, it is motivation based on the activity being an end in itself. External motivation includes doing the activity as a means to an end or for some external reason.

Amotivation is a lack of motivation and is first on the continuum. It is followed by the three levels of extrinsic motivation (EM), which are external regulation, introjected regulation, and identified regulation. External regulation refers to motivation based on external sources, such as receiving an award or coercion to participate. Introjected regulation means that pressure from themselves or guilt over not doing the activity. Lastly, identified regulation refers to when an individual begins to identify with the activity and chooses to perform the activity because it has some level of importance to them.

The three levels of Intrinsic motivation (IM) are next on the continuum and include intrinsic motivation to know, to accomplish things, and to experience stimulation. Intrinsic motivation to know looks at the motivation to learn and understand about that activity. Motivation to accomplish things refers to the pleasure of the experience of trying to master a difficult task. And finally, Intrinsic motivation to experience stimulation refers to experiencing the joy of the activity in and of itself.

Chantel et al.(1986) found that the best athletes had higher levels of amotivation and non-self determined extrinsic motivation. Non-self determined refers to external regulation and introjected regulation. It should be noted that this study was on Bulgarian athletes who were likely influenced by communist practices. Looking at what motivates elite Kenyan runners, Onywera et al. (2006) found that they were primarily motivated by economic incentive, followed by talent and tradition. This finding would seem to match up with elites having higher extrinsic motivation.

The goal of this study is to compare motivation of a group of High School (HS) runners and a group of Elite/Professional runners using the SMS. Based on the research above, several hypothesis can be made. I predict that there will be a difference between HS and Elite runners motivation. Since elite runners are more likely to fall into the committed runner categorization, levels of amotivation in Elites will be lower than in HS runners. This will contrast to that seen with elite athletes who have higher levels of amotivation because of the uniqueness of the demands of running. Lastly, elite runners will have lower levels of introjected regulation than HS runners, as was seen in the studies on elite athletes.

Methods

Subjects

There were two groups of subjects used in the present study. The first group was the HS runners who were recruited for participation. These runners came from a HS that the author had connections to and were selected based on their participation in Track and/or Cross-Country. Participants had to regular compete in running events 800m or longer to qualify. Nineteen subjects qualified for participation

The second group of subjects consisted of elite runners who similarly competed in running events 800m or longer. In order to qualify as elite runners, the subjects must have met the 2009 USA Track and Field’s B standard for qualifying for the track and field national championship, or finished in the top 10 at a national road racing championship. Qualified runners were recruited based on their availability to the author. Sixteen subjects qualified for participation in this group.

Procedures

The measurement tool used was the Sport Motivation Scale (SMS) (Appendix 1). It is a survey that consists of 28 questions that are meant to measure the six different measures of Deci and Ryan’s Self Determination Theory that were previously mentioned. Upon agreeing to take part in this study, subjects were given the consent form to be signed, or if under the age of 18 for the participant’s parents to sign. Upon completing and returning the consent form subjects were given the survey and were told that the survey was looking at their motivation for participating in running competitively and to grade each statement from a 1 to 7 scale on what degree that statement corresponded with why they participant in running competitively. In addition to the measurement, the survey’s included age, event group, and best performance. Event group was defined as either middle, consisting of events 3,000m or shorter, and long distance, consisting of events 5,000m and longer.

Upon completion of all of the studies, they were graded according to Deci and Ryan’s scale and analyzed. Analysis was done using Microsoft Excel and consisted of using average scores for the seven categories of motivation (Amotivation, EM external regulation, EM introjected regulation, EM identified regulation, IM to know, IM to accomplish, and IM stimulation). For data analysis and comparison groups of subjects were split into the following groups:

-HS- consisting of all HS subjects

-Elite- consisting of all Elite subjects

-Top HS- Those HS runners who competed on the Varsity level

-Low HS- Those HS runners who competed at the Junior Varsity level or lower

T-tests were run comparing the different groups on each of the six different levels of motivation. Significance was set at p=.05, but given the low numbers of participants, significance levels approaching this will be acknowledged.

Results

The average scores for each group can be found below in Table 1.

Table 1- Average Scores among groups

Figure 1 presents a comparison of the averages for each group. Hypothesis one that there would be a difference between HS and Elite motivation using a 2-tailed test revealed that there were no significant differences between the groups. However, several differences approached significance with IM to accomplish (p=.11), EM introjected (p=.12), and Amotivation (p=.15) all near significance.

Hypothesis two was that elites would have lower amotivation than HS level athletes. Using a one tailed t-test, significance was closely approached (p=.07). The third hypothesis was that Elite runners would have lower EM introjected than HS runners. Using a one tailed t-test, the p-value was .06, which is very near significance.

An entire comparison looking for significance between all classifications was also done using a 2-tailed t-test. The results can be seen below in Table 2. When compared to the lower level HS runners, elites showed a significant difference in Amotivation (p<.05), and almost a significant difference level for EM introjected (p=.06). Lastly, in comparing High vs. Low caliber HS athletes, amotivation approached significance (p=.10).

Table 2- Significance levels between groups

Figure 1- Comparison of Averages among groups

Discussion

The first hypothesis was that there would be a significant difference between Elite and HS runners. While, there were no significant differences, several approached significance. EM introjected was closest (p=.06), which if significant would support the 3rd hypothesis. Lastly, the 2nd hypothesis that levels of amotivation would be lower in Elites was not significant when compared to the entire HS population, but was significant (p=.04) when compared to only lower level HS (HS-L) runners.

Several interesting conclusions can be drawn from these findings. First, while not statistically significant, there does appear to be a difference between the motivation for Elite and HS level runners. In particular HS runners seem to be more motivated by EM introjected reasons, such as feeling guilt for not running. This means that they might be more motivated by the negative aspects of not running, then the positive aspects of running. Several possibilities exist for this difference. One possible explanation is that since HS runners are on a team that you have to join, the feeling of letting down teammates, coaches, or others by not running is present. This is in contrast with Chantel et al. (1986) study finding that elite athletes had lower levels of EM introjected motivation.

Another interesting finding was that the difference between Elite and HS-L runners amotivation levels were significant (p=.04). This differs from the findings of Chantel et al. (1986) who found elite athletes (not runners) had higher levels of amotivation than non-elites. The contradictory findings on amotivation and EM introjected between the present study and the Chantel et al. (1986) study can be explained by two distinct differences. First, the act of running itself is different than other sports, as found by Clough et al. (1986). The present study would seem to confirm this idea that motivation for runners is different than other elites. Secondly, the study by Chantel et al. (1986) was done using Bulgarian athletes who were subject to different pressures than the Elite athletes used in this study who all live in the United States. U.S. athletes competing in the 21st century have significant more freedom than Bulgarian athletes competing in the 1980’s. In effect, the U.S. Elites choose to participate in track and field, while this may not have been the case in Bulgaria.

The present study had several limitations that I’d like to acknowledge. First, the subject numbers were very low which made finding significant differences difficult. Secondly, due to the nature of the study and the short time frame, the sampling was one of convenience. This was also partly due to the fact that in sampling Elite runners, the numbers of such runners are inherently low and spread out across the country.

