Most people spend a lot of time building capacity – very few train expression.

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Jeff, a male runner in his 60s, contacted me about his persistent right-sided runner’s knee pain. For over three years, it had been a constant companion, sometimes completely stopping him from running.

He’d seen his local doctor, and when they couldn’t find anything definitive, he turned to a physiotherapist. Jeff had one session every week for three months! Think about that for a moment: 12 weekly sessions, a significant investment of both time and money, all hoping to get back to the sport he loved.

Sadly for Jeff, 12 sessions of physiotherapy made no difference to his knee pain at all. In fact, Jeff also had very tight hamstrings, a problem he’d lived with since his younger years, and the physiotherapy hadn’t solved that either.

Jeff told me he’d managed to get back to running himself by using a neoprene sleeve over his right knee. This allowed him to run almost pain-free, which was incredibly intriguing. He actually had three different knee sleeves: a thin neoprene one, a more robust one with a small hinge, and an even thicker one with a stronger hinge. None were solid, just varying thicknesses of neoprene. While these sleeves allowed him to run almost as far as he wanted, they were a real inconvenience to lug around and wear on every run.

Unlocking the Nervous System: The First Breakthrough

So, Jeff came in for a running and movement assessment. We went through a thorough, personalised set of tests and observations. As with all my assessments, some tests are designed to discover the effectiveness of certain drills or sensory stimulation methods. As part of this, using specific drills and sensory stimulation, we actually solved Jeff’s long-standing tight hamstring issue in about 45 seconds! No joke – 45 seconds! This immediate improvement hinted at the power of working with his nervous system.

His knee pain, however, was a different story. Satisfied that the various scans Jeff had undergone over the past three years showed no specific tissue issues, I carried out extensive sensory testing around Jeff’s right knee. We discovered he couldn’t feel the sensation of cold on a small patch of skin on the outside of his knee. This was a crucial clue, suggesting that his brain wasn’t getting clear signals from that area, almost like a ‘blurry GPS signal’ for his knee. When your brain doesn’t have a precise sense of where a body part is, it can’t control and stabilise it properly, often leading to pain. We confirmed this by doing some squats; his right knee pain was instant, and I could see his control was poor.

There was a possibility then, that when Jeff wore one of the knee sleeves, his skin was heating up, and this extra warmth was making up for the lack of cold sensation, helping to sharpen the brain’s map of his knee. I applied cold sensory therapy to Jeff’s knee for the rest of the assessment, and we retested the squats. This massively improved his squat control, and there was virtually no pain. Running on the treadmill was also much better with less pain. I sent Jeff home with some cold therapy drills and other knee-mapping exercises.

In our next session, Jeff reported he could now run a couple of kilometres pain-free without the knee sleeves, but any longer, and it became very painful. However, he could now walk completely pain-free. I felt we were on the right track with sensory input, so I did more testing and re-testing. I gave Jeff some more mapping exercises to do at home. At his next session, Jeff said he could run a bit further now, but was still lugging one of the knee sleeves around in a backpack because beyond 3 or 4 km, he was still getting terrible pain.

Decoding the Knee Sleeve: The ‘Aha!’ Moment

So, I took to my large whiteboard, and together, we reverse-engineered exactly what the knee sleeves might be doing. Now, Jeff was like a lot of runners I see in that when he has pain, he immediately associates it with some form of tissue damage. Even though I had spent considerable time explaining and demonstrating that actually, it was his nervous system reporting false alarms of threats, Jeff struggled to move away from “it must be a tissue-issue, and I might be making it worse by running on it without the sleeve.” This made it even more important to figure out what the sleeve was actually doing.

Given that the sleeves were all made of neoprene, they offered minimal muscle bracing or structural support. This was a tough concept for Jeff to grasp initially. But by demonstrating how his knee could still freely move in all directions, even with the thickest sleeve, he started to understand that it wasn’t providing the external structural support he assumed.

So what was it doing for him? We knew his knee was probably heating up a bit, and therapy around the cold sensory deficit helped, but there was something else more important for his brain. Then Jeff mentioned something that made my brain go into overdrive: sometimes he would stop his run and massage the outside of his knee, and this helped reduce the pain. Bingo! It suddenly clicked.

Through a specialist technique, I tested how his brain responded to different types of touch on his skin – specifically, how it reacted to skin being stretched and skin being compressed. I discovered that by applying decent pressure directly onto his skin, compressing it in that specific spot, he could squat completely pain-free. This included single leg squats, which he could never do before due to pain and lack of control. This was it! This was the missing piece!

The Ingenious Solution: A Small Piece of Tape

But obviously, I wasn’t going to follow him around pushing on his knee! So I came up with an ingenious, simple solution: a small, 6cm strip of kinesiology tape. I applied the tape in a very specific way, creating that precise skin compression in just the right spot. Jeff tested this on the treadmill, and just like that, he was pain-free! I cut some more strips for him to take away and taught him how to apply it, sending him a supporting video of him applying it to his own knee for reference.

