The predominant lesson instilled in me as a child was self-reliance. My mother’s father grew up in the grip of the Great Depression and was a Sea Bee in the South Pacific in World War II. When he got home, he became a jack of just about every trade. He remodeled houses, drove trucks, and repaired, rebuilt, and sold everything he could get his hands on. He raised his kids in rural Indiana, where you didn’t pay for things; you did them yourself.

I spent the summers of my teenage years sweating in the sun alongside him. We re-graveled his driveway with two shovels and a wheelbarrow. We heaved railroad ties into place as the borders of his garden, because they were cheaper than landscape timbers. He taught me to measure twice and cut once and to swing a hammer like you mean it, as we laid the subfloor in the family room he built onto the house himself at the age of 70.

Mom taught me to handle the practical realities of life, including the mysteries of the kitchen, and how to mend my own clothes and dress my own wounds. Dad demonstrated that no skill was unobtainable, provided you were ready to study hard and work harder. He worked his way through an engineering degree with two young kids, and later taught himself calligraphy, photography, and sailing. He also taught me that the only standard for a job is your absolute best effort, and that your best is probably a lot better than you would have guessed.

They all demonstrated a tireless work ethic and a total devotion to causes higher than themselves. Better still for my eventual success, they demanded the same from me. There was no Google in those days, but we had a book case full of dictionaries, encyclopedias, Bibles, and how-to manuals for everything from automotive maintenance to stitching. If those failed, the library was a short bike ride away. The most common response to inquiry in our house was “look it up.”

The result was that by the time I was old enough to drive, I knew how to work on my own car, buy my own groceries, prepare my own meals from scratch, and figure out anything else I needed. I entered adulthood just as the digital age came to maturity, and as “looking it up” became even easier, the pace of my self-education accelerated. I taught myself how to drive a manual, ride motorcycles, and build and fix computers.

The seeds of self-reliance and determination sown in my youth grew into the confidence to try my hand at just about anything as an adult. This mindset has been the greatest resource of my professional career, and the most reliable tool in my personal life. It has led to adventures and opportunities far too numerous to list in this article, and saved me a whole lot of time, money, and heartbreak along the way.

The decision to become your own coach requires some degree of this same mindset. To do the job right will require an investment of time and effort not unlike that required to enter the profession formally, though it will be a lot cheaper. Above and before all the other concepts I’ll bring you in this article, you must be voraciously hungry for knowledge and not easily discouraged. You must develop the ability to characterize and analyze problems, and reflexively seek answers rather than giving up. You must be willing to fail, and to have nobody to blame but yourself.

Being your own coach takes a lot of work, and I won’t pretend that it’s the shortest distance between A and B; that would require hiring a coach. But if you think you’ve got what it takes and you’re the kind of person who prefers to do things for yourself, grab a strong cup of black coffee and read on.

You Could Be Your Own Best Coach

Abraham Lincoln once said, “He who represents himself has a fool for a client.” I served on a jury for a trial once that proved Mr. Lincoln correct. But he who coaches himself might have made the best possible choice. For instance, if you travel a lot for work, as I have for the past few years, the ability to coach yourself can be an invaluable asset. If you have a set of goals that would require the hiring and coordination of a whole staff of coaches, the most accurate plan might be the one you write for yourself.

But beyond raw necessity, there are advantages to self-coaching, provided you have the ability to be brutally honest with yourself and possess the other attributes I mentioned above. If you successfully coach yourself, you’ll have the ultimate program: perfectly tailored to your needs and goals, instantly adaptable to your evolving situation, and free of charge. You’ll become intimately familiar with the mechanisms at work in your training, because you will witness firsthand the effect each stimulus has on your body, rather than trying to convey it to another person. And you’ll be able to diagnose and correct issues in your performance on the fly, rather than waiting for your coach to be around, or to notice, or to get back to you with an answer to your question.

Self-coaching isn’t just for us lowly amateurs, either. Lots of professional athletes self-coach in one or more areas of their training, including top-flight weightlifters and CrossFit athletes. And there’s never been a better time to do it, because the accumulated knowledge of all of mankind is available to you in seconds, for free, on the internet. All you have to do is learn to use it. Simple, right?

Information, Knowledge, and Understanding

Before we get into the details of how to become your own coach, there are a couple concepts that need to be clarified. The first is that being your own coach doesn’t mean you have zero coaches, ever. In fact, to some degree, you’re probably already coaching yourself, so long as you leave your brain turned on while you train. Ever make a technique correction in the middle of a WOD? Decide to go a little heavier or lighter than your written squat program for the day? Those are coaching decisions, however minor.

I have coaches for weightlifting, but I only get to train with them twice a week; on the other days, I am self-coaching. I have running coaches, but my most successful season to date included nine months of writing and executing my own programs and workouts. I don’t work with a cycling coach formally, but I have a small group of (very fast) friends and mentors that I look to for advice and guidance. Whatever your sport, chances are you spend a large percentage of your time on your own, making your own decisions in the heat of the moment.

A useful construct of the learning process is to divide it into four phases of progression: information, knowledge, understanding, and mastery. It is beyond the ability of human beings to impart understanding on one another. Instead, we convey information, which is just raw data. Knowledge is the ability to organize and apply information in a meaningful and useful fashion. Understanding is what occurs when you fully digest and synthesize knowledge to the extent that you can create new ideas from it. Mastery is self-explanatory. If the information is the seed, knowledge is the tree, understanding is the fruit, and mastery is the most perfect apple strudel you ever put in your mouth.

To become effective as a coach, whether for yourself or others, your goal is to reach at least a basic level of understanding of your sport and associated training modalities. Mastery should be your eventual goal, but it is sufficient to start out with fundamental understanding and work upward from there. Alright; now that Pedagogy 101 is over, let’s get into it.

Make Useful Friends

A bit more than a decade ago, I got a series of wake-up calls. At the time, I smoked like a chimney, ate like a moron, and drank like it was my calling, usually in front of the TV or a computer screen. The physical neglect of my late teens and early 20s had made me so fat and out of shape that I almost failed an Air Force fitness test (I know, I know, go ahead and laugh). My lower back was a disaster. One day I had to ride my bike a couple miles up the road to get a part to fix my car, and it almost killed me. I had grown up as a scrawny kid, so when a picture of me with my shirt off showed rolls (rolls!) on my sides and back, I was utterly shocked.

Even when I noticed the problem and decided I should do something about it, asking for help never really crossed my mind. Lucky for me, the first lesson in becoming your own coach happened by accident. A coworker was studying for his CSCS at the time and gave me a few workouts to try, providing enough basic instruction that I wouldn’t hurt myself and had a general sense of what exercises did what.