This study demonstrates that Elite runners may show a different pattern of motivation than HS runners. Also, based on comparison with other studies, their motivation may be different from other Elite athletes. The finding that amotivation was lower in Elites demonstrates the great demand of training required for running and that peak performance likely cannot be achieved with high levels of amotivation. Future studies need to look at interventions that can decrease amotivation levels in HS level athletes. In addition, comparisons need to be made between Elite runners and other Elite athletes in the U.S. to see if there is indeed a difference. Lastly, while no significant differences were found, a comparison of high level and low level HS runners might be worthwhile. It was difficult to compare these groups in the present study because of low numbers, but in looking at the average scores it appears that HS-H runners were more similar to Elites than HS-L runners were. This opens up the possibility in using motivation scales to predict future success as runners.
References

Chantal, Y., Guay, F., Dobreva-Martinova, T., & Vallerand, R. (1996). Motivation and elite performance: An exploratory investigation with Bulgarian athletes. Int J Sport Psychol, 27, 173-182.

Clough, P., Shepherd, J. & Maughan, R. (1989). Motives for participation in recreational running. Journal of Leisure Research, 21, 297-309.

Fortier, M. S., Vallerand, R. J., Briere, N. M., & Provencher, P. J. (1995). Competitive and recreational sport structures and gender: A test of their relationship with sport motivation. Int J Sport Psychol, 26, 24-39.

LaChausse, R., (2006). Motives of competitive and non-competitive cyclists. Journal of Sport Behavior, 29(4), 304-314.

Ogles, B. M. & Masters, K. S. (2003). A Typology of Marathon Runners Based on Cluster Analysis of Motivations. Journal of Sport Behavior, 26.

Onywera, V. O., Scott, R. A., Boit, M. K. & Pitsiladis, Y. P. (2006). Demographic characteristics of elite Kenyan endurance runners. Journal of Sports Sciences, 24(4), 415- 422.

Running USA. 2009 Marathon and State of the Sport Report. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from: http://www.runningusa.org/node/16414#24640

Slay, H. A., Hayaki, J., Napolitano, M. A., & Brownell, K. D. (1998). Motivations for running and eating attitudes in obligatory versus nonobligatory runners. Int J Eat Disord, 23(3), 267-75.

Thorton, E. W. & Scott, S. E. (1995). Motivation in the committed runner: correlations between self-report scales and behaviour. Health Promotion International, 10(3),177-184.

The most important information you will ever read about Running Form: Passive vs. Active

2011-04-03T18:56:00.000-05:00

I've been hanging onto this post for a while now, as I wrote most of it a couple months ago for a coaching friend. It seemed like a relevent topic and a good enough time to post it here for the rest of you.

It might seem like I’m being overly dramatic with the title, but the following two concepts are critical for understanding running form, or even human movement in general. With the rise in popularity of running form and the increase in running form guru’s that accompanies that, I it was a good time to share what I feel is the most important lesson. Why? Because if you change mechanics and don’t know what you’re doing, you are begging for an injury. As always, I’m deeply in debt to the master when it comes to this topic, Tom Tellez. The two key lessons to learn are:

1. What happens Active versus Passive

2. The difference between Static movements and Dynamic movements.

What’s so important about these concepts? Well, quite frankly it’s what separates the knowledgeable from the quacks. It’s relatively easy to watch a lot of good people run and figure out in a general idea what good running form looks like. What’s harder is to figure out what the runners are actually doing to get to that point.

Passive vs. Active

The concept is relatively easy, but sometimes difficult to grasp with all the scientific type stuff, so I’ll try and keep it to a minimum. The idea is that in dynamic movements like running, things happen both actively and passively. It’s a little more complex than that, in that there is a large interaction between the two, but let’s stick with making it simple. By active, we mean that muscles have to be actively contracted to accomplish some task. For instance, in doing a bicep curl, we know that the muscles in the arm work together to lift whatever weight is in your hand. Essentially, it’s active if you’ve got to try and do it (even if it’s so ingrained that aren’t actually “thinking” about it to accomplish the task)

Passively is a little more complex. You can subdivide passive into passive mechanics, and reflexive. Passive mechanics are things like momentum or inertia, where it doesn’t matter really if it’s a human or not, objects will act in various ways. Think back to your High School Physics class for this stuff. Reflexive is exactly as it sounds. It’s those things that happen without you actively thinking or doing anything. It happens as a result of something else. The common example is the test where they tap right below your knee in the doctor’s office and your foot kicks out a little.

If we look at the various passive mechanisms we have in our body, you’ll see things like the stretch reflex. Which should essentially be thought of as a rubber band. The muscle-tendon unit is stretched and then snaps back really quickly. You’ve got the stretch shortening cycle, which basically means that if you stretch the muscle a bit before contacting, you’ll get a bigger power increase. The typical example is the calf muscle during any sort of hoping. When you hit the ground, the calf is stretched, storing energy, and then contracted as you push off. A practical example would be a counter-movement jump. If we were to measure jump height, what would you do? You’d start standing, then squat down and immediately explode upwards. If you instead squatted down, held it for a few seconds and then exploded upwards, you would not jump near as high because you didn’t take advantage of the SSC.

There are other largely passive mechanisms that aid us in running. We could look at the elastic energy storage and transference through the body that occurs when you strike the ground, or we could look at the interplay of the motion in the upper and lower body which can aid in movement and force production. But…those topics are for another post, as I don’t want this to become an all encompassing 20 page post. So we’ll focus on what I’ll call the big 3.

Passive applied to Running:

So what does this actually mean in terms of running? Well part of the running stride is active, and part of it relies on passive stuff. If you are changing someone’s mechanics and you are trying to copy some other runner, and you change something that he is doing largely passively, then you just screwed yourself. Because now you’re using muscles you don’t need to, which increases the energy cost, and increases potential injury likelihood. Let’s take a look at the running stride and help Identify what happens passively, or at least mostly passively.

Kicking your butt:

When athlete’s sprint or run pretty quickly, most have a high back kick where the foot folds up and almost hits their butt as it passes underneath them. This is a good thing because it increases the angular velocity of the lower leg. But we don’t get there by thinking about actively kicking ourselves in the butt…Why?

Because the reason the foot goes close to the butt is because of the inertial force that the thigh exerts on the lower leg. Once the thigh is extended as far back as it’s going to go, it then shoots forward (for reasons we’ll discuss shortly). Well, since the thigh and lower leg are linked, the thigh changes directions a tad “sooner” and moves faster (because it’s closer to the rotation point…the hip) then it has a profound effect on what the lower leg does. The thigh essentially “drags” the lower leg with it. The faster the thigh moves, the more it “drags” it. So what’s the effect that we see? The faster the thigh moves forward, the more the lower leg folds up to the butt. It’s simply an inertial force.

If you want to get creative and see it for yourself, get some sort of simple 2 link segment to mimic the upper and lower legs. I’ve used a longer metal hinge before. Just play around with it making sure to rotate the “upper” part of the hinge/linked system and see what the lower part does.

Okay, so we got that lesson? The thigh speed partially determines what the lower leg does. (I say partially because body lean, the angle of the hips (the joint which everything “rotates” around) also will influence it…but that’s for another post). So move the thigh forward faster right? Wrong!

Moving your thigh and lifting your knee:

The problem with trying to really move your thigh forward is that once again, it largely occurs passively. The stretch reflex at the hip plays a large role. As the thigh/hip complex moves back rapidly as you apply force to the ground, it creates a stretch reflex effect so that once extension is complete, the whole thigh shoots forward. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s best thought of as a pulling a slingshot back and then letting it go. As you apply force to the ground and the hip extends/thigh moves back, you are essentially pulling the slingshot back. Once you extend far enough back, then you “let go” and the thigh shoots forward.