At his next session, he was over the moon! He could now run more than 21km completely pain-free without hauling around those bulky knee sleeves. All he needed was a small, easily portable piece of tape. He carried several pieces with him when he went for a run; they’re so easy to pop into his pocket – no more heavy backpack!

We did some other mapping work at that session, but Jeff decided that now he could run pain-free and race half marathons again, compromising by sticking a small bit of tape onto his knee was the perfect cost/benefit ratio for him.

Your Brain is the Key to Pain-Free Running

I love stories like Jeff’s because they illustrate that even when someone holds onto the ’tissue damage’ belief, their running and their life can be profoundly transformed by working with their brain and nervous system. You don’t need to be a “believer” in neuroscience for it to work!

So, if you’ve been battling pain for more than a few months, and scans show no specific injury, or perhaps a past injury has long healed, it’s time to look beyond the obvious and start exploring the incredible power of your brain and nervous system.

To help you understand this often-overlooked aspect of pain, I’ve created a completely FREE mini-course specifically for runners which you can find here.

To access the FREE course you will need to create a free account on the course platform.

Important Note:
Jeff had already seen medical professionals before he came to see me. He had also undergone several scans so was confident there was no physical injury.

It is very important that if you suspect at all that you may have a physical injury then you must go and get it checked out by a medical professional. Nothing in this article nor in anything that I teach, suggest or recommend, replaces the knowledge and experience of a trained medical professional when it comes to acute injury. Please do not ignore the fact that physical injuries do happen, so ensure you receive the care you need.

The post From Three Years of Runner’s Knee to Pain-Free Half Marathons: Jeff’s Story appeared first on RunTeach.

In this article we are going to build on what you’ve learned in the free quick guide to breathing ebook and the first four supporting articles that expand on each topic in the book. We are now going to look at nose breathing: what it is and how it can benefit you both in your running but also in everyday life.

We’re going to begin by looking at some of the common benefits of nose breathing in general and then you’ll discover why these are important. We’ll also uncover why you may not currently want to nose breath and how to go about changing that. Finally, you’ll learn a nose breathing exercise and protocol that you can begin using right away. So, let’s get started.

Nose Breathing Benefits

Some of the common benefits often cited about nose breathing are:

• Filters the air and helps remove allergens and dust
• Warms the air
• Humidifies the air
• Pressurises the air

All of these sound great, and they are, but there is so much more that isn’t often highlighted unless you begin to dig deeper.

• Helps to induce relaxation: When you breathe through your nose the air is slightly restricted which helps to slow down your rate of breathing and encourages better regulation. This slowing down and breath regulation is what promotes relaxation.
  
  However, due to the restriction of the airflow through your nose, you may find this creates some air hunger – a feeling that you don’t have enough air coming in. This can then cause mild panic and lead you to believe that you simply can’t nose-breathe. This is particularly the case if you often suffer from a blocked nose. But you can relax as we’ll look at ways that you can get over this feeling and start to nose-breathe without the panic.
  
• Improves cognitive function: There is some research that supports improved brain function through improved breathing. Actually, the study looked at people with dysfunctional nasal breathing and measured impaired cognitive function leading to the conclusion that efficient nasal breathing helps overall cognitive health and avoids impaired cognitive function. How you breathe also influences the neuroplasticity and predictive models of your brain, so it makes logical sense to deliberately and positively influence these with efficient breathing rather than to leave it to chance.
  
• Smell is important to us in mapping out our environment in the same way as vision and hearing are. The more efficient you become as a nose breather, the more improved (in general) your sense of smell becomes. If you remember back to the article where you learned about the predictive brain, you’ll begin to understand why a good sense of smell is important in helping to provide your brain with the most helpful information it can get. There is some research that links nasal breathing to improved visuospatial awareness, particularly in a sports environment. It does this through synchronising electrical activity in the brain on a wavelength that appears to improve your visuospatial awareness.
  
• Improves the recruitment of your diaphragm which leads to more efficient breathing and is strongly linked to the biochemical aspects of breathing. A strong and well activated diaphragm has also been linked to improved midline stability, something that is very important when you are running.
  
• Increased oxygen uptake in the blood: Nose breathing is more effective at increasing oxygen uptake than mouth breathing. This is something we’ll look at in a bit more detail later on in this article, but for now it’s helpful to know that arterial pressure of oxygen in people who consistently nose breathe increased by 10% over those that don’t.
  
• Production of nitric oxide: As you breathe in through your nose, you produce a molecule called nitric oxide which helps to maintain healthy lung function and may protect against certain respiratory diseases. Nitric oxide also helps to open up your airways, maximising the available oxygen for transfer to your blood and working muscles.
  
• Dilation of blood vessels: Nose breathing helps to open up the blood vessels in your lungs that then improves the amount of oxygen being carried around the body and to your working muscles and other tissues.
  
