You can run faster by lifting weights

This post is part 3 of a 3 part rant of dumb shit I’ve heard from running haters who have no idea what they’re talking about, but think they do. Today’s myth:

You can run faster by weight lifting.

The theory

You know this is bullshit, right?

Running uses a complex combination of hamstrings, glutes, calves, core, arm, chest, and back muscles. By strengthening those muscles, you will be able to put out more power and therefore move farther with every step, and therefore run faster. Or maybe the idea is that by strengthening your glutes/hamstrings/core that will erase any dysfunctional movement patters you have like quad dominance, lower cross syndrome, gluteal amnesia, or a lack of core engagement. 

...or something. It’s one of those things that’s so intuitive, that I bet a lot of people never really sit down and think it through. If you did think it through, you might come up with the following arguments:

But wait! The fast twitch muscle fibers…

Everybody knows that fast twitch muscle fibers are for running fast, and slow twitch fibers are for endurance running; and that some fast twitch fibers can be trained to behave like slow twitch fibers. Anaerobic activities such as weightlifting use fast twitch fibers, and preserve swinger fibers as fast-twitch-ish. 

If you want to run faster, then you will need more fast twitch fibers, right?

Not so much. First of all, your fast twitch fibers become less and less relevant in events lasting more than 30s to a minute. Beyond that, your fast twitch fibers are too slow to recover to contribute in a meaningful way to distances from 5K to the marathon, unless of course you’re the rare individual who can run a marathon if 57 seconds... In fact, if your “swinger” fibers are all more fast twitch oriented, then they could actually be counterproductive in events of 10 miles or longer where fatigue resistance and glycogen sparing are factors that have a huge impact on finishing times (fast twitch fibers are not only faster to fatigue and slower to recover, but also consume much more glycogen - energy - than slow-twitch fibers, making you more likely to bonk if you've got too many of them. More on this later). Honestly, if you’re endurance training, the effects of weight training aren’t going to outweigh the stimulus of your cardio training on the orientation of your muscle fibers that much anyway.

There is something to be said for training your neuromuscular pathways to engage more quickly and accurately, and some coaches have used this as a reason for using Olympic lifting in athletes’ programs (the snatch includes the fastest human movement ever measured). However, these skills are less crucial at the longer distances and can be more safely, efficiently, and contextually applied using plyometric and balance work as I will discuss in the next section.

Runners gonna run, son

If you want to get better at golf, you shouldn’t train by chopping wood. The principle of specificity states that the method of training that will have the most positive impact on any sport will be the exercise that best simulates the movements of that sport. Thus, if you want to squat more weight, actually squatting will have more of an impact on your squat than a leg press, which will still have more of an impact than a leg extension machine. And if you want to add more power to your run, then run. Hills, sprints, hill sprints, and resisted runs (think: dragging a tire or a parachute behind you) will all have more of a positive impact on your running power and strength than lunges and deadlifts.

It is better to have many muscle fibers that work together than just a few really huge fibers blowing a gasket to get the job done

Also, running is a series of many, many sub-maximal muscle contractions. So it does very little good to build power by building gigantic muscle fibers that will be just as quick to fatigue (or quicker if they have turned the corner back to fast-twitch-behaving). Instead, the goal should be to teach your body to engage more of your available muscle fibers at once. Just like the old saying that we only use 10% of our brains, we only use a fraction of our available muscle fibers. As a runner becomes more efficient, it takes even fewer muscle fibers to do the same amount of work. Let’s call these “favorite fibers” the A, B, and C fibers. If you don’t change up the pace enough and do enough hard running, your brain begins to “forget” its pathways to the less frequently used fibers (the D, E, F… L, M, N, O, P fibers), and it becomes much harder to recruit the number of fibers that you need for faster running when you need them. Your are also screwed when your "favorite" fibers finally give out from fatigue. I see this a lot with Ironman athletes, who have one speed that they can run for hours, but crumple if they try to push the pace by even 15s per mile for a few minutes.

Like a rowing crew, your muscle fibers are more powerful when
they are synchronized.