The best practical example of this is when you take patients who have spinal lesions, put them on a treadmill, and then manually force the thigh/hip to extend. If you extend the hip enough, then let go, the leg will “magically” come forward through the swing phase in a close approximation to walking (and the lower leg will fold up slightly due partly to the inertial force exerted by the thigh).

So, trying to move your thigh through the swing phase faster is a foolish thing to do. It’s trying to make something that is largely “passive” into something active. The same goes for lifting the knee actively. If the thigh comes through with enough speed, which will be a result of the stretch reflex and the inertial force of the thigh on the lower leg (because if the inertial force is great, then the lower leg will fold up towards the butt and increase the angular velocity of the whole leg coming through…). Put another way, the greater the force of hip extension/moving the thigh backwards by application of force to the ground, the greater the knee lift will be in the front. Why? Because the thigh would shoot through “quicker” because of the greater stretch reflex. Thus…why when you sprint, you generally have a higher knee lift then when jogging…You’re not extending the hip/thigh as quickly or as much.

Arm Swing

While there are a lot of other examples, one I’d briefly like to discuss is arm swing. The reason I’m mentioning this is it’s relatively easy to feel the stretch reflex at play. In this case, swinging your arms backwards will create a stretch reflex that aids in moving the arms through the forward swing phase.

It’s pretty easy to feel. Go stand in front of a mirror and just start stroking your arms. Start with an easy tempo and then increase the tempo and range of motion. If you are swinging your arms back appropriately, you can easily feel the effects of the stretch reflex. Just mess around with it for a while and you should be able to get it. This whole arm swing mechanism is why you primarily focus on the backswing and stroking your arms, not bringing them forward.

One last thing I’d like to mention briefly about arm swing, is that the arms and legs work in concert. Arm swing is a great way to control tempo and stride rate/length. For example, why do people open up the arms and stroke them when kicking it in? To increase stride length because the arms are going through a bigger range of motion, the legs will too.

Just a quick tip, the arms and legs counteract the angular momentum of each other. Upper body rotation/arm swing problems can be used to identify lower leg problems and vice versa. Most of the time what I’ve found is if you fix the arm swing, the legs will compensate and “fix” too. It’s why you’ve got to take a whole body approach and not isolate.

So what the heck do I worry about?!

You’ve got to make sure everything is in the right position to work correctly. The biggest lessons are learning what NOT to do. That being said, this isn't a post about how to change form. The quick and dirty cheat sheet guide is to pay attention to the following:

1. Body position –slight lean from the ground, everything in alignment, moving forward, not wasting motion.

2. Foot strike (not only where on the foot, but more importantly where in relation to COM)

3. Hip extension once you hit the ground (Downwards and a little back. The key is starting hip extension once the foot hits the ground and ALLOWING it to happen and not trying to rush it or cut it off short…or as I like to invoke my inner info commercial…just set it and forget it…)

4. Arm stroke- arms are your gas pedal. Use them to control the tempo.

5. Relaxation

Static vs. Dynamic

Passive and Active are very much related to static and dynamic. If you’ve suffered through this post long enough, you’ll realize that the body has to work differently in a dynamic state then a static one. The stretch reflex, SSC, and inertial forces for example all rely on relatively quick movements. They don’t happen if we move really slow through the same range of motion. That means that the way we work dynamically is completely different then how we might work statically.

This has a couple major implications. First, you can’t really use static tests or static range of motion to tell you much about a dynamic movement. My favorite example is that Carl Lewis couldn’t touch his toes, yet watch him long jump and his dynamic range of motion was incredible. If you don’t believe that story, I’ll demonstrate on myself…

Ask anyone who has run with me and they’ll tell you my static flexibility is horrible. I’m completely useless. Even when I wear high socks to run in, I can’t come close to being able to bend down and touch them. The pictures below illustrate this. In the first one, I’m actively raising my heel as close as I can get it to my butt. In the second one, I’m pulling my heel to the butt as far as I can without feeling like my quads about to be ripped. It's pretty apparant that if you looked at these pictures, you'd realize my static range of motion sucks...it's horrible... :)

But, what happens when I sprint? Well, my heel somehow is able to make it right under my butt with no problem. It doesn't feel like my quads going to rip or like there's anything abnormal about the range of motion it's going through. It is a perfect example of Static VS. Dynamic!

The point in mentioning this is to not fall into the trap of doing stuff like static flexibility or range of motion tests and then using those to explain someone’s movement in a dynamic situation. For example, if a runner doesn’t have a high back kick and a trainer/coach notices they have horrible static hamstring flexibility, the conclusion is often that the kid needs to stretch more so he can get that range of motion…Well that would be wrong. Runner’s muscles are often “tight” statically because a tight musculo-tendon unit is “stiffer” which means it can work as a spring better, storing more elastic energy than a completely loose muscle. Our body isn’t dumb; it tries to become efficient at what we do. That’s the reason why research studies show that runner’s with worse sit and reach scores have better Running economy.

Does that mean no static or dynamic stretching? No. Because remember that most of our mileage is run at relatively slow paces, so we primarily adapt to that. That’s why you need some dynamic flexibility work, or more importantly some sprinting or faster running where the range of motion is much higher throughout the year.

To finish the static vs. dynamic section, I'll quote a dissertation by James Smoliga (2007) where he said, and backed up with research:
"Functional MRI imaging has revealed coordination between the upper and lower body to be a complex task controlled by multiple areas of a motor network, distributed across cortical and subcortical regions of the brain61. Coordination of the arms and legs is task-specific, with a reflex pathway active during locomotion73, 112, but not during tasks performed while standing or seated73 "

So What?
The whole point is to be informed. It's easy to look at a picture or a video and realize what you see. But what matters is the why and how what you see is happening.

Not being able to distinguish the above things is what seperates the so called "guru's" and the people who actually know what they are doing. Sorry if it sounds harsh, but with the rise of the barefoot running stuff and the interest in running form, there are a lot of people trying to make $ of runners who don't know any better...

The danger with using EMG:

Lastly, a section I’ve added on because Pete Larson requested it…EMG is a way we measure electrical activity in the muscle. EMG simply tells you when there’s an electrical signal going to the muscle. So it can basically be used to tell if the muscle is “on” or “off”. It’s a tremendous tool. What it doesn’t tell you is important to understand. It doesn’t tell you where the nervous impulse originated, whether it was through higher motor centers, from a Central Pattern Generator in the spine, or as part of a reflexive adjustment based on feedback. More importantly, it doesn’t tell you what the muscle is doing. Just because it’s “active” doesn’t mean it is being used in a primary contraction/force production way.

For instance, if we look at the concept of muscle tuning in the lower leg, an EMG might show that there is some pre-activity going on in the muscles of the lower leg for example before we even strike the ground. That doesn’t mean the lower leg muscles are necessarily being actively contracted by the individual to dorsiflex the foot or try and get the “force generation” going early. Instead, what is going on is that the whole lower leg complex is “muscle tuning” meaning it’s adjusting the characteristics of the musculature such as stiffness to prepare for the force absorption that will occur when the foot collides with the ground.