• Improved blood distribution in your lungs: The nitric oxide produced when you nose breathe helps to improve how your blood is distributed throughout your lungs which has been shown to improve blood by up to 24%. This is particularly the case with the upper areas of your lungs where gravity may otherwise present a challenge to the gas exchange process. Essentially, nose breathing is helping to improve the diffusion of blood from your lungs across into your blood.

I could continue with many more functions of the nose, but this is enough for us to start looking at a little more detail into some of these things so you can begin reaping the benefits of breathing through your nose in a more consistent manner.

Increased Oxygen

Let’s start with increased oxygen because this can seem a bit at odds with the restricted airflow of nose breathing compared to mouth breathing. However, with the help of a small formula it’s easy to see why nose breathing facilitates more oxygen availability. 

When we are exercising hard it’s easier for us to take air in through the mouth because we basically get more air in than we do through the nose. However, if you also speed up the rate of your breathing, you actually end up with less available oxygen. Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you are breathing through your mouth and you are breathing at the typical resting rate of between 12 and 20 breaths per minute. Let’s actually say that you are at the healthier end of this scale and you are breathing at 12 breaths per minute.

The amount of air you take in each breath that is usable is known as the tidal volume (TV), and the total amount of air taken in one minute is called your minute ventilation (MV). The typical minute ventilation is around 6 litres: that is, you take in around 6 litres of air per minute. This is represented in the formula below:

Respiratory Rate * Tidal Volume = Minute Ventilation

RR * TV = MV

12 (breaths per minutes) x TV = 6 litres

So TV must be 500ml of air per in breath:

12 x 500 = 6000ml = 6 litres

But, not all of the air you breathe in a single breath can be used for oxygen transfer. Around 150ml per breath remains in various areas of your throat, trachea, bronchi and bronchioles. This is known as dead space air and it cannot be used for gas exchange. So our tidal volume now becomes:

12 x (500 – 150) = 4200ml = 4.2 litres.

That’s 1.8 litres of air that cannot be used for oxygen exchange in the lungs.

Nose breathing generally encourages a slower breathing rate, typically between 6 and 8 breaths per minute, and at rest we are really aiming for a respiratory rate of 6. However, the amount of air coming into the nose remains the same as the mouth breather in the first example as they weren’t overbreathing, something we’ll look at next. So the total amount of air coming in in one minute is still 6 litres.

The amount of dead space air is the same as before, but our calculation now looks like this:

6 x TV = 6 litres

6 x 1000 = 6000ml = 6 litres

6 x (1000 – 150) = 5100ml = 5.1 litres

So you can clearly see that by slowing down your breath rate to around 6 breaths per minute from 12 breaths per minute, you are gaining an extra 20% of air that can be used for oxygen exchange. 

Of course the question is: “if I’m a mouth breather can I slow it down and get the same benefit?”. In theory, yes. In practice though, slowing down your breathing when just breathing through your mouth is hard to achieve on a consistent basis. You also won’t get the other benefits of nose breathing such as filtration and the very important nitric oxide.

So, nose breathing combined with slowing your respiratory rate is the preferred method of increasing oxygen in your blood. Doing exercises to help with the pacing of your breathing, such as those you learned in earlier topics in the guide and articles, will help you maintain good pacing in your breathing as your exercise intensity increases.

Over-breathing

You’ve just learned that slowing down your breathing rate can increase the available oxygen for gas exchange – something that is very important when you are running because you need to maximise the amount of oxygen that gets to your working muscles and other tissues.

So, why can’t you just take bigger breaths through your mouth to achieve the same thing? Well, apart from losing the benefits of nitric oxide you will also be breathing in too much oxygen. Not a bad thing you might think, except that it will displace the carbon dioxide in your blood (hypocapnia) and that certainly is not a good thing if it happens over longer periods (hours or days) – so you don’t want to be relying on large mouth breaths to get the oxygen you need.

To understand the issue of persistent hypocapnia (as opposed to deliberate, short term hyperventilation training for a few minutes at a time), we need to refer back to the previous article on biochemistry that included an explanation of your energy systems. If you remember, the higher the intensity of your running the harder it is for your body to get oxygenated blood to your cells. As a result, carbon dioxide builds up and eventually you will get to a point where the cells don’t work well and you’ll be forced to slow down. In practice, this is like starting your 5k race way too fast, rising quickly from aerobic to lactic and possibly to alactic, only to blow up a few minutes later and then having to settle down into a more sustainable pace in your aerobic or lower threshold zone. During this high intensity phase there is a build up of carbon dioxide, or a hypercapnic situation. This is the opposite of what happens when you over-breath, but being in a high intensity situation can force you to hyperventilate and over-breathe to compensate for the carbon dioxide build up and leave you in a carbon dioxide deficit.