This was the beginning of a pattern I still follow today: find somebody significantly fitter than me, and then find out how they got there. Every time I met somebody at the mountain bike trailhead, I’d try to learn something else about the sport. When I joined my running team, I watched and listened to the fast guys and girls as they warmed up or cooled down (which was the only time I could keep them in sight). A handful of people genuinely have no idea of how they got as fit as they are, but the majority usually have some sort of information or advice to offer to the neophyte.

Maybe the most useful friend I made during my early forays into self-coaching walks on four legs. When my wife and I adopted a puppy, we knew he was going to be work. We didn’t know we’d invited a wiggly little Drill Sergeant into our home. The puppy needed exercise—a whole freaking lot of it—or he turned into the very devil. So every day, I’d walk or run a few miles with him in the morning before work, and my wife (the most wonderful woman in the world and my favorite training partner) would take him out for a few more miles every evening. The puppy stayed happy, and fat started melting off of us like soft serve at a 4th of July parade.

Our dog unwittingly (or perhaps intentionally; he’s very smart) became our first coach, and the biggest lesson he taught us was consistency. I’ve often joked that he’s the best athlete in the house, but it’s true. He eats perfectly, fasts regularly, stretches all the time, sleeps as much as he needs to, throttles back when he’s tired, and trains with regularity and intensity. Even now, as he enters middle age (for a dog), he’s got a sub-4-minute mile and hasn’t gained a pound from his mature adult weight. Someday, I hope to be half the self-coached athlete my dog is.

Get Obsessed

A vegan, a fighter pilot, a CrossFitter, and a triathlete walk into a bar. Who bores the bartender to death first?

We all get a chuckle out of the single-mindedness of those four groups, but the truth is that it’s the very thing that makes them good at what they do. Their enthusiasm and drive to learn all they can and become the best they can be bubbles over into daily conversation. They just can’t help it.

And why should they? Being well-rounded is a hugely overrated quality. All the cool stuff in life happens at the bottom of the proverbial rabbit hole, and if that comes at the cost of not being able to make small talk about the latest Twitter controversy or Kardashian shenanigans, who cares?

The early phases of learning to coach yourself will require you to eat, sleep, and breathe your new sport. Read, watch, and listen to everything you can get your hands on about it, until you know the principles, the history, and the science and trends shaping its future. Going this deep will allow you to evaluate your own strategies and performance through a wider and more objective lens, which will help you create more effective and sustainable plans.

There’s nothing wrong with becoming obsessed enough over your new athletic pursuits that it makes you a little awkward in polite conversation. The most successful people I know in any given field share an allergy to small talk.

Study Everything, Believe Half of It

While you want to devour information, you also want to maintain a healthy level of skepticism. Everybody’s got something to sell, and coaches and scientists are no different. Alarm bells should ring especially loud when anybody claims a superlative about their ideas. The best diet, exercise, training plan, or supplement is only the best in the full context of its application, and there will be no application that’s a mirror of your own circumstances.

Check out more photos like this by Bev Childress on Instagram

Nutrition and supplementation might be the murkiest area of study, in this respect. The way people assign meaning to both scientific studies and personal experience belies a flaw in human cognition, in that we love simple explanations and single factors. This error is reinforced by the way most studies are conducted and published. The right way to do science is to control as many variables as you can, then change one thing and document the effects. Unfortunately, too often this leads both scientists and lay people alike to expect major results from minor changes.

The only effective (though not foolproof) antidote for this is broad consensus. For instance, the case for the safety and efficacy of creatine as a dietary supplement is pretty well closed. But other details, like fish oil supplements or optimal protein intake, are still widely debated. Reading meta-analyses and research summaries can help cut through the fog, but the end game is to intelligently experiment on yourself to figure out what works for you.

Be Willing to Make Mistakes

Coaching yourself is not for the faint of heart. There’s a certain amount of gambling involved, and the chips on the table include your time, money, and most of all your body. To improve, you have to challenge yourself, and that means a certain amount of risk.

You’ll occasionally lose one of those bets. That could mean you don’t PR at your highlight event of the year and have to deal with feeling like you wasted six months of your life. It could even mean you find yourself injured and have to spend the next six months rehabbing.

It’s important to take calculated, intelligent risks, but it’s equally important to not become so risk-averse that you don’t try new things, learn, and improve. Along the way, there will be plenty of people who feel it’s their duty to point out your shortcomings, including coaches who want to sell you something and friends whose egos are threatened by your ambition and accomplishment. Some of that feedback can be useful, but it’s no reason to stop trying. One of the biggest advantages to self-coaching is that you are intimately familiar with the training plan, because you wrote it. If it doesn’t work to your satisfaction, chances are you will have a good idea why.

Invest in Yourself

If you were shopping for a coach for yourself, you’d likely be interested in their qualifications. Why should it be any different when self-coaching? Most certifications, courses, and seminars are aimed at people who will go on to coach other people. But the information offered is just as useful to enhance your own program, and you’ll have the advantage of being able to immediately apply new ideas and concepts to yourself.

One thing you’ll have to be ready to do is leave your preconceptions at the door. If you’ve been a one-man band for a while already, you probably are used to doing things a certain way when it comes to movements or programming methods. Holding onto those ideas might cause you to miss or disregard some useful concepts offered by the course.

For instance, I had a few years of success with my running programs before I got my USATF certification. But the progressive, layered model I learned there has become indispensable in the plans I write today. Likewise, the bros had me convinced that behind-the-neck presses and jerks were dangerous to my shoulders before I got my USAW certification, where I learned how to properly program and perform them.

Be Ruthless, Be Reasonable

Taking charge of your own training requires a heaping helping of stoic, honest, objective self-criticism. You have to become aware not only of your obvious weaknesses, but of your tendency to avoid things you need, but don’t like. If you’re a weightlifter and you run out of gas in a competition environment, you might need some of that dreaded cardio. If you’re a cyclist who falls apart at the slightest hint of a hill, maybe it’s time you find your way under a heavy barbell. You must become ruthless in the way you attack your liabilities as an athlete.

At the same time, you have to avoid the temptation to expect too much out of yourself. Rapid progress is fun, but once you’re past those newbie gains, it’s unlikely to occur without taking substantial risks. Trying to improve too much, too fast, is the number one cause of injuries, in my observation. When you set the goals that will form the backbone of your training plan, take a minute to ask yourself if they’re reasonable. Knocking a few seconds off your mile time over the course of the season is probably reasonable. Lopping off a whole minute probably isn’t.

Another common mistake I’ve seen from people who write their own plans is what I call “shiny rock syndrome.” There are so many cool and useful exercises out there for any given training goal that the temptation is to try and cram every single one of them into a single training cycle. Constant variation is all well and good, but you still need to get enough exposure to a type of stimulus that your body can create the desired adaptation to it and improve.

