Hold your horses! Marathon pacing
You’ve done the months of training. You’ve put in hours and hours of running. You’ve dealt with the niggles, the doubts, the setbacks and now you stand in the pen at the start of your marathon. You are as ready as you’ll ever be, and all that stands between you and...
Switching to fat?
This article is designed to provide you with a brief look at our energy systems and why eating a diet low in carbs and high in fat may help recreational runners like you and me in our running performance. First, we need to take a look at our energy systems. Next, we...
Marathon nerves
“Whoa! My autumn marathon is almost upon me and I don’t think I’ll be ready...” Are you thinking this? I know some of the athletes I coach and others that I also talk to are - even the really experienced ones - it's those marathon nerves.I’ve run seven marathons over...
Relentless Endurance
You know that feeling of “why did I decide to do this?”... well that was me after only 3 laps of the 5 mile route at the Mizuno Endure 24 race in Reading, UK last weekend (15th and 16th June 2019). As the name suggests, it is a 24 hour endurance race and it starts at...
Stabilise your feet
Have you been told that you over pronate? Have you noticed that your knees and feet collapse inwards when you walk or run? While over pronation and collapsing knees (known as knee valgus) is often down to a number of factors including gluteal and abdominal activation...
Shin strength exercises for runners
As we learnt in an earlier post, one of the things that can be a factor in shin splints are weak shin muscles. The muscles that we are particularly interested in are the tibialis anterior muscles. However, a couple of others are also important here... Extensor...
Ankle testing for runners
In previous posts we've looked at ankle mobility and some of the reasons why we get shin splints. Now we're going to follow those up with a quick way to assess your ankle range of motion, how much you need and how to increase it. So let's dive right in with how much...
Shin Splints – Causes of shin pain in runners
Painful shins are common amongst runners, but in a lot of cases they are actually pretty straightforward to fix. We’ve read a lot on the forums recently about shin splints and what we can do to sort them out. But what are shin splints? The term shin splints is...
What is Gait Analysis?
Most specialist running shops now offer a gait analysis service. Many charge a low fee and if you go on to buy a pair of shoes from them, they take the cost of the gait analysis off. This essentially gives you a gait analysis for free! So you would be forgiven for...
You are the weakest link…
I see it all the time, and I'm sure you do too: “You need to work your glutes!" "Your glutes aren't activating..." “Your ITB pain is probably to do with weak hips and glutes” While all these statements may be true, there is more to running than just the glutes. To me,...