As part of the normal cellular processes, the carbon dioxide that is shuttled from your cells is combined with water in the blood to form carbonic acid. The next reaction is to disassociate into H+ (hydrogen ions) and HCO3 (bicarbonate ions). This creates an alkaline buffer that neutralises changes in your blood’s acidity. When you hyperventilate or even just over-breath through large mouth breaths, you start to remove a lot of carbon dioxide. This leaves an excess of bicarbonate ions and a deficiency of hydrogen ions. At the same time, your breathing volume decreases to help restore your carbon dioxide levels. However, this will only work during short-term hyperventilation bouts as you return to normalised breathing quickly, allowing those carbon dioxide levels to settle. With continued hyperventilation or over-breathing, you end up in a constant state of hypocapnia and this impacts on your blood’s pH levels. As a consequence, your kidneys start to offload the excess bicarbonate ions to try and normalise your blood’s pH, making them work harder to maintain this fine balance.

In addition to your blood pH levels, the low level of carbon dioxide can cause other issues. Carbon dioxide is a strong catalyst for releasing oxygen from your blood into your cells, so by over-breathing you end up doing the opposite of what you may think you are doing. It is also a dilator of smooth muscles, the kind of muscle found in some of your airways. Therefore, over-breathing can actually restrict some of your airways, further reducing the effectiveness of your breathing.

Essentially, over-breathing other than when doing specific hyperventilation training exercises for a specific outcome, is going to reduce the available oxygen and hamper your running.

Carbon Dioxide Tolerance

Sticking with our carbon dioxide theme and becoming even more running specific, I just want to go back to the energy systems and the build up of carbon dioxide as your effort level increases.

You’ll remember that as you transition from your aerobic system being dominant to your lactic system becoming dominant, the level of carbon dioxide in your blood starts to build up because your system cannot pump the blood fast enough back to your lungs for the carbon dioxide to be diffused back to the lungs for exhalation. This is a state known as hypercapnia where there is excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and eventually this will help create an environment where your cells cannot perform well so you are forced to slow down so everything can begin to normalise. This feeling of not getting enough air in is called air hunger and you can actually use this state to improve balance and brain function – but that’s for another article.

The good news is that you can increase your tolerance to this CO2 build up so that you can push on for longer in this transition zone between energy systems. Ultimately, this means your speed endurance improves and therefore your race times. Even if you are not motivated by running faster and instead want better endurance, being able to operate for longer with a higher CO2 level means you are more fatigue resistant as you are overall much more efficient.

And the starting point for increasing your tolerance to higher levels of CO2 is by nose breathing, even at rest. This is because nose breathing naturally restricts the airflow by up to 50% compared to mouth breathing. Right away you are dealing with less oxygen going in and less carbon dioxide going out. This is also why you may find nose breathing, even at rest, challenging at first: you are not used to this build of CO2 and a reduction in O2 so you respond to the CO2 trigger to inhale as your brain perceives holding out as a threat. Remember that your brain is a prediction engine and the predictions it uses are shaped by every moment in your life so far. As soon as you start to train your CO2 tolerance, you are also shaping your predictive models for future reference.

So where do you start with this and how can you progress it?

1. Start with nose breathing at rest as often as you can, aiming to make it a permanent change.
2. You may find it challenging at times, so take a break but always go back to it and push yourself that little more. Nose breathing will actually help you to open up your airways (remember nitric oxide?) so persisting with it is the key.
3. Begin to build in nose breathing when you are walking, which will present more of a challenge as the CO2 will build up quicker and you may experience stronger air hunger. Again, take a break and go back to it. Each time you do this you are letting your brain know that it’s perfectly safe and you positively shape those predictive models.
4. When you are ready, try some nose breathing when you are on your easy runs. This may only be for 30 seconds to a minute at a time, but it’s all positive graining and positive reinforcement for your brain to build predictive models from and feel safe.

Nose breathing is such an important part of functional breathing, whether you are running or sitting on your sofa, that ignoring it is like ignoring speed work, strength work and other aspects of your run training.

In the next article I’m going to pull everything together and show you how you can improve your breathing in a step by step framework that also takes into account how you are feeling during some of the more challenging aspects of nose breathing, breath holds and rib cage mobilisation.

The post The Benefits Of Nose Breathing appeared first on RunTeach.

But maybe you’re the complete opposite and you love going to the gym but have found that no matter how much strength work you do, you still get those niggles and quite simply, you’re not getting any faster. 

As a runner, if you do a quick search on the Internet for reducing your injury risk and/or improving your performance, you’ll discover very quickly that “getting stronger” is the top tip from almost anyone. And I’ve got to agree with all of them: getting stronger is one of the outputs we need to develop to keep us running for longer and working towards our running goals.

Strength Is An Output

You see, strength is an output from your system. It’s the result of a whole bunch of stuff coming together and allowing your muscle fibres to contract to whatever level is needed to achieve the task. That task might be lifting a kettlebell or handling the forces of running. In all cases though, one huge element in strength is stabilising a joint as you lift, move and run. In fact, I would even argue that in our day to day lives outside of an experimental lab, joint stabilisation is one of the main things our expression of strength is doing.

