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When To Stop Running For The Day

by | Jun 4, 2020 | Training Principles

Every runner will experience little aches and pains and alarming sensations in the body from time to time. How you respond to these determines whether you become a stronger runner or an injured one.

Injury often happens because we have not been paying close attention to when some part of the running body and its supporting systems is weak and is starting to fail in its attempt to keep up with everything else.

 

When Do You Stop?

When you are going along in a practice, how do you know when to stop for the day?

Go for as long as you have time? Go for as long as you have energy? Go until it hurts?

None of these.

You need to stop when the weakest member of the performance team cannot keep up with the rest.

Your performance team is composed of these systems that must work together in proportional strength:

  • Metabolic – your body’s ability to supply energy and remove waste.
  • Muscular – converting energy into power.
  • Motor (neural) – directing that power with precision.
  • Mind – your ability to direct attention and hold it, to perceive and interpret what’s going on.

The weakest member of this team is going to hold you back, and if pushed beyond its current capacity to work in a healthy state, it will cause you problems and increase potential for injury. Just because other parts of your body are feeling stronger and want to go more, that does not mean you should let them go ahead of this weaker member.

So, when you going along in your practice session, you will start to feel some fatigue in one or more of these systems. Like a child trying to keep up with his big siblings on a long hike, one of these will eventually start to lag behind, hindering the others.

Initially, you are able to and should increase your effort to maintain focus and control. But at some point you are no longer able to do that, and form will start to deteriorate. If you can no longer hold attention, you should stop for the day. If you can hold attention, but can no longer correct or protect key parts of your posture or movement, then you should stop for the day.

 

What Fails First?

It is very likely that you will actually experience a wavering in your awareness and control of movement (features of the Mind system), before you actually feel to tired physically to carry on. This course is requiring you to build up strength of awareness and control so that these can work in proportion to your metabolic and muscular strength. Or, if you happen to have strong awareness and control, but lack fitness in the others, likewise, your body will quite responding consistently to your motor commands and you know its time to stop.

In practice, you do want to work up to this failure point for your weakest system and let it be pushed, just a little. This is how that system will get stimulated to grow stronger. So don’t be discouraged by hitting this limit, but be glad that you can recognize it clearly and use your result today to compare to your result in the next practice to have a clear sense of progress from practice to practice.

Run Warm Up and Cool Down

by | Jun 4, 2020 | Preparation

Every body is different in its needs, to some degree. Yet, every body, especially as those bodies get older, will appreciate having a good warm up. As a matter of fact, the better the warm up, the better your body will be able to do the hard work of the main training ahead.

Likewise, cool down is important because it allows the body a way to gradually shift out of the exercise mode, allowing tissues, fluids, and temperature to adjust smoothly. Abrupt shifts from exercise to sedentary activities can be surprisingly hard on the body.

We recommend that you keep the same routine for your warm up from practice to practice. This will make it possible for you to sense the starting condition of your body from day to day. If some factor from the day or hours before could affect your performance, you will likely be able to notice signs of this in your body during warm up and compare to the way you have felt on other days, doing the exact same warm up activities.

By keeping your warm up and cool down routine the same, this will reduce the amount of planning and thinking you need to do for each practice.

 

Design Guidelines

Make your warm up 10 to 15 minutes long. Never skip your warm up.

Make your cool down 5 to 10 minutes long. You might skip your cool down if necessary but you might pay a price in a longer recovery.

 

Warm Up Routine

5 to 15 minutes of preparatory exercises.

Then 3 to 5 minutes of brisk walking.

Then 5 to 8 minutes of gentle jogging.

Allow heart rate to increase gradually, with gradually more vigorous activity.

Provoke an increase core temperature, particularly on cool days, so that you feel warm all over your body by the time you begin your main practice activity.

 

Cool Down Routine

5 minutes of gentle jogging.

5 minutes of walking, transition from brisk to gentle.