The best way to improve your neuromuscular recruitment of your D, E, F fibers, is to do exercises that mimic the running motion but in an explosive way that require a greater power output in the same amount of time. That means exercises like sprinting, hill running, bounding, and plyometrics. These exercises not only teach you to engage your A through Z fibers at the same time, but also teaches them to coordinate so that they can fire in one big clap of fire, rather than fizzling by firing fractions of a second apart (because the rusty fibers take longer to come to the party).

Resistance training as Prehab/Rehab

WTF? Why would a runner do push-ups.

A lot of runners, and running coaches, and running authors think that if muscles are imbalanced or underactive, all one has to do is strengthen the underactive musce (or the antagonist muscle to the overactive muscle), and voilá you will be fixed. Unfortunately, that rarely works because the problem is very rarely in the muscle; it’s in the brain.

Let’s say that you have a knee problem caused by underactive glute medius and minimus (hereafter referred to as “side butt”) muscles. The running books suggest that you lie on your side and do some Jane Fonda leg raises to strengthen your hip abductor muscles. For most of us, you will automatically default to using whatever “wrong” muscle to do the exercise that you have been using to compensate for your sidebutt while running (probably your hip flexors). If you’re not a completely hopeless case, you may actually be able to feel this in the correct muscles, however, the movement center in your brain has received absolutely no cues to tell it that this muscle should be used in the running stride. Instead, you’re just learning to be really good at leg raises (remember that whole specificity thing?). So you will go back to running after a day of sweatin’ to the oldies, and you will drop right back into the dysfunctional stride that you have spent millions of steps practicing. And your knee will keep hurting.

Instead, just like you did when you were trying to improve overall strength with running, you need to find a way to accentuate the resistance on that specific muscle in the context of a running motion. It may take a few repetitions of isolating the muscle you are targeting with clam shells to get you to be able to feel that muscle at all (called “activation”), but once you know where it is, then it’s time to get back to stepping motions. In the example of the sidebutt, this can be accomplished by doing stepping motions (lunges, step-ups, surrenders) with a band around your stepping knee, pulling it toward the inside. That way your sidebutt learns to engage to stabilize your knee while the bigger hamstring, glute, and calf muscles are doing the hard work of extending your hip and knee in order to move you forward.

Similarly, many runners lack core stability when they are running. Not really understanding what “core stability” is -- or even what the “core” is -- they do a lot of crunches and assume that that’s doing something to change their running. The “core stability” that most runners lack is actually pelvic stability, and the rectus abs (the muscles isolated in a crunch) are only a small part of pelvic stabilization, especially when you practice using them to pull down on the ribs rather than up on the pelvis. Instead, you have to train a combination of muscles including the glutes, transverse abs, obliques, hip flexors, hip abductors and adductors, and yes, the rectus abs to contract and relax in the right combination in order to keep your pelvis from tilting forward or side-to-side as you run and thus throwing off the entire concert of muscle contraction from your toes to your neck. How do we do that? You guessed it: by learning to stabilize the pelvis (correctly!) first in static exercises like the plank, and then in increasingly more dynamic and unstable exercises that more and more closely mimic the movements of running.

Toughen up!

I don't see what drooling on your sports bra has to do with HIIT
training. And what is that in her hand? A purse? You can't do
anything intense with a 5lb kettlebell.

I have heard the argument put forth (mostly by the Crossfit Endurance camp - followed by no successful elite endurance athlete ever) that high intensity circuit training can improve endurance performance by increasing your tolerance for high-intensity activity. This is like training for t'ai chi by boxing. Theoretically the mechanism behind this is improved lactate clearing or something. However, you will never be producing lactate at such a prodigious rate when racing the 5K or longer as you do in a high-intensity interval weight training workout. Because of the high intensity of a circuit workout, you will also need to give those working muscles a rest at some point while you keep your heart rate high by training another muscle group. This means that A) your muscles still do the bulk of their lactate clearing while at rest, and B) you are wasting time training non-running-specific muscles; time that could otherwise be spent improving your running. And there’s another problem with weightlifting as a form of cardio training…

Bulky muscles are bad for endurance

There is a time for re-building muscle mass, but it is in the offseason not in your race build-up. Too much muscle excess muscle during the competitive season harms your endurance performance in 3 ways:

1. 
   It increases the amount of mass that you need to carry. Jack Daniels estimates that for every pound of body mass you gain, you run 2s slower at the same effort. Even though muscle is active mass, that doesn’t mean that it’s actively helping you run. Runners don’t need really big pecs or biceps. The idea should be to be more efficient with many smaller fibers than to build big, burly ones. Because....