Instead of burying yourself in excess volume or complexity, pick a reasonable number of items to work on, and rotate them out every 1-3 months. Let’s say you want to improve your footwork in the split jerk. Instead of devoting four hours a week to a half-dozen different drills, spend a few minutes on one or two of them at the end of your session a few days per week. Once they’re sufficiently grooved in, swap them out for something else.

The overall concept should be one of proportionality. Spend the bulk of your valuable training time working on the biggest holes in your game. Majoring in the minors is a great way to grind your overall progress to a halt.

Practice on Your Friends

If you consider self-coaching as an elaborate science experiment, the obvious downside is the extremely limited sample size: one. Good thing you’ve worked so hard to become smarter than all your friends! Chances are they’d love to copy off of your homework, especially if they’ve watched your performance improve year after year.

This is not an invitation to become the know-it-all gym bro. People will likely come to you because they see how you’re killing it. Don’t be that guy.

Coaching your friends can get a little tricky, as you’ve now added relationships (or even marriages!) to the risks of your coaching program. With that in mind, stick to offering concepts and programs that you know the best, and keep the prototype stuff to yourself. Soon, the rate that you accumulate coaching experience will have increased exponentially, and you might even become the recipient of a steady stream of free beers.

Go Forth and Get Better

The job of a coach is never done, and that applies double to the self-coach. There’s no end to the ways you can grow, and that means you’re never done learning. For me, that’s part of the fun, because as I evolve as a coach, I improve as an athlete. Conversely, as I mature as an athlete, I improve as a coach. I’m never bored.

It’s tempting to say that anybody can be their own coach, but the further I get down this road, the less I believe that’s true. You have to be a certain kind of person to be successful at it: reflexively self-reliant, endlessly curious, and risk-tolerant without being reckless. But if you have the right personal attributes, there’s never been a better time in history to blaze your own path.

The post Athlete, Coach Thyself appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of running training plans out there. There are plans for every event from the 40-yard dash to ultramarathons, and all of them, to some degree, are effective.

You can choose from plans that include three days of running per week or six; plans that include track work, trail runs, barefoot sessions, and every imaginable type of cross-training and drills. There are almost more training plans than runners to follow them, and thanks to the nature of the digital age, most of them are available for free.

But this leads to more consternation than enlightenment for most runners. In a sea of options, which plan is right for you? It’s all fine and well for a coach to tell you to “just pick one and stick with it,” but sometimes that means investing six months of your life and not a few dollars into something that might blow up in your face (or your shins, knees, or hips).

Then there’s the part where life gets in the way. Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th century Prussian general, famously observed that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”

Likewise, no training program survives first contact with cancelled babysitters, unexpected business trips, and minor injuries. The shiny new plan you started off with in the spring will be a tattered, marked-up, charred shell of itself by the time you toe the line in the fall, no matter how noble your intentions.

All of this means that the best running program is the one that’s built for you. It will adapt to your lifestyle, your goals, your previous experience, your injury history, and the dozens of other variables that make your training life unique. It will bend without breaking, have room for error and recovery, and allow you to do things for fun, without throwing the whole plan off the rails.

That all sounds like I just made a complicated task even more complicated, but this is something that I do for every runner who comes to me asking for a training plan.

Today I want to share the general principles I use to construct those plans, so you can use them to build your own, or adapt an existing plan to better fit between your goals and your life.

Work Backwards

Start by defining your start and end points. If you want to run a marathon (and you should), pick the event you’d like to do, and set that date as your endpoint.

This is the first of several reality checks: if you currently can’t run from your door to the car if it’s storming, and the marathon is in two months, pick a different marathon.

Your start point has two important elements: your current level of fitness, and the number of weeks until the endpoint. A lot of people ask me how long it would take me to train them for a marathon, but that answer is different for everyone.

If you’re already comfortable running half marathons in a reasonable time, I will probably feel good sending you a 12-week plan to get you to the finish line. If you’ve never run before and you’re 80lb overweight, we might take a couple years.

For most busy adults with a little running experience, who can currently trot out a 5k without undue suffering, I like to take about six months to build to a full marathon.

We can often get it done faster, but the purpose is to allow you to get to the starting line prepared, healthy, rested, and confident, and with plenty of slop time built into the overall plan for the curveballs life throws. That means if you’re eyeballing an October marathon, you should start putting your plan together in March, so you can roll in hot in April.

Once you’ve picked your race, study it and take notes. Learn about the course conditions, typical weather, and any hills you might encounter. These are the things you’ll need to simulate in your training in order to be as prepared as possible.

I can always tell the runners who’ve trained for hills from the ones who haven’t by how quickly I pass them once the climbing starts. Don’t be that guy.

The last step before I start building the training plan itself is to map out your life between your start and end dates. This will include travel (for work or pleasure), weddings, other races or events, birthdays, family gatherings, the works.

Your training shouldn’t make you an intractable jerk, so I’m not going to schedule a 10k time trial for the morning of your daughter’s birthday party.

Accumulated Fatigue

There are dozens of complex physiological mechanisms at work when you create a large change in your overall fitness.

But as an endurance coach, the one I pay the most attention to is accumulated fatigue. Going for a 10-mile run when your legs are fresh from four days of rest is a whole lot different than, say, going out for 10 miles in the evening after work, when you’ve already run three days this week.

Accumulated fatigue is a very handy concept if you have a full schedule and lots of training to get done. If I need 14 miles out of you on a given day, the training effect is similar if you run six in the morning and eight at night, as if you’d run all 14 together.

You’ll spend some additional time in the shower that day (pro-tip: hang two towels for yourself), but you’ll also be around to put the kids on the bus in the morning and make them dinner at night.

The plans that I write are, in essence, the careful manipulation of certain types and levels of fatigue to produce a desired physical adaptation.

I want to push your body enough to make it think that this is the new normal, but not so hard that it starts to break down. The variable I watch when creating the plan is overall volume, which can be measured in either distance or time.

It’s Not the Miles, It’s the Time

I prefer to mediate volume by time since there is such a huge variation in training paces and levels of difficulty.

If I ask you to go run five miles at your marathon pace +30sec, that’s a whole different animal than five miles of hill repeats or track intervals. An even better metric would be time in specific levels of exertion, but that gets too convoluted to track, for most people.

Tracking by time also allows me to create realistic workouts for the work week, and then vary the long runs (usually on a weekend) to modulate the overall volume.

If I write a workout that’s two hours long for a Tuesday night, chances are you won’t finish it. So I write workouts that you can reasonably accomplish in the time you have, and clean up loose ends if you can find time elsewhere.

All that said, writing your training plans according to time makes picking routes a little finicky. If I have you scheduled for a 90-minute long run at an easy pace, you have to figure out ahead of time what that easy pace is going to be, then how many miles you could cover in that time, then find a route that is that many miles. It’s a couple steps more work than just saying “go run 10 miles at an easy pace,” but I’ve found it produces more reliable outcomes.