They all start with trying to activate the muscles themselves. You’re given squats, lunges, deadlifts, landmine lifts, single leg exercises and much more. This can work for some people, but if the rest of your system won’t allow your muscles to activate and contract well, at best doing these exercises will just take a very long time to get any results. More often than not though, they simply won’t help you get any closer to your running goals at all.

You Are Already Superhuman!

You already have so much strength within your muscles already. Your strength, or “expression of strength” as I prefer to call it, is controlled by your brain. It’s not just to do with muscle size. You have neural inhibitors that actually block and reduce the amount of strength you can use. This is primarily a protection mechanism so you don’t injure yourself if the rest of your body and system can’t handle the forces you are generating.

A good example of this is when you have a limited quality of movement around a joint. If you can’t move well and control a joint, your brain will not allow you to exert or try to handle large forces across that joint. In other words, your ability to generate strength around that joint will be limited. This can have a cascading effect throughout the whole kinetic chain – all the other joints in your body, even if they are nowhere near the weaker joint.

Traditional strength training can work, but it usually takes a long time and a lot of patience because you are forcing the development of a skill (how to stabilise a joint) by working at the sharp end and hoping that your system will respond without you getting injured. To me, this is inefficient and completely backwards.

There Is A Better Way

The RunTeach system uses the following process to help you develop the strength and resilience you need as a runner:

Strength is the final output of the process and often doesn’t even need to be trained directly, depending on your running goals and current ability level.

By first developing the skill of joint stabilisation through working directly with your brain and nervous system, you can unlock the neural inhibitors and unlock your strength. This often happens very quickly: we’re talking minutes or hours of training as opposed to months and years of training! Longer term results will take longer, but it’s all relative to your goals and how much strength you need to be a resilient runner. 

Having developed the appropriate level of skill you need, adding endurance to that skill will enable you to run longer and faster without increasing your injury risk – essentially, you’ll be able to keep being strong for longer distances, more sessions, and at higher speeds.  Once you’ve got that strength, keeping it tends to have a very low requirement in terms of exercise and time. In fact, running just by itself can be the main maintenance factor.

If you want to find out more about this really quite jaw dropping approach to getting stronger, I would recommend attending one of our Resilient Runner Workshops. You’ll not only learn more, but will be able to actually apply it to your running right away.

The post Stop! Does Strength Work, Work? appeared first on RunTeach.

Do you love going to the gym? Or perhaps you’re like me and just don’t enjoy it at all; it seems way too much hassle carving out the time for a strength routine when you could be out running. Sound familiar?

The problem is, whatever we hear and read about reducing injury risk, injury prevention, prehab and rehab, getting stronger is something that almost always tops the list. And in many ways the phrase…

…is absolutely correct. We do tend to be more robust and more resilient when we are stronger. We are also able to develop more power and have greater stability – two things that go hand in hand in helping us run faster. Furthermore, if you are a runner over the age of 40, research implies that we should pay even more attention to staying strong in order to improve our performance and reduce our injury risk.

So essentially, you’ve got to get stronger! But hang on a minute… What does that actually mean? Does it mean you need to make time for two or three weight training sessions per week? Does it mean you need to drop one run per week to focus on strength work?

If the very thought of it is making you anxious, the good news is that you may not have to do this at all. There are ways to help you get stronger without lugging giant weights about, or spending numerous hours per month doing resistance training. Actually, some of that might still be necessary, but as it will be super targeted it will be shorter in duration and you’ll see results far quicker and they’ll last far longer.

What Is Strength?

Before we get into that though, we need to look at what strength actually is. Here are some dictionary definitions:

The ability to do things that need a lot of physical or mental effort

Cambridge Dictionary

The Merriam Webster dictionary has these definitions:

Looking through each of those, I can apply them in my mind to running. But is that what most of us really think of when considering doing strength work in connection with running? Although it seems logical that we need to be strong to run, do we really think “I’m going to make myself impregnable, solid and tough!” Or do we just think “I wish I could run faster and longer without my knee hurting! I better make sure it’s strong enough”.

So dictionary definitions of strength don’t actually help us at all in a practical sense. And I’m pretty sure most of us think we’re robust enough already, until we aren’t of course.

Be honest here, how many of us would skip strength work if we didn’t really need to do it? What’s that – you are already skipping it?… Yeah, I hear that all the time from runners.

But that’s OK. To me, strength is like fitness. It changes in the different areas of your life. If your goal is to sit on the couch all day and watch TV, and you can achieve that goal, then you are both fit and strong enough to do that. Equally, if your goal is to run a 20 minute 5k, but you’re currently running a 25 minute 5k, then you are neither fit enough nor strong enough to achieve that goal. We can split this down a bit further to be more helpful.

If we leave fitness to one side for now – mainly because I view strength as just one aspect of fitness and this could get very complicated – and just focus on strength. We can view strength in a similar way in which I view resilience:

The ability for your body’s tissues to withstand the forces applied to them, in the intensity, duration and frequency which your activity demands.