2. 
   Increasing your muscle mass increases the metabolic cost of running. In longer events, performance is limited to a large degree by your body’s ability to spare its stored glycogen. More muscle mass does increase the amount of glycogen you can store by a little bit, but it also increases the rate at which you will burn it, especially if you have lots of muscle tissue in your upper body that will just drain your liver of glycogen meant for your legs. And if you have a fussy running tummy (or bowel), remember that the faster you burn energy, the more you will have to eat more in a race to replace it. And the faster you're going in a race, the more it will affect your digestion, and the more likely your race nutrition will be to turn to runner's trots than useable energy. If you can’t pack in the food fast enough, you will hit the wall sooner. And with that metabolic cost also comes…
3. 
   Heat! All muscle contractions throw off heat as a byproduct. How fast your body will allow you to run in a race is in part determined by your core body temperature. The more active lean mass you have, the more heat that muscle will create. And the larger you are, the less surface area you will have in proportion to your mass to dissipate that heat, and increasing the likelihood of overheating. All this will produce a slight but not insignificant increase in body heat that will convince your brain to do something drastic to put a cap on your performance. In my case, it makes me feel like I’m going to crap my pants, but you may be a puker, a wheezer, a fainter, a heavy leg-er, or an unbearable muscle burner. All are just ways for your unconscious brain to slow you down from the biological threat of overheating.

How resistance training helps

I’m not saying that a well designed resistance training routine has no place in a running program. However, your average meathead trainer isn’t following these factors for success:

• Offseason muscle building. Since running is a catabolic (muscle-wasting) activity, you do need to take part of the year to build some muscle back on so you don’t waste away until you look like a 90’s perfume ad. http://famousmisfortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/katemoss.jpg
• Prehab and rehab work can and should be done year round, but should be done in a context that mimics the movement of running as closely as possible and will most likely include balance work and bands more than weights and machines.
• To improve your running power, you are better off doing so by actually running, with a little bit of plyometric work thrown in if you are injury free.

And with that I conclude my, “Shut up your face because you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” series.

Lifting weights is better than cardio for weight loss

This post is part 2 of my “Shut up your face if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” answer to all the dumb things I’ve heard about cardio from people who don’t do cardio.

The high-end, education-focused gym where I used to work was a wonderful place to learn, but a terrible place to work (labor violations, discrimination, and exploiting employees are a matter of routine there), so last summer I started interviewing at other gyms. Since a new lower budget gym was opening up less than a mile from my house, I interviewed for a job as their personal training sales director. It was one of those interviews that went more like an orientation than an actual interview, and the hiring manager spent most of the time explaining their sales pitch than asking questions of me. The pitch went something like this:

Most people who join a gym are joining to lose weight, so they come and use the cardio machines and don’t lose any weight. Do you know how many calories it takes to lose a pound of fat? 3500 calories, that’s 500 calories a day. Do you know how many calories you burn in 30 minutes on the treadmill or elliptical? 200-300 calories. You’re never going to lose any weight with that kind of calorie burn. You would have to do an hour or more on the elliptical every single day to lose a pound a week, and as you get smaller you get to eat less and less and exercise more and more to lose any weight. Do you know what the key is to weight loss? Muscle! Every extra pound of muscle you put on burns about 100 extra calories per day. If you put on an additional 5 pounds of muscle, you can be that friend that gets to eat whatever they want because you’ll be burning an extra 500 calories every day just going through your day without doing any exercise. Now you can’t put on 5 pounds of muscle in just a few weeks, it’ll take awhile. You will need to commit to a year of training (meanwhile, he is scratching down all these numbers on the back of a 1 year contract). But our personal training sessions are only 30 minutes, and in those 30 minutes you will not only burn calories, but you will also build the muscle that you need to burn more calories every day. And that way you don’t have to do any cardio!