Programming for time also allows you to adapt to circumstances like the weather. If you get a freakishly hot morning and you have 14 miles on the schedule, you’re likely to slog it out until it’s a death march, or else push yourself into a higher level of exertion than I prescribed.

Either way, the desired training stimulus is compromised. If I told you to go run for 120 minutes, as soon as that watch beeps you can knock it off.

Step Up, Step Back

Deload weeks are common in many training environments, and I find them particularly useful for runners.

In my own training, I’ve found a 4:1 ratio of build weeks to deload weeks to work pretty well. This pattern is also called a microcycle. I’ve also written programs that included 2:1 microcycles, or even 6:1 microcycles, based on the athlete’s schedule, needs, and natural tolerance for accumulated fatigue.

To go back to our 5k-to-marathon runner above, the long runs in their program might follow a pattern like this, in their first couple cycles:

There are two critical things happening here. First, the volume builds gradually, so it doesn’t overwhelm the runner. Second, the step-back (or deload) weeks allow them to recover physically and mentally.

That five-mile run in week 10 is going to feel a lot easier than the one in week three, and that’s an important piece of positive feedback. I think deload weeks are so important that I’m much more likely if the plan becomes compromised, to accelerate the increase in mileage, rather than eliminate a deload week.

Tangent to this concept is the taper. I like to taper runners about 10 days out from a half marathon, and 2-3 weeks out from a full marathon—shorter races require a week or less.

Theories abound on what a proper taper should include, but the general concept is to sharply reduce the overall weekly volume to allow your body to recover and consolidate the gains of your last training cycle.

The most important part of the taper is simply to not screw it up by trying to squeeze in a few last-chance workouts. When the taper comes, let off the throttle, no matter how nervous you are about the upcoming race.

Hit the Track

Crafting track workouts is an art unto itself, but the most important thing is that you’re doing them. The simple truth is that running slow will not teach you to run faster, and I’ve never met a runner who wasn’t interested in going faster.

No matter what distance your eventual goal race is, you’ll benefit from spending at least one day per week on the track.

In general, I keep track intervals to a mile (1600m, or four laps of a standard track) or less. Any more than that and they start to feel like drudgery, and frankly, I have a hard time counting past four while sucking wind at the same time.

The track is the place to work on your running mechanics and efficiency (also called running economy), increase cardiovascular capacity (VO2 max), and test new, more minimal footwear.

I adore doing track workouts in spikes, because they’re impossibly light, make me feel much faster than I probably am and most important, help strengthen my feet, calves, and ankles.

There are dozens of different ways to build a track workout. If you’re new to the track, to get your feet wet, I suggest picking a reasonable 5k goal time, then running sets of 200m repeats at just under that goal pace, with 50m recovery.

When you can do a dozen of them without your form starting to break down, move to 300m repeats with 100m recovery. Then move to 10 sets of 400m/100m, 9 sets of 600m/100m, and 8 sets of 800m/200m.

If you can finish that last workout at goal pace, go get your new 5k PR! In the meantime, every other distance you want to run just got easier.

Hit the Trails

This is one area where I sometimes get pushback from my road runners. For reasons I don’t quite understand, the risk-averse among them are intimidated by running trails, even while they continually suffer injuries pounding out road miles.

Trail running is one of the secret weapons in my training program arsenal. They teach your body to handle varying surfaces, relieve boredom, reconnect you with nature, and remind you that running is supposed to be fun, or even beautiful.

Regularly putting in an hour or so of trail running, once every week or so, will make you more resistant to injury, improve your stride and foot-strike mechanics, and make you a better person.

The trails are one area that I encourage athletes to leave their watches in the car, or at least in their back pocket. The pace you run on the trails matters very little. Go out there, find some flow, run happy, and let your body and nature do the work.

Most trails are too variable to stay in a certain physiological zone anyway, so just don’t sweat it. Run by feel. There’s no reason to ruin a perfectly good trail run with meaningless data.

Get Under a Barbell

There’s a whole lot of science out there to back this up, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Runners who start lifting weights with purpose and intensity get faster, last longer, and suffer fewer injuries.

It’s happened for every single athlete that I’ve managed to convince to get under a heavy barbell. Squats, deadlifts, cleans, loaded carries, and kettlebell work are all your friends, especially in the offseason.

Most runners are also tragically misinformed about lifting technique, so I encourage you to find a coach to teach you. Lift hard, lift heavy, and don’t sweat all that 1970s nonsense about weights making you slow. All it will make you is stronger, more resilient, and better looking.

Less Is More

You will not successfully run a half or full marathon without running quite a lot of miles in training.

That much is fact. But there are diminishing returns to just pounding out miles, and your risk of injury increases as the miles stack up. I have become a huge proponent of plans that include only 3-4 days a week of focused running, coupled with 2-3 days of rigorous cross-training.

This approach often results in longer training programs before a goal race, but I don’t view that as a drawback. Gradual progress is more sustainable, and less taxing psychologically and physically.

Speaking of diminishing returns, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests training efforts longer than about 2 ½ hours aren’t really worth it. Past that duration, you get very little in the way of adaptation, and your risk of repetitive stress injury goes way up.

With that in mind, your last few long runs in a marathon training program might not exceed 16 or 18 miles, depending on your pace. Don’t let that worry you on race day, though. The adrenaline of the event and the fresh legs from your taper weeks will give you the extra gas you need to make it to the finish.

All of this comes together in a plan that has you doing a long run on the weekend and at least one track workout during the week.

Your third run is a “wildcard,” and will be either trail, hills, or tempo, depending on your goal race and where we are in the overall program. I tend to use hills to build strength in the earlier portion of the program, and tempo (or race-pace) runs in the latter stages to build confidence running at speed.

Employ the Principles

Those are the general principles I use when I build plans for myself or my runners.

I encourage you to try them out for yourself in your next training cycle or discuss them with your coach. If you find all that overwhelming and would rather somebody else do the engineering for you, I’d be happy to work with you.

The post Behind the Scenes of Your Running Program appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

This is the fundamental purpose of governing bodies in sport. Their charge is to create a system of rules that guarantee, to the greatest possible extent, a level playing field for all participants. But as we’ve seen time and time again, the corrupting influences of money, power, and international politics cause many sporting organizations to forget their duty to the athletes and fans. Instead, they use their positions to enrich themselves and advance their agendas.

This seems to be the case with the latest controversy surrounding track and field. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) seems powerless or uninterested in curbing the rampant use of performance-enhancing drugs, but intensely interested in enforcing their conception of the feminine ideal. Most recently, they crafted a set of rules that appear to be directly targeted at South African middle-distance champion Caster Semenya.