Another great example is in the hamstring muscle group during the swing phase as the leg swings through, unfolds and is getting ready to touch the ground. As the leg swings through, you often get an EMG activity signal. This is sometimes interpreted as the hamstring being active so that the lower leg unfurls and then there is a large active pawback where the runner tries to contract the hamstrings a ton to get the foot moving in the same direction as the ground. What’s really happening is that as the leg comes through and the lower leg unfurls, the hamstring is simply active to slow down the lower leg unfurling. Because the thigh and lower leg swing through with a lot of momentum, the hamstrings work to counteract the lower legs unfurling momentum so that it doesn’t just keep going until the leg is straight. If the hamstring didn’t contract to provide just enough “braking” while the lower leg unfurls, we’d have a lot of runners landing with their whole leg in a straight line far out in front of them.

These are only two examples, but many more can be given. The “core” is an excellent example that I’ll try and delve into some other time. Additionally, it is hard to seperate out the stretch reflex mediated signal from a higher level motor signal. The stretch reflex will elicit an EMG response, so unless the study is designed to, it's hard to figure out how much the stretch reflex (or even if one contributes at all) contributes to the EMG signal. The point is that EMG only tells us when the muscle is on/off, not what it’s role is or where the signal is coming from.

Non-responders-Why Science conforms to the average:

2011-03-23T16:24:00.000-05:00

Non-responders-Why Science conforms to the average:

Research likes dealing with the average. If you fall far outside the average, you might be in trouble. For years, only the average received any attention. For instance, if you looked at an intervention study and the average group improved by a significant 30seconds, then whatever the intervention was worked, despite the fact that in many such studies there is usually an outlier or two who saw no improvement. No one asked why certain individuals improved more or less. Who cares about the individual?

Recently though, more attention has been paid to those who didn’t see any improvement or change. The Scientific community buzz word is “non-responders.” A couple years ago you heard the term used in relation to altitude training. No matter how well designed the study was, in almost every altitude related research study you’d have a group of non-responders who showed no changes. Flash forward to present day, and in the exercise research that word is popping up again. This time though, it’s used for those who don’t show changes in strength or endurance following a standard training program. It’s a large phenomenon that goes across several parameters from strength to endurance to health. According to Timmons (2011) for most variables, about 10% of the study population is a non-responder, while in some variables such as changes in insulin sensitivity up to 20% are non-responders.

For instance, in recent strength training studies, despite the same program for everyone, increases in muscle size vary from no change at all to a 60% increase! The same thing can be seen in changes in VO2max, mitochondrial density, and on and on. So what’s the problem? Studies are built for the average, ignoring those who fall outside those realms. In coaching, it’d be like if we took a 7 man cross country team, trained them all the same and who cares if a couple don’t improve as long as the majority (4) did. That seems kind of unfair to the few who didn’t improve at all! Timmons et al. put it best when talking about the non-responder phenomenon:

“It is also an observation that is largely ignored by the majority of researchers interested in the health benefits of exercise training, presumably because the focus has been on the “average” health benefits within a population and the desire to have a simple health promotion message.”

The last portion is particularly telling. In essense, it's the desire to have a one size fits all recomendation, or in training terms, a magic training plan that works for all...

Let's look at why we might see non-responders...

Wrong stimulus?

As a coach, the main answer to why people are non-responders seems pretty obvious. If you’ve coached at any level you know that despite giving the same/similar training, the results can be drastically different. Fortunately, as coaches we have quickly realized the need for individualization. Two runners who might have the exact same PR’s can and do respond completely differently to training. For instance, if we have two milers with the same PR’s, one might need more threshold type work to improve aerobically while the other might need more igloi style aerobic intervals to get the same adaptation. Or an even simpler example would be two runners, one who needs 80mpw to see aerobic benefits, while the other needs 110mpw. If we did a study and gave both guys 80mpw, one would be a responder while the other (the guy who needs 110mpw) would be a non-responder

In these examples, and in many cases, the problem isn’t the person being a non-responder, it’s that the stimulus is wrong. In the real world, you see it as a runner’s race times not improving, while in the research world you might see some variable not changing after a training intervention.
It’s just my gut feeling, but a lot of the “non-responders” seen in the research literature is probably due to the wrong stimulus. Of course people have a highly individual response to training but the goal should be to figure out what kind of training each individual responds best to.

How much of the non-response in studies is due to the wrong stimulus and how much is due to an actual non-response is unknown...

Wrong Measurement?
Another factor to consider is whether the measurement actually measures what people think it does?
We know the ultimate goal is performance changes and performance changes are hard to measure accurately (any coach will tell you that…just look at how difficult it is to get 5 guys all on the same CC team performing well on a specific day…). A lot of times, research uses physiological parameters like lactate threshold, VO2max, running economy, anaerobic capacity, etc.

These are all useful parameters to a degree, but the problem is that often they are used as surrogate markers for performance. For instance, many studies rely on VO2max, and make the leap that if VO2max is improved performance is improved. Or they make the link that if VO2max is improved aerobic abilities are improved…Which is not the case. Again, we’ll go to a quote from Timmons et al. (2011) in looking at the molecular basis for these claims:

“Thus, based on the available human data, aerobic capacity is an important predictor of human health (6, 7, 40, 55, 69); improvements in aerobic capacity can be predicted from the expression level of a group of non-exercise-responsive genes (in muscle) and that the molecular processes stimulated in the high responders (for aerobic capacity) involve calcium signaling, extracellular matrix signaling, and promotion of angiogenesis a(91, 92). In contrast, improvements in aerobic performance relate more to alterations in muscle energy metabolism (100) and it would be expected that the genes that control the variable training-induced improvements in performance will be distinct from those that control the health-related gains in aerobic capacity.”

To summarize: aerobic capacity and aerobic performance are different!! And one more quote to get the point across:

"That is, it is a mistake to assume both of these parameters are always directly coupled."

As I always like to give practical examples, one is the interpretation of the now famous TABATA workout. It’s a repeated sprint workout that has claimed benefits of improving aerobic and anaerobic abilities. The problem with the study is that it found that in untrained people VO2max increased after doing repeated 10sec maximal sprints. That’s not unexpected for a lot of reasons. The problem comes when people interpret this as saying aerobic performance is better attained by doing 10sec sprints (cough Crossfit cough). That would be the wrong interpretation…. (for clarification, another interpretation is that using Noakes CGM, it’s not surprising that maximal sprints increase VO2max is not surprising as VO2max is directly related to muscle fiber recruitment…there are other interpretations too, which I’ll go into detail another time)…

Another quick example is when researchers looked at Kenyan and European runners back in the 90’s they used aerobic capacity as the sole marker for performance. This led to some suspect conclusions as researchers consistantly stated that there VO2max didn't change or were similar between groups. For instance in a study by Larsen and Saltin, they were looking at the trainability of Kenyan versus Danish boys. They relied on VO2max as a measure of "initial fitness" to conclude that both groups were at the same initial fitness levels and then after 12wks, the kenyan boys ran 10% faster. The problem is that VO2max does not equate to initial fitness. Whose to say the kenyan boys weren't 10%, 5%, or 15% faster when they started...

The bottom line is that markers and performance aren’t are always directly correlated or related.

What’s the practical impact?
One of my grad school professors was fond of evidence based practice, which makes complete sense. The problem though is that when all the research is aimed at the average, as Timmons points out, what do you do when you get with the outlier? You’ve got to deviate from the research, sometimes by a whole lot. So what do you do as a coach reading the research?