Let’s ignore all of the other reasons why this presentation was offensive to my integrity as a fitness professional (and a person with a brain), and just focus on the weights vs. cardio argument. Plenty of other fitness programs use a similar argument to sell their method of fitness: Crossfit, Jillian Michaels videos, and personal trainers the world over - including the high-end gym I worked at. And the argument, like Disney’s Pocahontas, is based on a true story, but not the whole truth.

Energy balance - where those 500 calories come from?

For most people you can burn 500 calories in about 45 minutes of running, an hour of “vigorous” cycling (think, Spin class or a tough group ride), or about an hour and a quarter of intense circuit training. These numbers are estimates and will vary based on your body and fitness level. No matter how you burn those 500 calories, you can eat them right back with one Clif bar, a grande latte, and a rice cake. At my size, the number of calories I burn in a marathon can be eaten right back in one Chipotle burrito. Clearly, you can eat yourself out of any work you do in the gym with a few extra forkfuls of food at every meal. No matter what method of exercise you use, nutrition must be the greater part of your weight loss plan.

If you’re not thoroughly depressed yet, consider cheat days. The idea is that if you behave 6 2/3 days of the week, you can have one cheat meal, or better yet, spread the cheating over the course of the day. So let’s say you’ve been good all week, netting a deficit of 500 calories per day for 6 days. To reward yourself, you go to the Cheesecake Factory and eat:

2 avocado egg roles (2x960 cal)

A chicken caesar salad (980 cal)

A piece of strawberry cheesecake (730 cal)

2 glasses of wine (2x120 calories)

Total: 3870 calories

In one meal, you have not only erased the 3000 calorie deficit that you had accumulated over the course of the week, but you have also added an additional 1000 calories to your tab. At that rate, you can expect to gain a pound every 3.5 weeks. I don’t mean to depress you, but you might as well give up the idea that rich foods are a god-given right. If you want to lose the weight and keep it off, your concept of what food is can no longer include cheescake and fried egg rolls. Tough titties.

Muscle gain… and the role of shitty trainers

It is not all that easy to put on 5lb of muscle (especially if you’re a chick, naturally kind of skinny, or not that good at lifting weights). You have to train consistently, in the correct range of reps and intensity, progressively increasing total load and work done (weight x time under tension), while still incorporating enough rest for your muscles to rebuild. Oh yeah, and you have to be in positive energy balance (meaning eating more calories than you’re burning), so if you don’t want to gain weight while you’re building muscle it will happen even more slowly.

Yeah, bro. That is totally the most
efficient and safe way to do whatever
it is that you're trying to do.

Most trainers, in an attempt to dazzle you with how awesome they are, change up the program too much for the kind of progressive overload you need to efficiently build muscle. It is also difficult for a trainer to land on the correct load that will produce true failure between 8 and 12 (preferably 10) reps. Instead, 10 reps becomes like a contract: you reach 10 and stop before you have reached the level of intensity that will truly build muscle (you have fulfilled your side of the contract), or your trainer picks a weight that is too heavy, you can’t fulfil your end of the contract, and so they pick something that is too light so that you can finish with a feeling of success and easily reach your contractual obligation of 10 reps… and then don’t give your muscles the stimulus they need to grow. And a lot of trainers just aren’t very good and do dumb stuff like train your upper body more than your lower body (training the legs releases the most growth hormone, so even if you want a bigger upper body you will still get better results if you train your lower body as well), train one muscle group more than its opposing group, or let you get away with bad form and use the wrong muscles to do the work. Add to that the fact that most people are not consistent about showing up to their training sessions with their A game 3-4x per week, and the chances of overcoming lifestyle inertia to put on those 5lb of muscle on the same diet is pretty remote.

Remember, too, that in the sales pitch scenario you’re here to burn calories so that you can lose weight. You will build more muscle and burn more calories the harder you work in your weightlifting session, but most people can’t handle the cardiovascular demands of a true circuit session. I learned pretty quickly that the best way for me to end a session early would be to have a guy do a set of body weight squats followed by a set of push-ups in their first month of training. When they stood up to do the second set of squats, their blood pressure would stay low, the blood vessels in their legs would dilate, and then they would get faint and nauseous. Nearly every time, the guy would end up lying on the ground with his feet in the air asking for orange juice so he wouldn’t pass out. So much for trying to sell him personal training...