Returning to the show this week to weigh in on the situation is Nick Symmonds, 2-time Olympian, entrepreneur, and outspoken advocate for the rights of athletes. He and I dive into the principles behind the IAAF controversy, including what a level playing field should look like. We also discuss his recent retirement from professional running, and how his next adventures will take him to the top of the world seven times over.

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Photo by Bev Childress

America is addicted to superlatives. We’re bored with better; we want the best, biggest, fastest, strongest, hottest, coldest, highest, funnest, most expensive, most incredible thing that has ever been devised, and we want it every time. We want it from our entertainers, in our driveways, and on our dinner plates. But somewhere along the line, our predilection for the extreme has robbed us of our ability to characterize things any other way.

I see this on my social media feed every day. Somebody eats responsibly and exercises, and her health improves. The reaction? “Girl, that’s amazing.” Somebody else ran a half marathon. “That’s incredible.” Another person turned off their cable service in an effort to watch less TV. “So awesome.” One dude quit smoking cold turkey. “He’s so brave.”

I’m not saying people shouldn’t celebrate their accomplishments. They absolutely should. All that stuff is hard, and I know because I’ve done it. But we should also maintain the perspective that the things we do in the gym, in the kitchen, and on the roads and trails to improve and measure our health and fitness are, from the perspective of what we should be capable of as a species, normal. Hard work is normal. Full-depth squats are normal. Toil and sweat and perseverance and delaying gratification are normal.

You want amazing? Go watch how NASA put a nuclear-powered, Volkswagen-sized, semi-autonomous robot on Mars using a rocket sky crane. You want incredible? Go watch Stefi Cohen deadlift over four times her bodyweight.

You want inspiring? Look no further than Des Linden, who triumphed at the Boston Marathon in conditions so atrocious that the majority of the pros DNF’d, and you and I would have never gotten out of bed. You want brave? Go look into the eyes of a combat veteran who’s about to deploy again.

Why We Should Call Normal Things Normal

Getting up and going to the gym six days a week is a good thing to do. Skipping the weekly office donut party is pretty smart. It’s also what your physiology requires. At your job, you don’t get kudos for doing the bare minimum that your position requires. There’s no special parking spot for turning in your spreadsheets on time. The IRS doesn’t send you a basket of flowers for filing your taxes. In most cases, your car doesn’t run better because you got the oil changed. That’s just what you’re supposed to do.

There are several problems with elevating normal things to exalted status. The first is that it tricks our brains into thinking we’re working harder than we actually are, and thus deserve better results than we’ve gotten. If you think your diet has been super strict lately, and darn it, you still don’t have that beach body, you’re far more likely to give up. The truth is that your diet should probably be that strict just about all the time for the rest of your life.

Eating food that isn’t bullshit and copious amounts of movement are what your body sees as normal. Pizza and Netflix binges are the aberration.

The second problem is that it discourages people from trying stuff. If we always call everything by some overflattering adjective, it puts those actions out of reach for people with less confidence or experience. I’m here to tell you that as hard as it is to go ride a hundred miles on a bike, it’s nothing like an exclusive task. With the right bike and a little training, anybody can do it.

If I do it, that’s good. But it’s not amazing unless I did it with some sort of quality or against some odds that set it apart. If I rode a century up a mountain in a snowstorm in less than five hours to rescue a baby panda, that’s amazing. Otherwise, it’s just another day at the office.

Leave Your Superlatives at the Door

The superlative attitude also seeps into our workouts and causes us to do stupid stuff. We want every time we step in the gym to be the best ever, and so we try to go the hardest, lift the most, and run the fastest we ever have. In the process, we sabotage our progress with pointless intensity, or worse, a silly injury.

When we make the transition from viewing our workouts as epic performances to daily requirements, we make the mental switch that makes healthy choices normal. This reduces the mental cost required to make those choices, which makes the more likely to happen again. Being healthy thus becomes a lifestyle, instead of a constant, epic struggle.

Photo by Bev Childress

So here’s what I think we should do. I think we should start sharing everything we do for our health and fitness, all the time. Show up at the gym? Check in on Facebook. Do a 3-mile recovery jog? Tweet about it. Post that broccoli omelet to Instagram. Do it at least as often (and hopefully much more often) as you post about your epic marathons, lifting sessions, and weight loss milestones.

Use hashtags like #everydayathlete or #anotherdayattheoffice or #thisisnormal. The people who find this annoying enough to unfollow you probably aren’t the people you need in your life anyway. And the rest, including you, will have the idea reinforced in their heads that living in a way that enhances your health is normal, not superlative.

The post I Am No Superhero appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Close your eyes and imagine yourself standing in front of a barbell that you’re about to lift. It can be a squat, or a clean and jerk, or whatever lift you enjoy the most. What’s your first step to address the bar? Where do your feet and hands go? What’s in your mind? What are you going to do before the first rep ever starts?

If you can’t answer those questions, you’re missing a huge opportunity for consistent improvement. Many of the lifters I see have a nonchalant approach to the barbell, and as a consequence, have a hard time figuring out what to fix to improve their movement. I’m not here today to tell you the best starting position or set up technique for every lift out there. What I do hope to convey is a framework to develop your own pre-lift checklist.

Address the Bar Like a Scientist

Your starting position isn’t the only determining factor in the quality of your lift, but it is arguably the biggest. Tiny changes in the placement of your hands and feet or the way you pretension your muscles can have outsized effects on the path of the bar and the total power you produce as the lift progresses. But if you don’t know where you started, how can you possibly know what you changed, and what effect it had?

I’m not anything like a gifted athlete, so I make up for a lot of my missing natural talent with careful study. When it comes to moving heavy things, I’ve learned to approach each lift like a scientific experiment. Researchers discover new things by controlling as many variables as possible, testing a theory, then changing one or a very few things and testing again.

The scientific method works as well (or better) in the gym as it does in the lab. I struggle with my overhead position in the jerk, for instance, so I’ve started playing with a wider hand position, a quarter inch at a time, to help make the lift more comfortable and stronger. A wider hand position eases the amount of mobility required from my (garbage) thoracic spine and shoulders, but it also effects my timing, tension, and footwork, so it’s a little complicated. But I couldn’t have made that adjustment effectively without first knowing where my hands were on every rep previously.

Your Pre-Lift Checklist

There are a huge variety of setup theories, considerations, and techniques for every lift. Each will be more or less applicable to you, the individual lifter, based on your size, limb lengths, joint angles, mobility, and so on. There are world record holders with very unorthodox positions, so don’t let anybody tell you that there’s only one way to get set up. After you’ve created your checklist, try different things and see what works for you, and don’t be afraid to go back and reevaluate your choices later on.

1. Hands and Feet

In general, the first thing is to set your hands and feet. If the bar is coming from the floor, I set my feet first. If it’s in the rack, I set my hands first. Use your pinkies and thumbs to find a spot on the bar consistently spaced from the knurling and use that every time. For snatches and overhead squats, I can just touch the collars with an extended pinky. For back squats, my outstretched thumb will reach the inside of the knurling.

