Mountain Bikers: fill your podcast list with this!

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New on the airwaves – Legendary mountain biker Jamie Goldman and Spencer Burback launch their new podcast Pro2Call MTB on iTunes.

Honored to be guest #3 behind of international legendary rider Kyle Jameson and Carson Storch (the next big thing….now). We talked bike position, warmup, rehab, keeping your body tuned to get the most out of your time on the bike, how to prepare for RedBull Rampage when you break your collar bone 5 weeks out from the hardest event of your season, and the importance of YOUR voice to maintain access for our trails.

Great chat – search Pro2Call on iTunes to get into the conversation

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Are Larger Runners More Prone to Injury?

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I had a great chat with Competitor Magazine recently about just this question. If you’d like to know the rest of our conversation, take a look at the jump.

Take home – weight is WHAT you are made of. If that weight is predominantly well-trained and functioning tissue (lean body mass!) – you are right on track. People comes in all shapes and sizes, and people who win races come in all shapes and sizes!

Take a look here for the full scoop!

Shoulder Solid – Improve your posture on the bike

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You pedal with your legs, but your shoulders and core drive the front end, and deserve some respect too. In this video, Jay Dicharry and Lindsey Voreis will teach you why posture and shoulder position are critical to keep you solid on the bike.

Better bodies make better riders, and better rides!

The New York Times talks Maximal Shoes – or maybe maximizing yourself

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I really like house projects. I know, I’m likely i the minority here, but it gives me a way to be involved in the place I live, and make stuff, and well, I find that pretty cool. To be successful at this, you’ve got to have fancy tools like a chop saw, joiner, planer, but more importantly know how to actually use them!

So when it comes to footwear, I tell my athletes that footwear is but a tool for the job. Full disclosure, my lab consults for many different footwear companies, and these findings have helped shape a number of products on the wall at your local running speciality store. I’ve seen objective data on how different footwear influences running gait and the individual runner. Not just a slow motion video of your foot pronating, but really dorky stuff like force vectors and the like. All of this data we collect has shown me a few things:

1. Shoes do make a difference.

2. There is no single shoe optimal for all runners, or even a single shoe that is optimized for a single runner across multiple speeds. Again you are looking for the “right tool for the job”

3. Its been really interesting to see what is “marketed” vs. what really “works” in each shoe.

Finding an optimal match of footwear for you is currently best done in a lab where we can measure data points to help runners find the best tool for their needs. As we learn more about what shoes REALLY do, hopefully the REAL message and technology will get out to your running retailer to help you match what is right for you (and the simple slow motion barefoot running assessment isn’t even close to the right way to match a shoe to your gait, as the research shows there is zero correlation to foot pronation and matching footwear).

However, let’s break this co-dependent relationship on shoes. In the excellent New York Times article on the upswing trend of maximal shoes, I closed with a statement saying that runners should spend less time shoe shopping and more time improving themselves. Gathering clinical, biomechanics, and training data with many thousands of runners over my career, has led me to the conclusion that the best thing you can do is to put a better “you” into a pair of shoes. If you’d like a little a help here, I suggest this video I made with Running Times a few years ago. While its called “Are you ready for minimal?” it really applies to all runners, and the goal is simple: the foot is the most important thing. Period. If you bring better foot control to the table, you aren’t relying on the shoe.

And if you’d like to know more on how footwear applies to running, I’ve got a whole chapter dedicated to footwear in Anatomy for Runners (with over 80 references!) and also highly suggest Pete Larson’s book Tread Lightly.

Here’s a recipe for success: Put the best foot you can into a shoe that lets your foot do its job. Don’t be afraid to try out a bunch of different shoes to see what works best for you, but don’t skimp on your body. You want it to perform? learn how to use it, and give it some attention.

My buddy’s joiner and planar allowed me to fabricate a beautiful african mahogany door to a cabinet I once built. But its the knowledge of how to USE those tools that allowed me to produce a beautiful piece (and avoid loosing a finger in the process!)

The Perfect Christmas Gift for Runner’s on Your List

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Want to help the runner you love (or yourself) reach their next level this Christmas? OK, so sure, here’s a shameless plug…. but hey, its 11 bucks at amazon, and Santa will have it under your tree or in your stocking by the time you wake up on the 25th.

To all of you who have bought the book, thank you! And to those that haven’t, the gift of knowledge is keeps on giving.

Merry Reading, and Merry Christmas Everyone!