Even if you are fit enough to handle the blood pressure changes, lactate clearing, and high heart rate demands of a true circuit workout, it’s still hard to match the calorie-burning capacity of a cardio workout of a similar intensity. Let’s say you do an intense circuit of 3 sets of 10 repetitions of 7 exercises. Every set will take you roughly 20s, but every transition between exercises will probably also take about 20s. As you do more and more of these anaerobic exercises back-to-back, your blood lactate level and heart rate will climb, and eventually between sets you will need an extra minute or so of rest to get your heart rate back below your anaerobic threshold (the threshold you simply can’t sustain for more than a few minutes). Even if your trainer is excellent at managing time, you are still probably only working for 15-20 of those 30 minutes and the rest is dedicated to recovery, explaining, demonstrating, collecting equipment, and correcting. Although your heart rate is higher during those 15-20 minutes than it would be if you were running, it's not high enough to compensate for the lost time. In a 30 minute weightlifting session, you’d be lucky to burn more than an underwhelming 250 calories.

This missing link: the role of fitness in exercise weight loss

Let’s go back to the slimy Chain Gym sales guy and dissect his pitch. It is based on the assumption that burning 500 calories is a difficult and onerous task. Speak for yourself, Mr. Meatsweats; I burn 500 calories during one of my recovery workouts, and routinely burn more than 1,000 calories per day every day during marathon training. (Have you ever noticed that every time someone makes the “weights burn more calories” argument they severely underestimate the calorie cost of an hour worth of activity? Like 250lb guys estimating an hour of running at 400 calories?) Burning 500 calories is only an onerous task if you are unfit and suck at it. In order to be able to burn 500 calories per session, you need to start with burning 200 calories per session and slowly build up from there. In short, the ONLY way you can lose weight through exercise is if you make exercise a part of your daily routine and stop thinking of it as an onerous task.

You can totally change your metabolism with those little
things. What are they? Bottle caps? Here, have a cookie.

The same goes for weightlifting, by the way. If you want to put on 5lb of muscle quickly, then you’re going to have to build up the fitness to do the intensity that builds muscle most efficiently. Let’s say that you have to lift 1 million ogblats (a made-up standard of measure, abbreviated &) to put on 5 lb of muscle. If you can lift 500& for 4 sets of 10, 3 times per week it will only take you 4 months to get the work done. However, if you are a novice and can only lift 200&, for 3 sets of 12 repetitions, twice per week it will take you 6 years to do the work it takes to put on 5lb of muscle. Of course, this example is simply meant to illustrate a point, because muscle gain isn’t nearly so linear. Instead, let’s consider a more familiar example from the cardio world: a runner. Let’s take 2 runners that are trying to lose weight: each of whom burns 100 calories per mile. Each needs to run 700 miles and maintain their calorie intake to lose 20lb. However, the runner who can run an hour a day at 7mph can lose 20lb in 14 weeks, while the “jogger” who can only run 40 minutes at 5mph will take more than twice as long (30 weeks, or over 6 months) to burn the same number of calories.

A note about Crossfit (and other circuit training gimmicks): some exercise programs downplay the role of fitness in an exercise program’s effectiveness by claiming that circuit training  - defined as any resistance training with minimal rest - is a shortcut to burning more calories. However, no matter how you scale the workout, a fit person will still burn more calories per session by either lifting a weight for more reps per unit of time, or by lifting more weight for the same number of reps. There's no way around it. If you're not fit, you can't burn that many calories through exercise. So much for burning off that muffin top at the gym.

The take-home

No matter how you slice it, a successful weight loss program has to include a nutrition component. The reason that most people don’t lose weight by cardio training is that they don’t have the fitness to outpace their appetite. However, once you build the fitness for it, resistance training doesn't burn quite as many calories as cardio. The only resistance-based athlete that can compare to the 6,000 daily calorie demands of a Tour de France rider is perhaps a Strongman competitor (who is still eating MORE than his body requires to maintain his muscle mass at 5-7K calories). For mere mortals, it doesn't really matter what you choose, as long as you will be able to enjoy doing it frequently for a long time while you build the fitness to burn a shitton of calories. The best way to burn calories through exercise is to build the fitness to be able to work out hard for an hour, and then focus on your diet.