For your foot position, it’s a bit more by feel, but try using some marks on the floor as a reference. Most people benefit from setting their feet under or just outside their hips, with their toes pointed slightly out (think 11 and 1 o’clock). Once you’ve done it the same way several dozen times, you’ll find your foot position much more naturally, and can make minor adjustments as needed.

2. Core and Tension

Before the bar leaves the rack or the floor, make sure you have the right muscles loaded, and have braced your core appropriately. Before I un-rack the bar for a back squat, for instance, I squeeze my glutes, breathe into my belt (if I’m wearing one), pack my lats down, and squeeze and pull the bar apart with my hands to create tension across my whole back. I visualize creating a solid platform for the bar to sit on for the duration of the set, so that my hips and legs can transmit maximum power to the bar. I’ll re-breathe between un-racking and the start of my first rep, but all the right muscles are already turned on, so I waste very little time getting ready.

For lifts that come from the floor, this is also the time to set your hip height and torso angle. Again, these will vary widely based on anthropometrics and your coach’s priorities for you, so be cautious of the keyboard heroes out there who want to prescribe one starting position for everybody.

3. Lock Your Eyes and Mind

I cannot stress enough the importance of a fixed point for your eyes during a lift. Your vision plays a huge role in your sense of balance, which in turn can act as a limiting factor in your force production. Whether you look low, high, or straight ahead depends on the lift, but make sure you look at the same thing every time and stay locked on it. A great way to lose tension, position, and a disc in your back is to try and see what the cutie in the corner is doing while descending on a 95% squat.

Right before the bar starts moving, I give myself one cue. It will be something I decided before I even looked at the bar, or before I walked into the gym that day. That cue will be the focus of my attention for the whole set. It might be to maintain even balance on my foot in an overhead press, or fire hard out of the bottom in a squat, or to not rush the bar past my knees in a clean. It’s easy to get lost in a lift by trying to focus on a half-dozen things you want to fix within a five-second (or less) movement. Pick one thing, attack it until it’s habit, then work on something else. That split second before you initiate the lift is the time to flash that cue to the front of your mind, so it blots out everything else.

Slow Down, Lift Smart, Progress Faster

There are a handful of lifters out there who are successful just walking up to a bar and ripping it. For the rest of us, a more methodical approach will give us a chance to process what’s going on and get more out of every rep. Over time, your set up checklist will become as natural as breathing, and it will become easy to diagnose and fix problems with your lifts by making slight changes in your set up. As the steps become more ingrained, you can add more things to pay attention to, and refine your technique even further.

The weightlifting platform and the squat rack are holy places where you commune with the iron. Don’t get caught up with what your buddies are talking about, and don’t get in a hurry. Address the bar, run your checklist, and watch the PRs pile up.

The post Respect the Bar: Create Your Set Up Checklist appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

In the most basic sense, a tool is a small thing you use to create a large effect. The most profound tools are simple and unglamorous but require a high degree of skill to wield effectively. This is just as true in a carpenter’s workshop as it is in the gym, but we don’t spend nearly as much time talking about those tools as we do the finer points of mechanics and technique.

Kyle Flynn wants to change that, and his Athlete’s Toolbox series for Breaking Muscle aims to make you a better fitness craftsman. Kyle is a Level 3 CrossFit Coach and Certified Trainer at Old Line CrossFit in Millersville, Maryland. He sat down with me to unpack what it means to have an unbeatable mind, the topic of his first column. We also chat about how he keeps his athletes engaged within a highly varied programming model, how Old Line has worked to manage growth while maintaining class quality, and how they create opportunities for the gym’s culture to knit itself into a cohesive community.

Old Line is a gym that is unafraid to try stuff, and Kyle details some of their successes, like their ChickFit and RuckFit programs, along with a few ideas that didn’t pan out as well. Through it all, Kyle has discovered that people don’t stick with a gym for the brilliant programming or the string of PRs, as much as for the value of the relationships they find there. With that in mind, he and his staff work from the first day with any athlete to develop mutual trust, respect, and understanding.

The post The Essential Tools for Athletic Success appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It’s not good enough for us to shove our hands in our pockets and sadly shake our heads. This is not a problem that will be solved by throwing more money at it. There needs to be concrete, immediate, and personal action.

Team Red White and Blue has stepped into that gap. Their mission is “to enrich the lives of America’s veterans by connecting them to their community through physical and social activity.” If you’ve seen a bunch of eagle-emblazoned, flag waving crazies at your local 5k, that’s Team RWB. But behind their unabashed patriotism and almost impossible friendliness is a group with a very serious purpose. They’re using the best tools available to fight back against the tidal wave of veteran disengagement, depression, and suicide, by fostering camaraderie, purpose, and mental and physical health.

Zack Armstrong is the Director of Programs for Team RWB, and he sat down with me to dig into how they take action every day, all around the world, to create authentic, positive connections between veterans and civilians alike. He details the philosophy and core values that they deploy through their cadre of Eagle Leaders, who then become engines of positive change in their local communities. We discuss how they’ve managed their exponential growth while preserving their culture, and how their leadership development programs focus on providing the skills and practice needed to engage veterans in empathetic, authentic relationships.

The post The Most Important Team in America appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Dear driver who almost killed me: I’m a person, too.

I know that, subconsciously, I didn’t seem like a person at the time. I was a spandex-clad obstacle in your way on a two-lane ribbon of undulating asphalt. I was a disruption in the speed and direction of your three-ton missile of masculinity. I was, paradoxically, another in a series of threats in an environment that is increasingly perceived as dangerous.

How Deadly Decisions Are Made

As you’re hurtling down the road at 60mph, there are more things going on than you can consciously pay attention to. You have to watch the road surface, predict the actions of other traffic, navigate, monitor your gauges and the feel of your vehicle for anomalies, and a dozen other tasks. You’re also listening to the radio and thinking about what will happen at your destination. I can only hope that you’re doing all of this sober, and not trying to text somebody on top of it all.

You’ve done it enough times that all this seems normal, but driving is a high-stress situation, and that lowers the threshold for rash decisions, like nearly murdering a cyclist. In the moment that you mashed the gas and almost clipped me with your mirror, forcing me off the pavement and into the gravel and grass of the narrow, sloping shoulder, I wasn’t a person to you. In the only part of your mind available for use, I was a sub-species; an “other” that didn’t belong to your tribe, threatened your identity, and was also incapable of retaliation.

That last part’s about to change, but more on that in a moment.

There is a type of bidirectional anonymity that gave you the subconscious green light for attempted vehicular manslaughter. Inside your glass and steel cage, your identity is masked, and your ability to communicate is reduced to the crude tools of a horn, some lights, and a dangerous type of body language. You approached me from behind, so you couldn’t see my face. When people don’t look at each other, it’s much easier to vilify each other. (As evidence, I present every comment section on the internet.)