So basically, you are strong enough if your body’s tissues can handle all the forces you chuck at them without either giving up (injury) or forcing your nervous system to introduce some red flags such as fatigue, niggles and the warning experience of pain.

To complicate it slightly, strength is also linked to your ability to produce power, which in turn helps you run faster. But let’s just keep this simple for now, as your nervous system won’t let you express high levels of power without first having a powerful expression of strength. If you just went “uh?”, then let me explain:

Strength can be expressed in two different ways:

When you run, your feet will typically only be in contact with the ground for between 220 milliseconds and 350 milliseconds. At the more elite end of running, the number is lower as the foot turnover (cadence) tends to be a little higher. And I know, we are all told to improve our cadence.

But the trick with improving cadence is also keeping good form and not just turning what may have been a half-decent heel lift at a slower cadence into something that resembles a fast shuffle, just to get your feet turning over faster. There is also the challenge of being able to put down enough power in a shorter amount of time, but I’m kind of moving away from the point here and these are topics for different articles. Back to strength…

With your feet being on the ground for such a short period with every step, you don’t have enough time to voluntarily think about keeping your joints stable in your feet, ankles, knees, hips, pelvis, back, shoulders and neck. This all needs to happen automatically or reflexively. It also needs to be coordinated across the different areas for improved movement efficiency. And while you may think that only being on the ground for a fraction of a second means that there isn’t enough time to even bother with joint stability because you essentially hop or lunge from one foot to the other continuously, the forces of running are such (up to 3 times bodyweight – possibly more depending on what you read) that stability in each step is critical. 

Many of us get away with less than ideal reflexive stability over short distances and when we are not tired, but ramp it all up and suddenly the impacts are amplified and before long we certainly know about it. The same is true if you start to push the pace. More pace generally means more force both into the ground and back up from the ground (ground reaction force), so your body’s tissues need to be able to handle the greater demands and the need for even better reflexive stability.

One great example that we can all observe is the classic hip drop. The next time you are running behind someone, look at the movement of their pelvis. If their hip drops down to the opposite side of their stance leg, then they are likely to have some reflexive stability issues. Ordinarily, if you have hip drop, you will be told to do lots of glute (maximus and medius) and core strengthening and integration exercises (hopefully), but if your reflexive stability is poor, you are still unlikely to be able to build or use that strength properly.

Mastering the skill of reflexive stability is, in my opinion, a relatively quick and highly efficient way to improve your overall expression of strength for running – far better than just lifting weights and hoping it will all work. You will feel more stable, be able to put more power into your running, and run longer distances more comfortably than you’ve been able to before. 

You will also be teaching your nervous system how to identify, activate and control your muscles (these are all individual skills by the way). This then forms a fantastic foundation for you to carry on with any other strength work you may enjoy doing, and it will have much more of a positive impact and the benefits are likely to stick around for longer.

For clarity, to improve your reflexive stability, you do need to do voluntary neural drive exercises (i.e. resistance training), but they need to be well designed so they stimulate and upregulate the parts of your brain and nervous system that control reflexive stability.

Summary

To summarise then, first think about reflexive stability when you think about strength in running. Once you have mastered this through well designed and personalised exercises, you may or may not need more strength work of the normal “just lift weights” kind. You may find that your running sessions already provide you with enough stimulus to keep improving your resilience and neural drive strength. Of course that does depend on your goals, but that’s a topic for another article…

The post What Is Strength In Running? appeared first on RunTeach.

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But why do glutes play such an important role-in running? And why have you been told they are lazy and not “firing” correctly?

All mammals have glutes, but not all glutes are equal. The structure, shape and size of your glutes will depend on what you want to do. If you are an ape, you want raw power. You want large and powerful gluteus maximus muscles that face outward, in other words: big butt muscles!

Because, as an ape, you spend a lot of your time quadruped (all fours), you need your glutes to power you forwards without much of a requirement to stabilise or stand. When you are quadruped, you have your arms and hands to help stabilise. You can see that a gorilla has large thighs and large gluteus maximus muscles, but the gluteus medius muscle is long and shaped to help with the forward driving power. 

Of course, this means that when you want to walk or stand on two legs, it will only be for a short time because you don’t have stability. Standing on one leg is even more limited, if it’s at all possible. There are exceptions, but walking using four limbs is the prefered option.

Now imagine you are a squirrel or a meerkat. You’ll only really come up on two legs to survey your surroundings, then run and walk on all four limbs. And while some bears, gibbons and reptiles can walk on two legs for a period of time, the structure of their glutes still favours power over stability – the two legged walking bit is limited.

Now go back to being you. On a good day, you can not only walk and run upright, you can balance one leg, hop, skip and bound. Really, walking and running upright are one-legged activities, and as a species you are very special to be able to do that. And it’s how your glutes are designed that allows you to be so skilled at these single leg activities.