Next bullshit myth: You can run faster by lifting weights.

Running is bad for you

Put on your storm boots, because there’s a rant coming…

Runner people and fitness people are not the same species. They may look similar, but gym people don’t know squat about endurance, and endurance people don’t know squat about how to lift weights. I am an endurance person who spent 6 years learning everything the gym people could teach me, and then slamming my face into my palm every time they tried to teach me anything about endurance. I’m going to take a few posts to rant about all the bullshit that I’ve heard come out of gym people’s mouths over the years. Originally this was going to be all one post, but there is just too much to say. So I’m going to say it and then I’m going to take a deep breath and let it go.

Gym rat myth no. 1: Running is bad for you.

Yeah, deadlifting WRONG is bad for your back.
Running wrong is bad for you too.

The argument goes like this, “Every runner gets injured. The body isn’t made to take that much impact, and all runners wind up hurt and hobbling around like old men before their time. I knew a guy once who ran every day, and he needed 2 knee replacements by the time he was 50.” These are the same people that will jump down your throat if you try to tell them that deadlifting is bad for your back. Let’s be a little more clear: The wrong kind of running is bad for you, just like deadlifting wrong is bad for your back. Most recreational joggers fall into a few traps that will cause injury, undue wear and tear on their joints, and a general symptom of hating life when they run. It’s not because running is bad for you, it’s because they’re doing it wrong!

• Too much, too fast, too soon
  Let’s start with the obvious. Just like it takes time to build up the strength to deadlift heavy, and you need to strengthen your tendons and work on your form to safely lift a heavy load, it takes a long time of progressive overload to get to a point where you can handle a structured running training program. For many, this means starting with just a mile or so 3 times a week for several weeks. Few running programs start so modestly, and thus the majority end with as much heartache as a French art film. Gym rats are forever reminding you that sore muscles are a sign that your muscles haven’t finished recovering from your last workout, and if you don’t rest you won’t get stronger. The same rules apply to running, but the signs that you’re not recovered are way more subtle, and almost every single person I’ve ever met overestimates their ability at the beginning of a program. They cross their overuse threshold and get hurt or begin to ingrain compensations. For the record, I see the same thing in deadlifting. People who are quad dominant (nearly everyone) can lift more weight loading their quads and back than their glutes and hamstrings, and so they develop improper deadlifting form that aggravates their knee and back problems, and ingrained habits that are very hard to break. More on this some other time.

  

  This is a poor deadlift set-up: note the knees forward of the ankles, the excessive knee bend, and the weight in the midfoot. This is the deadlifting equivalent of overstriding. See, sometimes even the guys in the Bodybuilding.com top can do things wrong

• Improper movement patterns and muscle imbalances
  Ninety-nine out of 100 runners will suffer from the following: ankle immobility (which can lead to foot pain, heel pain, shin pain, and other dysfunctions up the chain), quad dominance (which can lead to knee pain, low back pain, IT band issues, weak core, and everything that comes with crappy running form and overstriding), underactive lateral stabilizers (which can lead to knee pain, hip pain, foot pain, and sudden injury such as twisted ankles), and underactive core muscles (which can lead to back pain, shoulder pain, knee pain, and generally crappy running form that will cause everything mentioned in this list so far). You’re not going to win against these risks unless you give up everything invented since the stone age, but runners need to take steps to manage these imbalances. Runners need to foam roll, do active stretching techniques (such as a dynamic warm-up), and retrain the neuromuscular system to teach the correct muscles to fire in the correct combinations to manage all of life’s imbalances.
  
  Does this mean that running is worse for you than deadlifting? Absolutely not. Running uses almost exactly the same muscles as deadlifting in almost exactly the same proportions to each other, and thus a gym rat needs to manage the same issues that runners do: tight hamstrings, tight ankles, protracted shoulders, and gluteal amnesia. If you don’t have the hamstring, hip, shoulder and ankle mobility to reach the bar on the ground and load the right muscles, you’ll get hurt. If you do more weight than your muscles can currently handle, you’ll use the wrong muscles to compensate, and you’ll get hurt. If you lift too often without the proper recovery, you’ll get hurt. It’s the same thing, people!
  