The Forgotten Sanctity of Human Life

But there’s something you need to realize. More than that, you need to meditate on it, chew on it, and make it a part of your being so deep that your instinctive reaction to me on the road next time will be human compassion and deference, instead of callous indifference and aggression.

I’m a person. Just like you. Well, maybe not just like you; while I drive my car every single day, you probably haven’t ridden a bike in decades. But I pay the same taxes as you, have people who depend on me for love and support, and keep a bucket list of places I’d like to see and things I’d like to do, just like you do. If we met at a restaurant over a beer, you might even like me. I’d try to overlook your unfortunate taste in music.

The common thread running through all of the violence, chaos, and disorder we see on the news every day is that we’ve forgotten this reality. There are too damn many of us to really get to know each other, and we’re all under an incredible amount of stress, so we resort to labels. We lump people into buckets according to their political ideology or party affiliation, sexual preference, or their views on guns, religion, or scientific theory and practice. Once we have applied the label, it’s far easier to make decisions: if somebody’s labels are the same as mine, great! If not, they’re the enemy, a threat to our tribe, and maybe it’d be better if they were eliminated.

We aren’t going to fix our problems as a society until we decide to strike at root causes. In short, we have to change hearts and minds, and the most important change is to remind everyone, at all times and in all situations, that human life is sacred, and that all of it is equally valuable. Even if it has different ideas on healthcare than you, and happens to be pedaling a bicycle on the road you take home from work.

You Won’t Get Away with It Anymore

Enough of the analysis; we need a solution. It’s unlikely (and probably unsafe) for me to pull you over, after you almost killed me, to have a calm and nuanced discussion about the situation. But in any circumstance in which there is a vast power disparity, the playing field is evened by either a tactical or technological advantage. So smile! Because you’re on camera.

After a good friend of mine was hit by a red Toyota and left for dead in a ditch a few years ago, a bunch of us decided to buy cameras to mount to our bikes. I just bought a new set, and they capture crystal-clear, stabilized 1080p video at 60fps, recorded to a 32GB microSD card, and linked via Bluetooth to my phone. I also run an app from RoadID that streams my location to my emergency contacts, and notifies them if I unexpectedly stop. This is the type of fitness tech that even the Unplugged guys would approve.

Every time I put a skinny tire on pavement now, I’m recording. Every driver that passes me is captured in vivid, brilliant detail, from front and rear, and timestamped. There are dozens of us in my area running similar setups, and hundreds more in larger cities.

We’re tired of being killed, or almost being killed, and so we’re lobbying for safe passing laws. In 29 states (including my home state of Ohio), passing a cyclist with less than three feet of clearance is now a prosecutable misdemeanor. We’re also working to establish relationships with local law enforcement, and documenting dangerous drivers on the Close Call Database. We’ve all got good lawyers too, because we ride with half of them. Cycling is the new golf, in case you hadn’t heard.

If all of this sounds threatening, good. It should be cause to stop and evaluate your behavior. And before you bluster that we need to just “get off the road,” you should know two things. First, roads were not built for cars. Second, bicycles are classified as road-going vehicles in every state, and in most municipalities, it’s actually against the law to ride on the sidewalk.

You may not be able to help falling into the state of mind that allows you to take a stranger’s life in your hands, but I encourage you to work on it. If you don’t, there is an increasing chance that the next time you decide to “teach those @#%$ bikers a lesson,” you’ll become famous, and not in a way you ever wanted to.

The post Cycling Through Rage Infested Roads appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle people face when trying to eat in accordance with their goals is America’s love affair with the diet. As far back as the 1920s, everybody from government agencies to snake oil salesmen have taken their turn on the soapbox, preaching to you that you should follow one diet plan or another to lose weight, look better, and perform at your peak. But every diet fails for the same reason: it doesn’t create a lifestyle that you can follow for the rest of your life.

That’s what Alex Maclin wants to change. In his years of experience with the likes of Travis Mash and the Barbell Shrugged crew, he figured out that moving a barbell was the easy part. Moving your mind to a sustainable nutrition philosophy was much harder. He’s recently struck out on his own to provide personalized nutrition coaching for anybody who wants to get out of the yo-yo cycle of dieting, and into a sustainable practice.

Alex and I chat about how he starts his coaching process with building trust and asking the right questions. He explains that while his strategy includes talking about food, it’s really about empowering the whole person. He has learned the value of creating early wins to create positive momentum, and that creating change isn’t about telling people what to do. It’s about helping people realize what they really want, what it will take to get there, and then giving them the tools and knowledge to keep doing it for a lifetime.

The post How to Not Eat Like an Idiot appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

For our 50th episode, we’ve seized on the opportunity to do something pretty special and bring you a joint episode with another new podcast, The Gravel Lot. We’ve talked a lot on the show over the past several months about the positive effects of fitness on our communities, and this week I get to talk to a couple of guys who have real world experience in helping to make it happen.

Doug McClintock and Jon Wolery are with the Cincinnati Off-Road Alliance (CORA), which is the local chapter of the International Mountain Bike Association (IMBA). CORA has built something pretty special in and around their city, that is a case study in intentional, effective community development. We compare notes on the different paths our IMBA chapters have taken over the past several years, and detail some of the challenges we face together.

We cover how communities are built around a unifying struggle, and how not everybody has to agree, or even get along, for the group to be cohesive and productive. We talk about how to harness passion, create buy-in, and create connections to the organizations around us to become part of a rising tide. The result is a fun and candid conversation that contains lessons for members of any community that wants to see their tribe grow and succeed. It was also a chance for me to play the opposite role as a guest on their show, and talk about some of the successes and failures I’ve seen as a volunteer and race director for my IMBA chapter.

The post The Fundamentals of Building a Community appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

But that isn’t what works. Instead, my job as a writer and a coach is to get inside your head, recognize the reality that exists there, and work to reshape it in a way that moves you closer to what you want to be. The magic doesn’t happen with what I give you, but what you do with it inside yourself. This means that the vast majority of the time I spend on writing doesn’t involve my fingers tapping madly away on a keyboard. Nor does the lion’s share of my coaching involves giving cues, talking to athletes, or demonstrating techniques.

It involves intense, persistent observation. The empathic connection between writers and readers, and coaches and athletes cannot be created any other way. It’s easy to skip this step and write finger-wagging articles telling you to do this or stop doing that. I’ve written a few of those pieces myself, but they aren’t the work I’m most proud of. The most profound writers and talented coaches meet their subjects where they are, and lead them in a direction; they don’t stand in the pulpit and rain down fire and brimstone.

It’s with all that in mind that I’ve spent the past couple years shaping the following piece of advice:

Stop. PRing. Everything.