1. Use it as a guide, not as something set in stone.
2. Don’t try and fit your individual into the research.
3. Pay attention to how your individual athlete responds to every kind of stimulus.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to fellow coaches who continue to use some sort of training method, despite seeing no practical benefits from it. When asked why they keep doing it, it’s because the research says it works. Well, that may be true, but the research didn’t test your exact athlete who may be doing different workloads and volumes, and may have a different individual physiology (Fiber type for example) than those in the research. It doesn’t mean the research is wrong, it just means that if it’s not working, don’t hold onto it because it’s “research based” instead try and adjust the stimulus to get the adaptation you are looking for.

A practical example would be with lactate threshold. I’ve talked about this before, but in general an athlete more Fast twitch orientated for his event will need slightly different work to get the same increase in Threshold than a Slow twitch orientated athlete. They need a slightly different stimulus. A ST athlete might need more constant traditional threshold work, while a FT athlete might need more progressive work where he works above and below the threshold and then add in more medium intervals at faster than LT.

In a recent Running Times article coach and exercise Physiologist Pete Pfitzinger demonstrates this wonderfully. He writes about what he’s changed since his RT column days. In one section he describes how in the past he subscribed to a very defined window in which tempo/threshold work should be done. Now, he feels like there is a much wider range of paces that tempo work should be done in. This is similar to another coach, Jack Daniels, who originally had a very narrow threshold “zone” in which he said stuff done much slower was essentially a black hole of training. In his recent book, he’s adjusted that to a wider range too, though not as much as Pfitz. The point is that, these guys based their views on the research which said to improve your threshold run at this exact speed…Well that worked for many, but not all. And it was quickly realized that things needed to be adjusted.

The point of the example is not to become a slave to the research. Not because the research is wrong, but because we still have a lot to learn and figure out, especially on the individual response to training and studies can’t currently discern this.

The Bottom Line:

I’ll end this with another quote from the Timmons et al. (2011) paper:

“Probably the single most important philosophical question to raise at this point is why, given our apparent recent heritage as an “active” hunter gatherer (18, 56), do we have a significant number of humans unable to mount a strong physiological adaptive response to physical activity? Is it the case that for some subjects we provide an inappropriate pattern of stimulus for their particular genotype? We are far away from a scientific basis for tailored exercise prescription for the general public…”

There’s a lot left to learn, and it’s about time it’s being realized that there is a large individual response to training that has largely been ignored in the research world. It’s probably one of the reasons why coaches training methods differ from pure research based methods…

It’s not the research that’s bad. It’s whether us as researchers ask the right questions and interpret it correctly…which is a hard thing to do.

Training lactate Clearance and utilization: How to use alternation and blend workouts

2011-03-15T14:58:00.000-05:00

An article I wrote on training lactate clearance and utilization is out now in the April issue of Running Times Magazine. In the article, I talk about how and why to us two of my favortite workouts called alternation and blend workouts. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Kenenisa Bekele's workout: How do we get there?

2011-03-05T23:08:00.002-06:00

Here’s a selected workout that Kenenisa Bekele did around 10 days before his 2007 10k world championship win, the same race which I wrote about on an earlier blog.

16x (400 in 52-54, rest, 200 in 24-25) w/ 90sec-2min rest b/w everything
Is this some magical workout that we all should copy? No. The point of this post isn’t to talk about some amazing workout and how it did X or Y. In all honesty, one workout tells very little. Instead of marveling over the workout, I’d like to pose the question: How does one get to where they can run workouts such as the above?

Breaking it down:

Let’s take a look at this workout from several different angles. Looking at the speed alone, it’s obvious that the first requirement is an ability to run pretty dang fast, as 24sec for 200m is moving. That means we need some pure speed. Next we look at the 400m reps in 52-54 and it’s obvious that not only will we need pure speed, but an ability to hold that speed over “longer” distances.
Now we’ve got speed and speed endurance.

If we continue along this path, the next thing we might notice is that we’re not just doing a few reps, but 16 in total. This tells us that we’ve got to be able to handle high volumes of work structurally and that we’ve got have pretty dang high aerobic abilities/endurance. Add in the 90sec-2min rest and an ability to recover becomes apparent. The ability to recover is partially dependent on the aerobic system clearing everything out. If we step back and look at the workout as a whole, we know we probably have to deal with and be able to clear large amounts of lactate quickly given the paces, volumes, and recovery. Additionally, since this was roughly 10 days out from his biggest race and it’s logical to assume that he was doing other workouts/high volumes of running surrounding this workout, he needs an incredible ability to recover and adapt to the workload. Finally, since the workout was at 2300m, he obviously needs to be highly adapted to altitude to be able to do the workout at that altitude.
So put all together, to complete this workout we’ve got to have:
1. Pure speed
2. Speed Endurance
3. Good structure/biomechanics
4. Endurance/Aerobic ability
5. Ability to recover within and after workout
6. Lactate dynamics
7. Altitude adaptation

So….we need pretty much everything to be top notch to complete just a single workout that Bekele did.

How do we get there?

One logical way to get there might seem to be to just copy the workout with reduced speeds and volumes and then slowly progress towards his workout. Maybe we’d start with 8 reps at 60sec and 28sec for our hypothetical runner and then gradually increase volume and speed. Sounds logical right?
The problem with this logic is that somewhere along the way, we’ll hit a road block and plateau. Maybe it happens when we hit 12 reps, and the limit is in the athletes ability to handle the volume structurally. Or it could come when he moves down to 56sec, and can’t get it any faster because his 400m pr is only 53. The point is that at some point, the progression stops and even if you kept repeating the workout, your not likely to break through that plateau.

Instead of simply copying the workout, what needs to be done is to make sure the runner has the necessary components built up before we begin to put everything together. That means, he needs to be working towards maximizing all of the above mentioned components. That lessons the likelihood of hitting a plateau early on because we are limited by one component.

Applied to Training

So far, I’ve dealt in the hypothetical world. What the above translates is simply that early on in an athlete’s career we need to focus on building the necessary requirements for later success. Later on, the fine tuning is done. We’re used to the idea of building a base of endurance, but really we have to build a base of everything necessary for maximizing performance

For High school runners for example, that means focusing on the following:
1. Biomechanics- Work on optimizing biomechanics before he’s got tons of motor programming that determines his stride.
2. Structural adaptations- The body responds to the stress it’s put under. The bones/ligaments/tendons will grow stronger if gradual stress is applied with sufficient recovery. This means gradually increasing the volume of running. It also means strengthening the key components such as the Achilles/calf-complex early on with both traditional strength work and some natural barefoot work.
3. High end aerobic ability- The aerobic system takes a long time to develop. That means both gradual volume increases, and gradual increases in high end aerobic work.
4. Pure speed- Teach them how to sprint and learn how to recruit the right muscles to sprint.
5. Just enough in-between/specific stuff to get them todevelop mental toughness and the ability to adapt and recover from ever larger volumes of hard track work.

Essentially, build the base. Focus on the extremes. Lay the foundation.

Once the components are developed, then you can start working on putting them together. Often, in the U.S. when athletes get to HS, they go straight into trying to do high volumes of very hard/fast work. Essentially, trying to put the pieces together before we actually have the pieces.