• Poor running form
  
  "It isn't gymnastics or ice-skating, you know." - Emil Zatopek

Whether for the reasons listed above or just because you run like a Muppet, running form (just like deadlift form) needs to be constantly monitored and reworked to find your strongest, most efficient you. I don’t believe that there is one true “correct” running form -- many legendary runners such as Emil Zatopek and Dave Scott have notoriously terrible running form. The trick is finding the most efficient and safe form for your body. 

"Ultramarathon Man" Dean Karnazes overstrides like many ultradistance runners

Dave Scott says himself that he
"runs like a duck"

Emil Zatopek looked "like he'd been
stabbed in the heart" when he ran.

Haile Gebrselassie does
that weird thing with his arms

Crappy form, whether running or lifting, will make you feel like you’re putting out a lot of effort without much result (because you are!), and eventually lead to injury. Most running form can’t be corrected consciously; it’s just too complex a motion that happens too quickly and too many times (up to 120,000 times per hour) for you to consciously override muscle memory, so when a certain hitch starts to develop in our stride, or personal idiosyncrasies start to lead to pain and injury, then you have to manage it. “Management” may mean foam rolling, drills, visualizations (e.g. “running over logs”), or functional strengthening exercises that teach the correct muscles to fire in a certain pattern.

Think that you don’t have to be constantly monitoring and retraining your technique in weightlifting? Of course they do!

• The wrong shoes

I love hearing people who have no clue what they’re talking about talk about shoes. There are as many answers to, “What’s the best shoe for me?” as there are to, “How do I find my soulmate?” (no pun intended). The answer is different for every individual, and will change over the course of their life and their running career. The answer is to run barefoot, except if you’re one of those people who should be running with mattresses on your feet, unless you’ve always had good luck with a traditional Asics-type running shoe, unless you can handle running in Newtons. And never get a shoe with orthodics or corrective features, unless of course you need orthodics or correction.

Only one thing is for sure: don’t run in ice skates.

Barefoot running is appropriate for a small amount of volume (mostly just drills) for smaller runners of advanced abilities. Run too much in Vibrams or no shoes at all, and you will get a weird gait where your hips and knees never fully extend. Next time you see someone running in Vibrams (and they’re always guys bigger than 200lb, aren’t they?!), you’ll notice that they don’t run heel-to-toe, or toe-to heel, but instead place their entire foot down as one piece, using their knees and hips as the shock absorbers. To reduce the impact, they scoot along with hips and knees always slightly bent and never use the full springing capacity of their glutes and hamstrings, instead relying on the quads (worsening the quad dominance we’ve already touched on).

I’m a fan of zero drop, hard soled shoes but they may not be appropriate for new runners, runners with particularly tight calves and restricted ankle mobility, or those who have been running without injury in the regular Asics-style running shoe for years.

Old school shoes: These may be necessary for heavier runners who need the extra cushioning to handle the heavier load. However, I don’t think they’re the best choice for smaller runners, unless they’ve been running in them for years without injury. For an explanation why, just read Born to Run. Next!

Nike Frees: UGH! I HATE these shoes. Nobody should be running in these shoes. The concept is that they’re supposed to allow your foot to move the way it wants to move, but the soles are TOO flexible. As the uppers stretch out (as they always do on these cheap shoes), your foot slips around in the shoe. And because the sole is made to flex in ways that the human foot does not, the small muscles in your feet work double time to find purchase in your crappy slippery shoes. Nike Frees are a sure path to foot pain, rolled ankles, and maybe even a broken wrist if you try to change directions suddenly when they’re wet.

Newtons: I have drunk the Newton Kool-Aid and I am sold. These days I run almost exclusively in them, and only use hard-soled, zero drop shoes like Inov8’s for trail running and to mix it up on recovery runs. They hold up really well to high volume (and I can even wear them without pain long after the time has come to throw them out), and the forefoot lugs do make faster running much more comfortable. However, it took a long time for my achilles tendons to adjust to the strain that an elevated forefoot put on them, and they are less comfortable at a pace slower than 9 min/mi, so I don’t think they’re good for slower runners.