The Traveling Runner: how to maintain benefits from weights when you don’t have a gym

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Does anyone else live in a bubble where time-zones tick by as fast as minutes? Last night I got back home from one trip, unpacked, repacked, and flew off again this morning….traveling can be tough on our routines, and unfortunately, wreak havoc on our athletic efforts. Let’s face it, on some trips we have hours on end to utilize the high end gym (that is likely nicer than the one you have at home!). But for most of the time, it’s a pulley machine, a swiss ball, and a treadmill stuck in a standard sized hotel room masquerading as a “gym”. Not really an ideal environment to push the limits. And on top of limited equipment, you likely only have about 30 min between answering emails from your “regular work” on top of everything else demanding time on your trip. So how do you maintain your benefits of your weight work while facing the demands of traveling?

 

Its easy to say – OK – no weights, I’ll just go for an easy run. No harm in this at all. But for those of you really dedicated to making gains while on the road, there is a will, and a way. Take a look again at the previous post on ways to improve your neuromuscular recruitment. If the weight room isn’t set up to help you kickstart those fast twitch fibers, hitting some local hills, or even doing sprints in the parking lot go a long way.

 

But remember, the goal of these is to go HARD. Really hard. As hard as you are working on the last few reps in the weight room. And to go that hard, it means you have to rest between intervals. For those of you who think that rest is only for the weak, let’s look at what sprinters do. People who run hard for a living (sprinters) take approximately 1 full minute easy for each 10 meters they run. So yes, a 30 meter sprint means 3 minutes rest before the next one. And keep the durations short. Intervals over 40 meters aren’t helpful. And while sprinting hills is really tough, the effort should still be quite high and be limited to less than 20 seconds of effort. Throw your shoes on, hit a short easy run, some dynamic warm-up moves, and then hit some intense hills or sprints. Jump in the shower, and get back to travel life……knowing you did something for yourself before the day even started.

Neuromuscular control: why is it important for runners, and 3 easy ways to improve it

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Efficient movement is one that allows you to activate your muscles as fast as possible. Why? Because running demands some pretty quick contact times (between .08 – .3 seconds every stride). If you can generate a forceful contraction rapidly during the stance phase, you’ll tap into some amazing efficiency. And tapping into those forceful contractions requires good “neuromuscular control”. This term gets throw around a LOT with abandon. A quick explanation here: Strength is nothing unless your body can control it. Our nervous system needs to “learn” to control our newfound strength and power. Said simply: better neuromuscular control, better economy.

 

To get more of your nervous system in the game, we need to recruit more muscle fibers to contract. And there are three ways that we can increase muscle fiber recruitment.

 

  1. Sprint all the time. If you are in a drag race, you aren’t going to pull up in a Prius. You are going to borrow your neighbor’s Porsche. Who cares about economy, you want to win the checkered flag! Running as fast as you can isn’t really that efficient. It costs way more energy per distance than running slow. This increased energy cost comes from recruiting a LOT of muscle fibers at once. Sprinting is actually one of the best running- specific forms of strength training out there. Its not just for track-stars. I have my 800 meter, 5K, 10K, 13.1, 26.2 and even ultra runners doing sprints at various cycles during the year. But its hard, and that why we don’t do it every day!
  2. Run Hills. No secret here. Running up hill requires we raise our body up against gravity more than running on flats. And the extra force per step it takes to conquer that hill comes from….you guessed it…..more muscles fibers being recruited each and every step. Hills are tried and true for years to improve running-specific strength. But again, these place a big training load on our body, and we can’t do them every day.
  3. Lift weights. The cool thing about weights is that we can get a huge increase in the number of muscle fibers activated (there’s that catchy term again…..more neuromuscular recruitment!) without a big cardiovascular and connective tissue training stress. Lifting quite heavy and quite powerfully has been directly coorelated to running economy. And here again, you can’t do these daily either.

 

So the secret to improving your ability to activate more muscle fibers comes from, well, activating more muscle fibers. Take a look at your training plan and see how you can include 1 or 2 of these techniques into your own strategy each week. A little goes a long way here. Have fun, and watch as you achieve those running milestones.

 

Want to run better? Join us for the Health Running Course in Carmel, California

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healthy runningCalling all Doc’s, therapists, and trainers (and yes you super guru runners)!

Join your’s truly and Robert Gillanders on October 18th and 19th in beautiful Carmel, California for an amazing installment of Healthy Running! This course was created by myself, Dr. Mark Cucuzzella, and Ian Adamson to be the premier running medical education resource for clinicians.

We’ve taken the research, and distilled it down to its essential didactic components, so that you’ve got answers when your patients ask you for help. And we’ve got big blocks of lab time to practice hands-on evaluation techniques, injury treatments, gait analysis, shoe prescription, and exercise prescription. You’ll not only sharpen your clinical through process, you’ll be comfortable applying our framework to your patients on the first day back in the office….and yes, you’ll likely learn a thing or two to help yourself!

Our mission is simple – every patient – from weekend warriors, to the professionals that frequent my clinic – deserves the highest level of clinical care. We want to share our approach with you, to help you and your patients achieve success!

Click the link for registration, and see you in Carmel!