If we look at the East Africans you can make a case that they do a wonderful inadvertent job of the above. How? Well, they spend their childhood running to and from school, with some research pointing towards most international elites running around 10km a day as they ran to and from school each day. That takes care of your general aerobic abilities and strengthening the body’s structure. If you realize that most of this is done barefoot or in some really light shoe, you realize that now the foot /calf/Achilles complex is simply going through a long terms strengthening program, and their biomechanics are likely optimized. And they do it all without expending the nervous energy of thinking they are doing “actual training.”

It’s only after 10yrs or so of doing this, that they then begin the formal training. We could learn a thing or two from this model.

Again, the purpose of this blog isn’t to say “train to be able to do this workout.” Instead, it is to show that training should be different to a degree as the athlete progresses. Early on we have to get the components that are needed. Only later do we begin to connect and assemble them. Often in this sport, we try and put everything together before we’ve even tried to build the components.

So we’ve gone from an amazing workout to High School training. I guess the take away message is when you hear about some great workout or whatever, don’t try and copy the end product. Figure out how they got there and what you can do to get there.

Step away from your Specialty

2011-02-25T14:08:00.000-06:00

Step away from your specialty

This month a scientific journal article came out that discussed what it would take physiologically to run a sub 2 hour marathon. This paper first grabbed attention a couple months ago when it was discussed on such websites as http://www.sportsscientists.com/. While the paper was interesting, what caught my opinion were the comments that were just now released.

The commentary on the paper isn’t just some random comments from internet message board experts. Instead we get to see a glimpse of what some of the top scientists around the world think is the key to running a sub 2 hour marathon and where they think that runner will come from. The interest in the topic was obvious as the commentary covers 17 pages and around 50 different individual comments.

While there were a lot of thought provoking comments, this blog isn’t about what it takes to run sub 2hrs in a marathon. What caught my attention is how much perspective and human nature affects everyone’s analysis. If I could sum up my thoughts after reading through everyone’s take it would be:
Everyone thinks there particular field is the key.

Everyone took the challenge of running a marathon that fast and attempted to give the answer based on their specialty. Now this isn’t ground breaking at all. We all do this. Take a strength coach, and he’ll say that runners need to spend more time in the weight room getting strong and powerful. Or if you want a an example from within running, take Brooks Johnson and the key to endurance performance is sprinting/speed. Take Arthur Lydiard and the key to running the same race is aerobic development and mileage. I’m simplifying but the point is we all analyze things from our own perspective.

What this left us with is different expert scientists making points that perhaps the following factors are important in reaching that performance.

Factors important in the sub 2hr marathon?:
-Improved nutrition and fueling strategy.
-Foot strike
-Heat storage capacity
-Greater mass participation
-Pacing
-VO2 slow component
-Other high altitude dwellers
-Women (!?)
-Paraolympian
-Physiology based training
-Early activity
-Flexibility
-That the men’s WR is 25yrs behind the women’s.
-oxidative stress
-Haile Gebersalassie in 2000 (!?)
-Genetics/Epigenetics
-Pulmonary vascular resistance
-Breathing economy
-cerebral oxygenation

The point isn’t to criticize the author’s thinking but to be aware of our own bias. Researchers are a great example because by necessity they have to be deeply ingrained in their field. You can't fault them, it's the job. And sometimes you get so deeply ingrained that you start seeing everything through that perspective. So, those calculations that tell you a sub 2hr marathon should have already happened or that a women will do it first seem perfectly fine. But if you step back and see the whole picture (i.e. running a fast 10k and a fast marathon are different, and that women's marathon times were improving at a faster rate because they've only been competing since the 70's or so...) you would realize quickly how crazy it may sound. On the other hand, all of the factors above might play a role. In fact, many likely do, but we should realize that none of them are the "key". Performance is a complex thing and it is likely that many of the above factors work together in creating such a fast performance.

Applied to Training:
You are probably asking what the heck a bunch of research scientists comments on a paper have to do with your training or coaching. The answer is that the same line of thinking bias our coaching. Let’s look at a quick example.

I like using examples from the real world, so we’ll look at a runner I worked with way back when he was a freshman in HS, Ryan. He got outkicked by everyone left and right. So let’s imagine you are the coach when Ryan was 15 and you went around asked a bunch of experts on how to improve his kicking ability. What kind of answers do you think you’d get? My guess/experience is the following:

Ask a Lydiard disciple/Endurance based distance coach- They’d say “He needs to get more endurance so that he is more aerobic when it comes time to kick. The answer is a stronger aerobic base.”

Ask a Sprint coach: “More pure speed work. He’s got to learn how to sprint so he can use that at the end of the race.”
Ask a mid-distance coach/Coe disciple: “More speed work under fatigue.”
Ask a Strength coach: “He needs to get stronger and more powerful. He’s got to learn to produce more power so he can accelerate during the kick.”
Ask a strength coach who likes core stuff: “We’ve got to get a stronger core so he can hold together his form better.”

I could go on, and yes I’m stereotyping, but the point is that we have one simple question “how do we improve our kick” and we’d likely get a myriad of answers and the answers would be biased towards their specialty. If we relied on only one of these experts and went solely in that direction, we likely wouldn’t reach our true potential in solving the problem.

The real answer, in my opinion, is a mixture of almost all of the things mentioned above and more. Just for informational purposes, we took the route of developing him aerobically, working on his pure speed and biomechanics, and increasing strength endurance to kind of bring things together. Essentially a combination of the answers above.

The point is that we need to recognize our biases and that of those around us. Biases aren’t bad, but we need to know that they are there. A track coach is essentially someone who has to take all these different fields and decide how much importance to assign each one. We don’t have the luxury of a strength coach for example who only works with power athletes. And be aware when you talk to experts from single fields, that they likely will tell you that the key is from their field. There idea might be important, but it’s likely not the sole key to everything.

Be aware of Biase, both yours and others, when making decisions. Realize that your perspective influences what you think is important. It’s hard being a generalist in a specialist world. But keep the big picture in mind.

Non Running Related- Plug for my brother's book on Lincoln

2011-02-22T10:46:00.000-06:00

I don't plug many things or get off topic from running related content much, but I figured a plug for my Brother's new book can be the exception. Just in case any of you runners out there are History buffs or like reading about Abraham Lincoln, my brother has a new book book coming out soon that brings a lot of new information to the Abraham Lincoln Saga. In particular, he found out that Lincoln was working on a plan to ship slaves to South America during/after the Civil War. You can read more about it more in the articles from the Washington Times and the London Daily Telegraph below.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/feb/9/book-lincoln-sought-to-deport-freed-slaves/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8319858/Abraham-Lincoln-wanted-to-deport-slaves-to-new-colonies.html

To buy:
http://www.amazon.com/Colonization-after-Emancipation-Movement-Resettlement/dp/0826219098

Back to Running Content shortly...

180 isn't a magic number- Stride Rate and what it means

2011-02-17T13:03:00.001-06:00

Speed= Stride Rate X Stride length
It’s simple. It warrants repeating. Through in Ground contact in and you’ve got a nice model….But I digress…

There have been a recent surge in articles and blogs in regards to stride rate. It seemed to start with Jay Dicharry’s blog on stride rate and impact forces. Which led to Amby Burfoot and others to join in on the foray.

This post isn’t to address that particularly point, but rather a different one that Alex over at Sweat Science brought up in a recent blog and one I’ve discussed with Peter Larson lately. That issue is quite simply “how do we increase speed,” and further more is a focus on stride rate necessary?