As I mentioned when you were being an ape, our buttock muscles are called the Gluteus Maximus (G-Max). While it is critical for apes and all quadrupeds that these are very powerful and mainly rearward facing, it is slightly less important for you. You trade a lot of that power for extra stability. There are two other gluteal muscles that need to work with the G-Max so you can speed around in your running shoes without falling over. These are the Gluteus Medius and the Gluteus Minimus.

All three muscles need to work in concert to provide the stability and power you need to run. In many of us, this simply doesn’t harpen, and the result is an overworking of your calf, hip flexor and low back muscles.

In my experience of assessing and coaching runners, the lack of integration of the glutes is rarely down to strength. In the majority of cases it’s a case of faulty wiring, and the good news is that this is usually simple to fix without lots of weights or gym work.

A word of warning: simple doesn’t mean easy. The exercises are simple and they don’t take special equipment, but they do need persistent practice. Your brain holds a virtual map of your entire body, and it uses this map when interacting with the nervous system to output movement. If the map is out of date due to a lack of regular movement or perhaps poorly learned movement, the entire reference is wrong. This is super important because walking and running are automatic processes; if the reference base is wrong, the movement will be wrong.

Your job is to keep the map up to date and to strengthen the pathways between your brain, nervous system and muscles so the movement patterns are as efficient as possible.

OK, now you know why we need to start with re-coding your movements and keeping that brain map updated, let’s look at my top 5 exercises and build them into a four-week progressive plan:

• Lying glute raises
• Glute pull backs
• Hip hikes
• Banded foot ups
• Synchro-lunges

The aims of the plan are:

• Start off by becoming aware of and feeling your glutes
• Start to control your glutes independently
• Start to control your pelvis independently
• Integrate your hips and core

From this base, you can then build endurance and strength, and then start to put it into practice in your running.

Take the challenge of integrating your brain, nervous system and muscular system and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can improve your running.

The post Glutes, lazy glutes appeared first on RunTeach.

You may come to the same conclusion as many other runners, and look to strength training for the answer:

Get stronger = run faster

Get stronger = less injuries

Get stronger = better endurance

That’s what you’ll often read online or be told by your running buddies or your club/group guru. But are they right?

Conduct a Google search for “strength training for runners” and you’ll get over 30 million results! Where do you start with that lot?

There is no doubt that most runners do need to get stronger in some areas, but just doing squats and static planks won’t cut it. From the mass of search results, you can become very confused about what exercises are actually beneficial for running for most people. So, I want to give you a starting point where you can progress from.

The starting point for any strength programme is to address the imbalances you may have. When you have muscles that are stronger than the other muscles around them, it can cause the stronger muscles to be overworked. Weaknesses can also cause other muscles to take on the job of handling the forces of running they were never designed to do. This can then lead to many of the overuse injuries we see in runners.

Now, you don’t necessarily need to get all technical about this, as you can start off by targeting the most common areas. But, if you do want to find out where your imbalances are, I can help you with my RunForm and RunTest assessments. For this article, I’m going to highlight what I believe to be the best place to start.

In my opinion, there are some essential areas that you should always start with, unless you have been told otherwise by a professional. These are:

• Hips
• Core
• Calves
• Single leg
• Feet
• Shins

I am in the process of writing about these areas in-depth, so for now let’s have a quick look at two of these to begin with as they are what I would consider to be a solid base to build upon.

I usually begin at the hips and go up and then down when I’m assessing imbalances. Looking at just your feet and legs means that you miss so much information that can help determine what’s going on.

The hip area plays a crucial role in what is a complex set of movements that allow us to walk and run. In fact, the gait cycle (the motion of walking and running) is automatic. We start it off with an initial movement and it completes without any extra input needed.

On the one hand this is great because we can focus on other things, but the downside is that if the coding of the movement is faulty it often influences poor movement both upwards towards the shoulders and down towards your feet – no matter how strong those other areas may be.

And it’s not simply a question of doing heavy weights or millions of repetitions. If you are not engaging the correct muscles for each part of the cycle, you will be asking other muscles to take the strain. A good example is when a runner is “quad” dominant. This is where they run by using more of the power from their thighs rather than from their glutes (buttocks and side of hips). This often leads to sore and tired thighs, overuse around the front of the hips (hip flexors) and on longer or faster runs, the thighs will tire out quickly. This is the classic “I’m not using my glutes” scenario.

In this instance, many runners will look to squats to help engage their glutes, but this isn’t always the right starting point. I believe you need to learn to feel your glutes to use them properly. And only when you can use them properly is it worth strengthening them. Otherwise, you’ll be strengthening an incorrect movement pattern and unlikely to be targeting the glutes in the way you want.

I have some simple but very effective glute engagement exercises that will get you started. They are about making brain/muscle connections and helping you to become aware of your glutes:

Isometric hip hike video

Isometric glute activation (banded) video 

These two exercises are best done with a little and often frequency. So, three or more times per day, but only a minute or so each time. Put the focus on feeling your glutes rather than just going through the motions. The repetition of good form is creating new pathways between your brain and muscles and with enough practice will begin to spill over into your normal walking and running.