Super fluffy shoes: I went back and forth about these shoes for a long time. On the plus side, the extra padding on shoes like Hokas and Altras reduce the impact through your legs when running ultradistances or when running downhill. On the negative side, having to push off of a softer sole means that your muscles have to work harder to get the same amount of spring in each step, and the extreme squishiness does weird things to your foot’s relationship with the ground. I have a pair of Hokas, and ran a few trail runs with them before I decided that I didn’t like not being able to feel the trail surface underneath me in case it was rocky or technical. Next I tried using them on a 20 mile run,but afterward my legs felt more sore than if I’d run an extra 10 miles, and I resolved never to do that again. Not one to throw out a pair of $160 shoes after only a few runs, I tried wearing them for recovery runs. On the bike trail near my house there is a wooden footbridge that has a little bounce to it. I noticed that running on that foot bridge in my super squishy shoes was doing weird things to my vestibular system, and every time I ran on that bridge in my Hokas I would come home feeling dizzy and nauseous because the strange feedback from my feet to my brain was convincing my vestibular system that I must be dizzy.

• Not everyone’s made to run

It may not be PC to say, but not everyone’s made to run. If you weigh over about 200lb, it puts so much load on your skeletal system, that it just isn’t the best use of your time to be running more than about 30 miles per week. If you have a severe leg length discrepancy, or some other orthopedic condition or structural issue that interferes, running may not be for you. There are many things that can be fixed and managed, but not everything. Be realistic about your running prospects, and if running really isn’t good for you, then pick something else.

***

Before I sign off, there is one more gigantic load of crap that I would like to address: the idea that oxidative stress of endurance training makes you more susceptible to cancer and some made-up thing called “cardiac fatigue”. I think this is just hogwash. Those pedaling this theory claim that endurance athletes who train at a high level have a lower life expectancy than… someone (soccer players? Olympic lifters? yogis? elephants? I’m not sure how you would isolate out the single variable of “excessive” endurance training). The theory is that all of that extra breathing that comes with burning an extra 1000 calories or so per day creates a higher concentration of free radicals in your body, which causes cell damage, which causes aging, which causes death.

The human body has evolved to deal with the adaptive stress that comes with breathing by eating a diet rich in anti-oxidants, which remove free radicals from the body. Thus, the free radical problem is not a problem with breathing volume, it’s a problem with the proportion of breathing in an endurance athlete’s lifestyle to the number of antioxidants in the standard American diet. And do you really think that the chronic free radical damage can stand up to the biological stress that comes from eating the kind of high protein, high suppelement diet that most serious weightlifters use?

For most of us mortals, pushing yourself to the level of effort that elite athletes can sustain would actually signal imminent death to your brain and cause you to do anything to slow down (e.g. puke, faint, experience extreme pain, poop your pants, breathe fire...). There’s a reason that our brains don’t let us put out the amount of effort that it takes to lift a car off a baby or outrun a mountain lion: because putting out that kind of effort could really fuck you up. You have enough power in your muscles to rip your muscles off your bones or crush your skeleton, and it’s your effort monitor in your brain (what Tim Noakes calls “the central governor”) that protects you from that kind of power output unless it is a matter of life or death. Athletes teach their Central Governors that it is safe to push themselves closer and closer to that limit over a lifetime of training. Do you think that putting out that level of effort day after day is good for you? It is not.

Let’s get one thing clear: training for elite sport is not good for you. I don’t care what the sport is: bodybuilding, running, Strongman, or elite bowling. The low body fat that it takes for many female athletes to perform at the highest level causes you to stop menstruating. That’s not good for you. Having muscles so big that you can’t wipe your own ass: that’s not good for you. Lifting so much weight that your blood pressure skyrockets to heart attack levels, or your tendons might rupture: that’s not good for you! Doing so much yoga that you can scratch your opposite ear with your toe from behind your head: that’s not good for you! As for endurance being worse for you than other forms of exercise, it’s apples and oranges. Wear sunscreen, don’t run next to the freeway, and eat your veggies, and you’ll be fine.

And one more thought for the road. While endurance training may have a greater oxygen demand during the activity, weight training has a far greater oxygen demand AFTER the activity (EPOC), so the oxidative stress of the two types of exercise may not be as drastic as the gym rats may think. So there!

Hrumph.

Next I’ll tackle Myth no. 2: Cardio is not good for weight loss