How do we increase speed:
There seems to be an ingrained belief that stride rate is constant and that to increase speed we simply lengthen the stride. This is a staple teaching in Chi Running for example, but others such as Amby Burfoot in his recent post brough up the same concept.

The general idea that we use stride length to increase speed (via an increased force application, not by reaching out) to a greater degree than stride rate is true. But there becomes a problem when we think in absolutes and limit ourselves to we ONLY see changes in speed with stride length.

We’ve got two different ways to pick up the pace, why limit ourselves to one particular way?

If we look at a previous post of mine that showed how elite 10k runners ran at just below 10k pace and then picked it up during the race, you see clearly, that runners use several different methods to increase speed. Bekele for instance went from running 10k pace to running just faster than mile pace solely by increasing his frequency from 190 to ~216. He did this without a change in stride length. On the other hand, some of the other runners increased speed by lengthening their stride or doing a combo of both. The point is, that the data shows us that to increase speed from 2:45 per kilometer to a sub 60 last lap, athletes employed several different methods. And the method they used was that which they hadn’t relied upon all race (i.e. Bekele had relied on a long stride and “slower” frequency so he increased the frequency).

If we look at some other data from a group of top notch NCAA athletes from UTEP 2-3 years ago, you can see their stride rates and relative stride lengths (a ratio of their height) at a mix of paces (note this is the average for the group so we can’t see how individuals pick up the pace):
Pace ---Stride Rate---Relative stride length
7:40 175 .68
6:43 181 .76
5:58 185 .82
5:22 191 .83
4:58 196 .93
(Data from De Heer, 2008)

For these athletes you go from a very easy pace to about marathon pace or a tad faster, so still not that quick in the big scheme of things. As a whole, their stride rate changed by an average of 21spm to accomplish an increase in stride length.

Lastly, I think it’s important to realize what happens during fatigue. When we tire our ability to produce force quickly starts to fade. Since we aren’t imparting as much force into the ground we do one of a couple options. We either slow down as our stride length diminishes or we compensate. We compensate by increasing stride frequency to take up the slack and maintain or increase speed (remember speed=rate X length, so if length drops, we got to increase rate to maintain the same speed), or we do something to allow us to maintain force production such as increase the range of motion of our arms. (Open up the arms like a sprinter- allows for increased force transmission.)

What’s the point of all this? To show that, yes we do rely on stride length more so proportionally to increase speed, but don’t neglect the role of stride rate. They both change, and to try and hold one constant is not a good idea. We don’t simply increase stride length to change speeds like is often taught.

What the heck is a high stride rate?
The other part of this debate is the notion that everyone should have a high stride rate. That’s the argument coming from several in the running industry. I don’t disagree on the surface that a quicker stride is better compared to what most people do, but how high is a high stride rate?

In several running form publications they tout 180 as the magic number. There is nothing special about 180. It comes from work back in the day when Jack Daniels counted stride rates during competition of elites and found that they all had a stride rate of over 180. People forget the “over” part and they also forget the question of what speed were they running at? As we can see from the data above, speed matters. If we measured the Kenyan Runners warming up at the same pace, they would have been at 175, with some being at 165 and some being at 188 (based on guessed from Standard Deviation data). If we only looked at when they were running a tempo run, then the average is 196, and its almost guaranteed that they are all over 180.
If we go further to faster paces, stride rates get even higher. Elite sprinters like Tyson Gay reach around 300spm when sprinting the 100m. In the Bekele data, he reaches 215 or so for the last 400m. I’ve got data from travelling around watching world class athletes that have guys running 200spm and 220spm roughly at the same 3k pace.

To back this idea up further I took some data from myself as I picked it up from a slow jog 7:30 pace to down to about 5min pace, which is about threshold pace for me at the moment. At 7:30 pace I was around 166, in the mid to high 160’s. At the tempo pace I was 192-198 consistantly.

Which brings us to the current topic of increasing stride rate that everyone seems to be talking about. If we know elites go from anywhere from the 170 range for easy distance pace (~7min/mi) up to 215+ for 3k race pace, what does that mean for the rest of us? Do we copy the elites in having relatively “high” rates even though some recreational runners might be jogging 4+min slower/mi on the distance pace side of things?
Does it make sense for a recreational runner running 10-11min miles to be trying to hit 180spm? Probably not, unless that is a quicker pace for him. Just to do the math, if we had a runner doing 180spm at 11min mile pace, he’d have a stride length of just 32inches!

Then why is everyone in a rage over increasing stride rate? Because as I’ve pointed out before, most recreational runners simply overstride, which artificially creates a very low stride rate. Why? Because the foot lands so far out in front of the Center of Mass that it takes a while for your body to be over it and ready to push off. So, when some running form coach says to increase stride rate to X, what ends up happening is the runner is trying so hard to increase stride rate, he chops his stride a bunch by putting his foot down earlier and landing closer to his center of mass, thus decreasing the overstriding. Nothing particularly wrong with that.

Where we go wrong is in the logic that the stride rate increase is the key. No, it’s not. It’s the elimination of the overstriding. Using the cue to increase stride rate is a way for coaches/runners to reduce the heel striking overstride.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal, until people start taking it to the extremes. That’s when you get the claims of a magic stride rate and the idea that you can NEVER have a low stride rate. Or another bad direction is when you have people who stick to a certain stride rate without variance.

Stride Rate, footstrike, and Ground Reaction Forces
All of this somehow brings us to the excellent post by Jay Discharry on stride rate and GRF/loading rates. To really cover this topic, another post is required, but briefly I’d like to make some points.
I agree with Jay that footstrike isn’t everything. I’ve seen it numerous times where you can have an athlete forefoot or even midfoot strike while still reaching out with their lower leg. We used to call it toe reaching and there was a pretty good elite runner about a decade ago who routinely would fall into that pattern when fatigued. I also agree that it’s quite possible to heel strike with a low impact loading rate if you land close to your center of mass without reaching out. You see this with athletes who have always been taught to dorsiflex like crazy (i.e. Toe up- coaches love yelling that for some reason), instead of just letting the ankle be neutral and do its thing.

The thing to keep in mind though is that it doesn’t mean that footstrike isn’t important. We’re looking at one variable, GRF loading rates, which are important presumably but we still don’t know their exact role. If GRF was all that mattered, great, we could just say land close to your COM and that’s it. Except for the fact that transmission of forces, not just how they load, must play a role. As does putting the foot in position for push off, maximizing elastic energy, etc.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, and the questions regarding foot strike, loading rate, or what have you are very complex. But we’ve got to be careful when focusing on single variables. It’s fun and easy to do and gives us seemingly concrete answers. The problem is when we get into business of tailoring towards single variables, we lose the big picture. You see this in running training when people started to focus on improving single variables like VO2max or Lactate Threshold. Ya, you might improve that, but your making a leap that that one thing is the key to performance and forget the complexity of performance.

The same goes with biomechanics and performance or injury prevention. A single footstrike isn’t the answer. Neither is simply changing stride rate nor simply getting that strike closer to your center of mass. All are pieces two the puzzle. Don’t become obsessive over one and forget the others.

If you really want to minimize loading rates, run really slow with a tiny stride length where your foot barely comes off the ground. It’s simple and it would do the job…but that’s the point, there are more things than just loading rate

For instance, high GRF aren’t all bad. Sprinting is partially dependent on producing high GRF.