Now let’s dig into what that means, and why it should matter to you.

The PR Arms Race

My observation started with the #PReveryday crowd. Their enthusiasm is matched by their creativity in the number of different things they’re willing to call a PR. Know somebody with a 3-rep-no-belt-snatch-grip-deadlift-from-low-blocks-in-Nano-6s PR? I bet you do. They seemed to be mostly CrossFitters, and mostly under a year of experience. It’s fairly simple to PR every day when every workout is different and you’re riding that wave of newbie gains. But when the honeymoon is over, what then?

At first, I thought this was a phenomenon exclusive to the CrossFit crowd. That is, until I sat down to watch the Rio Olympics, and counted the number of events in the pool and on the track. CrossFitters may have taken the “PR everything” mindset to new heights, but I’d argue it was born with swimmers and runners. The PR addiction has infected the weightlifting community as well, as my Instagram feed is littered with videos of people PRing every manner of assistance lift, technique drill, and minor variation.

There are even more specific PRs. You can have a comeback PR, a post-injury PR, an annual PR, or an event or course PR. You can PR benchmark workouts (what’s your Fran time?), Strava segments, or even your diet (I PR’d my macros, brah!). If it can be measured, it can be PR’d, and we do love to ring that bell.

Hell, I might be chief among sinners. I’m a runner, cyclist, weightlifter, and CrossFitter. I have an entire spreadsheet full of PRs, with entries for running distances (100m, 400m, 800m, 1 mile, 5km, 5mi, 10k, 15k, half and full marathons), power lifts (overhead press, deadlift, front and back squats), Olympic lifts (snatch, clean and jerk), and a smattering of bike distances (longest ride, longest climb, 10mi TT). I generally don’t track my benchmark WOD PRs, but that’s mostly because I forget to write them down at the gym, and there’s not a results page to look them up on later.

The Semantic Danger of the PR

As Dr. Andy Galpin points out, the issue is not the data, it’s what you do with it. So the problem isn’t the proliferation of PRs per se or PR in the noun form. The issue is with PR as a verb and its influence on the way you approach your training.

The trouble with trying to PR everything, all the time is fourfold:

1. How exactly are you going to PR your rest days? You are taking rest days, right?
2. How contrived are you willing to make something and still call it a PR?
3. What effect does that mindset have in your training?
4. What happens when the PRs stop coming?

I get it. Most of us don’t go to the gym to just move around a bit and get sweaty. We go there to make progress, and the best way to see progress is to track what you do. I think logging workouts is a very useful practice that can help us stay on track and serve as a reality check against some of the stories we tell ourselves about our fitness.

The turnover from useful tool to detrimental obsession happens when our pursuit of the PR causes our workouts morph from a means to an end, to an end unto itself. When we’re trying to PR something, the mental risk/reward calculus changes, and we start to take risks we don’t need to. We’re more likely to compromise our technique to hit one more rep, to sprint into Zone 5 when we were supposed to be on a recovery ride or to bury ourselves in the pain cave again when we could barely drag ourselves out of bed after our last workout.

PRs are Expensive

Progress is addictive, and intensity can become a drug. I’m a recovering addict myself, as my wife (the most wonderful woman in the world and my personal sports psychologist) will tell you. I was one of those guys who would drive himself until he was injured, then grit my teeth and drive a little further. To this day, if I haven’t had a hit from that PR pipe in a while, I get grouchy.

The thing I’ve come to understand as I’ve matured as an athlete is that a PR often comes at a high physiological and psychological price. Maximum effort, especially if you’re a seasoned athlete, takes a toll on muscle fibers, mental resolve, your nervous and endocrine systems, and your overall wellbeing. It’s not unusual for a PR attempt to cost me two nights of sleep: one the night before, because I’m nervous, and then the night after because I’m so destroyed that I can’t get comfortable.

How often are you willing to pull that trigger? If you do it too often, you end up compromising the stimulus you worked out to achieve. If you can’t squat heavy for 10 days because your back is wrecked from your spur-of-the-moment 3RM attempt at what was your 1RM two weeks ago, did you do yourself any good? Conversely, when everything you do is a PR, how do you harness that next-level intensity when it really matters?

Curb Your PR Obsession

I propose that we negotiate a new relationship with our PRs. I can’t tell you what to track, and I’m certainly in no position to set a number of things you should count as a PR, but the following guidelines might help you bring your PR obsession under control.

Write down your primary goals. They should be counted as PRs, and anything that is one standard deviation from them can be, as well. For instance, if I have a goal for my clean and jerk 1RM, I can track a PR for my front squat. But only choose one PR for that accessory, whether that’s a 1RM or a 3RM, based on your coach’s training philosophy for you.

If you set several goals, prioritize them to give yourself space to move more quickly in one area than another. For instance, if you want to improve your deadlift and your 5k time in the same year, it’s totally fine to work on both at the same time. But recognize that while you’re doing 800m tempo repeats and speed work every week in your 5k program, you may not have the gas left to annihilate a heavy deadlift session. It’s useful in this case to adopt the concept of seasonal fitness.

You can still log and track everything else, but be cautious about applying that PR label. If a PR happens during the course of your training, that’s great! But it should only be something you aim toward occasionally, and only when it is one of your primary goals. If you’re the type who can’t track data without it burning in the back of your mind during your workouts, then stop tracking data. I promise, the training will work anyway, even if you don’t write down every detail of it. Instead, record qualitative details of your workout (i.e., heavy triples on squats today, hips achy, bar moved fast though).

Last, never allow a PR attempt to compromise your best mechanics. As Kevin Moore and I discussed on this week’s podcast A Unified Theory Of Human Movement, bad things happen when we allow our enthusiasm to outstrip our ability and control. If you aren’t getting paid to do it, or aren’t in contention for a national or international medal, you don’t have a good reason to lay your own body on the altar of the great and powerful PR goddess. Bail the barbell, shut down the workout, and live to fight another day. Take it from somebody who’s learned the hard way, over and over again: no PR is worth months of not training.

The post Not Everything Needs to Be a PR appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Kevin Moore is among those striving for a better answer. His explorations of biomechanics, Pilates, and dance clashed with the rigid structures imposed by a lab environment, so he struck out to create his own system to explain and improve human movement. The result is the Reembody Method, a modality that combines physics, evolutionary biology, neurology, and fundamental psychology.

Kevin sat down with me to explain how his frustration with the lack of imagination in the health and wellness community drove him to seek out the most useful elements of a variety of different approaches. He unpacks what side dominance really means, and how a sense of environmental safety can unlock movement potential in any situation. When the brain perceives a threat, he explains, it reorganizes itself in a way that may not be conducive to performance, and may even create pain to avoid uncertainty.

The post A Unified Theory of Human Movement appeared first on Breaking Muscle.