To really do justice to feeling and strengthing your glutes, this excellent 12 week glute course, specifically created for runners, is a great choice. It has been written by James Dunne at Kinetic Revolution.

Like me, he believes in correct movement patterns and will take you through a self-assessment to find those imbalances and then how to correct them.

You can go directly to the course from this link.

In running, when I talk about core, I am referring to everything from neck to thighs. This part of your body is so well connected that when you get it all working together your running will improve amazingly!

The go to core exercises always seem to be the plank. While the plank is a great core exercise, we really want to make it dynamic so it becomes running specific. In fact, you want all of your core exercises to be dynamic so that you can take advantage of harnessing the rotational forces when you run.

You may have seen runners whose shoulders twist and turn with every step, or have run behind someone whose hips are bouncing up in a hypnotic trance. Both of these can stem from your core not being integrated, with each part trying to control movement at a local level. However, this is not how the body is designed. Your physical architecture is such that you need integration. You need your inner corset to synchronise with your outer corset; your low back to work with your glutes and hamstrings; your obliques to work with your hip flexors and glutes. If all this seems a bit too technical, then let’s simplify it:

You need to control the rotation of your hips, back and shoulders so that you create a catapult like power that you release with every step. You do this by engaging your whole core in the exercises you do. Here are some to get you started:

Russian twist

Dead bug

Pallof press (video here)

Dynamic plank variations (here’s Cori Lefkowith’s excellent selection)

 Essentially, any anti-rotation exercise is going to be great for engaging and integrating your core.

This fantastic book by Mary bond looks at an integrated core in terms of posture. I use a lot of the stuff she talks about in my coaching and training. Here is the Amazon link to the book:

In this article we’ve looked at two main areas for you address. But, it’s not just about strengthening them with weights. First, you need to move your hips, glutes and core properly. Then, you add endurance to those movements (i.e. moving correctly over a period of time) and finally you can add strength work.

If you read my previous article about marathon training, you’ll know that you can get a lot stronger just by your nervous system recruiting more muscle fibres without increasing muscle mass. Practicing correct movements is a form of doing this.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to deep dive into the areas above and into the other areas that I beleive are important for marathon and half marathon strength work: watch this space.

The post Strength training for runners appeared first on RunTeach.

The muscles that we are particularly interested in are the tibialis anterior muscles. However, a couple of others are also important here…

Extensor digitorum longus and Peroneus longus

All you really need to know though, is that we are talking about the muscles down the front of your shins. In most recreational runners, these muscles are weak and underused. As such, we tend not to be able to get the range of motion at the ankle that we need for running. This is turn can lead to lots of compensations such as over pronation as well as knee and hip pain.

The movement where your toes and shins come closer together by your foot moving upwards is called dorsiflexion, and this is crucial to running from both a injury prevention perspective and a performance perspective.

Essentially, to run fast and to reduce injuries, your ankles need to move properly. We also talked about it in the following posts:

1.  You are the weakest link

2. Shin Splints – Causes of shin pain in runners

3. Ankle testing for runners

So, how can you get strong shins and improve how your ankles move? Fortunately, it’s really simple and only takes a few minutes each day to do.

This exercise may be the only one you need. It comes from those experts in all things gait Shawn and Ivo, AKA The Gait Guys. Unfortunately their own video is a little old and difficult to view properly, so we’ve created our own.

Doing this simple exercise for two minutes every day, or at least three times per week, for a few weeks, will result in huge gains in shin strength.

Combine strong shins with increased ankle range of motion, and you will reduce your injury risk and get faster!

The post Shin strength exercises for runners appeared first on RunTeach.

According to the available research and expert discussion, arriving at a “normal” range of motion is pretty tricky. Some labs use fancy geometry equipment such goniometers, but there is a simple test that has been proven to be very reliable – and according to some people, more reliable than the fancy equipment. This test also provides us with a easy benchmark for the range of motion we can work towards achieving.

What is the test? It’s a lunge against a wall and the video below shows how easy it is:

Ideally, we want to be able to be 10cm or more from the wall and still keep the heel of our front leg on the ground. However, many of us can only get to 5cm or fewer.

If you can’t get to 10cm or more, the solution is also very simple. You can use the test exercise as the exercise to increase your range of motion. There’s also a variation that you can do, as shown in the following video:

This range of motion is known as “dorsifletion” and is the movement where your toes get closer to your shins.

In addition to the exercises in the last video, you can increase dorsiflexion by:

• Releasing restrictions in the ankles, calf muscles and hamstrings
• Improving the strength of your shin muscles

To release restrictions, you can foam roll, self-massage or see a professional such as a physio or body worker. We’ll have a post up soon to help you increase the strength of your shin muscles, so stay tuned.

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