What does this all Mean:
In a roundabout kind of way, we get back to the original point of this blog post. Stride Rate is a variable. If you combine it with stride length you get a calculation of speed. It’s very easy to measure, anyone can do it. Because it’s easy to measure, we’ll put more emphasis on it (you don’t see a magic stride length # do you??) I don’t mean that it isn’t a good variable, just don’t give it more meaning than it deserves.

It’s simply one of two ways in which we pick up speed. It’s simple really, turn over faster or lengthen the stride, or some combination of both. Don’t limit yourself to only one of those options artificially.

What I’ve found in my years working on running mechanics and in being taught by some of the best minds on the subject, is that I nor them have ever focused on stride rate or length. Those are outcomes of what you do. They are feedback. They are not things you directly change. If you take care of the mechanics, whether it’s arm swing, body position, force application, footstrike or whatever, the rate and length will optimize. Is it useful to measure length and rate? Sure, but remember that they are data. If one of them seems “off” you’ve got to figure out how to fix it.

Muscle Tension- Running Times article available online and New job

2011-02-10T11:46:00.000-06:00

For those who didn't buy the magazine, my article on Muscle Tension that was in the March issue of Running Times is now available online:

http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=21918

Also, as some of you might have heard, I have a new job:

Watch more videos on Flotrack

Running Times magazine- Muscle Tension.

2011-02-03T19:20:00.000-06:00

In the March issue of Running Times magazine, which is out now, you'll see an article on Muscle Tension that I wrote. It's a very interesting topic that I've explored here on the blog in a previous post, but the Running Times article let me dig much deeper. Former elite runner Marius Bakken provided some great insight. Just my opinion, but it's worth a read.

For those of you who pick it up and give it a read, I'd love to hear feedback.

The history of Hydration : A lesson in the scientific method and the Hype cycle.

2011-01-01T11:54:00.003-06:00

The history of Hydration during running: A lesson in the scientific method and the hype cycle.

The history of drinking during endurance exercise is an interesting one. It serves as a wonderful lesson for two reasons. First, it demonstrates a concept I’ve discussed at length before called the Hype cycle where a particular concept or method goes through a cycle of first overemphasis, then under emphasis, before eventually settling into its rightful place. This cycle can be seen almost anywhere, but in terms of training you’ve seen it with such things as “core” training, mileage, and interval training.

Secondly, the history of hydration demonstrates that we tend to overemphasize what we can measure and to ascribe more meaning initially than we deserve. As you’ll soon see, there was nothing wrong with the scientific measurements taken throughout the study of hydration, the problem has been the interpretation of those measurements.

No drinking….ever
Going back to the early days of marathon running, it was thought that the consumption of most fluids during long races like a marathon was not needed and even detrimental. Why? Because runners were studied and it was found that at the end of the race, the winners or top finishers lost the most body weight. The logic was that the best runners lost the most water weight, therefore losing fluids was necessary to maximize performance and hydration should not occur. The top runners were the most dehydrated, so dehydration is good! This line of thinking is used often, even to this day (i.e. The Kenyans do X, so X should be done…). This should be a cautionary tale to doing something just because the fastest guys do it.
So early in the history of hydration we have a policy of no drinking. What happens next?

An Overreaction
With the rise of mass participation running, an increased awareness of illnesses associated with dehydration and the ability to measure hydration status very easily and quickly, we overeacted. The norm went from drinking nothing during exercise to trying to replace all of your fluid loss during exercise by drinking water or sports drinks. The common advice of measuring yourself before and after exercise to calculate hydration needs reached mantra status with coaches, nutritionist, trainers, and the common exerciser.

According to a nice summary by Mundel (BJSM-2011), one reason for this overreaction was the design of studies which measured the effect of drinking on tests at fixed intensities which essentially found how long you could go, and not how fast you can go over a fixed distance, which is what we do in the real world.
As mentioned above, the other reason is that heat exhaustion and similar illness became more prevalent with the rise of mass participation. The thinking was simple, extreme dehydration caused some problems and helped contribute to heat exhaustions, therefore if we eliminate dehydration heat exhaustion and similar illnesses would be eliminated. The problem with this thinking is similar to the “no drinking” logic. Just because a lot of dehydration is bad, doesn’t mean we need to eliminate all of it. It’s only bad if it gets to a dangerous point outside of the norms. Until it gets to that point, which is hard to do unless you force yourself not to consume any fluids (which is what was occurring in the previous period), you are fine.
You see this “all or none” thinking in a myriad of different places. Some obvious examples through history are: free radicals, carbohydrates, fat, lactate, etc. Just because a lot is bad, doesn’t mean a little is.

Finding the Happy Medium
With this overreaction came a new problem called hyponutremia, which was essentially over hydration. Thankfully, we’ve seemed to correct our earlier mistakes of way too much or way too little and found a nice balance.

Currently, we’ve reached a sort of happy medium. Research consistently demonstrates that losing water and dehydration by a couple percent is fine when running. In fact losing 1-2% or so body weight during a long performance may be the sweet spot in terms of maximizing performance. . Not surprisingly research by Marino et al. 2011 (British journal of sports medicine) shows that the body goes through several neuromuscular adjustments to maintain core body temperatures, despite fluid losses occurring. Noakes and others have consistently demonstrated that drinking by thirst does the job. You won’t replace all your fluid losses like the previous recommendations had you, but instead you’ll drink just enough during exercise to keep you from reaching the critical level where dehydration effects performance. Of course the problem is people have been inundated with recommendations on drinking water during exercise (i.e. those who carry a water fuel belt on a 30 minute run…) that many have forgotten how to drink by thirst and need to reawaken that ability.

Somewhat ironicly, recent research by Tim Noakes (http://running.competitor.com/2010/12/news/new-study-finds-drinking-less-running-faster_19567) showed that once again, just like the early studies, that top runners seemed to drink less and lose more body weight than slower runners. It’s almost like we’ve come full circle. The difference is that this time the human interpretation was different. Noakes didn’t say that because the top runners lost the most weight that dehydration should be desirable. Instead he concluded that drinking by thirst, or just enough, is what is needed. We’ve seemed to reach that happy medium indeed. It just took us about a century.

Of course, the word still needs to be spread that a little dehydration is fine. Even in the scientific community there are still those who hold on to the idea that we should replace ALL fluid during exercise. Unfortunately, it will be years before the knowledge that we went too far in our recomendations is accepted and spreads to everyone.

Lessons Learned:
What’s the takeaway lesson to be learned from the history of hydration?
-Don’t overreact. Recognize the emphasis/hype cycle.
-Watch out for human error in interpretation.
-Be careful with "All or none" thinking

Singles, Doubles, or Triples? How many times per day should you run?

2010-12-13T06:31:00.000-06:00

A consistant item on this blog has been the debate over running singles versus doubles. I've run through the analysis from a scientific standpoint and a practical standpoint a couple of times. Recently, I wrote an article on the subject for Running Times that integrated everything together that many of you will hopefully find interesting. My conclusion is that there is a time and place for each, you just have to know when each is needed. That's another reason why we can't get into dogmatic statements like I believe in singles or I'm a high mileage (or low mileage) coach. The truth is if you want to be a good athlete or coach, you have to be highly adaptable and be able to use multiple ideas.

http://runningtimes.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=21454